I haven't posted for a while, principally because I have been away on several extended weekend breaks, firstly to Derbyshire for a wedding, and then entertaining my parents with a tour of Northumberland. I much prefer taking holidays in this form, because it leaves you with pin points of escape to look forward to throughout the summer, as opposed to anticipating two weeks by an exotic pool, and then suffering the deflation that comes after this period has passed. However, my appraoch does mean that my work habits have become very disjointed.

Coming worringly close to the end of my first year, the introductory component of my PhD (about 35 000 words) has taken shape although, to extend the cliche, it is one that is a little ragged round the edges, with localised holes in the middle. About three weeks ago, I started to move on to my first primary text, A.S. Byatt's Possession. Appearing on Radio 4's Start the Week programme on the brain at about the same time as I read Possession, A.S. Byatt complained bluntly about Freudian literary critics: "I am a writer, and I know what I am doing." In my reading of Possession I am looking at the impact of cybernetics and neuroscience, but although this multidimensional work covers much from Victorian poetry and evolution to modern academia, cybernetics is a very trace element indeed. So although I am not a Freudian critic, as with any interpretation that embraces the affective fallacy, I am nevertheless plunging, against Byatt's deadening warning, into the subterranean workings of her mind, showing the subconscious influences on this most deliberate and learned of authors.

Just as I was beginning to believe I was negotiating the tightrope, and drawing out cybernetic elements without tugging too hard at the "hooks and eyes" (a Byattian trope) of her cognition, I had to leave it again for another long weekend, and I returned to find my exitement dented, the notes I made in a heady rush of thinking somewhat incomprehensible. If after a great pain a formal feeling comes, then you need to be realising that feeling on paper for the strange and wonderful period whilst it lasts, not lounging on a sofa or walking across the Northumberland moors.

And so, with a clear ten days in between breaks, I have taken another approach, and rather than writing I have immersed myself in reading. Whereas in an undergraduate essay I might get away with looking at just one work by a major author, such an isolation of the "key text" is not really valid in a thesis. Particularly with this polymathic author, I need also to read several of her other novels in order to get a sense of what history - what learning and interests and biography - she brings to the main text in which I am interested. For the past three days then, for eight hours a day, starting with The Virgin in the Garden, I have been working my way through a quartet of texts, following the fortunes of Frederica Potter, a brilliant intellectual but a human being who is unsympathetic to the feelings both of others and herself.

But, disorientatingly, my head starts to fill to clotting point with characters and settings, such that reality and fiction begin to merge into a seamless web of existences. On the radio this morning, The Idea of a University deals with the same 1960s concrete towers of new academies as feature in Babel Tower , with its imaginary University of North Yorkshire; even as the presenter interviews someone at the University of Sussex, I call up an image of "The Language Tower. The Evolution Tower. The Mathematics Tower. The Social Studies or Social Sciences Tower" with their "layers of connecting walkways" looking like a "beehive." In that same book, Daniel, a disturbed vicar, answers strange telephone calls for a listening service, and when my telephone rings, and my girlfriend plays a prank by putting on a Scottish accent, I put the phone down with anxiety. Vladimir Tretchikoff dies, and I see his "Green Lady" portrait not in terms of colour, but in the words of colour; in the manner of Still Life, I try and pin verbal identities on the grassy shades of the face of his "Green Lady." A friend of mind is currently in Nigeria working on an infra-red telescope, spending twelve hours a day absorbing rows of data streaming down a monitor. She is, she says, going slowly mad. This reading is my equivalent of the scientists' data collection; it is the guts of my research, and although easier than writing, because it is less involved and more reliable than writing - I know the words are not going to dry up when I turn the page - it brings with it a strange kind of tedium, enjoyable though the novels may be.

Most people look forward to holidays curled up with a good book, and would envy me the opportunity to spend my time (fully funded) reading on my couch or lying in bed deep into the morning and night. Suddenly, though, I look forward to next week, when I will spend three days in North Yorkshire, hopefully without a book in sight.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

The debate about proposed changes to the English National Curriculum has been fierce. The tabloid press has had a field day with reports that canonical writers such as Dickens and Bronte may be removed from the list of prescribed texts, in a "dumbing down" of the subject. Now education minister Alan Johnson has reached a compromise, maintaining the requirement that students study writers "who are a crucial part of our national heritage," whilst allowing teachers more flexibility in choosing which writers in particular students must read. Half of the writers, chosen by teachers from a long list, can be from before World War One and half from after. The cut-off date needs some justification: is it really the case that the same number of "heritage" writers were born in the twentieth century as in the four centuries the novel has been around before it?

Regardless of reasoning, though, according to The Guardian Education, the following writers are staying in:

Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, John Bunyan, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, HG Wells

Whilst these are under threat:

EM Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Evelyn Waugh, JG Ballard, RK Narayan, Berlie Doherty, Susan Hill, Laurie Lee, Joan Lingard, Alan Sillitoe, Bill Naughton, Mildred Taylor, Robert Westall, Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, Willa Cather, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Ernest Hemingway, HH Richardson, Doris Lessing, John Steinbeck, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Yesterday, I was reading A.S. Byatt describing in Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings her first introduction to George Eliot as being

unpropitious. At the age of eleven I underwent a class 'reading' of Silas Marner at Sheffield High School and remember finding it very tedious: no drama, or what there might have been subdued, too many comic country people who bore little relation to anyone I, a city child, had met, no Romance of the simple sort I was looking for.

Byatt today models herself on that great Victorian polymath, and so it evidences the dangers of teaching fine but subtle works too badly, to children too young, that even she was put off Eliot at school. Although I was taught very well in my secondary eduction, looking at the list I hated doing Defoe even at university, and I can't imagine 14 year-olds being particularly enthralled by the "book of lists" that characterises (in my opinion) Robinson Crusoe. And so whilst the "In List" maintains Eliot and her comparable peers in the historical ranks of Great English Literature(TM), I am concerned that heading out are writers who might be more immediately accessible and resonate with the children of the early twenty-first century, for whom the dominant literary genre, played over the varied geographies of Middle-Earth and space and cyberspace, is science fiction.

If teachers are confident that they can present Eliot or Conrad in a way that captivates and enlarges young minds, then good luck to them. But I would not be keen to reject out of hand the possibilities of popular literary fiction, such as William Gibson's Neuromancer, with its startling poetic invocations of cyberspace, or Aldous Huxley, with his unsettling prophetic visions of the Brave New World in which kids, drugged by cannabis and glued to the cinema, arguably grow up today.

Update: Thursday, August 10, 2006
John Sutherland is not happy with the list either: This Reading List Fails the Test

Labels: Literature, National Curriculum

Since I got my Nikon D50, my photography has shot up a gear in terms of quantity, although you can judge for yourself whether it shows any qualitative improvement. Because of this, whereas before I was uploading two or three photos a month, I am now putting on two or three a week.

I found when I switched to using Blogger that I was writing more, being less put off by the need to upload two separate files, and change titles and breadcrumbs and dates and menu lists and so on. So in relation to the Photography section of The Pequod, I have got rid of my old XHTML ways of doing things and switched to using the PHP photoblog script, Photoblogger. After a bit of fiddling around to incorporate my templates and upload my old photographs in the order I wanted, I have decided that it is nothing short of fantastic. Now to add photos I click one button to upload, type a title and description, and I'm done. An RSS feed automatically points to the newest post, so I can register the site on Photoblogs, and I also get a full gallery facility, search options and an automated commenting system (no need to copy and paste from emails).

Nicholas Carr and Yochai Benkler may be arguing over whether bloggers and photographers are going to be paid for producing their content in three years time, but one thing of which I am certain is that talented programmers such as Sylvia Trommer who wrote Photoblogger stand to make a significant amount of money by providing the tools bloggers and photographers need to get their work published with as little technical fuss as possible.

Labels: Photoblogger, Photography and Art

With his sensitive finger monitoring the pulse of English Studies in the British university, John Sutherland wonders in Guardian Education whether what was "once the most venerated of disciplines," namely English Literature, is "headed for the dustbin of academia."

A glance at my old university prospectus and degree classifications shows how the times have been a changin' even whilst I have been at university. When I signed up to my undergraduate institution, I was inspired by a prospectus that showed pictures of (attractive) girls reclining beneath oak trees, reading The Mill on the Floss. When I was interviewed (a practice now stopped), I was asked some general questions about what poets I liked and why I liked them. I suspect that my answer was similar to that John Sutherland observes: "they will blandly inform you that they 'really like' Sylvia Plath as if that was all that needed to be said, critically." Despite this, some one must have taken to me as I managed to get a place to study for a BA in English Literature.

But when I emerged from the "production line" after three years, it was as a graduate not in English Literature but in "English Literary Studies." My department, and my degree, had been rebranded and, implicit in the name change, expanded to embrace all materials, not just textual, towards which "literary" approaches might be directed. Along with this change, leaflets and brochures dispensing careers advice and advertising graduate posts in corporate banking suddenly appeared in prominent positions by the photocopiers. Although I stayed on to study further, according to Prospects, some 58% of my contemporaries did not, preferring instead mostly to enter managerial roles in commerce and industry, to teach, or to occupy clerical positions. The buzzword now is the "transferrable skills" English graduates possess, their critical and writing faculties applicable equally to the writing of reports and policy documents as to the deconstruction of the proto-feminism of Jane Eyre.

One eye on their careers, A-Level students consistently choose to study English at university, and it remains one of the most popular courses. With vice-chancellors eyeing up the top-up fee income, it seems unlikely that English departments are going to close any time soon. But the question Sutherland asks is whether the intellectual nature of that discipline, which "was once the queen of the curriculum: the chemistry of the humanities," is going to survive intact. If English departments are now principally proving grounds for our future civil servants and industry moguls, it seems hard to justify studying Henrik Ibsen's minor plays, or Sapphic Modernism; rather, perhaps we should focus attention on the semantics of report writing, on the art of the press release.

For the time being, as a postgraduate, I have a stay of execution from such infections of the real world of economic sense. That some quality (and some would say, not without some foundation, irrelevance) of the Leavisite hey-day of English remains at the postgraduate level is indicated by the fact that my PhD is still classified as "English Literature." But even here, the fact that I am treating Dawkins and Maxwell in the same thesis as Byatt and Amis indicates the sea-change that has occurred in my field. With language at the centre of all human intellectual activity, English Studies - for that, I now feel, is the more appropriate title - is best placed to pursue the interdisciplinary approach. English Literature is not so much heading for the dustbin, as being recycled.

Labels: Literature

Having difficulty trying to see beyond the number's game in relation to the conflict in Lebanon and Israel, I come up with an analogy. It seems from my perspective that Israel's incursions are equivalent to what might have happened in a parallel universe twenty years ago, if at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict the UK government had sent Tornadoes across from RAF Lossiemouth to blitz North and West Belfast where IRA support was at its strongest. If such a blanket atrocity had happened, it is hard to imagine peace having come about today; equally, it is certain that without an intense military and intelligence operation taking place on the ground rather than from 30 000 feet, terrorist activity would have been far worse than it ever was in reality.

But recognising how the analogy does not quite fit the current conflict in the Middle East balances my impulse to condemn Israel outright. In the Northern Ireland situation, the IRA and Sinn Fein were like Siamese twins: respectively terrorist and political organistions conjoined physically and ideologically, yet in some sense recognisible as separate entitities. The UK government and Unionist parties could never have sat round the Stormont table with the IRA, but with Sinn Fein as their representatives a solution was workable, albeit uneasy. Back in Lebanon, and Hezbollah have been, rightly, condemned for using civilian areas as their base for militaristic operations. But by far the more dangerous merging of civilian and terrorist lies in the fact that Hezbollah is simultaneously a party in democratic politics and armed conflict. Negotiating a settlement through peaceful means is therefore going to be all the harder, many times more so than the resolution to the Northern Ireland conflict was.

Labels: Middle East, Politics