A.C. Grayling’s pieces on moral dilemmas in The Guardian (later collected into various books) always impressed me. Witty, erudite, elegant, they anatomised the modern ethical landscape, and presented solutions that were often informed by references to classical literature. Grayling has had his detractors as a so-called media don, but it always seemed to me that you don’t get to be a media don without some reputation to start with. Schama, Starkey and the rest became TV personalities because they were serious academics with prestigious positions, not the other way round.
Grayling would be an obvious champion of the humanities at a time when they are under threat in the academy. So it was not a surprise that he should be the figurehead behind the launch of a new educational institution, the New College for the Humanities, dedicated to, as Grayling says on the website, “personal enrichment, intellectual training, breadth of vision, and the well-informed, sharply questioning cast of mind needed for success in this complex and competitive world.” Well, that’s just great, and many of us in the humanities would love to work for an institution with that as a mission statement.
But here’s the rub. Elsewhere, Grayling asserts that “We’re open to anybody who has talent and ability.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The standard fee for the NCH will be a whopping £18,000 a year, meaning that it is out of reach for all but a tiny minority. Given the promises that Grayling is making, the fees might be justified in some people’s eyes: stellar academics (Dawkins, Pinker, Ricks et al) supported by a dedicated teaching staff unencumbered by admin duties, who will offer small group and one-to-one tuition. Marvellous. But that £18k fee, despite some suggestions that some students will have the fee waived, remains a huge barrier. I’m reminded of the well-worn quip of Justice Mathews – ‘In England, justice is open to all – like the Ritz Hotel.’
What makes the enterprise (and that’s clearly what it is) smack even more of opportunism is that perforce, since the NCH isn’t an accredited university, study will lead to a University of London award, and students will use London facilities. Even the course materials have been lifted wholesale, as Amanda Vickery, and a number of others pointed out. As Vickery said on Twitter “NCH thinks my 18th-century women course worth £18k. Come & have it @QMUL for half that, & taught by Prof who designed it.” Moreover, it transpires that the “Professoriate” of big name dons might teach for as little as one hour per year.
It’s difficult to see what NCH can offer, other than an alternative route into a prestigious degree for the rich who don’t manage a place at Oxbridge. The NCH, if it were to charge low fees, or use sponsorship to offer humanities degrees to the brightest, would be a noble enterprise. As it stands, though, it is, in its way, simply another example of the commercialisation of HE in this country.
I began writing this post before the news broke today that Johann Hari had been suspended by The Independent, so much of what I was going to write is redundant now – read the Guardian article for the details. I have been a fan of Johann Hari for some time. I liked his style, and that he seemed an individual in a sea of identikit rent-a-gob commentators. I sometimes disagreed with him, but always found his articles lively and entertaining. Then the news that he routinely passed off quotations from books as quotes he had obtained in interviews appeared, and he immediately lost some credibility. That was compounded by his initial denial that this was wrong.
That was bad enough, and then, a couple of days ago, Nick Cohen wrote a blistering piece on Hari, characterising him as a vindictive and deceitful prat. Then a tweet by David Allen Green, alias Jack of Kent, suggested that there was something even murkier about Mr Hari. Green wrote this, which confirmed that the Orwell Prize winning author seemed to be at the very least condoning some juvenile and nasty behaviour. This evening, Green said that he now knew the identity of “David Rose”, but was not going to reveal it, for fear of triggering an expensive libel action.
It’s a sorry tale, and you wonder if Hari can recover from it. I can’t imagine taking one of his columns at face value again.
Update: and, according to Guido Fawkes, even his Orwell piece was nicked.
Update 20th July: Hari has taken his website down completely.
Update 21st July: Hari is accused of more dishonesty here.
Update 26th July: Hari has broken his silence to say he’s been instructed by the Indy not to say anything until the outcome of their investigation. Meanwhile, the Orwell prize committee all but confirm he’s to be stripped of the prize.
OK, I’m 56, I’m unfit, and I’m overweight. So I had a choice to make at the end of last month – do I renew my gym membership again, or try something else? I’m not a great fan of the gym, as I’ve mentioned before, so I decided to save my money, and try a different tack. I’m lucky enough to live close to an urban water park, so I have the perfect environment for some outdoor workouts. I came across the C25k (Couch potato to 5 kilometer) programme, and on the recommendation of a friend (thanks Lisa!) chose the NHS version. The advantage of this is that you have a podcast to guide you through, rather than having to check your (in my case, non-existent) watch to keep on track.
The programme itself seems to be based on what I used to know as Fartlek. My gym teacher at school, Reggie Bell, used to make us do fartlek at the end of games sessions. As the name was already inherently hilarious to us, we used to find it hard when Reggie’s rich Lankysheer voice urged us to “do some Fartlek, lads!” The word is Swedish, and means speed-play, and the technique is really simply about alternating bursts of more and less intense activity. The etymology is interesting – the first syllable survives in the German “Fahrt” meaning journey. “Gute Fahrt” – bon voyage – can always raise a laugh in a German lesson, and you can hear the Viking echo of “lek” in Yorkshire where kids still ask their mates if they are “laikin’ out”.
Anyway, I downloaded the podcast, loaded up the iPod, and have now completed the first week. Your guide is Laura, who is very encouraging and sympathetic. She tells you when to run and when to maintain a brisk walking pace. Whilst you are running or walking, music takes over – a kind of bland, sub-Coldplay vaguely uplifting wash of guitars and keyboards when walking, and a more urgent generic 70s / 80s rockular sound when running, probably knocked out in a morning by old session guys on union rates. One riff sounds suspiciously like “Sweet Home Alabama”. But I digress.
You run, you walk. You sweat, you get a bit breathless. Laura encourages you – “You’re doing really well,” she says. How does she know? But it works, and eventually, you have managed a fairly basic half-hour aerobic workout. And that isn’t much at all, but it’s a small step for me. I do feel a bit fitter, and I will try to complete the nine-week programme. So far so good. And Laura says I’m doing great.
Photo: by me!
A typical exchange with the spotty youth manning, or teenagering, the supermarket checkout yesterday. After we paid and packed, I said “thanks” and he said “see you later.” Actually, what he said was more like “see yers later”, but that’s besides the point really. Now, unless I’ve missed a very subtle invitation from a boy young enough to be my grandson, he didn’t really mean he’d see us later. He didn’t even mean he’d see us. “Later” has been added to the ubiquitous “see ya” for no apparent reason, as far as I can see. I’m tempted in these situations to say “oh right, where shall we meet?” or something along those lines. It’s another example of how informal speech has replaced formal in situations where two people’s lives intersect briefly. For some reason, we have to appear to be on terms of deep familiarity. “‘Scuse me, mate,” someone said as he approached me for directions the other day. I’m not his mate, and “excuse me” would do the job. “Cheers,” says someone when I hold the door in a shop. I’m not having a drink with them, merely offering a tiny courtesy. The worst one doesn’t occur in speech, but in email: an increasing number of my students seem unable to complete a message without signing off with a ‘x’. Aaargh!
This is a first for me. I’m reviewing a book that I haven’t held in my hands – yes, it’s my first e-book. My friend Anthony Levings, the onlie begetter of Gylphi, the new publisher for arts and humanities, sent me an E-Pub version of this new volume of critical essays on David Mitchell, and I’ve been reading it on my iPod. It’s been an interesting experience, and largely an enjoyable one. I’m still not quite used to turning over the virtual pages with a finger gesture on screen, but I was agreeably surprised by how book-like the experience was. The print is clear and crisp, and I can annotate as I might a physical book. I won’t rehearse here all the pros and cons of ebooks, but suffice to say that this convinced me that the format is viable, useful, handy and attractive.
What of the contents? The volume, edited by Sarah Dillon of St Andrews, arose from a conference held there, the first on Mitchell, and it ranges over his entire oeuvre, including his most recent novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in Dillon’s introduction. An added feature, most unusual in books of this type, is a piece by the author under consideration, in which he expresses his delight in the critical attention his work is receiving, as evidenced by this volume. The articles, by an eclectic bunch of academics, demonstrate the variety and complexity of Mitchell’s work. As a particular fan of Cloud Atlas, I was very interested in Will McMorran’s contribution ‘Cloud Atlas and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel’ in which he demonstrates some striking parallels between Mitchell’s Matrioshka doll structure and Calvino’s endlessly recursive vignettes. It certainly enhanced my understanding of both Calvino and Cloud Atlas, which I have used as an exemplar of the postmodern novel in my teaching.
‘The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas‘ by Courtney Hopf offers some sharp insights on the self-reflexive nature of Mitchell’s fiction, and ‘Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas‘ by Nicholas Dunlop higlighted aspects of those two novels that have been neglected so far in the developing critical response to Mitchell’s work.
It is clear that David Mitchell is a very important contemporary writer, and Gylphi can be proud that they have produced the first critical work about him. I am sure it won’t be the last. Like all good works of criticism, it sends you back to the original texts with a renewed interest and curiosity. This is an auspicious debut volume for Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers series. I look forward to the next one.
One of the pleasures of the internet is making connections with people who share your interest. Martin Phipps, a Canadian, whose path I would not otherwise have crossed, is one such: our mutual interest in Anthony Burgess led to some exchanges via Facebook and the Burgess forums, and made me keen to read his novel Rue des Mensonges. The book is published, as Martin’s others have been, through Blurb, an innovative internet company offering authors the chance to self-publish and market their work. The result is, in effect, a bespoke copy of the book delivered to your door. I liked the quality of the paper and the binding, which I’d say was better than most mass-market paperbacks these days.
So- what do we have here? It’s a short (about 130 pages) fast-paced thriller, set in locales ranging from expensive Paris penthouses to Roma encampments in rural Slovakia. It has a very contemporary feel, since the backdrop is the recent financial scandals and the global economic downturn. At the centre of events is the unpleasant crooked former financier James Moody, now enjoying his ill-gotten millions in Paris. His plan to disappear by faking his own death begins to unravel, and triggers a quickly moving succession of scenes in which Moody becomes embroiled in a maelstrom of lies, deceits and double-bluffs. What distinguishes this from your standard thriller is that the novel engages with the moral bankruptcy of modern capitalism, embodied in the figure of Moody. There are no clean-cut heroes on the street of liars – everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is on the make. It’s gripping, vivid and thought-provoking. Great stuff, Marty!
I blogged before – blimey, nearly six years ago – about the use of “no problem” as an all-purpose response by people who serve you in shops, bars etc. There was a classic instance of it last night. We went for a pre-event meal to a branch of a well-known pizza chain, whose name begins with Pizza and ends with Express. In a largely empty restaurant, we were escorted by our waiter to a back room, which was perfectly pleasant, but from where we couldn’t be seen by the passing trade on the street. We decided we were too old / too uncool to occupy the visible seats, an idea confirmed as we were joined by punters of a similar age.
Anyway, pleasant young waiter took our order. Drinks would be ‘no problem.’ The fact that we didn’t want water as well as beer would be ‘no problem’. The fact that we wanted just one salad to accompany the pizzas was ‘no problem’. Could we have a soft egg on the Fiorentina? No problem. Could we have some pepper? No problem. Could we have the bill? No problem. Could we actually have the correct bill, with the special offer price he had recommended? No problem.
Pizza Express operates a rigid recipe control system, to ensure that wherever you are, your Fiorentina is going to be the same as the last one you had. So I wish their training people would instruct waiters that the language has a number of responses that are appropriate to customer questions – of course, right away, I’ll bring it to you now, certainly… Getting staff to use them? – no problem, you’d think.
I found this story astonishing. In the year of my birth, about a mile from where I lived, a teenage girl was being sectioned under the mental health act for the crime of having a baby. That boy, a few months older than me, was adopted, and has never known his mother. I thought this kind of barbarity had stopped before the war – it’s a shock to know it was still going on in my lifetime. There’s a happy end, of a kind – but as the woman’s second-born son says, she’s the victim here.
An interesting example of how stories are distorted in the telling, and how ‘news’ is created. Yesterday, at my place of work, there was a power cut. It happened around lunch time. I went out of my office to see if it was just my room, or more general. It was quickly apparent that the whole campus had lost electricity. Soon, a helicopter, a fire engine and two ambulances arrived. People on the corridor were immediately speculating as to what had caused the problem. In the space of three minutes I heard that construction workers on site had cut through cables, that there had been an explosion in a lab, and that there had been an explosion elsewhere, that the helicopter was there to take someone seriously injured to hospital. The local press reported it as a major incident.What had actually happened, it transpired, was that a power cut in the area had caused a distribution board to short-circuit, making a loud bang. Maybe whoever called 999 had been a little over-dramatic in describing the event. I imagine that person is a bit embarrassed.
The campus was not evacuated, classes were not particularly affected (especially as not that many classes happen on a Wednesday afternoon) and things were back to normal by mid-afternoon. Nothing to see here, move along…
Image: DailyPic
To the IABF once more for the latest in their literary event series. The subject this week was Nicholas Royle, together with Nicholas Royle. Royle mark 1 is an academic, the co-author of the very successful undergraduate text An Introduction to Literature Criticism and Theory, and the sole author of The Uncanny. He is also, and this was one of the main impulses for the event, the author of an intriguing new novel, Quilt. This new work gained laudatory reviews from some very important people, including Cixous and Kermode, so this is clearly a major work. T’other Royle is the Mancunian short story writer and novelist who also teaches Creative Writing at MMU. He is also the publisher of beautifully produced chapbooks from The Nightjar Press. I have admired his short stories in the past, and very much enjoyed his reading at an Edge Hill conference on the short story a few years ago. Our paths have crossed professionally too, when he was the external on a PhD viva. This Royle has developed a line in rather chilling, discomforting prose, with a dash of the surreal. Uncannily, the other Royle has similar tastes.
Obviously, the two Royles are frequently confused. What I didn’t know until this event was that Nick Royle the academic had written about Nick Royle the novelist, and had delivered a conference paper about him. This was at a University of London conference, and the two of them had arranged to meet there, but in a kind of publicly theatrical way. Nick mark 1 delivered the paper, and then stepped down from the platform, shook hands with Nick mark 2, who stepped up to take questions on his own novel. An uneasy silence ensued…
Of course, the two Royles are inextricably entwined. Look on a book site and you’ll see there’s no discriminating between the two. The Manchester Nick mentioned that, at the Cheltenham Festival, he’d done a talk and then was invited to sign books, many of which were – well, you fill in the rest. The Sussex Royle has a short story in the other Royle’s new anthology, and so the seeds for more confusion are being planted there too. To digress briefly, congratulations to Edge Hill student Claire Massey on being included in Nick’s new Best of British collection, where she finds herself in the company of Hilary Mantel among others.
The IABF event was well-attended, and the format of alternating Royles reading from their work made for a lively opening half. They then had an informal chat, and took questions before signing their (own) books. Despite the frequently rather dark materials of the respective writers’ work, the evening was light-hearted and very enjoyable. As always at the IABF, a good few friends and acquaintances were present as well.
We came away with a copy of The Uncanny and The Matter of the Heart, which will be the first in what I expect will be a Nicholas Royle reading marathon, of both flavours.
