An Addendum on the Strike

Having written at length about why I'm not persuaded that a strike is a good idea when it comes to university pay disputes, I've just learned that Goldsmiths, and maybe a couple of other places, are diverting the money that would have been paid to striking staff to the student hardship fund.

Now that's the sort of thing that might win me over.  Staff would still lose out in the short term - that's part of the nature of a strike - but students would get some kind of benefit that'd begin to offset any inconvenience; and employers wouldn't be rewarded for making staff angry.  (Not all inconvenienced students would benefit, but some would; and a benefit to the student body in abstracto doesn't mean that every student in concreto would have to feel it.  That's probably all that matters.)

If I hear from my employer that there's a comparable scheme at our place, then I think I'd be persuaded.  I'd still probably work, but that's because I've got nothing better to do with my time; but I'd be much more likely to register as being on strike.

To Strike or Not To Strike?

Officially, the UCU is on strike today; the headline is that the dispute comes down to being about pay.  According to the UCU website, the real value of academic salaries has fallen 14.5% since 2009; the latest pay offer is 1.1%.  I'm not sure how the 14.5% figure is calculated, but I'll take the Union at its word.  (I don't doubt that Universities UK would dispute the figure; but even if it's mistaken, there's no reason to suppose that the UCU is speaking in bad faith.)

To be honest, when it comes to pay levels, I'm personally not all that fussed.  Larger pay rises are nicer than small ones, but academics at my level are not poorly paid by any stretch of the imagination.  But it's not about what I get personally.  What's much more worrying is the dual trend of the demands placed on us in return for that pay, and the casualisation of HE.  Everyone I know works evenings and weekends; I've had five days' annual leave in the past two years, and I worked during that; I'm not taking any holiday this year.  The idea that one might take a couple of days away from the keyboard to read and get to grips with a new book, or longer to get up to speed with a new but important topic or sub-field on work time is risible, even though doing so would obviously contribute to teaching and research.  There's no time or incentive to step back and look at how courses work and how the might be done differently.  If you're casual, you can flit between sessional gigs for years - and increasing numbers are casual.  Pay at my end of the scale may not be bad in absolute terms; but if you're starting out, it can be awful.  It isn't always; but it can be.

In many ways, the UK system is beginning to look like the US system, with all the grotesqueness that that entails... except that here (with a very few exceptions), we don't have the Prince-Bishop professoriate.  Senior academics are in pretty much the same boat as a newly-appointed junior lecturer.

We do have our Prince-Bishops, though: Vice-Chancellors' pay has gone up by quite a bit more than academics' - in one case, by about 25%.  (Falmouth has a university.  Who knew?)  The Wolverhampton VC's pay went up by 19.6%, apparently as a reward for exceptional leadership - whatever that may mean - and reflecting the "size, complexity and performance of [the] university" - as though academic staff have nothing to do with that performance.  On that basis, the hypocrisy of the 1.1% offer is stunning.

Repeating a Success is Still Repetition

Review: Nerissimo
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld (Specula)
.....
"Hope."

That single word constitutes the first refrain of "DBX 2", the second track on Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld's second full album, Nerissimo.  The second time we hear the refrain, it's changed.  "Hope," it now goes, "Should be/ A controlled substance".

One shouldn't read anything much into the lyrics to pop songs.  All the same, it sounds like it's asking for trouble for people who'd been waiting expectantly for this followup to 2013's Still Smiling.  They - oh, all right: we - would have had no small amount of hope invested in the project; Still Smiling is a great album, and between that and this, Bargeld had overseen a brilliant return to form for Einstürzende Neubauten, in the form of Lament.  So there was every reason to be hopeful.  Yet, one can be too hopeful; as the lyric suggests, there might be times when hope ought to be kept in check.  Hope might be the kind of thing upon which we oughtn't to get too dependent.

After all, getting the Lament project together, and then touring it alongside a sarcastically-titled "Greatest Hits" set could easily have meant simply that there wasn't really time to get the new album to succeed as well as it might.  Faced with that kind of pressure of work, it's equally possible that a person would fall back on tried-and-tested formulae rather than doing anything all that new; and any innovations attempted, by the same token, may not have the fullest realisation.  On reflection, it's this more downbeat assessment that is the more appropriate when evaluating Nerissimo.

The basic problem is that, although there are elements that build on the last album - there's a use of steel guitars gives the album an almost country-rock undertone ("Animelle" having hints of REM's "Airportman", for example) - the bulk of the record is rather derivative.  Much of it relies on extensive recycling of material heard on Still Smiling: "The Beast" clearly fits the same mould as "Buntmetalldiebe";  "DBX 2" is a close cousin of "What If?".

Bargeld has been happily ripping off his own back catalogue for almost as long as he's had one to rip off.  Hence we shouldn't really be surprised to find that it's not only the last Teardo and Bargeld collaboration that is pillaged/ revisited (delete as appropriate), but Bargeld's contributions to the other bands with which he's been associated.  The lyrics to the titular opening track hark back to "Sabrina", the opening track of Neubauten's Silence is Sexy; "Ich Bin Dabei" has - alongside another hint of "What If?" - a clear echo of the Bad Seeds' "Stranger than Kindness".  He's even gone so far as to include what is pretty much the same song on two albums in the past: "The Garden" is more or less the same track that appeared three years earlier as "Salamandrina".  The pattern, of course, is itself copied from musicians through the ages: there's any number of composers from the classical tradition who quote themselves (and others) freely.  Yet it's one thing to be expected to churn out yet another Mass or cantata for an Esterhazy on a weekly basis - I'm guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a significant portion of what we take to be the musical canon either started out as hack-work, or informed hack-work shortly after its composition - but it's quite another to approach album-making in that way; the context is very different.  Not the least of the differences is that the album is released on Teardo's own Specula label, so there should have been no pressure on that front.  Hence it is perhaps pushing things a little to include two versions of the title track - once in English, and once in Italian - to top and tail what is anyway only a nine-track album.  It's one thing to want to return to a theme or idea to work it out as fully as possible; but I'm not sure that there's really that much of a new angle being taken here.  For what it's worth, the Italian version is preferable, but that's because I don't speak Italian; Italophones may prefer the English.

In passing, there's the odd moment when Bargeld's voice seems to be feeling the strain - "The Empty Boat" really could have done with another take.

Lest this sound like an attack on the album, it's really not meant to be.  Is the album any good?  Yes: it certainly is - with the possible exception of "Ulgae", which... um... well, you know that Simpsons Tree-House of Horror episode in which creates a whole civilisation in a petri-dish?  Yeah.  Let's leave it at that.  But if you ignore that, and the double inclusion of the title track, you're left with a long EP as much as a short album.  A good one, for sure, but - well, is it enough, and good enough?

The nagging suspicion is that if Nerissimo is a good album, that's because Still Smiling is a very good album, and Teardo and Bargeld have taken some of its component parts, spray-painted them, and released them again.  Control your hope.

The Slow Death of Printed Newspapers, and why it's a Problem.

There was a piece in The Guardian the other day about switching from print to digital newspapers... and then back again.  It's rather Proustian and elegaic in its tone: Stephen Curry writes that, having bought a paper copy of his newspaper,

I sat at the kitchen table with the paper spread out and immersed myself.  The pleasures are simple and deep and have yet to be reproduced on any screen that I have used.  Browsing is easier and feels more natural than with a… browser.  Despite the ease of search that computerised versions offer, you have more command of the content as the eye ranges across a double-page spread, skimming the headlines and noting those stories that you will return to read in full.  And you know where you are with a paper newpaper.  By which I mean you know where you are in the story and how far you have to go.  I was relieved to escape the seemingly endless scolling that disorients digital reading. 

There was also pleasure in the physicality of the interaction.  I had not lost the skill of whipping the wide bundle of sheets to initiate a fold, or the knack of pulling out creases and shaping the page to frame the article selected for attention.  And those muscle memories brought to mind other recollections – an instant reconnection with a childhood in Ballymena that bears the imprint of newsprint.  My father, a dentist in the town, picked up the Irish Times and the Guardian on his walk to work, to peruse in his lunch break and bring home at the end of the day.  In the evening the Belfast Telegraph would thud onto the mat at the front door.

Told you it was elegaic, didn't I?

I think he misses something, though, which occurred to me as I was reading his article (online, natch).  What you don't get with digital newspapers is serendipity.  It's easy to search for things that you want to read; but that means that you're less likely to read things that you didn't want to read but were glad you read - things, I susppose, that you didn't know you wanted to read.

You don't have as much control with the dead-tree press.  That's a good thing.  The alternative is that one is much more likely only ever to read things that confirm one's view, or that are "relevant" to one's life; one stays in one's own information bubble.  (This, incidentally, also provides a defence of the library and the bookshop, both for leisure and academic purposes: giving students the URL of a paper will take them directly to it, and so reduce the chance that they'll look at the table of contents of different editions of a journal and read something out of sheer interest; providing a scanned chapter from a book, or typing a search into Amazon, saves everyone from reading the book that's on the shelf next to it - and so condemns them to not reading it by the same token.)

So when Curry says that, with the newsprint version of a paper, "you have more command of the content as the eye ranges," I think he's wrong - and I think that it's good that he's wrong.  (Or, even if he's correct, I reject the value he imputes to that control.)  In leafing through an actual paper, you eye can be caught by an interesting headline, or picture; you take in half a sentence and follow it up, and sometimes you learn something about the world that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.  It's not impossible to browse an electronic version - but it's harder.  And in having to work for it, you lose the serendipity that is the whole point.

One of the things that I miss with the decline of the Indy, which I only ever bought on a Saturday, was reading the book reviews over a slow breakfast on a Sunday.  I've added any number of titles to my wishlist on the basis of that that I would never before have considered, or even encountered, otherwise.  And you can put a hot plate of oatcakes on a newspaper without having to worry about the damage that might be done to it by molten cheese, too.

What goes for book reviews goes, pari passu, for the parts of a newspaper that are probably quite a lot more important than books.  Of course, exposure to things that one would not otherwise have read is imperfect even with an actual newspaper, since the editor does preselect them for you - in choosing the Indy over, say, The Times or the Express, I narrowed my focus a little - but, still.

I am not the first person to worry that internet searches may only tell us what we want to hear.  But it'd not occurred to me that the printed press might be at least part of the solution to that problem.  An imperfect one, to be sure, since one chooses one's newspaper according to one's tastes; but a part of it.

If the printed press is in decline, we shouldn't mourn it (just) for Curry's essentially sentimental reasons.  We should be concerned in other ways, too.

I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".

Am I Still Charlie?

One of the things that makes it hard to defend Charlie Hebdo is Charlie Hebdo's habit of publishing stuff that's hard to defend.  In particular, I'm thinking of the editorial published on the 3rd: "How Did We End Up Here?".  In this article, it seems that the magazine is placing the blame for Islamist violence not only on Muslims (which is trivially true, inasmuch as that non-Muslims are unlikely to take up the Islamist cause), but on all Muslims (which is trivially false, and feeds into a rather unpleasant right-wing narrative).

Having said that, we do need to be clear about what, exactly, Charlie is supposed to have done, and why, and what our response should be.  The Independent's piece on criticism of the editorial gave much more attention to the critics than to the editorial itself.  (Admittedly, this later article did make the case for the other side.)  And I'm fully signed up to the principle of charity when it comes to assessing people's arguments; even if they screw up the argument, the thing for which they're arguing may still be worthwhile.  So we ought to take the best possible interpretation of a given article, and dismiss it only to the extent that a charitable reading is not possible.  For some things, the dismissal will come fairly quickly; for others, it'll take longer; and for some it'll be late, if it comes at all.

Photo: Exeter Express and Echo

Based on the application of that principle, I don't think that the Charlie editorial is quite as bad as it might appear at first.  It certainly does have the whiff of the train-wreck about it  in certain respects; but upon examination, my sense is that things could probably be worse; it seems analogous to the weekend's bump between trains in Plymouth.  There were no serious injuries caused when the trains bashed into each other - but it's clear all the same that someone can't have been paying attention, and the damage is going to need more than a bit of paint to put right.  As for Great Western, so for Charlie.

(At least, I think so.  Look: writing about this stuff is always going to be difficult, so I make no claim that what follows is anything more than thinking aloud.  But since this is a blog rather than an academic analysis, and I'm writing under my pen-name rather than ex cathedra, I reserve the right to throw stuff out there pretty much as it occurs to me.  So, suitably disclaimered, here we go.)

The first thing we should note is that Charlie is, and always has been, fiercely irreligious, and fiercely anti-clerical.  The image on the right is the cover it published on the first anniversary of the murders in its own office.  It's god who's fingered as a the guilty party here.  Religion is not going to get an easy time in its pages - and it is no harder or softer on Islam than on any other religion.  The figure in the image could be Allah, or Yahweh, or anyone: the name and the particular mythology don't matter one bit.  So the background for any article is a presumption that religion, or at least the encroachment of religion into the public realm, is something to be resisted.  With that noted, how should we read the editorial?

The trivial answer is that, at the very least, we should read it.  And some of it is, I think, misjudged.  But it's worth quoting at length, all the same.  (I'm tempted to C&P the whole thing, except that I think that this is already going to be quite a long post, and there's really no need; you can follow the link above if you're really bothered.)  And it starts off well - if vaguely - enough:

Why India? Why Brits?

Cross-posted from the other blog.

Julie Bindel had a piece in The Guardian the other day about India's surrogate mothers.  It makes for pretty grim reading.  Even if the surrogates are paid, and are paid more than they might otherwise have earned, there's still a range of problems that the piece makes clear.

For one thing, the background of the surrogates is an important factor.  Bindel writes that

[s]urrogates are paid about £4,500 to rent their wombs at this particular clinic, a huge amount in a country where, in 2012, average monthly earnings stood at $215.

It's tempting, at first glance, to look at the opportunity to be a surrogate as a good thing in this context: these women are earning, by comparative standards, good money.  But, of course, you have to keep in mind that the standard is comparative.  If your choice is between doing something you wouldn't otherwise do and penury, doing the thing you wouldn't otherwise do looks like the better option.  But "better option" doesn't imply "good option".  So there's more to be said there; more questions to be asked.  Choosing x over y because y is more awful doesn't mean that x isn't.  It might be a good thing; but it might not be.  There might be economic - structural - coercion.  Choosing to become a surrogate might be a symptom of there being no better alternative.

A related question is this: are the women really making a free choice in offering their reproductive labour even assuming that the terms are economically just?  Possibly not:

I have heard several stories of women being forced or coerced into surrogacy by husbands or even pimps, and ask Mehta if she is aware of this happening.  “Without the husbands’ [of the surrogates] consent we don’t do surrogacy."

Note (a) the non-denial, and (b) the tacit acceptance that it's the husband's decision anyway.  That's not good.

(In a wholly different context, I've recently been reading David Luban's Lawyers and Justice, and - in a discussion about lawyers cross-examining complainants in rape cases, he makes this point:

([H]ere we have two people who are confronted by powerful institutions from which protection is needed.  The defendant is confronted by the state [that is: in any criminal trial, the defendant does need protection from the power of the state - IB], but the victim is confronted by the millennia-long cultural tradition of patriarchy, which makes the cliché that the victim is on trial true.  From the point of view of classical liberalism, according to which the significant enemy is the state, this cannot matter. But from the point of view of the progressive correction of classical liberalism, any powerful social institution is a threat, including diffuse yet tangible institutions such as patriarchy. (p 151)

(The sentiment would seem to apply here.  A view of human agency that sees liberty as being mainly or only about avoiding state interference is likely to miss all kinds of much more subtle, insidious pressures that are liberty-limiting.  Economic factors are such pressures.  The idea of the wife as property is another.)

I do wonder if readers of this blog might help out with answering one more question, though. One of the startling claims is that

[a]pproximately 12,000 foreigners come to India each year to hire surrogates, many of them from the UK.

I don't know how many "many" is, but let's take as read that it's more than none.  It's a statistic that raises a question for Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels:

Why India? Why not hire surrogates at home?
Because India has a lot of poor people, that’s why. Because the price is a fifth of what it would be at home. Because it’s a perfect setup for rich pale people to exploit very poor brown women.

I don't think that that's quite got it.  As I commented on Ophelia's piece, this wouldn’t easily explain the UK factor.  As the article makes clear, commercial surrogacy is illegal here; surrogates are allowed only to recoup reasonable expenses.  Surrogacyuk.org suggests £7000 – £15000 as a guide for the “price” (I know I shouldn't use that word, but you know what I mean) in the UK; but if Indian surrogates are paid £4500, and the clinic is still making up to £18000 on the transaction (assuming I’ve not misread the article), the Indian market is likely to be more expensive for commissioners, even without the cost of travelling to India to begin with.

So why do Brits use Indian surrogates?

Here's a hypothesis.  In the UK, surrogacy arrangements aren’t enforceable, the woman who gives birth is automatically recognised as the mother, and a Parental Order is required for the commissioning mother/ couple to be legally recognised as having parental status.  I don’t know what the legal niceties are in India, but my guess is that that side of things is probably a bit easier to deal with.  After all, if the procedure there is as free-wheeling as Bindel suggests, keeping track of exactly who gave birth to whom and with whose eggs isn’t going to be foolproof.

Is that it?  Is there any other reason why people from the UK might commission an Indian surrogate mother?