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.

Labels: Alan Milburn, aspiration, Daily Diary, National Insurance

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, the budget, Toffs and Toughs

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.

Labels: A History of the World, British Museum, Daily Diary

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.

Labels: Chekhov, Daily Diary, The Cherry Orchard

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.

Labels: Barack Obama, Daily Diary, Republicanism

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, West Side Story

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.

Labels: 1910 Paris Floods, Andy Murray, Barack Obama, Daily Diary, Hurricane Katrina

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

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.

Labels: chess, Daily Diary, Gary Kasparov

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, healthcare reform

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

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.

Labels: Andrew O'Hagan, Daily Diary, The Atlantic Ocean

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.

Labels: Daily Diary, John Keats, Ode to Autumn

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.

Labels: Band of Brothers, Daily Diary, Haiti, Lines Written in Early Spring, William Wordsworth

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.

Labels: Alan Bennett, Antonia Fraser, Daily Diary, Harold Pinter, Jenny Diski, Michael Billington, Psycho, The Waste Land

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."

Labels: Alistair Campbell, Daily Diary, Don Juan, Meatloaf, The Waste Land