The Guardian has a feature where readers say how wonderful the paper is. It’s usually either someone who has read the paper man and boy for fifty years, or some youngster who says how he picked up a copy in an idle moment, and abandoned the Daily Telegraph, or the Neasden Gazette, or whatever, on the spot. It’s not particularly edifying, and a bit pointless, since, because it’s printed in the Guardian, it’s unlikely to convince non-readers to switch. The second group is presumably the demographic that the Guardian is trying to attract with its Saturday Guide, in which events are listed, and associated articles are printed. One section is on Clubs, and I don’t mean the Athenaeum or Whites- I mean ones where rare groove trance grunge garage house- or whatever it is – is played. Given the average Guardian reader is distinctly middle-aged, I wonder who they think reads these pages. I do use the listings bits, but this week my attention was drawn to the opening page, which attempts to dissect a current TV commercial.This week’s was about an advert for Northampton University, but also contains a gratuitous attack on my place of work, Edge Hill University. It’s the worst kind of lazy journalism. The author, one James Donaghy, has decided, on no evidence at all, that Edge Hill’s degrees are worthless, and that anyone who goes there is an idiot. I think he’s trying to be funny, but it’s hard to say, so puerile is his prose. A sample: “Too thick to get into a real uni? Come to Edge Hill University where we will ruin your life with a meaningless qualification, rubbish social scene and low quality sex and drugs”. (But see update at the end of this post) Now, I suppose one could say, well, this guy is obviously a complete tosser so why bother even acknowledging him? If he’d published this in some grotty little internet forum, I would- but he’s published it in the paper I read every day, a serious national newspaper, whose readers will include many potential Edge Hill students and their parents. It’s easy enough to refute his pathetic drivel- any serious examination of the progress at Edge Hill over recent years will confirm this- we were shortlisted for the Times Higher’s University of the Year award last year, and there’s endless material available to show that we have an excellent reputation in our field. But Donaghy isn’t interested in facts. And that’s really my point. Famously, CP Scott, the guiding light of the Guardian, said that “comment is free” as the Guardian blog pages confirm on a daily basis- but the second part of his statement was “…but facts are sacred” . Donaghy’s vile little piece sets out consciously to ignore the facts, in the name of humour- but I’m afraid it fails there, because it just isn’t funny. Donaghy appears to be a freelance, who runs a website. It’s not an edifying read. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now as I give you a sample of his marvellous wit: Imagine it. It is December 2001. You are Spencer McCallum, Keeley Hawes’s newly acquired husband. You couldn’t be happier….Update: in the original post, I quoted a lot more of this, but I think it’s sullied my blog enough now. Go to the website for the full experience, but take a shower afterwards. Brilliant, eh? There’s loads more like this. Why let this man loose in the pages of the Guardian? Well, presumably because the Graun wants to attract the kind of readers who like this sort of thing – the same reason they are increasingly covering the vacuous lives of alleged celebs, and dumbing down all over the place. And to do this, they are employing people such as Donaghy. Well, I’m afraid the schoolboy pottymouth “humour” has made me consider whether I need to part with my cash every day for this stuff- and since I can get the diminishing amount of readable material on the net anyway, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. So if the Guardian want a column on why a former reader has stopped reading, I’ll be happy to provide it. This stuff is not big, not clever, and not funny. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust. They have betrayed the principles of that great editor, and lost me as a reader. Update: the reference to Edge Hill has now been removed…
To Aarhus for the 9th international ESSE conference.’Er indoors accompanied me to this lovely city in Denmark, and we had a great time, both academically and socially. Aarhus has a very pleasant feel to it, and we certainly intend to be back in the future. You can get a flavour of what we saw from the flickr stream on the right. Highlights included Den Gamle By, or the Old Town, where you can wander about the 17th century buildings; the buzz of the cafes and bars on Aboulevarden; and the Museum at Moesgård where the Grauballe Man is exhibited. This was a really impressive place, and the story of Grauballe Man, and other peat bog sacifices is told very clearly. The exhibit is displayed brilliantly, and I was reminded of how disappointed I was with Manchester Museum’s recent Lindow Man exhibition, which focuses, for reasons that escape me, on the lives and times of the people who found it in the sixties. Seamus Heaney’s poem about Grauballe Man conveys some of the impact of the sight of this man, apparently sacrificed to the gods of the bog two thousand years ago. We also went on an organised trip to Rosenholm, castle residence of the Rosencrantz family. There’s no real Hamlet conection, though the guide told us that a member of the family and his friend Guildenstern were reportedly in London in the 1590s. The family was very aristocratic, and that’s reflected in the grandeur of the castle. It was occupied by the family until relatively recently, and is now run by a trust. As part of the trip we were taken to an unremarkable mound where a stone with a poem about Hamlet is located. It’s not Hamlet’s grave, but is roughly where it might have been, according to the 1930s councillors who wanted to drum up a little tourist custom. Did I learn any Danish? No- everybody, but everybody, speaks excellent English. I did note the connection between the By (pronounced Bu) of Den Gamle By and the Orkney word Bu, meaning place of dwelling. On the academic front, there was much of interest, but I’ll save that for another post.
Good news that Penelope Fitzgerald now has a permanent space on the web, and a little shameful that the originators are American- why couldn’t we manage it in Britain? Well, I suppose the web knows no boundaries, and it is an excellent site- congratulations to those who put it together. It’s curious, as Dovegreyreader says, how PF has never had the kind of reputation that her work deserves. I hope this will be the start of an upswing in her fortunes. It would help if the US press would review her letters!
This film was made by the Eameses thirty-one years ago. I thought they made chairs…
Fascinating, and remarkable to think that it’s three decades since it was made. Not sure about the cheesy organ though, even if it is by Elmer Bernstein.
I suppose the way I encountered Charles Lambert’s excellent debut novel Little Monsters is emblematic of how the interweb works these days. I hadn’t read a review, despite my voracious appetite for the book pages of the proper papers, but came across Charles’s engaging blog, which in turn led to some correspondence. The upshot is, I have had the privilege of reading a brilliant novel, and now Charles has very kindly agreed to a kind of long distance Q and A session, which I will be including in the new e-journal I am co-editing at Edge Hill. As we speak, Charles is eating pork pies in Wolverhampton, apparently, but when he returns to his lovely home in Italy, I hope to do the email interview. With luck, that will be available in September via Edge Hill’s web site. The novel is a study of damaged people, but also touches on the possibilities of human renewal in the face of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man. The opening sentence has already lodged itself in my consciousness as one of the most startling and arresting I’ve read: “When I was thirteen my father killed my mother.” I still think Burgess’s opening line in Earthly Powers is my favourite, but this is now a high new entry on the chart. The central character and narrator, Carol, deals with the traumatic events of her childhood, and her exile to the loveless home of her aunt, by reinventing herself. The narrative switches from the memories of an adolescence growing up in the pub owned by her aunt and her Polish refugee husband in the sixties, to the contemporary setting of the camp for asylum seekers in Italy where the present day Carol works. Lambert’s prose is delicate and nuanced, and one of the delights of the novel is seeing how each narrative strand informs the other, through the repetition and variation of images and references. I was particularly struck by the use of what pompous academics would call tropes of flight, used by the author to link the strands and the characters. It is a beautifully realised novel, and one which manages to deal with very big issues on a human scale. I loved it. Charles writes about it here, and there are reviews by John Self here and Scott Pack here. Oh, and now I know what Pokemon means, so it’s educational too…
I expect that, by now, septuagenarian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen will have his feet up, having completed a remarkable series of gigs in Europe, largely, it seems, to supplement his pension after being ripped off by his accountant. It was quite a coup for the Manchester International Festival to book him for a series of concerts in the intimate surroundings of the City’s Opera House, especially since the festival is due to begin, er, next year. One in the eye for the Scouse capital of kulchur, methinks. I was there for one of these concerts, with ‘er indoors, who has always been a big Laughing Len fan, courtesy of The Guardian. They advertised a free prize draw, and, extraordinarily, I won- so, two prime £75 tickets on row D were mine. We went with a friend, Rachel, who was going for the second time. She is a stalwart of the Len discussion forums, and we met up with some of her correspondents at the Deansgate pub beforehand where I learned that tickets were going for £400 on ebay. What a lovely bunch the Cohenites are – a man in a pinstripe suit bought me a drink before scurrying off to the venue, and afterwards, we had a great chat with some fans before they got their bus home. The concert itself was fabulous, and I won’t go into the detail here – you can read very good accounts at the Leonard Cohen files and at the Guardian. I was hugely impressed at the professionalism and intensity of the presentation. Despite the rather snide reference in the Guardian review, I thought Dino Soldo’s energy and humour added a great deal to the band sound. The youngest people on stage were the sublime (Len’s word) Webb Sisters, who judged their contribution perfectly. They were really impressive, especially when they took over the very moving song If It Be Your Will. A really brilliant multi-instrumentalist band, and some very sensitive singing made this as good a show as it gets- one of the most memorable nights I’ve experienced in my concert-going career.
Playing tunefully away on the right is music by Pantagruel, whose album is available from the estimable Magnatune. They are appearing on simpering Sean Rafferty’s In Tune tonight on Radio 3. I’d love to see them perform. Update: I’ve taken the link down, because I got fed up with the same tune starting up every time I visited the blog. But it’s still available on Magnatune.
I haven’t read Clare Wigfall’s short stories, but with a bio like this, she just had to become a writer, didn’t she?: “Wigfall was born in London, but spent the first years of her childhood under the liberal sway of late 1970s California. She returned to England for most of her schooling, but her vital early impressions of travel are reflected in the places she has considered home and put pen to paper – from Morocco to Norwich to Prague. She now lives in Berlin.”
