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Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)

30.11.14

Humour

Oo-err! Top five gags from Penny Mordaunt, minister for innuendo

0 comments30 November 2014 16:07 
Penny Mordaunt at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards 2014.
Penny Mordaunt at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards 2014.
Tory MP Penny Mourdant has caused a stir in Sunday’s papers over her confession at our Parliamentarian of the Year awards that she said ‘cock’ in Parliament as a bet with her colleagues in the Royal Navy, where she serves as a reservist.
As winner of our Speech of the Year award, Mourdant clearly has a way with words. Here are her top five gags (so far):
1. Caring for your kit in the field
One of the highlights of her award-winning Loyal Speech earlier this year was a gag about her Royal Navy training:
‘I have benefited from some excellent training by the Royal Navy but on one occasion I felt it was not as bespoke as it might have been. Fascinating through it was, I felt that he lecture and demonstration on how to care for your penis and testicles in the field failed to appreciate that some of us attending had been issued with the incorrect kit.’
2. Cook-a-hook about animal welfare
As the result of a bet with her Navy colleagues, Mordaunt used variations on the word ‘cock’ during a speech on animal welfare in the House of Commons. Here are the select quotes from the speech were she used the offending word:
‘As some supermarkets seem to have substituted easter eggs, fluffy chicks and chocolate bunnies for tinsel and crackers cockcrow on the seventh of January’
‘The cause of hen and cock welfare is one raised with me by many of my constituents’
‘The British Hen Welfare Trust should be cock-a-hoop about its successful record in 2005 of rehoming 360,000 laying hens of pensionable age’
‘In ‘The Good Life’ idyll, one imagines several hens and a single proud cockerel but one strutting coxcomb will lead to many chicks and what is to become of the male contingent with not a layer among them’
‘I encourage people to consider homes for hens but to think carefully about a coop for a cockerel.’
‘When we eventually head into spring, let us have no cock-ups on hen welfare.’

3. Thelma and Louise of Parliament
In her Loyal Address, Mourdaunt hit back at remarks from fellow Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh that it was time to end the coalition:
‘The right honourable member for Gainsborough is concerned about the consequence of the coalition running its full course. He might see as the Thelma and Louise of the Parliamentary session: driving at top speed to the Grand Canyon of electoral defeat. Let me reassure him that this will not be the case because unlike a 1966 Thunderbird, this coalition is right hand drive.’

4. Blood pressure concerns
Mordaunt explained her reasoning for not delivering the Loyal Address in her navy uniform, as one of her predecessors Sir Hedworth Meux once did:
‘In 1917, he seconded the Loyal Address in his number 1b uniform, and in the course of his remarks, advised that the naval service was better praised by an outsider than one who belongs to it. I, in contrast, am not in my uniform. Alas, Chamber protocol and concerns for the blood pressure of my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) prevent it. As hon. Members who have come within earshot of me during the past four years will know, I am very happy to praise the senior service from within.’

5. I’d like to thank male genitalia… 
As well as admitting to the bet, Mordaunt’s also acknowledge that the real reason she won an award was not thanks to long working hours:
‘I feel a bit of a fraud actually because let’s face it, the reason I won this was not because of the hours I put in or the carefully crafted speech, it’s because I referred to male genitalia during the course of it. That was not the first time I’ve done that on the floor of the House…’
Tags: House of CommonsParliamentarian of the YearPenny MordauntUK politics

Our planet may be on the verge of its sixth mass extinction

Our planet may be on the verge of its sixth mass extinction - The Washington Post



29.11.14

How do you sell God in the 21st century? More heaven, less hell

How do you sell God in the 21st century? More heaven, less hell | Meghan O’Gieblyn | News | The Guardian

RIP

The Pleasure of His Company

Mike Nichols was a learned man who loved his work and was in love with the world.

I wrote of this two summers ago:
There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen, traveling with his younger brother. They were fleeing the Nazis. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan’s west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching all the bustle of disembarking when the boy saw something: “Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters,” he later remembered.
He was startled, then fearful. A sign in Hebrew letters—that would be impossible back home. He asked: “Is that allowed?”
“It is here,” said his father.
The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with all that America allowed.
He died last week at 83, at the top of his game and still in the thick of it. I’m grateful this Thanksgiving just to have known him, and been his friend.
He was a great man.
Director Mike Nichols in a publicity still for ‘The Graduate’ (1967).ENLARGE
Director Mike Nichols in a publicity still for ‘The Graduate’ (1967). ASSOCIATED PRESS
We all know his work but it must be said he had suchrange. Everyone noted the past week that he did it all—directing on Broadway, in film, brilliant comedy act with Elaine May, comedy albums. And he had another kind of range. He had perfect pitch for the tale of a lost, affluent college graduate in the heart of Los Angeles in the 1960s, perfect pitch for a striving Staten Island working girl who wanted to make it in America in the ’80s, perfect pitch for the Midwestern working people whose story was told in “Silkwood.” He understood people! He saw their sameness, their hungers and hopes. He bothered to understand the country he first glimpsed from the Bremen.
He once told me he didn’t direct movies, he cast them. In a way it was a line and a typically modest one—it wasn’t him, it was them—but it also wasn’t. He was saying he picks actors who have the quality and depth to do what he wants, and he trusts them to come through. That is a great thing, when an artist trusts his paint.
There was something in the home that he shared with his wife, his beloved Diane Sawyer , that I always looked for when I visited. He kept a big, faded pillow on the living-room couch. It bore the words “Nothing Is Written.” When I first saw it I pointed. “You know what that’s from?” he asked. Yes, I said, “ Lawrence of Arabia, ” Robert Bolt ’s screenplay. He clapped his hands with delight. To know it was to honor what it meant—that no outcome is dictated, no impediment is insuperable; you can wrest life from its ruts, its false limits.
I can’t think of a better attitude for an artist, or any other professional for that matter.
His closest friends this week marveled at the depth of the impression he made on all whose lives he touched. “He’d make you feel you were better than you believed—smarter, funnier, more alive,” one said.
It was his way not only as an artist but as a human being to turn things on their head. A friend of his son, Max, wrote to remind him of a birthday party they’d attended years before, when she was a little girl. They had gone to see “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” In the middle of it she ran out into the lobby, terrified. Naturally a parent would be expected to follow and comfort her by explaining it wasn’t real, there was nothing to be afraid of. But it was Mike who followed her out, and he asked, “Is being scared always such a bad thing?” A soothing philosophical discussion commenced.
A friend noted something else: his unbounded excitement about life, his ability to retain a freshness, an innocence. “It was always possible that this was going to be the best dumpling, the best conversation, this play was going to have a moment in it we’d never forget. . . . He was in love with the world. He was in love with Egg McMuffins ! He took such joy in what was. Maybe the Buddhists have it wrong, maybe the great livers are the ones who love things, too—that book, that painting, the McDonald’s breakfast.”
A thing that distinguished Mike professionally is that he thought he had to know things. He came up in a generation that thought to know the theater you have to know the theater. They read. He read, all his life. He knew the canon—his Chekhov, Ibsen and Molière, his Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard.
He learned his stuff in part for the sheer pleasure of learning, but in part because you have to know what has been said and thought and given to the world, you have to know what’s a cliché to be lost and what’s an ever-present truth to be resurrected or enlarged upon. Mrs. Robinson was, in fact, Phaedra. He knew, said a friend, that “every great story is a tremor from those dynamics that stretch back way over time.”
To make great art you have to know great art. And so his learned, highly cultivated mind. He dropped out of the University of Chicago and sought to teach himself through great books and smart people.
Great writers and directors have to start as great readers or it won’t work, nothing needed from the past will be brought into the future, and art will become thinner, less deep, less meaningful and so, amazingly, less fun, less moving and true.
The makers of American culture should return to this old style, which isn’t really old and yet is being lost.
Mike Nichols cared deeply—this was apparent in his later years—about keeping the American culture a thing of stature and height and radiance. It was the subject of our last long conversation, late this summer.
When he directed “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway two years ago he was, in fact, rescuing a classic and making it new again for those who had never seen or even known of this great play. He did a lot of rescue work. He wasn’t stuffy or old fashioned—that’s the last thing he was!—he loved the new, the breakthrough, the brave moment that he’d never seen before. But he wanted very much for us to retain and maintain the excellence of American theater and film.
An anecdote, about a friend who really got him:
The morning after Mike’s death, a friend of the family called those who had been in touch to invite them to a small gathering in New York the next afternoon. Among them was the actress Emma Thompson, who knew of his death and was bereft. Now, told of the gathering, she was crestfallen. She was in London, there was a big event months in the making the very next day, it wasn’t possible. Of course, she was told, we understand. Mike would understand.
The next day the gathering began, and first through the door was Emma Thompson. “Where else would anyone who knew him be?” she said.
Lucky us, that the Bremen came here.

Why luxury air travel is taking off again - FT.com

Why luxury air travel is taking off again - FT.com

What Should the Pope Do in New York City?

What Should the Pope Do in New York City? - NYTimes.com

Best books of 2014 - FT.com

Best books of 2014 - FT.com



San Francisco

Time Lapse Video of San Francisco Reminds Us What We're Thankful For Today | The Exhibitionist | San Francisco | San Francisco News and Events | SF Weekly



MANIEGO MEDIA/ VIMEO

28.11.14

Campus Books

John Sutherland, Sarah Churchwell and others pick books that capture truths about the sector
Man immersed in reading book
It has long been the practice of disgruntled academics with a literary bent to vent their frustrations by writing a campus novel, and their colleagues have been devouring the often comic results for at least 60 years.
But for those few who have not yet got beyond Lucky Jim, we wanted to solicit views on which were the most striking examples. And who better to ask than five academics in English literature?
Former Wellesley College and Cornell University lecturer Vladimir Nabokov is cited twice, for two different books, while ex-University of Sydney, University of Cambridge and Wolverhampton Polytechnic academic Howard Jacobson also figures prominently.
But universities are made up of students as well as academics, and two contributors cite novels that recall the writer’s time as an undergraduate. Not that they are necessarily any good. As John Sutherland suggests, sometimes a novel is compelling for what it represents rather than for any proximity to great literature.
But several of the accounts we present suggest that the best campus novels do indeed achieve that proximity and bear a profundity that far transcends the genre’s reputation for jaded satire.
Thomas Hughes writing at desk

Tom Brown at Oxford

by Thomas Hughes (1861)
Does it matter that all these highly trained minds, who form our opinions day in and day out, squeezed through the same tiny educational aperture?
What dominates the narrative is Oxford: a moral assembly line that can take any portion of the haphazardly ingested youth of England and turn out Tom Browns
Yes, whatever the joke says, I was certainly there and I can remember it well. The 1960s, that is. One of the texts of the decade, when England swung like a pendulum do (you probably don’t remember the Roger Miller song), was Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. Among other things, hairy Wilson decreed that you could get all the higher education you needed with a British Museum reader’s ticket, an Aran sweater, a sleeping bag, Nietzsche and a soft patch of Hampstead Heath.
His paideuma was too outside for many, even in the 1960s. But Hampstead Heath wasn’t the only domicile on offer to the young hipster with a thirst for knowledge. You could, post-Robbins, sign up for Albert Sloman’s quartier latin (“Alphaville”, the less respectful students called it, in a wry allusion to Jean-Luc Godard’s dystopian film) in Wivenhoe Park, Essex. Or follow the “new maps of learning”, laid down by David Daiches and Asa Briggs at Sussex. Or breathe inspiration from the new creative options at the University of East Anglia.
All universities – not just The Open University – were open. Moulds had been broken; higher education was no longer mouldy. But British higher education is like silly putty. However you reshape it, the stuff just imperceptibly returns to its original, immutable, shape.
A scenario. David Cameron comes on the Today programme (current editor: Jamie Angus) to vigorously defend the economic policies of George Osborne. They’re putting the country right. “No they’re not,” Ed Miliband and Ed Balls insist, a couple of clips later. Ultimately, we can’t be sure, opines Nick Robinson, playing both sides as usual.
On World at One, Martha Kearney returns to the fray. William Hague strikes in for plan Osborne. That afternoon, Anne McElvoy writes a rush-job column for the Standard. Judicious, as ever.
On Channel 4 News, Cathy Newman gives Jacob Rees-Mogg a drubbing. He remains imperturbably Jacob. Gary Gibbon comments wryly from College Green. On Newsnight (current editor: Ian Katz), Osborne continues to defend himself under the gentle probings of Evan Davis. Michael Crick follows with a jesting comment or two.
Next morning, Rachel Sylvester delivers her verdict in The Times, and David Aaronovitch offers a sardonic sidebar. In The Guardian, the two radical attack dogs, Owen Jones and John Harris, snarl and snap. Patrick Wintour offers more measured critique on page three. Boris Johnson bellows eloquently in the Telegraph. Just another 24-hour news cycle.
What the above 21 names have in common is that all were educated at the University of Oxford – and all did humanities or “soft” social science subjects (about half of them choosing philosophy, politics and economics, the degree of the upper classes). Does it matter that all these highly trained minds, who form our opinions day in and day out, squeezed through the same tiny educational aperture? Might there not be a certain “insiderness”? A little flank-rubbing among the Oxonian herd? In a recent combative review essay in the New Statesman, Mark Damazer, master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, defends the great Oxford machine. True, he says: of the 20,000 would-be undergraduates who apply every year, only 20 per cent are accepted. But that’s the luck of the draw. If you want to be exclusive you’ve got to exclude.
Now we turn, belatedly, to Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown at Oxford (1861). It is a sequel to the best-selling Tom Brown’s School Days. As literature, it’s beyond dire. Not even George MacDonald Fraser could breathe life into it. But with the silly putty thesis in mind, it’s instructive.
Tom, a squire’s son, is “upper middle class”. He has been shaped, but not “completed”, by Dr Arnold at Rugby. The first thing Tom does, in chapter one, is matriculate at his college, St Ambrose’s: “Here [the students] went through the usual forms of subscribing to the articles, and otherwise testifying their loyalty to the established order of things, without much thought perhaps, but in very good faith nevertheless.”
Those articles, of course, were the 39 articles of the Church of England (no Catholics, Jews or Nonconformists, thank you). Tom’s Oxford is founded on subscription and ideological affirmation to “the established order of things”.
Hughes’ plot is feeble. Should our hero throw in his lot with the fast set, the hearties or the swots? He finally opts for the Christian socialism of virtuous classmate Hardy, and declines to seduce the conveniently seducible barmaid.
What dominates the narrative is Oxford: a moral assembly line that can take any portion of the haphazardly ingested youth of England and turn out Tom Browns: liberal, unostentatiously well-educated, above all, “decent”. The best of English. Oxford educates – but more importantly, it “forms” character.
But it’s all different now. Isn’t it? Just ask – well, any of the above.
John Sutherland is emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London.
Vladimir Nabokov portrait

Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
Academics are at once the novel’s target and its most devoted followers. Careers have been made on only slightly less fantastic work
Delirious, funny and dizzying, it is at the same time a hoax and a satire, inviting us to participate in the mania it sends up
If you are a literary scholar, reading Pale Fire is part delight, part mortification. Ostensibly an annotated edition of a 999-line poem in heroic couplets by the late John Shade, a poet-scholar at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia, Pale Fire hits all too close to home.
Within a few pages we realise that the editor of the book, Charles Kinbote, is off his rocker. He proceeds to hijack Shade’s work with his scholarly apparatus: a mass of delusional footnotes that dwarf the original poem and smother it with Kinbote’s own story. Supposedly the exiled king of the noble, beleaguered country of Zembla (just north of Russia), Kinbote claims to have parachuted into the US and taken a literature professorship at Wordsmith, where he befriended/stalked Shade until the poet’s bizarre death.
On the surface, Nabokov is not so much interested in detailing the college setting in Pale Fire, à la David Lodge, as he is in building a multilayered edifice of artifice that mocks the parasitic nature of criticism. But there is a campus novel submerged in the portraits of the idiosyncratic Wordsmith faculty, such as the scene in the faculty lounge in which one Professor Pardon (a historian, of course) threatens to blow Kinbote’s cover, suggesting that he is really the insane “American scholar of Russian descent”, V. Botkin, who lurks in Kinbote’s notes. The fact that the rest of the academic community, including two trustees and the college president, seem to play along with this madman’s charade tells us what Nabokov thinks of the insular world of academia.
Delirious, funny and dizzying, Pale Fire is at the same time a hoax and a satire, inviting us to participate in the mania that it sends up. The physical act of reading the book, with its vertiginous cross-referencing, onomastics, acrostics and other paranoid wordplay, encourages us to descend down the rabbit hole with Kinbote and his hilariously off-base readings. Academics are at once the novel’s target and its most devoted followers. Careers have been made on only slightly less fantastic work.
As if Pale Fire were not delightful enough (the index alone is a thing of pathological wonder), there is an almost equally amusing discussion around the novel. Brilliant, zany scholars, even more zealously than Nabokov’s own “Shadeans”, debate the novel’s minutiae and spin metacritical theories about it in a slew of books, blogs and venues such as the Nabokov Online Journal and discussion forum NABOKV-L.
Pale Fire has a life of its own: Shade’s poem has been published as a free-standing work, the merits of which have been debated by eminent poetry scholars, and Nabokov’s novel even apparently has its own Facebook account. If there are any would-be Kinbotes out there, Nabokov’s last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, posthumously published in 2009 as 138 handwritten 3in x 5in notecards, remains to be annotated/colonised. “For better or for worse,” as Kinbote remarks, “it is the commentator who has the last word.”
Laura Frost is associate professor of literary studies at The New School for Liberal Arts in New York City.
Linda Grant portrait

Upstairs at the Party

by Linda Grant (2014)
The government paid us to spend three years being students, which meant, in those days, a way of life suited to Renaissance philosopher-kings
The bookish only child who positively bursts into her twenties on a giddy surge of intellectual self-determination could have been me
For years I wanted a campus novel that spoke to me. I wanted one that wasn’t shot through with the wearisome misogyny of Kingsley Amis, or the elitist exoticism of Donna Tartt. As a student at the University of East Anglia, I had an on-site, trailblazing campus novelist, Malcolm Bradbury, but his Watermouth felt far more like Brighton than Norwich. Howard Jacobson – a family friend – had immortalised my late father (as well as one of his wives and classic cars) in one of his novels in the early 1980s, but even that didn’t speak to me.
I came across Linda Grant’s writing only this summer and it gripped me instantly. The bookish only child depicted in her latest novel, Upstairs at the Party, who positively bursts into her twenties on a giddy surge of intellectual self-determination, could have been me as much as it is surely Grant. This is despite the fact that while I was at UEA in the late 1980s, Grant and her protagonist, Adele, were undergraduates at the University of York in the early 1970s.
The adult Adele writes of York’s founders that “their plan was to defeat ideology with a quiet, humane liberalism of human rights, equality and a spirit of public service […] The freedom of the university was the plate on which our lives had been handed to us. Real freedoms, for the administration had decided it would not act in loco parentis. There were no rules.”
That ethos remained alive even by the time I went to York’s sister plate-glass institution in the twilight of the Thatcher era and the dying days of student grants. We came to love grey concrete architecture, which we took to be the audacious incarnation of the similar dreams and ambitions of UEA’s founders. The extraordinary buildings contrasted with the former golf course that surrounded them, punctuated by a large, artificial lake (much like York, again, except that ours was a “broad” because this was East Anglia, after all).
Grant captures how the university as a cultural phenomenon has evolved and how we often go back – in our imaginations or in actual fact – but how we can never really go back. Visiting UEA now, I am a ghost, treading previously familiar paths and knowing that, somewhere under the sediment left by subsequent generations of students, teachers and builders, lies that part of me that the university formed and that part of the university that I formed.
This language of the melancholic revenant is one Grant adopts when Adele, now an adult, returns to her alma mater and viscerally senses how so much of the optimism of the 1970s has faded. Grant’s writing is deeply moving: “I had the vertiginous sense of time-travelling, but there was something lost and cold and alone about our party in late middle age walking in our own footsteps. Something was a dream, now or then. The memory of our young selves burned with an intensity we had not felt for many decades. We were compromised people in so many ways and were the accretion of our compromises. The founding spirits had not warned us that this was who we would become.”
The novel examines, through Adele’s eyes, the benign neglect of a liberal university at a time when “the government paid us to spend three years being students, which meant, in those days, a way of life suited to Renaissance philosopher-kings, until we were turfed out blinking and unprotected like baby koalas ejected from the womb on to the alien, leafless world of an Antarctic ice floe”.
It’s this laissez-faire ethos which comes to scar Adele and her peers irrevocably – but I won’t say how for fear of spoiling any would-be readers’ enjoyment of Grant’s extraordinarily redolent and exquisitely written novel.
Emma Rees is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Chester.
Vladimir Nabokov portrait

Pnin

by Vladimir Nabokov (1957)
Nabokov heaps acidic contempt upon Pnin’s colleagues - adding a few passing swipes at absurd undergraduates, like a lion lazily shredding gazelles
The author’s satirical mockery, the famous ‘laughter from Montreux’, fuses here with lament, longing and despair
While I’d like to give an honourable mention to The Groves of Academe(1951) by fellow American woman Mary McCarthy (not least because many credit it with being the first modern campus novel), there is no doubt that my favourite campus novel by far is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin.
Based on Nabokov’s experiences teaching at Cornell, the book tells the poignant tale of Russian émigré Timofey Pnin’s failed attempts to adapt to life at an American university. Bumbling, decent and pathetic, Pnin is not an anti-hero, but an unhero, a modern little Quixote whose quest to find a home can only ever be frustrated. Exposed to constant ridicule for his comic foibles, particularly his struggles with English, Pnin clings to his stubborn love of his lost language, and the lost motherland it symbolises.
What makes Pnin so remarkable is that Nabokov’s satirical mockery, the famous “laughter from Montreux”, fuses here with lament, longing and despair. (The only other novel I know that manages to be simultaneously satirical and elegiac is The Great Gatsby.) Nabokov heaps acidic contempt upon Pnin’s colleagues – adding a few passing swipes at absurd undergraduates, like a lion lazily shredding gazelles – while gradually ensuring that our compassion for Pnin transmutes into sympathy and even to a surprised admiration.
The campus novel usually pokes fun at the academic romance of devotion to the life of the mind, exposing the venality and pettiness beneath the lofty claims to intellectual high-mindedness. But Nabokov neither jeers at academic isolation nor romanticises it. Instead, the great chess player’s move in Pnin is to make his humble pawn a symbol of spiritual exile and deracination, of our basic need for fellowship or even simple affiliation. Presented with an American cartoon, which is supposed to be funny, Pnin can see only the “impossible isolation” that subsidises the joke and bursts into tears. The campus comedy is turned inside out: instead of chafing academics for the trite reason that they fight over allegedly trivial matters, Nabokov suggests that the campus represents what we all want: sanctuary, belonging, homecoming. Instead of ridiculing academics’ soi-disantpeculiarities, Nabokov generates his comedy from their universality.
Pnin’s helpless decency in the face of heartlessness leads the reader to believe that something has to give: either Pnin’s good intentions, or his ability to survive. Instead, Nabokov quite uncharacteristically sets Pnin free into a new romance with the American road. Ultimately, Pnin’s tale of exile, estrangement and escape becomes not a story of academics squabbling in ivory towers, but a story about the human condition, how we bear grief, isolation, the world’s assault upon our ideals and dreams: how beneath our manifest absurdity, there might be some lingering dignity after all.
Sarah Churchwell is professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at the University of East Anglia.
Howard Jacobson portrait

Coming from behind

by Howard Jacobson (1983)
The last straw for Goldberg is Wrottesley’s decision to twin itself with the local football club and share not just its facilities but its hopeless take on life
It may have been published 30 years ago, but it still has the power to shock us into moments of recognition
What can a university have in common with a football club, someone asks in Howard Jacobson’s campus novel, Coming from Behind (1983). The response is: “We are all showmen together. Furthermore we are all playing to empty houses.”
This novel may have been published 30 years ago, but it still has the power to shock us into moments of recognition. Will it ever come to this, as we scrabble with increasing desperation for students and sponsorship?
Jacobson’s novel pits Cambridge against Wrottesley Polytechnic in the troubled inner life of its Jewish hero Sefton Goldberg, as he battles his way through every kind of assault on his security and self-esteem, nursing memories of better times and higher aspirations. Of course, the danger with fictional representations of university life is that they can date as quickly as platform heels or mullet hairstyles – but, like any fashion trend, if you wait long enough they come round again.
Resistance to change has always been a feature of academic life. First it was computers, modules, semesters and emails. Then it was virtual learning environments, podcasts and online marking – not to mention all the reconfigurations of departments into schools, and schools into faculties. Jacobson’s novel captures all of this in his Department of Twentieth-Century Studies, which “had once been Humanities and before that Arts and before that Liberal Studies and before that English and History”. The last straw for Goldberg is Wrottesley’s decision to twin itself with the local football club and share not just its facilities but also its hopeless take on life.
Cambridge may have been Sefton’s glorious past and dreamed-of future (as he applies for a fellowship at Holy Christ Hall), but it is by no means exempt from Jacobson’s satirical gaze. At Cambridge, Sefton recalls, embarrassment reigned, along with an alien culture of medievalism, avoided eye-contact, silent speech, anxiety, reticence and pain. Even his college’s porter is skilled in inflicting shame and self-doubt as he checks him in (“all I’ve got here is a Goldblatt”). For Jacobson, universities are essentially places where bruised, hypersensitive egos survive on uneasy compromises, whether through guarded friendships or united resistance against common enemies.
Sefton’s Wrottesley colleagues are as mad as anyone from Lucky Jim, and all, in their own way, preserve some little piece of eccentricity from the pressure to conform. Those who embrace the modern world are rarely treated sympathetically in university novels, but nor are those who take their teaching too seriously. As Sefton’s students sit “passive and suspicious in orderly rows, their pens held uncertainly in tattooed fingers”, he tricks them into believing that the greatest English novelists were Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Mrs Henry Wood.
The details may have changed (there was no research excellence framework or impact agenda back in 1983), but Jacobson captures all the helplessness and secrecy of high-minded disengagement from brutal values. In a telling image of the kind of eccentric academic behaviour no longer tolerated, Sefton is shown using his filing cabinet to store “used copies of the Times Higher Education Supplement” along with job advertisements and student essays that might be plagiarised – only he can’t make up his mind. No transformational change agenda for him just yet.
Valerie Sanders is professor of English and director of the graduate school at the University of Hull.

Pictures

The best children’s books of the year

In a round-up review of children’s books, Melanie McDonagh launches a campaign for bigger, better illustrations — and many more of them
The Parent Trap, familiar from various film versions, is a story by Eric Kastner, now republished with Walter Trier’s illustrations by Pushkin Books
The Parent Trap, familiar from various film versions, is a story by Erich Kästner, now republished with Walter Trier’s illustrations by Pushkin Books
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case.
My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for children. There are some wonderful illustrators out there, contemporary ones, for all ages, and the scandalous thing is, they are usually limited to the age range, 0–7. If you want to remind yourself what we’re missing, make for the House of Illustration in London’s King’s Cross; that should do it. Or try Chris Beetles’s annual, brilliant exhibition, The Illustrators, on now at his St James’s gallery.
There are so many books where it’s the combination of author and illustrator that makes you love them. In the case of The Flying Classroom and The Parent Trap (£7.99 each, Spectator Bookshop, £7.59 each) by Erich Kästner, now republished by the ever brilliant Pushkin, it’s the combo of author, illustrator and translator. The bold line drawings by Walter Trier are the work of genius — he was quite something, was Trier. As for the stories, if you’re a fan of Emil and the Detectives, then you’ll find these just as spirited, with the same element of children pitted against the world. The translation, by Anthea Bell, who did Asterix, is very fine.
Younger children have it made when it comes to pictures, but I wouldn’t let them keep picture books for themselves. Some are just too good. Take This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen (Walker, £6.99, Spectator Bookshop, £6.64), an account of a little fish nicking a hat from a big fish, more or less the theme of his equally fabulous I Want My Hat Back. Something simple for infants? Actually, it’s one of the funniest books of the year.
From The Last Days of Stefan Zweig by Laurent Seksik and Guillaume Sorel (Salammbo, £13.99)
From The Little Train by Graham Greene, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, published by Jonathan Cape

Why Not?

NY’s Sparkliest Spectacular: Radio City & the Rockettes

Herald (Square)-ing the Holidays


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The Rockettes as reindeer in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. (All photos courtesy of MSG Entertainment.)
Pageantry. What ever happened to it? Humans crave it, that thrill of being a part of something grand and grandly presented.
I myself, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, didn’t realize how dishwater dull my life had become until I walked into the lobby of Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center and was confronted by the enormous Christmas tree crystal chandelier surely at least 60 feet high. Made up entirely of sparkling white lights and looking just like the Death Star exploding in a shimmering blaze of holiday repentance. And once inside the gi-normous theatre, when Santa’s sleigh zoomed onto stage pulled by three dozen rhinestoned, bejeweled and bedizened lady reindeer, well, a pageant-sized hole in my heart was filled.
Forgive the purple prose, but the Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring that vast excellent army of precision good cheer, The Rockettes, demands more than a little pip-squeaked “God bless us everyone.” This 90-minute, intermission-less extravaganza, welcoming, oh, just 5933 close personal friends for each of four or often a crazy five performances a day through December 31st lives up to its hyperbolic name.
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The Rockettes in the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”.
From the “Mighty Wurlitzer” pipe organ, the largest ever built for a movie palace, with its two consoles on each side of the Great Stage, to the laser lights, the hunky carolers, an ice skating pas de deux, and a Greyline doubledecker tour bus rolling by on stage, packed with Rockettes in terrific little sparkling dresses in green or red — it all makes the proverbial clown car look like a five-year old tin of dusty sardines in the back of the cupboard.
I could go on, so chock full of Busby Berkeley dreams is this Manhattan tourist perennial. There’s also the fat man in the red suit, a jovial Charles Edward Hall, who has played Santa Claus in the Christmas Spectacular for the past 28 years. I wonder what he does the rest of the year? Santa emceed and handled the only bit of narrative in the show, a little sacchrine tale about two brothers searching high and low for a Christmas present for their sister (cute little BJ Covington and a terrific Brett Gray in the performance I saw). Surprises that won’t be spoiled here are in store in the last third of the show, a moving, memorable and big-budget recreation of the nativity. (This is not a show that tries to give all religions’ holiday traditions equal time.)
But it’s The Rockettes’ world at Radio City; Melchior just lives in it. There are 36 Rockettes in each performance and more than 1,300 costumes flashing by. I guess I thought, having not seen them since I came to New York on a holiday trip when I was seven, that The Rockettes had descended into pure kitsch, had perhaps become threadbare, a gimmick for children and grandpas and were nothing more. But there is something almost physically thrilling in watching them at the outset of “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” stiffly walking out of the giant toy sentry box with the big wind-up key turning in its side.
The dress slacks of the Wooden Soldiers’ uniforms are blindingly white and match the tall plumes standing at attention on top of their hats. The red, blue and white of the line of them all across the stage is like some primary-color construction paper assemblage come to life and when they start their looooong, slow collapse into one another’s arms, it’s more satisfying than any Walking Dead massacre.
They are sharp, smiling, shining reflections of each other, those Rockettes, but somehow they don’t feel like automatons at all, each seems fully alive and individual even as a crack member of a well-disciplined team. They’re just terrific.
So, if you’re feeling a little bah humbuggish, you could tromp over to Madison Square Garden to commiserate with the Grinch, but for sheer, overwhelming oomph, I recommend The Rockettes, who still manage, after 82 years, to take your breathe away.
You think I’m laying it on a bit thick about the wonder that is pageantry? Go see for yourself, and take a kid or two with you as cover.


Read more at http://observer.com/2014/11/the-rockettes-sparkle-shine-like-new-at-radio-city/#ixzz3KOavtq3p 
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