Pete Medway

Wuthering Heights in Milford Haven

2012-01-28T10:34:00.001Z

The recent film of Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold) had the best representation of the Yorkshire moors I've seen. It had a powerful impact on me for the first half or two thirds, for landscape and sound, certainly, but also for characters and story. But I could have done without the rest of the story after Catherine died--the Gothic element I found, as I always do, silly--and I began to be conscious of the film’s innovative techniques as mannerisms -- too many shots at 2 cm range as if seeing something on one’s own cheek, too many scenes opening with crashing wind and rain, great though those were the first few times.

I have had the book since I don’t know when.

A good old Everyman edition. I thought I remembered reading it but not particularly liking it and I had no intention of reading it again. But I opened it and had a look and found the narrative lively and engaging, so without quite deciding to I ended up re-reading it (if indeed I’d read it before -- my memory now can’t be trusted). And after that I came close to going straight back and reading it yet again, but as that was partly to clear up the confusion left in my mind by the two versions, film and book, I opted to start on something else.

But the cover, I noticed, inside the dust cover looked like this:

And inside the front cover was this:

Margaret Hancock was my mother. Both she and my father went to school in Milford Haven but I’d always known it was to the grammar school. So what was this ‘Intermediate School’? It turns out that well before state (i.e. local authority) grammar schools were created by law in England they’d been legal in Wales, but under the name of intermediate schools, intermediate between elementary (primary) and university or college. The Milford Haven one was renamed a grammar school at some point.

I even found an image of it, from a postcard:

I was surprised how tiny the building was, for the only such school in the town. But I knew that more prosperous families sent their boys, like my mother’s brother, to the grammar school in Haverfordwest, and it wasn’t a rich town, so few would have afforded the fees (my dad, I think, won a scholarship).

Isles of Wonder

2012-01-28T10:14:00.000Z

That’s to be the theme of the Olympics opening ceremony but it strikes me that very few people in mainland Britain think of themselves on living on ‘isles’ or even, except occasionally, on an island.

How many of us have ever been to any other British isle?

Norman Davies’s big history book is called The Isles and historians sometimes refer to the British Archipelago or, I think I recall, the Western European Archipelago. Both feel odd. The cluster might be more like an archipelago if it weren’t for Ireland since an archipelago suggests a long line of islands -- like Britain and the Orkneys and Shetlands, with all the Scottish islands clearly belonging. I suppose if you think of it as an interrupted northward extension of Normandy and Britanny....

I've been totting up how many of the islands I’ve been to and I think it’s more than most people have. Yes for a start to the other big one, Ireland, though I don’t know it at all well. Otherwise, clockwise: Wight; not Scillies, not Skomer, Skokholm etc, not Lundy; Anglesea but not Man; Arran, Skye, Lewis and Harris, North Uist, South Uist, Barra; no Orkneys or Shetlands; Farne Islands, Lindisfarne. The best trip was sleeping on the deck of a Macbraynes steamer on a warm starry night from Oban to Stornaway. Time I did more of Scotland, the parts I've visited and the parts I haven’t.

A lost follower of this blog

2011-12-26T17:41:00.000Z

Sadly, I’m one faithful reader less since last week. Andrew Stibbs, my oldest friend, died on 22nd December. He not only read my blog, he responded, often putting me right. Scientist, English teacher, English PGCE tutor, poet, NATE activist, serious artist, lifelong correspondent. I hope I'm wrong in thinking they don’t make them like him any more.

NYR

2011-12-26T17:03:00.000Z

Never too soon, I suppose, to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Not that I ever make any since they seem doomed to be abandoned.

How about this, I'm nevertheless wondering: I've never read the complete works of any major poet, so perhaps I should.

Ted Hughes not only read the complete poems of Yeats-- as a schoolboy -- but, he reckons (Letters), he knew them by heart.

One reason the resolution would be hard to carry through is that I can’t speed-read poetry. It has to be taken at reading-aloud speed.

Enacting the resolution would mean, for once, finishing what I've started, something I can do if for instance writing an article but not if exploring some area of knowledge for myself over a long period. But I'm not sure enacting it would even be wise; I tend to think that when I leave a thing half done to take up something else the impulse is often a sound one, and the sense that the other thing is exactly what I need right now is based on some real self-knowledge; my swerves off-piste and sudden redirections of attention are often fruitful.

But at a cost. I often regret that the rewarding book that I stopped reading part-way through in favour of some new pursuit, and that I know would have benefited me, has since been buried lower and lower in the pile, further and further from being picked up again. Some day I will go back, I resolve. And sometimes I do, perhaps years later.

Reading Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (finally -- published in 1952!), makes me now, off-piste, want to read late 18th century verse -- an unusual impulse in our day.

So first when Phoebus met the Cyprian queen,
And favour’d Rhodes beheld their passion crown’d,
Unusual flowers enrich’d the painted green,
And swift spontaneous roses blush’d around.

Websites and blurbs describe Davie as an ultra-conservative critic but his comments on extracts like this are brilliant and make me see them afresh. If this is ultra-conservatisim, let’s have more of it. (I won’t copy it out: it’s at Penguin, 1992, p.31; I think perhaps online as well.) If one wants examples of good ‘close reading’, go to Empson, Leavis and Davie.

That bit is from a poem by Shenstone, who I've never heard of. Nor have I heard of several of the other poets Davie quotes. I imagine Shenstone wrote whole volumes of verse, or one fat volume at least, and that Davie read the lot and that most was boring. With what attentiveness he must have been reading, though, for a passage like this to stand out as, in his words, subtle, remarkable and beautiful! My other problem with reading poetry is that after a few pages I can’t maintain that sort of freshness of response.

Perhaps a small dose every day would be sustainable and I’d get through, say Yeats or Milton, in a few months. It’s not going to happen, though.

Sessions 3, 4, 5 -- AYLI, the rest

2011-12-21T17:40:00.001Z

Yes, I have to admit in the end, it’s actually very good. Not so much for reading -- needs to be performed for all that clever choreography of gender swops, synchronised marriage and sudden conversions to have its full clever or touching impact. But much of it is truly delightful and, while never quite attaining to funniness, is slightly smile-inducing.

Big problems still remain both for the unsympathetic teenage reader and for me. What are we to make of Touchstone’s ‘wit’ and what is to be done with it? A typical example:

Touchstone:         Art thou wise?
William:                Ay, sir, I have a pretty wit.
Touchstone:         Why, thou sayest well. I do now remember a saying: ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ The heathen philosopher, when he had a desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth, meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open....Art thou learned?
William:                No, sir.
Touchstone:         Then learn this of me. To have is to have. For it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that ‘ipse’ is he. Now, you are not ‘ipse’, for I am he. (V.i)

Presumably enough of the audience must have found this amusing. More infantile they -- which is the impression I also get from medieval writing, as quoted from letters, home-made prayers etc that I find in books of medieval history. They wrote like 8-year-olds of our own time, and seem to have as sophisticated a sense of humour. Thank God for progress.

Session 2, Act II

2011-12-18T16:48:00.000Z

Now that I have set aside the perspective of a drugged-up, angry teenager attending class in between rioting, I get along fine with this play. Everything in this act is delightful, I find; nothing to complain of except some unintelligible stuff from Jacques (textual corruption, suggests the notes at one point). Even ‘All the world’s a stage’ now seems appropriate and amusing. The earlier passage about the weeping deer was touching, as is Orlando’s care for Adam and the generosity of the good -- the forest -- Duke. And it’s full of music -- which productions usually mess up with some horrible, specially composed tune.

I can almost see why that Walworth class in 1951 might have enjoyed preparing scenes for the Shakespeare festival.

‘Lack-lustre eye’ rang a bell: Hazlitt uses it, more than once, I think, to describe some misery-guts like Bentham.

Second time round: is As You Like It as I like it now?

2011-12-17T17:24:00.001Z

As I said a few days ago, I reread it with the prospect of attending a semi-staged performance, found little merit in it and didn’t go. Ever since, and talking to people who love the play, I've wondered whether I was right in my reaction. So rather than put the book away on its shelf I've kept it out, and today felt I wanted to try again, picked it up and so started a re-read -- and decided to keep a log of my findings, act by act.

So, first stint, Saturday teatime.

I've just read Act I and thought it terrific. There’s lovely language, some characters are feisty -- all powerfully display their natures -- and I’d little trouble with understanding. Orlando forcefully expresses -- in gutsy prose -- his dissatisfaction with the way his elder brother treats him, and shows himself a spirited youth. I find myself respecting his interlocutor, his father’s old servant, Adam, a feeling confirmed when we see how the brother treats him, too, after showing himself vindictive and insulting to Orlando and provoking the latter to show his mettle. This deliciously wicked brother, Oliver, with no redeeming features except reluctantly recognising his brother’s qualities while persisting in his enmity -- implausible, yet I have no trouble accepting that the plot is schematic and conventional -- persuades the soon-to-perform champion wrestler to finish Orlando off when challenged by him, which in the event he fails to, even more implausibly and yet, to me, acceptably, thus establishing Orlando as indeed the courageous gentleman whose denial by his brother appears all the more dastardly.

My one point of confusion arises from the arrival on the stage of another delicious dastard, indistinguishable in his meanness and spite, the Duke, Frederic, who has usurped and banished his brother, the father of the witty Rosalind who, accompanied by her friend Celia, the Duke’s daughter, falls in love with Orlando (and he with her, natch) -- and is now banished, like her father, by the Duke. The loyal and loving Celia, another faultlessly virtuous character, decides to accompany her. Sounds nothing but corny, in fact delightful.

The clown Touchstone has been around, in the company of the girls, and even his clowning was more or less comprehensible and didn’t annoy me.

And, throughout, the verse, as spoken by the noble characters, as opposed to the proley prose of others and of themselves off duty, as it were, is lovely.

So, first take: why do I react so differently this time?

For a start I'm taking my time, while previously I was racing to get through it before the performance. Perhaps also, in the expectation of that performance, I couldn’t help envisaging how embarrassing and excruciating a bad reading by amateur luvvies might be (not that I’d any good reason to suppose it would be bad, except that the readers would be amateurs).

I think the other reason is that I find myself thinking quite a lot about the teaching of Shakespeare in schools, something I never attempted except for GCE exams, as few of us did in those days. And I was thinking all the time in part of my mind how a stroppy class of, say, year 9 kids would take it -- think of that group Simon Callow made such a hash of teaching in that Jamie Oliver experiment. And I can’t see what it would take, even if the language ceased to be an obstacle, to get them to accept the absurd conventions of the genre -- like accepting that characters sing in operas.

I recall though that at Walworth School in the early 1950s a third year class (year 9 in today’s terminology) did a production of scenes from As You Like It at a drama festival with their English teacher Arthur Harvey. We have a photograph of it and recollections by someone in the class and I have the impression that they loved it. Different kids from Jamie’s, of course, but still poor and working-class.

Fear of singing

2011-12-16T19:35:00.000Z

Is anything as terrifying as that singing by choirs of Bulgarian women in -- is it unison or close harmony? an image of an unthinking, totally conforming traditional culture, in which individuality can find no expression. It’s beautiful and heart-rending but also repulsive for what it suggests about what we might be reduced to.

Like those scenes from old British documentaries in which a thousand men pour out of a factory, all with flat caps, all heading the same way, all having to be back on the dot of 8 on Monday morning. Or where a shed full of women in oilskin aprons gut endless baskets of fish, with movements so rapid you can’t follow them, all subordinated to a mechanical rhythm.

Medieval plainchant, too. My terror of institutionalisation, total socialisation with nothing left over. Even stretches to community singing. Singing at football and rugby -- though the Welsh national anthem never fails to raise hairs on my neck. Mass rallies, all shouting, open mouths, faces uplifted...

Thank God for orchestras and conductors since Beethoven, lonely poets in garrets, plays with recognisable people, not Vice, Avarice, Charity...

Hopeless Shakespeare

2011-12-11T11:03:00.000Z

I've sounded off before about this and now, a current experience to report.

I was contemplating going this afternoon to a reading of As You LIke It, by amateurs with a professional director, wine and mince pies included in the very modest £3. I remember enjoying the play at the Globe not many years ago. So in preparation I've reread it over the last couple of days. And now I'm not going.

There were bits I enjoyed. Always good to get into reading Shakespeare again, and I recall what insatiable and incessant readers of him some people I admire have been, like Ted Hughes (see the terrific volume of his letters). But the pleasure soon palled as I was confronted with a text that seemed in the greater part to be either unintelligible or, because of the tastes it appealed to in humour and conventions, was simply, to modern reader who was not a specialist, pointless. I was left fuming at the stupidity of making young teenagers study it in school: what young person today, with all his or her exposure to the wit and sophistication we’ve enjoyed in English drama since the Restoration, most recently with classic American films and the best TV comedy, would find anything appealing in this?

It’s not that the plot is silly. That doesn’t matter either with Lear dividing his kingdom or Duke Frederick’s vendetta against his brother and niece and sundry others: the banishing scene and the others in court are effective. As Germaine Greer said in her book on Shakespeare, there’s nothing so magnificent as a Shakespearian king or duke.

Rosalind is captivating, it’s true, even when playing silly games. ‘All the world’s a stage’ is a nice piece, but gains nothing by being in that place in that drama.

And there’s the fact that I really did enjoy it when I saw it, or remember myself as having done, when I saw it. There the main actors were terrific -- I don’t recall the clowns and fools and simple folk, who are usually a disaster on stage. What stays in the memory is the atmosphere of Arden, with lute music and gentle singing, absolutely seductive. I suppose some nice bits of scenery or props, even at the Globe. So I guess the text can be made something of -- but that’s what it’s a case of.

I suppose I should read it again to be fair. I don’t remember taking against it when I first read it long ago so it may just be that I'm getting sour with age.

But I don’t think a semi-staged performance by amateurs will help me to feel more kindly. So, no, I'll give it a miss.

'Wasted generation'

2011-12-06T12:26:00.000Z

Too busy for blogging of late with the research and my art classes but I should keep in mind more consistently that the blog is a nice vehicle for occasional thoughts that aren’t connected to anything particular.

Like the one I had just now at the bus stop in Kingston, outside the Job Centre. I saw people going in who I imagined never had a hope of ever being employed. Meanwhile students were passing along the street, anything from 16-year-olds from the FE College to Kingston University students who might have been up to 26 or so. Nearly all were black or Asian (which in Britain typically means south Asian -- India Pakistan Bangladesh Sri Lanka -- rather than south-east or east Asian, often called ‘oriental’).

The schools and institutions like those I've mentioned are full of young people who are the first in the families ever to receive an extended education. Like the young Irishmen with little education who worked as labourers on English building sites when I was a student and some of whom I got to know, they represent a vast pool of intelligence, if I might use that dubious term from labour market accounting. A lot of very clever kids, and their equivalent in Britain now are getting something of an education, though by all accounts it may not always amount to much in the schools.

This is the lot who politicians are often calling a probably (almost inevitably, in fact, given the economics ) ‘wasted generation’. It’s not primarily because they can’t any more get to university that they’re wasted, though that is certainly harder now for many. It’s because they aren’t the jobs.

However, it seems to me that there may never again be the jobs. Already many of those in employment are doing work that’s well below their qualifications. How many jobs will there ever be that involve an educated specialist mind? what proportion of the population can ever be employed in work that does justice to the intellectual development they’re capable of, given good schools?

And there I'm stuck. What are the options? everyone do a PhD to keep them out of the labour market for a few more years? But few people want to stay in education indefinitely, even with generous grants; we see it as a phase in our lives, having its satisfying place because there’s the prospect of the real world after. There has to be, for most of us, an expectation that sooner or later we’ll be putting our minds to work at something that makes a difference ‘out there’.

Suppose there were a universal basic but very adequate wage, unrelated to employment. Could the whole unemployed population, or that part that has the capacity, spend their lives not in education but in the arts -- multiplying by a factor of n the amount of creative writing in the country, the number of bands, the frequency of theatre groups? an opera house in every small town? would that be good or intolerable? after all, much of it would be awful.

If the ‘out there’ were generously defined, ‘putting our minds to work at something that makes a difference “out there”’ might include doing research, even in things like history, since in the end it all has an affect on what people think and do.

We could double the number of teachers if they worked half time and were at university or in the arts the other half.

Etc etc.

But the cost can only be met by exporting, and perhaps having a financial sector (the City) that coins it by disreputable means and that can be taxed -- currently, I read, to the tune of £50+bn. The work in those sectors, however, plus services, will never be enough for everyone -- but might perhaps be profitable enough to fund the universal wage. Eh?

A dramatic rail journey

2011-11-05T20:50:00.001Z

One of the most dramatic railway routes in England must be that from Waterloo East to London Bridge. It takes five minutes at most but goes through the most exhilarating cityscape, from iconic buildings of Southwark and the City to offices you can practically read the papers in to Dickensian rooftops and garrets close enough shake hands through the bedroom windows. For a slideshow on Picasa click here.

Learning to draw and seeing Surbiton

2011-11-05T12:36:00.001Z

To the shops on a nice autumn morning and decided to extend my outing as far as my wrecked hip would allow. So I went down to Maple Road and past its lovely plane trees, fine houses and a leafy Victorian Square till I heard organ music from St Andrew’s Church. St Andrews I've always thought as a forbidding dirty brick pile with Victorian ornament that’s trapped generations of soot. I’d never been in -- in fact had never noticed it was open.

I went inside: just a verger or functionary was there, busy, and the organist practising his Bach, nicely. I was very surprised by the building: I was in a huge light space with beautiful new oak pews, fine glass and spectacular brickwork -- the same as outside but clean. There had been a big restoration job, well done. The uncluttered floor invited movement and the seats sitting -- which I did for a listen and a look. A brochure explained it was 1870s and named the architect and stained glass artists, all unfamiliar to me but then they would be as I know little about Victorian churches. I looked around, at the story of Noah on the ceiling of a circular apse, at the brass plaques of commemorated and thanked Victorians and at the stained glass, for which you have to learn to ignore the thick black grid of window bars -- not difficult.

My main pleasures were in the vast, intricately textured volume of the building and the pictures, on the ceiling and in the stained glass. I'm strongly aware how experience of a few drawing classes, in which I'm the least competent student, has made me appreciate both the appearance of, particularly, people (I enjoyed sketching in the Royal Festival Hall concourse the other night) and the drawings of professionals. Going out through the porch I inspected a group of small stained glass windows at eye height. I could see they were essentially coloured drawings and admired the lines and the arrangements of shapes and spaces. No camera with me, sorry.

So everyone at school ought to be taught to draw properly. Perhaps they now are.

Walworth/Mina Road info wanted on teachers

2011-11-05T12:28:00.001Z

This process is endless. At the moment Pat Kingwell and I are looking for members of the class that started as 1CL (Mr Clements) in 1962 and ended as 5H (Miss Harvey).

We’d also like to learn more about Mr Graham Reid who taught English between, we think, 1962 and 1964 and then went off to work in Yugoslavia. Chap with a black beard and Scottish accent. What can you remember about his teaching -- and where is he now? He’d be an invaluable informant.

And, as ever, we’re looking for pupils' work done between 1946 and 1965. Do you know anyone who’s kept English exercise books or folders?

Contact us, please, if you have anything or know anyone who might have something, at walworthresearch@me.com.

MRBCS -- more

2011-10-16T19:47:00.000+01:00

A question and a comment:

What are those pictures (prints?) on the wall of the ‘top class’?

And the comment: when I worked in the successor school in the 1960s -- Walworth County Secondary School, comprehensive -- you could see the boys as the central school scholars’ direct descendants: still smart, well dressed, happy and alert, except for that poor or neglected minority that would never have got into the central school and for the most part were in the ‘remedial’ classes, though these classes, too, had thoroughly wholesome-looking children. The introduction of mixed-ability classes in the second half of the ‘60s was a welcome and successful reform.

Mina Road Boys Central School

2011-10-16T14:50:00.002+01:00

These photographs were kindly sent to us by Darien Goodwin. The portrait is of his father, Eric, who was at Mina Road Boys Central School between 1917 and 1921. The class photographs are of the first form (Eric top row, far right) and the top class (bottom row, far left). According to the system in central schools, the first form boys were aged 12 and the top class 15 (called fifth year in my time and year 11 these days).

Schools like this were selective elementary schools and some, including Mina Road (it seems), were very successful. Although they had a vocational emphasis, academic subjects were taken seriously, including, according to Eric’s reports, the ‘English subjects’, Mathematics (Arithmetic, Geometry and Algebra), History, Geography, Science and French.

We know a bit about the school around this time from Herbert John Bennett’s I Was a Walworth Boy (London: Peckham Publishing Project, 1980). At least in his slightly earlier day (1913-16) the headmaster was Edward P. Paul who in the first assembly explained the school motto, Agi quod Agis, ‘What you do, do well’. ‘I do not think he was liked by the masters. There was certainly little affection from us boys’ (32).

A Mr Dawes is remembered with respect and affection: ‘[Dawes] had seemingly realised that the best prospects for us boys from working class families lay in our entry into the Civil Service, and he specialised in putting his boys through the Boy Clerks examination.’ The attraction was the promise of a pension to escape ‘the insecure world of poverty that surrounded me’. Dawes’s friendliness is remembered; he used to play football with the boys (33-34).

Perhaps someone can even today tell us who were the teachers in the photographs.

‘Mina Road School was not a large school. There were only six classes but in addition to the six classrooms [there were science, art and woodwork facilities]. Next door [he seems to be referring to the layout of the playgrounds] was a girls’ school and contact between the two was forbidden.’ There was a school production, though whether it was Shakespeare is not clear (32).

The building is the one that’s still there on the site of what is now Walworth Academy. I wonder when the tiered seating was taken out?

Mr Bennett had ‘no regrets… [It was] a good school with some wonderful teachers’ (9-10).

One can indeed imagine the well-turned out boys in the photos, in their jackets, waistcoats and ties, being receptive to a good education, especially when the size of the class reduced from about 41 at the start to 15 in the final year. They look quite ready for good clerical jobs. (If you were going into a trade, would there have been any point in staying for a fourth year?)

I suppose one can’t judge by such photographs but it doesn’t strike me as an unhappy school.

The National Archives at Kew, by the way, have inspection reports on this and the girls' school from the 1930s. Both are highly praised.

Andrew Salkey at Walworth/Mina Road

2011-10-12T09:47:00.002+01:00

We’ve been given a lovely letter of sympathy and good wishes that was written by a pupil to Andrew Salkey, her English teacher, who was then in hospital with bronchial pneumonia. It’s dated 24th October 1957 and was evidently never delivered. We would love to contact the writer, Barbara Allen: does anyone have her address or email, please? (Send it, please, to walworthresearch@me.com.)

We’d like also to learn more about Mr Salkey as a teacher. He was later a notable novelist and poet who dealt with themes relating to the Caribbean where he had grown up.

Country hikes from Walworth/Mina Road, 1950s

2011-10-10T20:12:00.001+01:00

We’ve just had this from Pip Piper -- Mr L.B. Piper, a New Zealander, who was a supply teacher at Walworth in 1957-58, partly substituting for Andrew Salkey (English) who was in hospital with bronchial pneumonia.

Harold Rosen, he tells, used to organised Sunday hikes in the country for Walworth pupils. Adults went too. Shown here (click to enlarge) are, left to right, Harold Rosen, Alex McLeod (also NZ), Gillian Murray (wife of Mike Murray, biology, another New Zealander), Mrs Rosen (Connie) and Pat Darby (PE; married Pip Piper).

Anyone who went on these jaunts (via the ‘Ramblers Special’ train), do get in touch: walworthresearch@me.com. Or add a comment here if you can work the system.

O'Reilly plaque at Mina Road/Walworth

2011-10-04T09:37:00.002+01:00

I mentioned before about a ceremony on 31 August to unveil a plaque to commemorate the first head of Walworth (comprehensive) School. It took place at Walworth Academy, who have now published their own photos of the event.

Romantics again

2011-09-27T19:42:00.001+01:00

I posted earlier on ‘English teaching, Romantics and Moderns’ in the light of Ian Reid’s book on the influence of the Romantics on English teaching. Ian immediately responded, but (like most people) was unable to post his comment -- procedure too cumbrous. Our exchange is now quite old since I've been away for a while but with his permission I reproduce it here, lightly edited.

Ian, 4 September:
Anyway, my lost-in-space comment was mainly to say (1) that I don't disagree with your remarks except that I don't see them as "problems" for my line of argument, just strands in the fabric I've tried to exhibit; and (2) that modernism's lack of significant impact on English teaching shouldn't really be surprising, because it has relatively little resonance (compared to Romanticism) with the self-shaping "sentimental education" that for most teachers and students has continued (albeit with variations) to be the major focus of "English".

Me, 4 September
Good of you to respond, Ian -- thanks. (1) fair enough. (2) -- this is not a comment on the book or your response -- it seems to me to take some explaining why people with a literary education and a keen interest in literature, who 'kept up' assiduously with developments in writing -- Britton, Rosen, Dixon -- and who would have been well aware of modernism and would have read the key texts -- were so unaffected by that whole revolution that their belief in the 'sentimental education' you rightly refer to should have continued in such an untroubled way?

When I think of it though I don't remember Harold [Rosen]-- my PGCE tutor who I knew well -- even referring to, let alone getting excited by, any modernist text. The stuff he liked was Dickens and stirring tales of revolutionary struggle -- Arturo Barea on Spain, Sean O'Casey's autobiographies (lots of autobiographies, in fact -- including Gorki).

In his case, it may have been the right-wing politics of Eliot and Pound and Proust's difficulty (for a start) that put him off -- but why not Joyce and Kafka? Though I recall he did read a quite 'difficult' (in a modernist way) poem by Charles Causley with us, and was an admirer of Miroslav Holub -- who I suppose you'd say was in the modernist tradition. And Britton was keen on Wallace Stevens and Malcolm Lowry.

Perhaps they found certain modernist works ok but didn't buy the whole rejection of, for instance, realist narrative -- nor see any implications in it for English teaching -- so had no hesitation in promoting it in kids' writing in school. Nothing could be more anti-modernist, come to think of it, that Britton's position (quoting Lady Chatterley) that novels were essentially the same thing as gossip....

Rosen certainly bought into Wordsworth's view of the child and was fascinated by and accorded great value to children's experience -- but I'm sure would have been appalled by Wordsworth's manifesto on education in Book IX of The Excursion, as I was when I read it a few days ago, possibly for the first time -- can't trust my memory now. How did intelligent people in the 20th century not find that stuff simply silly and offensive? (I didn't feel that way at all about the Prelude, needless to say, when I re-read it recently.) You're very clear, though, that Dixon, at least in his Bretton Hall period, was a serious Wordsworthian. Must ask him about it when I see him next.

Is it just my problem that I'm a bit perplexed by those people's position on modernism? As you can tell, I'm just floundering in all this. Perhaps they were simply right to stick with the essentially Romantic approach to childhood and education -- and after all there was no modernist position on education in the way that the Romantics -- the movement that it arose in opposition to -- had a view on it -- as they had a view on the state.

Ian on 5th September ends with a very strong point:
Yes, but I suppose another way of understanding the conundrum about modernism is to recognise that (despite some well-known oppositional gestures and dismissive rhetoric) it often tended to intensify certain elements in Romanticism. Think e.g. of Virginia Woolf’s emphasis (and Joyce’s) on epiphanic moments, or Kafka’s on the existential anguish of guilt-ridden individuals, etc.

Much of modernism could thus be seen in Harold Bloom’s terms as a combat with its inescapably influential Romantic parent.

Concern at CERN

2011-09-25T12:17:00.001+01:00

Seems some particles may have been breaking Einstein’s golden rule and exceeding the speed of light. I read, though, that an Italian physicists reckons may not have been going faster than light after all, on their test track from Switzerland to Italy, but ‘taking a short cut’ through another dimension.

As always when confronted with explanations like this I ask, What is the hope of a humanities product like me, who has trouble with maths, ever being able to understand?

I suspect -- incidentally -- that one problem is that term ‘dimension’. To me it means length, breath or height, x, y or z on a 3D graph. If those are dimensions it’s impossible to imagine a fourth that belongs in the same set. Time doesn’t seem to me to be anything like the same sort of thing, and as for the idea of others that don’t even have names that we understand (like ‘time’) in a rough-and-ready, everyday way, I can’t even get to first base. So should they use a different name, or is there perhaps a definition of ‘dimension’ that I might be able to grasp? (And would it help?)

'Building a library'

2011-09-24T11:54:00.001+01:00

Depending on the music under consideration, I enjoying tuning in on Saturday mornings to Building a Library on BBC Radio 3. Strange concept: I've never in my life met anyone who sets out to ‘build’ a library of classical music, on the basis, it appears, of wanting the best recording of every piece of music that exists. On that basis the programme, which deals with three or four pieces in three hours and a quarter, has a while to run before it has covered the lot. Doesn’t nearly everyone buy opportunistically -- ‘I like that -- I think I'll buy it’?

Whoever the intended audience of the programme is -- all ten of them -- they must be incredibly expert. The fascination is the discriminations that the presenter is able to offer between performances I can’t hear the differences between. Today he commented on one performer who, though good, was ‘unfortunately below the note’, which I presume meant ‘flat’ -- could have fooled me and I'm amazed that someone can be a professional who gets on recordings and plays flat.

The problem for me in listening is not that I'm not building a library but that I don’t know how to listen. The chap will make some point about the passage he’s about to play: by the time it’s a few bars in I’ve forgotten what I'm supposed to be listening for, or else I don’t know which bit is supposed to contain the feature he’s drawn attention to.

It’s still a good programme for the likes of me -- or at least the odd twenty-minute sample is. It’s like reading a book and finding a couple of lines of poetry quoted, indented, italicised and set off from the text. That often strikes with particular force. So it is with hearing a burst of music embedded in the prose of professional commentary. I’d love to see a breakdown of the actual audience -- it must be very different from that select community of library builders. So, keep Building a Library and pay no heed to charges of elitism -- though I suppose I'm elite so I would say that.

RE my musical education: some time ago [http://petemedway.blogspot.com/2011/07/ability-to-draw.html] I mentioned I was looking for an art class to join because I wanted to draw. The first class of the course I've ended up in, life drawing, run by Kingston Council Adult Ed, was a model of the sort of thing I need in music. We drew a skeleton, several times, quite fast and once from memory. In between the teacher ‘took us through’ the skeleton, showing us how it could be regarded as made up of three basic forms and suggested the features we regard as primary and those we’d be best ignoring till well on with drawing. She broke it into parts and identified them: the job was done by a mixture of pointing, gesturing and handling with naming or ‘attaching’ a verbal comment, so as to make them retainable in memory and thought.

I need the equivalent of that for music. Perhaps it exists online -- the internet would be the right medium: it could show the score and the player and the viewer could run it back to replay sections.

When does boring not apply?

2011-09-23T18:04:00.000+01:00

A train of thought. I’d been at a conference and had been thinking and talking education for a couple of days and it occurred to me that X at one of the schools I’d worked in had probably been a boring English teacher. Then I thought, that department was keen on getting the kids to do most of the talking and of staying much quieter than teachers normally do; in which case ‘boring’ or ‘interesting’ didn’t apply to the teacher; they were relevant only to teachers' ‘lectures’ or extended utterances, of which we intended few to occur.

At that point I became unsure. Surely X and any of his colleagues would respond to what the kids said, and the kids would expect them to? in which case might not be their responses be felt to be interesting or boring? However, I wasn’t sure that a response would indeed always or usually be expected or felt to be appropriate. I thought I remembered seeing lessons I considered successful in which the kids went at it hammer and tongs -- including gentler passages (rubber hammer, sugar tongs) -- and the teacher, quite rightly as it seemed, simply saw to traffic control.

Such lessons could undoubtedly be good and important ones, nor was the teacher any the less entitled to credit, for all that he or she wasn’t interesting, for creating the climate in which something became an argument or discussion and the participants took turns and behaved in a civilised way.

Nevertheless teachers know and understand stuff and have responses and relevance frames that kids don’t. If there isn’t a way in which these attributes are made available to the students -- in a manner that would be judged as interesting -- then only half the job’s getting done.

It’s not easy to judge from my own experience. I favoured listening to the students a lot, but couldn’t resist ‘being interesting’ and sharing my take on the issue. And of all my own teachers who I remember as being good all were either interesting talkers or showed me to do something I valued; none ran the sort of post-1960 classroom in which it was almost all down to the kids -- which I'm glad of since most of my class really were boring (for some reason, all the interesting people I knew were in other classes. Perhaps that was to do with my being in the dusty classics while they were on the livelier modern languages or history sides -- or science, though the teaching there could not be called lively.)

Loss of control of unsystematic mismanagement

2011-09-11T09:11:00.000+01:00

Then I decided it was time to tackle my computer problem. The fan had been running continuously most of yesterday and was still running, for no obvious reason. I looked it up on the Mac support site. As always, the answer was there-- a sequence of switching off, unplugging, waiting, replugging, waiting, restarting. It worked.

I went to make a note of this for when it recurs. But what was the name of the procedure? it was in the heading of the document but I couldn’t remember it. Was it resetting the

System Management Control, or the
Management System Control, or the
Control System Management, or the
System Control Management...?

And would it matter which?

This is what happens when Apple’s technicians don’t read Shakespeare or were taught about post-colonial gender power relations instead of poetry in their English lessons. They’d be capable of writing ‘a palpable hit’ inadvertently, without realising how brilliant it was.

Palpable

2011-09-11T07:51:00.000+01:00

In a dream someone in some situation I've forgotten said, boringly, ‘A palpable hit!’

Whether still in the dream or just out of it, I thought ‘palpable’ doesn’t sound right for a hit -- the word should be sharp, hard, dental (like ‘hit’). Pulp -- something flabby about it. But this was a sword fight. Surprising Shakespeare didn’t feel that.

Palpable means touchable and it seems the wrong word -- wrong sound for that, too. But there it is, the Latins thought it was ok -- palpare. (Which even has a remote connection with palpitate -- which does at least have hit in it.)

Then, definitely by now out of the dream, I thought, ‘You fool, Medway! he did! Shakespeare did feel it! This was Shakespeare, after all -- our lad!’

Quite why he liked it, can’t say. The sharpness of the hit, contrast with the pappy palpable softness of the flesh?

The thing is, he picked up on the qualities of words. It struck him, as it belatedly struck me, what an interesting pairing of words, if nothing more.

This is the stuff they should be picking up on in teaching poetry in school. Not gender, post-colonialism, power, the Other, gothic-horror-vampires... or only secondarily. Poetry’s not about that stuff. Or not primarily.

In that case, what’s its point, poetry? doesn’t sound serious.

That’s right, it isn’t, because the serious stuff -- real life -- isn’t enough. The day after the revolution we’ll be bored out of our minds. What we want is more -- another realm beyond this one. There isn’t any such thing really -- no afterlife, for instance, no ‘other world’. But there are the human-made, art-made worlds like poetry. Sooner symbolic satisfactions(symbol-derived, semiotic, virtual) that never come with the same intensity.

After those thoughts, the following popped into my head: south day empties...

...and I approved it. Doesn’t mean anything or do anything but you can’t deny it’s good. Say slowly, dwell on each word in turn.

Time to get up. I reset my mobile from Silent and selected ‘General’. ‘Activate’, it replied, and I thought, ‘Oh my darling, oh my darling, activating for a mine.’

Am I getting poetic in my old age? is this a compensation for the loss of marbles? Perhaps its the other side of my late-onset dyslexia that has loosened the semantic anchoring and strengthened the sonic anchoring of my words -- but that’s another posting, maybe.

Sweet are the uses of senility.

Or here!

2011-09-09T17:51:00.001+01:00

See previous post: same idea, but this time the names belonged to class 3K in 1955-56:

Blackwell	Jean
Cooper	Pat
Dunn	Florence
Durrant	Jean
Embleton	Vivien
Fleetwood	Pat
Gager	Vera
Hardey	Betty
Hart	Pat
Hedger	Gwen
Hewett	Yvonne
Monkton	Doreen
Pawson	June
Pearce	Rita
Plumb	Pat
Punt	Jeanette
Sparkes	Shirley
Townsend	Lilian
Trivass	Pamela
Waddell	Patricia
Wiggett	Susan
Ayerst	John
Beaney	William
Dinan	John
Donnarumma	Anthony
King	Thomas
Russell	Kenneth
Yarranton	Robert

We’d like to hear from anyone on that list or anyone who was in that class. If you know anyone’s address or email and you think they wouldn’t mind your passing it on, can you please let us know?

We’re especially interested in the English teacher who took you in from January 1956, Mr Harold Rosen -- please let us know if you remember him, and most especially let us know if you’ve kept any work that you did for him.

We’d also like to know who taught you in years 1 and 2, and 4 and 5 (for those who stayed on).

The best way to get in touch is via an email to walworthresearch@me.com.

Our website is http://remakingenglish.org.

Walworth/Mina Road: see if your name's here!

2011-09-09T17:47:00.001+01:00

As regular readers will know, a couple of us are collecting people’s memories of English teaching at Mina Road (Walworth) School as part of a research project. Pete was a teacher at the school from 1964-71; Patrick was a pupil who left in 1969.

We’ve been lucky to get hold of some documents that contain lists of pupils who were released for things like choir practice, music lessons and athletics events. Amongst the names are some that belonged to class 2D in 1956-57 and 3R in 1957-58:

Abbott	Sandra
Crump	Linda
Curtis	Jacqueline
Curtis	Gillian
Dower	Carol
Fitzgerald	Eileen
Hill	Brenda
Hollis	Garrod
Hollis	Michael
Keefe	Leonard
Leonard	Keith
Lewis	Kenneth
Longhurst	Diane
Munday	Barry
Richards	Derek
Vallance	David
Wakeman	Alice
Walker	Ian

We’d like to hear from anyone on that list or anyone who was in that class. If you know anyone’s address or email and you think they wouldn’t mind your passing it on, can you please let us know?

We’re especially interested in the English teacher who took you in those two years, Mr Harold Rosen -- please let us know if you remember him, and most especially let us know if you’ve kept any work that you did for him.

We’d also like to know who taught you in years 1 and 2, and 4 and 5 (for those who stayed on).

The best way to get in touch is via an email to walworthresearch@me.com.

Our website is http://remakingenglish.org.

Hypothesis re babies and language

2011-09-07T12:30:00.000+01:00

Am now regularly exposed to two children aged around one. This has just occurred to me -- I must check it out in the field (i.e. on the floor) when next I visit. It may be wrong; it may also be correct and completely familiar to those who know about this stuff.

Language, as I understand it, is known to have a different origin from animal cries. The only animal cries we human have are crying, roars of rage and such and laughing -- something like that -- I forget the formulation. These we hear from babies from the start. Only around now, though, am I beginning to notice vocal behaviour that seems the precursor of language; the nature of the distinction is my hypothesis.

Animal cries in babies are expressive, the manifestation of internal states like amusement or hunger. The sort of noises that seem to anticipate language are referential: they occur in the context of the attention being directed to something outside the self, or accompanying some operation like dropping a block into a slot. I'm not sure if these noises are getting specialised yet -- a particular vocalisation for a particular phenomenon -- in which case they would be on their way to being names.

The discouragement of good habits

2011-09-06T15:38:00.001+01:00

I take a quiet pride in being economical - not throwing the marmalade jar away until I've scraped the very last milligram of the Sevilly jelly, eating every last leftover scrap in the fridge, turning appliances off. The incentive to save is only partly financial -- one day soon we may all have to go back to scrimping and saving, so in preparation best get back into wartime ways now. There’s are moral and ecological dimensions too, in principle -- though in practice eating all my greens up won’t save the earth.

Nevertheless, it’s disheartening and a disincentive after saving 5p here, 1p there, to break the glass plate in the microwave and then to be charged £27.68 by the bastards at Panasonic for a replacement. Nor much choice but to accept, I conclude: I no doubt need the exact same plate with the grooves in the right place and I doubt if the 99p shop has an own-brand substitute; nor is it likely to be repairable.

Would I have been better off in the USSR with a socialist microwave that didn’t work but with spares that were free to Party members?

At least I wouldn’t feel like a mug for trying not to waste stuff.

Academics in wartime

2011-09-06T09:31:00.001+01:00

An item on today’s Today -- BBC Radio 4 -- described a wartime RAF establishment the name of which I didn’t catch. It recruited archaeologists and other academics, as well as gifted amateurs like crossword geniuses, to interpret aerial photographs taken over enemy territory -- thus detecting from an image a millimetre across the presence of a V2 rocket and estimating from its dimensions its possible range, or inferring from the type of goods trucks in a marshalling yard whether foodstuffs or industrial materials were being transported and working out what the answer might indicate about the state of things in the nearby city.

One of the participants, whose name I also missed, was asked if he and his colleagues resented the lack of any public recognition of the work after the war, in contrast with Bletchley. He answered that they didn’t expect recognition: doing the job was the reward in itself because the work was both worthwhile and interesting and the relationships formed during it were enjoyable.

A constant criticism of public policy under every government since Thatcher has been the failure to acknowledge that the worth and interest of the work can be their own reward, and that the motivation to work hard and to the highest standards can be present when there’s no monetary incentive. This particularly applies to work that people chose because it’s interesting and despite the indifferent pay, such as teaching and research. In teaching it can often be a bad idea to reward good work with marks and grades when you want students to come to believe that the exercise of intelligence and extension of knowledge is a good thing in itself. The same applies to teachers, doctors and NHS managers. Might it not even apply to bankers?

Chemistry dream

2011-09-05T07:38:00.002+01:00

In my dream last night I was attending, as myself at my present age, an undergraduate chemistry lecture in Canada. The lecturer, who was well-prepared and interesting, talked about some chemical compound that had a twenty-five year delay before it was activated. Then it could be set off by, for instance, the rumble of traffic. What happened on activation I’ve forgotten or never knew.

I asked a question, something like: ‘It’s quite a long time since I had my last chemistry lesson so could you explain a bit more fully?’ I’d thought of adding that in fact I’d never in my life had a single chemistry lesson, which is true, but didn’t want to outstay my welcome. As it was, my question evoked some laughter.

I don’t know how the lecturer responded except that she was nice about it, but in the audience was a colleague from my own department. I'll call her Eileen because I haven’t known anyone called Eileen since 1984 (Eileen Daffern, admirable communist co-director of the Centre for Resources in European Studies (or similar) -- six empty rooms, some notepaper and a lot of books -- at Sussex University). I was a frequent guest at pseudo-Eileen’s dinner parties, and came to realise I was something of a trophy, possibly because of my British accent and because I came with jokes, in which Canada was not self-sufficient. Her face wreathed in smiles at my question, she turned round to beam at me and then at all her friends in the hall as if to say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t this a great find I've bagged?’

Where did the dream come from? I don’t know but I was impressed by what my Canadian humanities students knew about science from their broad high school curriculum and the range of subjects they took in first year university.

My other observation about chemistry is that the chemists I've known -- not a large sample -- have been more interesting, more cultured and more human than the physicists.

English teaching, Romantics and Moderns

2011-09-02T16:20:00.002+01:00

I've been carefully re-reading, for our history of English project, Ian Reid’s Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies. It’s of particular interest because there’s an extended discussion of English at Walworth/Mina Road School in the 1950s and 60s, including accounts of some key teachers: Arthur Harvey, Harold Rosen and John Dixon.

His claim is that all these teachers, and teacher-educators at the Institute of Education and King’s, right back to John Dover Wilson and including Percival Gurrey and James Britton, were heavily influenced by Romantic values and ideas that sprang originally from Wordsworth’s poetry. The problems with his story are, first, that these people, for all that they had in common, had many important differences and were influenced, differently, by ideas that came from places quite other than Romanticism, and second that -- as Reid fully acknowledges -- Romantic ideas had been so thoroughly absorbed that they were no longer felt to be ideas or a theory but were simply the common-sense air that everyone breathed. How could a thinking English teacher not have been a Romantic if that was what you were if you didn’t espouse some moribund and atheoretical hangover from Augustan convention and classical rhetoric?

A question that continues to intrigue me -- it falls outside Reid’s remit -- was not how teachers were (still) influenced by Wordsworth but what they made of the liveliest literary movement of their own century, Modernism. If university-educated English teachers were a key group within that part of the society that seriously read literature, how can their work have been, to all appearances, so utterly unaffected by Ulysses, Kafka and Pound? Eliot got in there through certain exam syllabuses, maybe some Yeats too, but, as far as I can see, few others. Gabriel Josipovici (click on his name in the labels at the side) complains that British novelists still continue to write in nineteenth century genres. Well, it seems accordingly that kids in English lessons wrote nineteenth century narratives and Romantic poetry, as if the vast upheaval of Modernism had never taken place.

It’s possible to think of explanations. For instance, it’s not easy to see what teachers could have done with Modernism if they’d wanted seriously to build it in, in setting writing tasks, for instance; it may be that Modernist texts are simply too difficult for younger readers; or the Modernists’ sense of the exhaustion and irrelevance of nineteenth century forms wasn’t and couldn’t be shared by readers who hadn’t read enough of it to have grown weary.

Blue plaque for Miss O'Reilly

2011-09-02T15:27:00.002+01:00

Miss Anne O'Reilly was the first real head of Walworth/Mina Road interim comprehensive school, 1947-1955. Her niece, Pat Jones, and my colleague on the Walworth history project, Pat Kingwell, persuaded Southwark Council to award her a blue plaque for her war work (for which she was given and MBE) and her headship of two schools, Peckham Emergency Central School during the war and the new Walworth School after it.

The four-year-old Walworth Academy (principal Devon Hanson) hosted the ceremony, the plaque was unveiled by the mayor on the wall of the only surviving building (from 1905), Simon Hughes MP spoke and we all went inside for refreshments, mingling, and more short speeches, including by two impressive ex-pupils from Peckham, then David Harris from Walworth, Pat Jones herself and Pat Kingwell and me for our project, Social Change and English: A Study of Three English Departments 1945-1965, appealing for more information and stuff. Lots of reunions and, for Pat K and me, a chance at last to meet people with whom we’d had only email or postal contact.

Some decent photos will be up on the Academy site in due course; in the meantime here’s my petty offering. (Click to enlarge)

1. On Mina Road facing the school and the plaque. I'm sure there were more people than that when we eventually got inside.

2. Here I can recognise on the right John Sparrow (English) talking to Simon Clements (late 50s and early 60s, English and Social Studies). Of those present, John must have been the teacher who taught earliest at the school (1952). I also see Mary Lou Thornbury who taught World Studies in the 1960s and 70s.

3. I'm sure there will be a better photo of the plaque forthcoming. You can at least see Miss O'Reilly's dates, 1891-1963.

4. Finally, the one surviving original building (1905: the Mina Road Higher Grade School) which only now can we get a decent view of, after the demolition and new site layout. Here the only people I'm sure of are, on the right, Kim James, who I taught in the first and second year and hadn't seen since, and Bill Metson on the left, who we met and interviewed through the project.

I'm looking forward to some decent pictures taken by Tony of the Academy.

How literature should be studied

2011-08-25T17:16:00.002+01:00

What I do with books might suggest what English teachers might try to do with their literature classes.

The issue of principle or theory at stake is whether ‘just reading’ is enough and if not, what’s needed beyond what we see people doing with books on the bus or tube.

There are certain obvious things to be said.

(1) Life’s too short and not all books deserve more than a quick reading.

(2) In my experience, the main thing that needs to be done with a huge proportion of kids in secondary schools is simply getting them to read more fluently and get through more books. They don’t read well enough and they don’t choose to read. Leaving school unable to read well is far more serious than missing out on literary appreciation or analysis.

For myself, I've evolved a procedure to meet my own needs as a reader, though I'm very irregular in practising it, most of my procedures aren’t maintained for long and none are completely satisfactory. In addition, what I do these days is probably influenced by needs arising from failing memory -- I simply don’t remember what I've read as I used to.

Here’s the sort of thing I've been doing recently while reading Kafka’s Castle (re-reading, I think, but I'm not sure). Every so often I break off and write notes on ‘what strikes me’ -- that’s as good a formulation as any, and a measure of vagueness is desirable in specifying procedures, especially when a teacher is proposing them to kids, so as not to foreclose interesting variations one may not have thought of.

Note that I'm not studying the novel, as for an exam or to write an article, though I think my notes would be useful, though insufficient, for either purpose. I'm reading for pleasure and find that making notes enables me to get more out of the book.

Here’s the sort of thing I write:

Amalia dominating the household of Olga and Barnabas—what’s that about? goes nowhere...
Constant physical difficulty in moving: encumbered, deep snow etc—as in bad dreams.
The ‘gentlemen’ and Castle officials: temperamental, secretive, dissembling—hiding, pretending to be someone else.
What did K. come for? Who is he? Does he have a past? Above all, why does he stay and not simply go back?
interminable delays—waiting for a result for years, until old age.
The officials are human, have appetites, break rules—and behave like children or animals—‘the continued shouting in the dark stalls’.
The Castle isn’t a castle in fact but just an untidy settlement of ‘hovels’.
Ambiguity about whether a bureau is actually in the Castle, or a servant is really a Castle servant. Semi-official messengers etc, gradations and subtleties, uncertainties of status. ‘X is not a real messenger,’ etc.
People age quickly—a lifetime’s ageing in a couple of years.
The servants dictating into the air and the clerks without being asked or even glanced at taking it all down.
Extreme disparity between absurd claims for the ‘authorities’’ efficiency, infallibility and sensitivity—as believed for instance by the landlord and landlady—and the accounts of their extreme childishness and selfishness.
The stuff of bad dreams or nightmares: being trapped in vulnerable situations; losing time -- morning becomes late afternoon unnoticed; going to sleep in evening and finding it's afternoon on waking up surrounded by people.
Claustrophobia: getting into small spaces: the clerks behind the counter at the castle. Sleeping under the bar, constantly being crowded by people.
The officials spend a lot of time asleep. So does K. but is still constantly tired.

So what is the sort of thing I note and what use does it seem to be? Not so much impressions as things that are there, in the novel, features or aspects that give it the character it has. I note things, in the sense of notice. Things on the whole other than plot, character and structure; more themes, images, pervasive representations.

Because I lack a musical education I feel deprived of any means of getting a grip on classical music when I listen to it. I couldn’t write notes like those above because I don’t have the language. More seriously -- or, rather, an aspect of the same thing -- I don’t have the concepts; I lack the names and therefore the things -- I don’t know what it is I'm hearing. I can’t identity bits, parts, elements, aspects; I can’t make the necessary distinctions and fix them in memory so as to recognise repetitions and variations; because I don’t identify the elements my ability to memory is impeded. Without a functioning memory I can’t get a grasp of structure.

In noting the features of the novel I render myself able at the end to say what was in the novel, in a way I find harder when I haven’t made notes, and that’s without re-reading the notes. It’s not the writing down that makes the difference; it’s the registering you have to do in order to have the content that can be written down.

So in English, reading literature: I would argue they don’t need theory, not in the first place -- just a way of grasping what’s there, noting and registering it. They should come away with a sense of what the book was, what was going on it it. Explaining what was going on with the help of categories like gender, post-colonialism or psychoanalysis seems to me secondary, something to be brought in later, after they’ve given the text a good going-over with whatever resources they have to hand. Your help in enhancing those resources, allowing different features to become apparent in the text, will be best appreciated when they’ve got as far as they can under their own steam.

What I'm arguing for at a more general level is that English teachers take seriously something that John Dixon was onto in the mid-1970s, in his final, added chapter in the third (1975) edition of Growth through English: that simply, as it were, picking things out and naming them, putting them into language in the first place, was the primary act of abstraction on which all the higher operations like generalising and explaining were dependent, and should be the first concern of English (which meant in the early years, up to about year 9 I imagine, a focus on ‘enacting and narrating’ -- 117). There’s something out there: the basic intellectual move is, in the face of that something, to set up something ‘in here’, in the mind, in language, a symbolic something you can work with (for instance, through reasoning) as opposed to the actuality that you can’t work with, or not in the same ways.

A mundane day

2011-08-22T06:44:00.001+01:00

[Written last night -- touched up this morning]

So why don't I try just writing this blog as a diary, simply recording what I've been doing, at least once in a while? Here’s today's bulletin, then, in all its quotidian tedium (though, to be truthful, I've enjoyed my day).

It's ten to nine on Sunday evening and I'm watching a programme on culture, Leavis, Snow, Raymond Williams. Pretty shallow like so much TV, in sad contrast with radio. But it was broadcast yesterday and I have a telly setup I really like that lets me record things, without all the hassle of a VCR. So I'm never stuck for something to watch when I feel like flopping.

I came through to watch telly because I’d decided I'd had enough work for the day. The work was writing an article, based on a talk I gave at a conference in Germany, in the light of comments from the journal editor to whom I'd sent my notes. I'd been messing about with it in a writing program for the Mac called Scrivener but decided yesterday I'd be better reverting to pencil and paper and writing a fresh outline off the top of my head. That went well and what I wrote seemed usable and worth typing out, so I turned to the dictation package I'd recently bought, Dragon Dictate for Mac. I've used it a few times and while it’s impressive there seem to be more errors than there should be. I put this down to the difficulty it's having understanding my speech because my nose is currently blocked by catarrh. I say currently, but currently seems to have lasted all year; I always tend to get stuffed up but this year has been worse than any I've know -- is it something in the air, different pollen perhaps? (I don’t get hay fever.)

I persisted and in the end looked online for a Dragon forum that might give advice. I've been working through some good stuff that I've found.

That was most of the day. Never went out although it was fine -- not good, but I don't usually fall into that pattern. I've been less active recently because of a bad hip. On Friday, though, I was advised by the consultant to try painkillers and so far they seem rather effective -- I can walk more normally again and perhaps will even escape the need for a replacement, which I was expecting to be put down for at my consultation.

What else? some ongoing reading: Fredric Jameson's The Modernist Papers -- not an easy read and sometimes beyond me because I don't get the references to all that high theory but frequently exciting and illuminating -- the first very theoretical book on literature that I've read for a long time that makes me see more in the works; despite the grand ideas he’ll typically take a paragraph or two and subject them to an insightful reading, à la I.A. Richards, though picking on different sorts of points. Brilliant man.

Alongside, I'm re-reading The Castle by Kafka. As I'm going back to Germany next month I thought a couple of weeks ago that I’d try to learn a bit of German by following the text in both languages. Years ago I'd read two novels by Marquez like this and it worked: I retained a useful amount of Spanish. Not so with German, however -- too much grammar, too many words that look similar, too many confusing prefixes. Or perhaps it's that Kafka's sentences are too complex. So I soon gave up on the German text and carried on with the English, finding it more and more absorbing. Decided to scribble notes because I get so much more out of a book when I do. Often it’s some time after reading a section that I have thoughts about it, in bed perhaps or taking a nap on the sofa; if I then write them down, in the first place they begin to add up to something and also they make it more likely that I'll keep having ideas and retain them. To make the activity more substantial, I'll then dictate the notes, certainly if I can get Dragon to work more reliably.

The Kafka, of course, relates to Jameson's book on modernism, which in turn I got because I've long been confused about what modernism was and why it happened and why it seems now to be consigned to the past. And it’s relevant to why teachers taught English the way they did in the period we’re investigating in our research project, 1945-65. The parts of Jameson I've read so far, though, have been about Mann, Proust and Ulysses -- terrific on the latter -- one of the great works that I not only respect but enjoy.

The telly programme has moved on via Richard Hoggart, Kenneth Clark and John Berger to Edward Said. It's actually very good as it turns out, allowing for what it tries to pack into an hour. There was actually some film of Leavis lecturing -- never seen that before.

When I get to bed it will be with The Hugo Young Papers, confidential notes by a Guardian journalist of interviews with politicians from Harold Wilson to Tony Blair. Sounds dry but actually fascinating -- not least for Young’s ability to recall it all (he took no notes and had no recorder). Also his confidential assessment of the interviewees’ characters. Chris Patten comes out well, and John Major; Portillo and most of the Labour lot badly (at least so far: Blair hasn’t won the election yet).

Not much email today -- August and a Sunday. Talked by phone to my daughter and got an update on their building work (house improvements) and the kids' activities: Lucy (4) went to a drama workshop and loved it so I hope she can get lots more of that: it's a terrific thing for kids to do on all sorts of grounds, and I wish I'd done more of it when I was an English teacher in the remote past.

Monday morning
I should have mentioned: re having ideas while relaxing and somnolent. I had three good ones in the afternoon while napping on the sofa and afterwards scribbled them down: I'll certainly dictate them today. One was about our next research proposal, one was relevant to our present research and was about the similarities between kids’ learning from teachers and teachers' learning from each other; the third, relevant to the article I'm working on, was a point about speech and writing. If I was in a full-time academic job, in an office in the university with the phone ringing and students pestering and emails harrassing and constant bloody meetings, how would I ever have the space to have an idea?

And earlier in the day, now I remember it, I’d had another thought I hadn’t had before -- and immediately emailed someone about it: it was about how the working-class side of my dad’s family (his parents, two of his siblings and their families) regarded the middle-class side (us and my other uncle’s family). I realised I’d never asked about that, or really been curious about it. Too late now, I fear.

English teachers: listen to this

2011-08-07T18:38:00.001+01:00

Here’s a poetry workshop that I wish I’d heard when I was a teacher. Six days left to catch it.

Ruth Padel runs this session, the first of four, and she’s great (though I don’t understand her poetry). It takes place in Exeter, which is ok, but the other workshops will be in different places and I hope they’re in to cities, the north and other less well-heeled places. She starts with a terrific poem by Alice Oswald, perhaps my favourite English poet at the moment -- you can see it at that link, along with the poems by the workshop members.

I don’t think I ever taught poetry well until years after I was running PGCE sessions, and they were, to say the least, patchy. Not that I could have run a workshop like Padel’s with many of the kids I taught, but as preparation for teaching a poem a workshop like this would have been fantastic. And it represents a type of English teaching that I think has largely been lost.

Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation

2011-08-07T17:16:00.001+01:00

Delayed but here at last: photos from by visit to Marseilles in June. (Click on it: the ones below are just a sample.)

Walworth / Mina Road Central School

2011-08-03T16:21:00.001+01:00

All schools used to keep a log book that recorded staff appointments, staff absences, school events, inspections and the like.

Before the war there were two schools in Mina Road, sharing the two buildings: Walworth Central School (Boys) and Walworth Central School (Girls). The two amalgamated during the war and in 1946 were replaced by the ‘interim comprehensive school’ called Walworth County Secondary School. The log book of the boys’ school has survived, having been kept in a store by the comprehensive school, and contains a lot of valuable information.

But what happened to the log book of the girls’s school? does anyone know? Like the boys’ book, it would be an invaluable source for our research (see the label Walworth down the side of the screen). It isn’t in the London Metropolitan Archives where all the LCC records went.

Thomas Ablett at BGS

2011-07-30T16:37:00.002+01:00

As promised in ‘Ability to draw’:

Thomas Robert Ablett (1848-1945) lived long enough to see great changes in the nature of art education. As a young man he taught art at Bradford Grammar School and, choosing to depart from the contemporary practice of hard outline drawing in pencil, encouraged the children to draw freely from memory and imagination, maintaining that the so-called Freehand Drawing of the Department of Science and Art was not freehand at all, but rather attempted geometrical drawing without instruments. His success at Bradford led to his appointment to the London School Board in 1882.

In 1888 Ablett read a paper to the Society of Arts on drawing as a means of education, and he was encouraged in that year to found the Drawing Society. Lord Leighton, Holman Hunt, Lewis Carroll, Sir John Tenniel, Viscount Bryce and Lord Baden-Powell were early supporters ; and Princess Louise, the artist daughter of Queen Victoria, was the Society's president from its inception to her death in 1939....

Ablett also organized graded art examinations and, by this means and by its exhibitions, the Society has since discovered and assisted many budding artists from Britain and abroad with awards and advice. Out- standing artists who received early encouragement from the Society included Sir William Rothenstein, Rex Whistler, Sir Gerald Kelly, P.R.A., Edward Halliday, Claude Rogers, A. R. Thomson, Robert Austin, and Anna Zinkeisen. Drawings by Whistler submitted from the age of five, and 'Babyland', are still in the possession of the Society.
Ablett made two notable contributions to methods of art education. One of these, 'written design', arose from his conviction that a child would get delight from drawing and arranging letters freely, and consisted of using letters of the alphabet as motifs for design. The modern practice of letter patterns for juniors and Marion Richardson's 'writing patterns' stemmed from Ablett's written design.

'Snapshot drawing' was Ablett's other innovation. The child was encouraged to observe an object carefully but quickly, say a plant or figure, and then draw it when removed from view. It was one variation on Boisbaudran's system, others being Catterson Smith's 'shut-eye drawing' and Marion Richardson's mental imagery. Lord Baden Powell took up this method from an early age and later introduced 'snapshot drawing' for tests for the Scout's artist's badge, appointing Ablett as examiner.

Both Cooke and Ablett arrived at their views on child art primarily from the current new theories of child education and psychology, rather than from a special appreciation of the aesthetic merit of child art. This is evident from the phrases used by Cooke in his paper of 1885: 'exercise of function . . . to evolve expression . . . to stimulate voluntary mental activity' ; and from the words of Ablett, such as 'freedom' and 'muscular sense is the element'. Ablett arrived at his methods by grasping a psychological principle. Like Bain, he believed that art must arise from an instinct of which the fulfilment was pleasurable emotion. Ablett called his system 'Drawing from Delight', and his belief that art must be primarily delight led him to seek appropriate media, such as brush and paint, for the child, suitable for easy and natural manipulation.

Both Cooke and Ablett pioneered investigations into children's scribbles and were deeply interested in the theories of Sully, which were made known to a wide public in the nineties.

From MacDonald, Stuart, History and Philosophy of Art Education. U of London Press, 1970, 327-8 -- excellent book I found when trying to find out why Britain, uniquely in Europe and America, had a respectable art school/college in nearly every significant town. Turns out it was the efforts of one man, Henry Cole, the man behind the Crystal Palace. (Other good books turned up in the same quest were by Carline, Draw They Must : a History of Teaching and Examining of Art, and Bonython and Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole.)

Does art education any longer have a connection with child psychology, let alone with the Boy or Girl Scouts and the Royal Family? (Prince Charles, perhaps?)

Incidentally the inspiration behind these guys -- Ablett and, before him, Ebenezer Cooke - and the first to take up arms against the Science and Art Department that controlled the art exams and grants -- was Ruskin.

Bradford Grammar School has, or had, a Delius Music Room and a Rothenstein Art Room. If the second art room hasn’t been named it should clearly be the Ablett Art Room.

Learning to draw in Canada

2011-07-30T16:11:00.000+01:00

As promised in the posting ‘Ability to draw’. http://petemedway.blogspot.com/2011/07/ability-to-draw.html Two recollections:

Groups of 4th year architecture students at Carleton University, Ottawa, would spend a term in Rome. I heard an account of one such trip from a student who’d been on it. The students made their way independently to Rome and met at a pre-arranged time in a pre-specified square. When the tutor, Tom Dubacanik (not sure of spelling -- Serbian in name, I believe, and un-PC in speech), arrived after all were gathered, his first words were , ‘Draw, you fairies! Get sketching! What do you think you’re here for?’

Their work was every day of the term to complete 4 drawings, double-elephant size, which I think was like A1 in the Napoleonic hemisphere, the largest standard size of cartridge paper. Tom D’s aim was that they should draw as readily as speaking -- no conscious processes between ‘hand and eye’. By all accounts it worked -- whatever their deficiencies they ended up able to draw -- though what they learned about architecture I didn’t gather. The displays I saw over the years in the School of Architecture were graphically stunning. I don’t know how far the tradition continues now design has become such a computerised business.

Second recollected story: Steve Fai had a 1st year group. He set them to draw self-portraits in front of a mirror. Each week one assiduous and dedicated student brought his work in and Steve, recognising the effort, awarded him 2 marks -- out of 20 -- with the instruction to do it again. One week (5? 6? 7? don’t remember) the lad came in and said, ‘I've got it!’ and he had. Steve gave him 18 and there was no looking back.

I don’t know if learning to draw is like that for everyone for whom it hasn’t already come naturally. Perhaps for others it’s incremental; perhaps that kid was unusual. I’d like to know.

Ability to draw

2011-07-30T15:24:00.004+01:00

I've always been struck by 19th and early 20th century writers were always doing sketches of each other and of the places they were staying in. Almost every writer whose biographies you look has been drawn by one of his friends or siblings, few of whom are known as artists. I’ve noticed it in English and Russian writers, and none of the drawings I've seen are bad. I’d be proud to have done any of them.
How did they learn? in the sorts of schools these writers went to -- the men anyway -- they wouldn’t have taught drawingl, would they? not in any serious way that would yield the sort of results we see.
I did O level art by going to the Art Club after school and though I wasn’t much good at drawing, I did make a start. But I've made no effort since and now I want to learn. I’d like to put drawings on (blank) postcards from my trips abroad as so many people used to, and do animals and scenes for the kids on letters, birthday cards and the like. And amuse myself in boring meetings or when telly’s boring...
So I've had a look online at evening classes that are offered round my way. There are indeed a few but I don’t think they’re what I need. I know what I need: it’s lots of practice in front of things, scenes and people, with other people so we can motivate each other and with a helpful tutor who’ll set the tasks and give advice.
Instead what I find is the usual course description bollocks that’s perhaps the effect of having to meet government vocational criteria to teach anything at all -- the idea of education for leisure or self-improvement having been expunged from the purposes of colleges and institutes. Thus:

Skills will be developed step by step through a series of carefully designed exercises.
We will start with the basics - how to hold a pencil - and progress at the end of six weeks to drawing a portrait with a difference!

A topic for each lesson follows, with objectives. The first is

Edges
Aim: To realise the importance of objective observation in drawing.

Following an introduction to the course and basic studio craft, students will experiment with the mark making possibilities of different materials.

Then we have Relationships, Negative Spaces, Light and Shade, Making Plans and finally

A Drawing !
Aim: For students to produce a rewarding drawing using all skills practised to date and testing their skills of objective observation.

Well, it might work -- much depends on the tutor and, as I say, the reality may be much more flexible.

But my instincts and educational experience are all against this approach. I disagree with the philosophy of starting with component sub-skills and only in lesson 6 putting them together. It’s fifty years since we realised that you don’t develop writing ability by first teaching words, then sentences, then connections, then paragraphs, but by having the kids writing a complete piece, even if only a sentence as long as it’s real writing and not a ‘carefully designed exercise’ -- from Day 1.

(Actually art teachers, too, knew this, as long ago as the 1870s, including one Thomas Ablett at Bradford Grammar School -- and they organised to resist the government’s prescriptions -- on which schools’ funding depended then too -- of exercises in drawing cubes, spheres and pyramids. I'll do a separate posting on Ablett.)

I want to be in a group that sits by the Thames and draws the ash tree opposite, or the bridge and buildings down the river or an old chap on a bench -- and myself, that too, as included in the exercises on the course. As for mark-making and how to hold a pencil, let the tutor show me the possibilities when I'm struggling with the foliage or the hairy surface of a coat. Knowledge at point of need, is the slogan for this sort of practical learning, not ‘front-end-loaded’ as David Layton used to say when talking at Leeds University about design and technology education.

I want to be able to sit down in front of something, or just with memory and imagination, and draw something that looks like it and is nice to look at. How's that for sophisticated?

There’s another way to do it, one I was aware of in Carleton University (Ottawa) School of Architecture, where the standard of drawing was out of this world. But that calls for a separate post. Another separate post.

Private or public ownership 2

2011-07-30T15:07:00.001+01:00

A response from John Medway (MSc Econ), together with a chat, have made things somewhat clearer. He draws attention to the big thing I’d missed out, the market.

John kindly allows me to quote his email:

No, there isn't a simple answer. However...:-

1) In a well-functioning free market a Darwinian process operates. Efficient companies evolve through natural selection - the inefficient ones go to the wall. This doesn't automatically happen in the public sector, though governments can intervene to rectify the grossest inefficiencies by replacing staff etc.

2) In any organisation there is a "client-agent problem". How do you get your staff to perform well and in furtherance of the aims of the organisation? This was Jim Hacker's problem with Sir Humphrey, who was usually able to bend decisions in favour of his own and fellow mandarins' interest. I think this happens in the private as well as the public sector but the Darwinian process in the private sector keeps it in check.

Perhaps we there have the makings of a simple answer. By allowing a private sector to flourish, we allow a process of evolution to take place to ensure that producers become ever more efficient.

However where there are natural monopolies this Darwinian process can't work effectively. Furthermore, if we try and create artificial competition (eg through bidding for railway franchises) we may gain something but we may lose something along the way. It is said that Switzerland runs its public services very well as purely public operations and in doing so has created a public service ethos in its workforce that others envy. The French experience is less clear cut. French railways seem very good by our standards but are also reputed to be overmanned and very heavily subsidised. No simple answer there.

And poor service on French railways, I’d add -- offhand officials, terrible at communications when there’s a holdup. Contrast DeutscheBahn, in my experience (never been on a train in Switzerland).

As John added when we talked, a considerable and critical slice of British organisations is natural monopolies to which market forces can’t readily apply.

Private or public ownership

2011-07-24T12:44:00.001+01:00

I'm constantly realising basic things I don’t know about economics.

Here’s one. Why do we have private firms? Shouldn’t public organisations be better because they don’t have to make a profit so all their takings can go back into the enterprise? and because they can be run entirely for the public good and not for private profit? Just think of those cases when public/private are clear alternatives, such as utilities and railways.

Is it because public organisations are inherently inefficient (badly run) that they’re so out of favour? And that it necessarily takes the profit motive to get people to run things well?

Public companies (which aren’t of course public in the sense that the NHS is -- or was) have shareholders. The money people have paid for the shares is what the company runs on, as well as its takings. The reason people buy the shares is that their value may grow and that the company pays dividends. A public enterprise doesn’t have to pay dividends.

A public enterprise does, however, have to have money -- the equivalent of the money a company gets from the sale of its shares. The money comes, most likely, from loans on which the interest is paid out of the takings, if any (from train fares, for instance) and taxes. (A company, too, of course, may borrow money, on which interest has to be paid, but for simplicity let’s leave that out of account.)

Are companies deemed to be more efficient because the sale of shares does away with the need to borrow money and hence the cost of interest? and because the cost of paying dividends is less than that of paying interest?

If I don’t understand stuff like this, the case for economics in schools seems clear.

If someone enlightens me, I'll gladly post their corrections.

Hyderabad/UK: call centres/models of education

2011-07-20T16:17:00.001+01:00

On two occasions a year apart I've had to call Technical Support about interruptions to my broadband. The first led to a protracted nightmare of communications in which the main problem was the inability of the person at the other end of the line in India to understand what I was talking about. This wasn’t a matter of language in the narrow sense of linguistic forms or accent but of a lack of the experience that would enable them -- there were a number of them on different days -- to envisage my situation, resulting in the successive dispatch by email of the same irrelevant questions after each call. Finally I got, also in India (I think) a more senior person with experience of what was involved in grappling with computers in real situations.

I had to call again a few days ago and this time I got an Irish chap who couldn’t have been better -- I’d use him any time as a model for customer relations. It’s clear that the company -- let’s give them the credit: TalkTalk -- had moved their call centre (back?) to the UK or Ireland. This person knew what I was talking about, made an immediate guess at what the problem might be, gave me something to try, tried something himself while I discontinued the call and called me back when he’d said he would. Meanwhile something he’d said had reminded me that I had a spare microfilter (to go between the phone socket and modem/router cable) and I’d tried substituting it, which had appeared to solve the problem. He agreed this had improved things but because he’d nevertheless noted a problem with my line was going to put in for a full test by the engineers which would report to me within 10 days -- if not I was to call again and he’d nag them.

The following comparison occurs to me. The junior people in India have been trained by the book, learning by heart what to say when confronted with this or that specified problem. When the problem is reported in different terms or isn’t exactly the textbook case they’re lost. Compare learning in English schools to meet specified ‘targets’ or evaluations by precisely specified criteria; learners pass the tests but don’t know the subject.

My Irish expert knew his way around IT. He’d learned by immersion in the field as well as from formal instruction in the discipline. He’d experienced the muddiness of real-world, ill-defined, multi-explanation problems and had the profession’s collectively built and informally disseminated know-how as an unspecifiably extensive web of resources to draw on.

Walworth/Mina Road writing topics: Harvey and Rosen

2011-07-19T11:30:00.002+01:00

I've been wondering if there was such a contrast as I’ve thought between the English teaching of Arthur Harvey and Harold Rosen (and successors at Walworth/Mina Road School in the 1940s and 50s).

The impression I've had is that Harvey set titles for writing that were either wild imagings or literary/purple prosish. Examples of the first that we’ve collected are ‘My Wild White Cat’ and ‘The Red-Headed Man with a Glass Eye’ and of the second ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ or ‘Observing the weather through the front room window’. Rosen on the other hand would be after writing about your real life in family and street -- grandparents, uncles, weddings, an adult who frightened you.

But looking more carefully at the information people have told us or sent us I note that Harvey also set the following, which seem exactly Rosen’s sort of topic:

Conversation at the fish and chip shop
At the barber’s
Waiting outside the pub

The last in particular taps into the vivid local experience of kids living in Walworth, Bermondsey or Peckham.

Readers who were there, can you recall more subjects set by Walworth teachers in the period (1949-64) of Harvey, Rosen, John Dixon and their colleagues? Share them by a comment on here, if you can work out how to do it (a pain) or, much easier, by an email to walworthresearch@me.com or a comment on our website, http://remakingenglish.org/. Whichever, we’ll be grateful and you’ll be contributing to history!

Swallows, Surbiton & telegraph poles

2011-07-15T12:47:00.000+01:00

After writing the last post I went out and realised for the first time that there are no telephone wires, which may be one reason why I haven’t seen many swallows in the past. I'm sure there were wires and poles where I lived in Bradford (tram wire poles as well!), Wakefield, Newton Abbot and Leeds.

Let alone Ottawa. One of the best reasons for returning to England was the ugliness of North American towns, all -- as far as I recall -- disfigured by overhead lines, not only for telephones but power lines.

Swallows in Surbiton

2011-07-15T08:54:00.001+01:00

Never seen so many from my back window as this year. Usually it’s the odd one or two at very infrequent intervals, but now I see them often and 6-10 at a time. Is this because it’s been such a warm spring and summer, or have new nesting sites become available or been chosen by them? I’d love to know where they are nesting.

Swallows are for me the most magical bird, for the gusto of their flying and their migratory lifestyle. One of things I envy my sister for, living in rural Pembrokeshire, is that every year she sees them return to nest in the eaves and barns and can watch them wheeling and swooping all summer long, and finally watch them lining up on the telegraph wires read to ‘go back where they came from’ -- to everyone’s regret.

It’s one of the things I’d most like to live in the country for (impracticable idea -- where would I see my Miro exhibitions, browse in big bookshops, hear 20 different languages a day, see big orchestras, consult an Apple Genius bar and attend talks on Adam Smith, new archaeological ideas on ‘the social mind’, Rimbaud and the prospects for the euro? quite apart from getting livened up at least once a week by the company of clever, funny and nice academic colleagues.)

If the swallows decided to nest in the roof of our flats in Surbiton, that would be the perfect solution.

The year the swallows don’t return will feel like the end of the world.

Education needs to be long

2011-07-05T16:23:00.002+01:00

In order to flourish, some people need to continue in education beyond 18, but the education that group needs is often neither of the alternatives on offer in England: vocational, for trades or professions, and academic, for induction into university disciplines.

A case in point. In Canada I was able to take over and run for ten years an undergraduate course in which I had considerable freedom. It wasn’t a required element for qualifying in my department’s discipline of linguistics and it was taken by students from a variety of programmes, from second year to fourth. The course was called ‘Writing: Theory and Practice’. You could summarise it as Writing: What it is, how it’s done, what it does, how it’s learned.

Though elementary school teachers on day release from local schools had been the original intended clientele, they had (thankfully for me) stopped being released and no longer attended in any numbers; instead, regular undergraduates flocked in -- a far more appealing group to work with. Gearing the course primarily to the teaching of children in classrooms no longer seemed appropriate so while retaining the material on research into the writing process, together with theories of writing, I tried to make it relevant to students studying university disciplines and, above all, to enable students to understand and extend their own writing, and realise how writing can be a means of making ideas come and getting thoughts into order. That is, to experience the heuristic function of writing.

I devised occasions and tasks that would get the students writing in a variety of genres. Some students claimed at the end that this had resulted in their papers/essays in their other courses improving, while some discovered a talent for short stories. Most significant, I think, was my encouragement of the regular production of unspecialised informal writing on the content of the readings and lectures. Such productions are often called logs or journals but what I was after was something more intellectual and more intelligent than the familiar work that comes under those labels, having had a bellyful of the usual wordy and self-indulgently expressive gush in too many summer courses. I was after ideas and thought.

Some found this sort of writing liberating and claimed it was their first experience of doing writing into which their thoughts could flow. It seemed to accompany an intellectual awakening, a broadening of vision beyond disciplinary boundaries and a taking hold of education as something one was doing for oneself -- though I realise it’s easy to claim too much and there was no proper evaluation.

This relatively unregulated writing, while it had its moments of sparky perceptiveness and rhetorical brio, was not what anyone would call ‘good writing’. It was, however, good mental activity and educationally valid in that students began to learn to connect their writing to their minds. The experience started to make writing an intellectual resource -- with effects, too, I thought, on how the students read the prescribed texts.

As tends to happen with me, I found that I continued to have contact with students who’d proved particularly interesting or on a roll, the ones (by no means all) for which this sort of course was just right at this point in their education. It was right because of those features that made it not a conventional university course, though I’d claim it was just as intellectually demanding. What it didn’t do is teach people how to write the approved political science or English Literature or psychology essay.

One student for whom the course apparently worked went on to take one or two graduate courses, having time on his hands over the summer. One was taken by a professor (North American usage: = any sort of university teacher) for whom I had great liking and respect, as did his students who had a good time with him and learned a lot. Having flourished throughout the course with my colleague, this student did his final assignment which was predictably lively and personal -- along the lines I’d been hospitable to -- but got back, along with an appreciation of the thinking, an adverse comment on the writing: observance of conventions, referencing, marshalling of evidence and arguments. All absolutely valid points to pick up in a graduate course -- but baffling to the student who legitimately asked, though not to the teacher and perhaps not explicitly to himself: ‘Who but a specialist in a discipline, which I'm not trying to be, would care about such stuff? what matters is the ideas and the thinking I do around them. I'm not submitting an article to an academic journal.’

The prof did his job superbly, to teach a Masters level course in Applied Language Studies. The young man, though, was into getting a broad education, and developing as someone who could use writing to further his thinking and learning. As someone for whom the world of ideas with its vistas and excitements was just opening up, he was back with the sort of mismatch that had characterised his experience in all his academic courses: they simply weren’t what was needed by a mind developing as his was after emerging from a narrow high school curriculum and needed, above all, free play in the domain of ideas and knowledge. The suggestion that he conform to academic writing standards was simply irrelevant to someone who was a way off from even contemplating a higher degree of the sort the course was located in -- though he found the ideas and texts in the course stimulating and mind-enhancing.

There thus needs to be a way for young men and women who leave high school -- and indeed, in England, who leave year 9 or 10 (at 13 or 14) -- to do something that is not a disciplinary induction and socialisation but yet is rich in ideas and knowledge. Does such an education anywhere exist?

The Decorated School: a great project

2011-06-26T17:28:00.004+01:00

I was lucky yesterday to attend, as a complete amateur, a day conference in Welwyn Garden City (where I’d never been) in a 1950s primary school by the innovatory school architects of Hertfordshire County Council who, although in straitened financial times, specified that 0.3 of 1 per cent of the building fund for each school had to be spent on work by a contemporary artist. The artists were straight out of art school and so not too expensive, but some of the work was wonderful.

Here, for instance, are murals by Pat Tew in Templewood School, where we were yesterday.

This is from the very rich blog of the Decorated School project, a network of educationists, art historians, architects and architectural organisations, coordinated by Dr Catherine Burke, a historian of education at Cambridge, and and Dr Jeremy Howard from Art History at the University of St Andrews. See the impressive list of partners on the project blog.

The blog has lots more great images, historical comment and storied of rescues. (Note Little Red Riding Hood at the top of the first page.)

It was a great conference because it included one (at least) of the original architects, people who knew Pat Tew and experts of a great variety of kinds, including an American academic, Roy Kozlovsky, who talked about how colour featured in post-war primary schools as symbolic both of the freshness of childhood and of a revolution in education.

Part of the project’s purpose is to discover and save from destruction all the works by artists in schools in England, Scotland and some European countries. Great initiative.

We also learned about the wonderful collection of works similarly purchased by Hertfordshire County Council at the period, which they were trying to catalogue until they were recently sacked.

Standing up to speak in class

2011-06-24T06:13:00.001+01:00

I just saw a clip of old German film (1950s?) showing a class of 10 year olds in a lesson. It was striking that the pupils stood up in their places to answer a question or read out what they’d written or make a contribution to discussion. I've often seen the same thing in American films.

(Colleagues point out that this was the practice in Russia, too -- with the variation that the pupil addressed not the teacher at the front but the rest of the class.)

Was standing up to speak ever the practice in English schools? Within living memory, even? I don't remember it from my schooldays -- we always answered, and volunteered, while remaining seated.

On the historical research project Social Change and English: A Study of Three English Departments 1945-1965 we’d be interested in people’s memories relating to our schools: Walworth/Mina Road, Hackney Downs, Minchenden.

Poetry taught at Walworth/Mina Road

2011-06-21T08:22:00.001+01:00

Someone who was a student teacher on teaching practice at Walworth in about 1957 was invited by the head, Mr Rogers (who was an English teacher), to watch him teach a poetry lesson to a third or fourth year class.

The poem he taught (probably from a book) was the following and I wonder whether anyone else remembers that poem being taught either by Rogers or any other English teacher -- and what was the poetry book?

To a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Any memories, please send them to us (the Walworth history research project) at walworthresearch@me.com.

Hamburg

2011-06-18T17:18:00.001+01:00

Can’t manage a decent posting but here are a few from my wandering along the canal and my trip on the ferry on the Elbe, a river I've never seen before. It’s vast and powerful -- however did the Allies think they’d bridge it -- and did they, or didn’t they have to?

Marseilles

2011-06-09T19:52:00.001+01:00

It’s three weeks since I came back from a jaunt to Provence with a plenitude of photos, of which these are by way of down payment and an apology for recent neglect. I’ve had no time to do anything with them -- and now I'm off again so it will be another couple of weeks’ wait at least.

These are Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, in a suburb of Marseilles, and Auguste Chabau, Avions, 1912-14, from Musée Cantini in Marseilles.

KFC at last

2011-06-04T12:05:00.001+01:00

How many years has KFC been around? that’s how many years I've kept away from it, assuming it to be unhealthy junk food, nasty and unappetising.

Drinking after an academic event in Bloomsbury, my two companions and I decided we were hungry. I knew and suggested some nice and inexpensive restaurants but the others had but one thought: KFC. Setting aside my misgivings I joined them and it was tasty and thoroughly nice, excellent in fact and just what the doctor ordered after my pints -- except that doubtless it really is as unhealthy as I thought. So now I eat my words, or long-time thoughts since I may never have voiced them, on top of my chicken fillet in a bread roll.

Pictured isn’t the one we went to (that was Tottenham Court Road) but my local in Surbiton, which too might now attract my custom once in a while.

What next? McDonalds?

On reading blogs

2011-05-23T20:57:00.002+01:00

There’s always a twinge of hurt when a respected friend says they don’t read my blog -- ‘Are you still doing it? how’s it going?’ But they are people who have jobs, unlike me who am more or less retired. And I don’t even read theirs regularly, much though I enjoy them when I do.

It isn’t just a matter of people having the time, though objectively many people don’t. It’s also the sort of time we count it as. Certainly in my case, there’s a sense that while blogs (the sort I enjoy) are not frivolous or trivial, nor are they books and only books and substantial articles count as serious (still a live category in my old-world weltanschauung) and as contributing to my ‘getting on’ in the sense that was instilled into me at grammar school.

Blogs I classify along with serious newspaper articles, of which those in the Guardian, Observer and New Statesman exhaust the time I'm prepared to spend on keeping generally informed rather than seriously deepening my knowledge or understanding. Worthwhile, but only up to a point - time on them should be rationed, I feel. And when I add factual television programmes to that time budget, it’s more than full. So no room left for even friends’ blogs.

In order to justify watching and enjoying The Inbetweeners or Campus I have to put them into the ‘serious art’ category -- or else regard them as popular culture products warranting my ‘serious’ sociological attention.

Just listen to me -- talk about a relic of bygone times. Getting on! -- I'm nearly 70 for god’s sake. Getting on to where, do I imagine? which is the question I ask of Tennyson’s Ulysses and get no sensible answer.

So if you’re not reading this, you’re forgiven.

Getting stuff done before you die

2011-05-22T11:29:00.001+01:00

In yesterday’s FT A.N. Wilson commented on someone’s death at 73 that that was a good age at which to die. For me, 73 is a bit too close for comfort; there are things I want to do before I die. Yet what sense does that thought make?

In rational, or do I mean rationalist, terms, none. It won’t do me any good when I'm dead that I've achieved an extra five things. I suppose I might die happier having achieved them, i.e. feel happier during my seconds, hours, weeks or months of dying, but if my death were sudden and unexpected, as I think would be best, I would simply have been happier for what I wouldn’t have been aware was the final stretch of my life.

But if I hadn’t achieved them and were still striving, that needn’t be an unhappy state. If I were cut off in the middle of it and had the odd moment to reflect, I don’t see that my feelings need predominantly be of unhappiness or frustration. I’d be dying in the course of, instead of at the end of, doing stuff like the stuff I do now and being in the state I'm in now, thinking what I do is worthwhile and enjoying doing it. Suppose I had to stop striving and submit to an extended period of illness while gradually dying: I agree that might be frustrating, though I imagine the frustration would be less to the fore in my consciousness than the experience of illness and decline.

Looking at it less rationalistically, though, Hannah Arendt, if I understand her, held, following the Greeks, that we are distinctively human in so far as we escape the sort of round of mere survival routines that all animals have to engage in, and contribute to ‘the human artifice’ (artefact?) that outlives us and constitutes the human world, as opposed to our mere environment. Thus it’s human to put into the world products that last longer than us and are used rather than simply consumed, which may be anything from tools to abstract entities: buildings, paintings, music, books, ideas and institutions. And she doesn’t say this, but I would add the moral and mental formation of the young -- what we leave in the minds of our successors.

It’s irrational to think that we survive in our works after death; the works may survive, we don’t. On the other hand living our lives as if that were the case seems to lend dignity and meaning to them. It seems inhuman not to care about how we will remembered, despite the fact that, being dead, we’ll never be aware of how we are.

Being old and able to contribute something to the lives of younger generations is satisfying, and even in terms of our own interest as opposed to that of others, seems - though it isn’t -- a good reason to be unwilling to die prematurely. Logically, it’s a bad reason because once dead we experience neither being dead prematurely nor missing the people we loved and liked and the fun we were having; being dead is no loss to us. So there’s no sense, logically, if we’re aware we’re about to die prematurely, in regretting it for ourselves: living a bit longer might have enabled us to make a crucial difference to a grandchild, but we wouldn’t have been in a state to regret that difference not being made. We wouldn’t have been in a state full stop. The logical or rational argument here doesn’t seem enough, though.

It’s clear I find this issue confusing intellectually -- if perhaps only intellectually.

Wm's swan: r to r to r

2011-05-06T16:27:00.001+01:00

It's not a problem that I ever gave any thought to but you're probably right [Mark] we should be careful about giving free rein to adolescent turmoil -- amongst other reasons because what comes out ain't poetry.

I don't think I ever taught poetry writing well until I had undergraduates and then PGCE students when I did something a bit like your A level venture: I had them start by chopping up two different texts, scrambling them on the the computer and then using the bits as their raw material by making juxtapositions that might mean or suggest something. I liked the way it removed 'expression' right out of it. On the other hand, it may have been a cop out.

Wm's swan: response to response

2011-05-06T16:18:00.003+01:00

This by email from Mark, for the very good reason that he...

...can’t be coerced into signing up to Google to respond on the blog, so here goes:

What does it tell us about teaching poetry? Don't? or 'can't'? From my perspective, teaching poetry - the writing of - is about first, technique, or form (but really just drawing on a limited palette of features, so that much classroom poetry ends up sounding the same); and second, about the expression of feeling - which ends up with propositional statements, rhymed or alliterated, or metaphoricalised. And feelings expressed being of a safe, conventional sort - no feeling murderous, horny, rapturous.

Is it possible, or desirable, to have teenagers meddling with the inchoate in a classroom? Not a little too volatile, this letting rip? But most of all, is a classroom a place where the un-sensical can be contained, handled, explored?

I think I taught two good poetry lessons when I was a teacher. The first, on teaching practice at York, played with They Dream Only of America, by John Ashbery. My mentor said she'd be in the staff room; I'd need her in about 20 minutes...

The second was on 'difficult' contemporary poetry with an A level group. They weren't very academic, and quite perplexed by Pauline Stainer, John Ash (not bery), Robert Crawford I think. A cruel and unusual set text. Best way in was to let them have a go themselves - to write something arcane, obtuse, condensed, free-form. Best work they ever did, and still in my attic somewhere. To my shame and regret I'd said I'd get it published, but never did. What liberated them was the permission to behave like wanky poets; to let rip. It was playful - they weren't handling things that were out of their control, as I think William was; it was consciously a performance, which gave them a get-out, and an alibi.

Swans and pots of greed

2011-05-02T13:56:00.003+01:00

On their mitchellreidamerica blog (April 27th) Mark reports of William (British teenager currently at school in America) -- and I now pass it on with W’s permission -- that

Wm’s class’s latest assignment was to each respond to a different photograph. His was of two swans on a lake, and here it is, followed by his account of it:

Swan Song

A singing swan was on the lake  
A bell ringing in the land forever the land of the swan 
A singing swan was on the lake 
Two hands clinging together in the partnership of the swan 
A singing swan was on the lake 
A man kneeling at the altar of desperation in the church of the swan 
A singing swan was upon the lake 
A cart wheeling eternally into the sunset that was of the swan 
A man with a gun was on the lake 
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan 
A singing swan was on the lake 
An innocent child blind to the outside world of the swan 
A ringing shot was heard on the lake 
A bird flying off the cliff of the mountain that was of the swan 
A singing swan was on the lake 
A ripple of terror among the reeds of the lake of the swan 
A cry was heard on the lake 
The last salute of the soldier who died in battle for his country, which was the country of the Swan.

Mark comments on what William was doing, and here’s my two penn’orth.

William evidently has the gift of letting his imagination rip -- uninhibited chains of association, one idea or word setting another off. What the association was isn’t always clear, probably not to him even. Where did the bell come from as early as the second line? how does a pair of swans on a lake suggest that, or how does the pair ‘swan’ and ‘lake’ suggest it?

What about ‘the land of the swan’? the photograph would have shown the lake, but the thought that the lake is in a land -- which means not our land -- has to have come from somewhere else.

Sometimes it’s language making its own connections: carts don’t wheel but there are cartwheels, so that says they do. That’s a poet’s gift, to have a sense of the original sharp meanings that have been muffled over time in composite formations.

Wittgenstein said that while most language has serious stuff to do -- ordering, informing, requesting, seducing, naming -- poetry is language that doesn’t. Instead it’s language idling, like a car engine in neutral, not driving anything, just doing its own thing. He also, I think, spoke of language on holiday, playing.

If that’s the case, then the job of the poet, or some sorts of poet, or all poets some time, is to stand aside and let the engine tick over, let language (associations, chains of thought) just get on with it and do its stuff. The hard thing for most of us is letting that happen.

But the idling engine throws up things that work, are usable, remain of value. It’s possible that never before has any human uttered the collocation, ‘the altar of desperation’, but once one has we recognise what it’s saying and it will stay with us resonating. The poet may have been surprised when it came up, but once it was there, a fact of life out in the open on page or screen, he may have decided to buy into it: ‘Yes, I'll go with that -- it can be not just words twittering away but me saying it; I don’t mind meaning it; it can go out as me saying it.’ Or as the poem saying it, since a poem isn’t the poet speaking in any simple way.

Some poetry works by leaving gaps, creating holes with fuzzy edges. Thus, I have a strong sense that there’s a connection between these two lines:

A man with a gun was on the lake
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan 

but it’s a great dramatic coup to get from the man having some mean and selfish motive to the concreteness of a pot of greed -- like a pot of gold in a (princess’s?) palace. [Later: Hmm -- W & M now tell me the Pot of Greed is a card in an anime game called Yugioh.]

Some of this poem is doing the sort of thing Rimbaud invented and that still seems like genius and just what was needed, tipping us out of Victorianism into modernness. If I was teaching English I’d give the kids a good dose of him.

But some of the good stuff is quite conventional, as poetry goes, but still original and vivid: ‘A ripple of terror among the reeds’ is great.

William protests that he wasn’t intending any deep meaning. That’s rather the point -- the process churns meaning up anyway.

Surbiton: the good stuff

2011-05-01T07:01:00.001+01:00

A couple of posts back I was up a Surbiton side street looking at the nice houses and nasty (and less nasty) flats. Round the corner is one of the main streets, Claremont Road, and very satisfying it is too to walk along from Adelaide Road towards Surbiton Station (itself a classic -- I see I haven’t done a blog on it and I must). Satisfying because interesting in its variety and some of the buildings are good.

First, welcome to our wheelie bins but behind it is the sort of substantial house that was built when Surbiton started to be a commuter suburb with the coming of the railway (which nearby Kingston, the obvious town for it, was too snooty to admit -- to its great disadvantage ever since: it’s stuck on a slow branch line and we’ve got all the fast trains and loads of them.)

Then this:

And -- a bit of a comedown:

But this I think is a gem:

Pity we then pass on to this, though I suppose it could be worse:

Surbiton doesn't have much more of that stylish 1930s architecture, still less good post-war, but plenty more 19th century villas. It's been saved from ruination by having the Kingston By-pass (another 1930s wonder) nearby, so there's little through traffic necessitating road widening, one-ways, counterflows, giratories and all that. It's a backwater with a great, well-served railway station -- about which more one day.

Arendt and Sennett

2011-04-26T11:42:00.001+01:00

I've been re-reading in a protracted, fragmentary way Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) which I first got onto years ago after a good book architecture (George Baird, The Space of Appearance) made heavy reference to and drew its title from it. I know I've read it before from my pencil markings but, as seems normally to be the case these days, remember none of the things I’d marked -- in fact I almost might as well not have read it. Not quite, though I suspect my vague general impressions come from Baird’s quotes, not the book itself.

I was reading the section on homo faber, man the maker, about the craftsman, as opposed to homo laborans who just labours, producing things like food or laundered sheets that are consumed almost as soon as produced. Arendt makes a distinction between work and labour, the products of the former being ephemeral, those of the latter lasting, often, longer than their maker’s life and contributing to the ‘human artifice’ or made world that is there before we arrive in it and survives after our death.

Other European languages, she points out, make the same distinction. Labour is associated with childbirth, travail -- French travail. Work can be a verb or a noun, including a count noun (with singular and plural works), in French too: oeuvre, les oeuvres -- which reminds me that literary and artistic and scholarly works are part of the human artifice too, though whether she counts them as the product of homo faber too I’m not sure.

For our lives to be meaningful we need an intelligible world -- ‘human artifice’ -- in which to participate, and our works, deeds and words need to be seen and heard by others, our polis, our society, in the space of appearance.

Her homo faber is mainly the craftsman who makes things with hands and tools, and her account of him (and her, as we have to supply throughout -- she was writing before gender awareness got into philosophy) struck me as in some ways unconvincing. It doesn’t matter how for now. So I found myself wondering if Richard Sennett knew of her views or had anything to say about them in his own book The Craftsman -- which again I owned and had, apparently, read in part (though, again, without any recall of the bits I’d marked).

So I look at Sennett’s Prologue and what’s the first sentence I read:

‘Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the days in 1962 when the world was on the brink of atomic war, I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street’

on the Upper West Side in New York, it turns out. And the whole book, as I'm embarrassed not to have remembered, was an argument that Arendt had got it wrong about the craftsman.

I've heard Sennett speak at the London School of Economics, where he was until he retired, about the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. He’d been round the house sketching and measuring Wittgenstein’s crazy design, including such features as doorknobs exactly half way up the door for the sake of geometrical neatness.

So I have personally a student of Hannah Arendt who was a student and lover of Heidegger who was an assistant to Husserl who studied under Brentano (who unfortunately was a student of no-one I've heard of and a Catholic priest into the bargain, thus ending my backwards chain.)

On the grounds of that pedigree, at least its part back to about 1870, I reckon I deserve a bit more respect. (I certainly can’t claim it for my memory.)

What are buildings made of?

2011-04-25T11:50:00.003+01:00

Had one of those moments when you’re pulled up short by realising what you don’t know. Walking up Adelaide Road from Claremont Crescent to St Mark’s Hill I passed from a few lovely Regency houses...

and, looking back to the sunny side of the street, this:

...to modern low-rise blocks of flats in brick with white wooden window frames...

...and was trying to pin down what was so objectionable about the flats.

It's their pusillanimity. Although they're Modern in being rational and functional -- no frills, no ornament -- they're Modern without panache, machines for living in without brio, built of bricks and wood with their only modern material, concrete, concealed in floor slabs and staircases. Though modern in their use of concrete, electricity and provision of plumbing in bathrooms and kitchens, there’s nothing about them that celebrates modernity. Rather, the visible materials suggest banal and unscary conformity with traditional domestic norms. Its elevation may have been drawn with ruler and set square eschewing any variation that might add interest or create satisfying proportional relationships, and avoiding the rhetoric that in older buildings marks entrances as special and suggests the relative importance of the internal spaces, what we get is an ordinary brick house wall only bigger and ordinary windows and frames only more of them. It even has a hipped roof like a semi.

(This one’s a bit better, on the sunny side -- the sun certainly helps -- volumetrically satisfying with some interesting massing -- a bit more than just an ordinary house on steroids:

) (How do you 'close brackets' after a picture?)

Then I thought, what could have been used instead of brick? That's what I realised I didn't know. Very recently it’s been possible to use an inner and outer skin, the outer perhaps of wooden strips or laminate and the inner of plasterboard, separated by a wide cavity filled with insulation, and triple-glazed windows that in the interests of insulation try not to be bigger than they need to be. But what about when these flats were built, which I image was in the 1980s?

Come to that, what did Corbusier use for his walls in his Unités d’Habitation flats in Marseilles? presumably he didn’t pour concrete for his walls, though he might have. Perhaps he too used brick, covered with white stucco?

After the war there was talk of turning the vast apparatus that had produced matériel -- tanks and planes -- over to housing. I'm not sure what came of that, but steel- or aluminium-plated houses never appeared and prefabs were made of asbestos -- weren’t they, or was it plywood? -- and not in aircraft factories?

You note I could find all this out with a minimum of research, but I'm choosing to write out my ignorance first. The information I'm lacking will come along some day soon without my having to look for it -- as indeed it must have done plenty of times in the past, without my paying attention. But writing this will make me take notice when it arrives this time (a 'language and learning' or 'language across the curriculum' point, for those in the trade).

Prefabricated concrete panels, of course, were one possibility, as used, notoriously, in tower blocks and slab blocks -- and sometimes looking great -- as in Park Hill at Sheffield and in Robin Hill Gardens in London (these two):

and sometimes, in fact usually, awful as in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s blocks you see from the inner motorway in Leeds. Perhaps prefabricated panels were precluded by cost from use in the odd single low-rise block. So can’t low-rise blocks, being condemned to brick, look daringly modern and exciting? I'll have to pay attention to them as I walk around.

Back at the start of architectural modernity you had skyscrapers -- Chicago and New York. Steel structure, of course, and steel-reinforced concrete floor slabs, but what, before glass walling was possible, were the walls made of? My impression is that on the Chrysler Building and the Empire State they were made of stone -- how modern is that?

...and poems in the car

2011-04-23T13:46:00.002+01:00

At the risk of signing up to a bloggers’ mutual admiration society, since there’s a nice reference to this one (i.e. mine) in Mitchell Reids in America, I nevertheless recommend it, not least because here there’s another way in which poetry can play a part in life, this time in a sociable and indeed a family context, which wasn’t at all Stéphane Hessel’s situation.

It’s apparently to be a short-lived blog since the Mitchells and Reids in question are only in America for another few weeks. While it’s very enjoyable about being there, I hope they continue on what it’s like to be back. As Mark says, having to write each day is good for us.

There’s a question left for me in there, too -- but I need more time to think about it.

Knowing poems by heart

2011-04-23T12:20:00.001+01:00

I could, if more organised, have made a collection of testimony about the value people have found in knowing a stack of poetry by heart. I remember George Steiner somewhere talking about running an underground seminar over several years in, perhaps, Czechoslovakia. From time to time a student would stop appearing, only to turn up again months later explaining they’d been in prison where, lacking pen and paper, they’d occupied themselves in translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin from Russian to English, a poem over 200 pages long in the translation I looked at.

When our friends in other classes were told that their French master, Twelves, had told them how as a student he used to pace Sheffield Station reciting French verse in his head, I'm afraid we put that down along with his general demeanour to absurd Victorian stuffiness and lack of a real life.

I did, myself, though, use to know enough chunks by heart to keep myself happy for a while, though they weren’t very long -- 20-30 lines max, like the opening of the Canterbury Tales and, more arcanely, Dryden’s ‘Absolom and Achitophel’ which I thought hilarious, which in fact it is -- which makes me less dismissive that some that pupils might gain by reading Dryden. And speeches from Othello, as a result of starring in the school play (as Third Gentleman, around whom, as I explained in a long-lost article in a school magazine, the whole plot really turned).

I'm still taking Philosophie Magazine, because I think it’s good for me though I don’t get round to reading much of it. In the monthly feature, ‘Les Philosophes: L’Entretien’ the March issue has an interview with Stéphane Hessel, who I’d never heard of. Though trained in philosophy and involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he is also a poet. Arrested in the Resistance he spent time in the camps:

The experience of Buchenwald, Rottleberode and Dora...showed me that knowing long poems by heart is an immeasurable resource. It’s as if you have opium on you, a substance that makes an arduous situation bearable. At Buchenwald I’d recite Paul Valéry’s Cimetière Marin Rilke’s Orphée and Villon’s La Ballade du Pendu to myself. Poetry is one of my vertical columns. It was like a medicine, it enabled me to hold on in the camps. It was more of a medicine for my soul than philosophy.

Not sure of my translation of some bits of that.

It seems to me that the fact that poetry can work like this is important and is insufficiently taken account of, let alone explained.

Blond Armpits and Hyacinth Blood

2011-04-21T15:56:00.002+01:00

Joan Miró had the honour of my visit this morning at Tate Modern, and very enjoyable it was. HIs best titles were:

Young Girl with Half Brown, Half Red Hair Slipping in the Blood of the Frozen Hyacinths of a Burning Football Field. (1939)

Worthy of Louis Aragon! And

Woman with Blond Armpit Combing her Hair by the Light of the Stars. (1940)

This was very funny. The woman was of course little more than a suggestive outline with nipples and other features, and the blond armpit, a small white blob that I took some time to notice, made me (almost) laugh. There was a moon through a window, a bird, and a scattering of his black disks.

Could have looked at this one much longer, but that went for most of the ones I looked at, which was 11 individual works or sets. That took an hour, enough for me, though I intend to go back and take advantage of my membership for free entry. (I get very good value for my £60 or whatever.) I took notes as I've done a few times now, finding it makes me look better and see more.

If I'm conscientious, before I go back next time I'll look at my notes and try and sketch the paintings from them, then check, as well as looking at some more.

Although he does a big variety of things (and it’s a big exhibition), it felt much more like looking at Kandinsky than looking at Picasso. Or Klee. I wished I’d had a grandchild or two with me -- they’d have enjoyed it.

(The image above wasn't in the show, I think -- found it online from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I'm sure they'll agree my purpose in purloining it is educational.)

Mina Road: some documents

2011-04-17T09:26:00.001+01:00

Before they were abolished in 1904, to be replaced by the London County Council as the authority in charge of London schools, the School Board for London produced a large printed report that includes a history of the development of its school buildings over the years since 1870. (Their achievement was impressive. There were no publicly provided schools when they started; over their 34 years they built 469.) One of the schools mentioned as significant was Mina Road (1882), and they print its plan, evidently of the first floor, where the Boys’ department was housed:

(Final report of the School Board for London 1870-1904, 1904, p.63.)

From other things I've read it seems the basic class size was 60, though it could be subdivided into 2 x 30 as we see in two of the classrooms, or doubled up for teaching by the head teacher, with one or more pupil-teachers, in the hall -- which had desks for that number. The broken line represents the ‘rolling shutters’ that were later removed. The principle was that the head teacher should be able both to teach one or two classes in the hall and keep an eye on the assistant teachers and pupil-teachers in the classrooms.

The total accommodation for that floor, going by the numbers on that plan, was 420 pupils (boys, not infants, aged 7-12) in 7 classes of 60 - and that fits with the actual pupil numbers I've found recorded in documents at the National Archives in Kew.

Mina Road was not judged a success. The Board’s account is as follows:

ln order to combine teaching with the occasional use of a large room for collective purposes, two types were now tried; one the Mansford-street (Hackney S) and Mina-road (East Lambeth K) type, of which four schools were built. Here there were large halls available for infants and for boys, but each of them were occupied permanently by two classes and the corresponding rooms for the girls were supplied on a separate floor over the hall. This type, though providing two handsome rooms, was not serviceable for teaching or for assembling the children. These schools are being improved by the halls being freed from the classes and used for their special purpose. (Final Report p.37)

That improvement was made possible by the removal of the oldest classes (Standards 5 and 6, what would later be called 1st and 2nd year secondary and now Year 7 and 8) to the new building, that still stands. Quite what was meant by that account of the girls’ provision on the second floor isn’t clear to me.

I hope the original plans survive in the archives. Patrick Kingwell and I will be looking in the London Metropolitan Archives -- we’ll report if we find them.

School desks at Mina Road

2011-04-15T06:56:00.002+01:00

This is from the book written by the London schools architect, E.R. Robson in 1874 -- 8 years before Mina Road Elementary School (later Walworth School) was built (School Architecture, p.172).

Were there desks like this at the school within anyone’s memory? Comments here welcome, or, if you can't work out how to do that (many people can't, I find) then email me at walworthresearch@me.com and I'll post your memories myself (with or without your name, as you prefer).

You can enlarge the image by double clicking -- then notice the slate rack at A.

Further memories of the building

2011-04-13T17:22:00.001+01:00

Bit by bit we’re getting there. Now I've had this from Bill Cutts:

I was at the school from 1952 until 1957 and the old building was for the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th formers. The ground floor had a hall but it was Paddy Price’s gym and also served as the dining hall. I think there were 5 classrooms on the ground floor. Three classrooms in the gym section and one in each of the corridors at each end of the gym.

The 1st floor had a similar layout but the hall had been converted into the library, half of which was the 6th form.

The second floor I remember had the same classroom layout and numbers and the hall was used for the upper school assemblies.

A bit later Bill adds:

I have tried to remember the classrooms on the 2nd floor but all I can remember was that the first classroom inside the hall at the Walworth Road end was Miss Porchetta and next to that was Mr. Besch’s science room.

Incidentally, the Walworth Road end corridor of the first floor had a classroom on the Mina Road side that was my 3rd year form room. It had a piano in it and it was used for music lessons. Next to it with the door just inside what would have been the hall, was Miss Ashton’s form room, my maths teacher. Next to that was my 4th & 5th year form room and Mr. Rosen was my form teacher. The next classroom which was opposite the 6th form end of the library has slipped my mind. Through the double doors and again on the Mina Road side was my French teacher’s form room. He was Mr. Rogers.

I did make a mistake with the ground floor. The Walworth Road end corridor did not have a classroom. That space was the kitchen for the school dinners.

One day I'll search for the original plans in the London Metropolitan Archive.

Meanwhile, does anyone else than John (last posting) remember fires in the classrooms? Open fires, coal scuttles, tongs, pokers? how did it work, or not work? John remembers someone’s plimsolls getting burnt.

More on Walworth/Mina Road

2011-04-13T06:46:00.001+01:00

John tells me:

When I came up from the Lower School in 1963 the old building was still in use. There were two halls and I remember the boys and girls in the third year being separated into them for sex education lessons. The RE teacher, Mr Tagg led for the boys , standing on the stage and asking the boys to send him confidential written notes regarding their queries about sex. As you can expect one boy's note was 'does masturbation make you blind?' Mr Tagg’s reply was confidently 'no' , but more hesitantly he admitted 'but it can make you out of breath'. He went on to state it was like 'running around the old school building at least three times'.

I can only remember two floors being in use. I don't remember whether there was a third floor. Most interestingly. during the winter the classrooms had open fires. The coke/ coal store was at the end of the building towards the Old Kent Road end. Often small bits of coke would be thrown around the playground. I think boys and girls had separate playgrounds, with the boys being adjacent to the old building and the girls being next to the remaining building. The upper school library was on the first floor of the old building. It was not very big and I think it was just a classroom made into a library. library periods were time tabled in year 3( 9), Sometimes school detentions were held in there. Brenda Harvey did much of her teaching in the old building and would be a good source of memories. However, I remember Reg Hunt saying that when the Old building was demolished they found a long length of railway track in the roof space, apparently , debris from the Blitz and bombing of Dunton Road railway yards in the second world war.

Good writing I get bored with

2011-04-12T16:51:00.001+01:00

I wrote this last Saturday and have now just tidied it up and decided to post it for what it’s worth.

17:30
Reading Owen Hatherley (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain -- architecture in cities post-1970) I think how good the writing is and how there’s plenty of good British writing around that requires -- i imagine -- no knowledge of the Authorised Version or Shakespeare or Milton to be enjoyed, so do we really have to read Eng Lit classics at school and uni? (a question that I'm aware deserves closer attention).

Though personally I wouldn’t look for it, good British writing, in fiction. Perhaps Martin Amis is good now, though he wasn’t when I tried to read Money. Just irritating. And I suppose I only say that because I don’t read much fiction -- tends to irritate me like theatre.

19:42
That was after reading the intro -- autobiog, survey, rant, most enjoyable and lively. Then I read a big chunk of the first chapter, on Southampton. Intrigued at first and held by the lively and witty writing, then after a while I'd had enough. I thought this was because I didn’t know Southampton (and the photographs are too small and grey to do the job -- a problem that I suppose reading it on an iPad might solve, I suppose, one argument for such devices that don’t much tempt me).

And then I thought that one advantage of the novel is that one doesn’t have to know its places and people in advance. It tells you all you need to know. But now again I think I don’t need to if I read a good history, either, even if it’s on a topic I've no knowledge of ... so I don’t know where this leaves me.

Except, come to think of it, I do. My education and all has meant I've spent a lot of time with history, one way and another, and that makes reading about it meaningful, not because I know the places and people but because I've become a sort of minimal connoisseur of how history goes so that new cases come to me as relevant, as fitting themselves -- in ways I have to decide and perhaps can’t help trying to decide -- in a tissue of memories of other works.

So, by analogy, if I'd been an assiduous observer of and reader about architecture and urban planning, and still more if I'd myself grappled with the confusion of post-1970 British urban scenes and groped for ways of making sense of them, then Hatherley’s efforts would interest me for the categories and characterisations he comes up with, for the light he throws on what appeared meaningless and for the insightfulness of his metaphors.

Later again
Then I have my tea, over a newspaper which has an extract from the unpublished (unfinished, reconstructed, I think) novel Pale King by David Foster Wallace who the papers insist was exceptionally good. Well, yes, it’s good -- very nice description of an unusual and interesting situation, the narrator’s father being caught in the closing doors of a Chicago subway train and hurtling to his death at the opening of the tunnel -- as are thousands of parallel passages in novels. But so it should be if he’s devoted his life to writing -- he’s a writer, dammit. In short, so what, nothing special, and no particular reason to read yet another new novel out of the impossible pile of good novels.

In any case I think I've always preferred non-fiction, mainly -- fiction once in a while, certainly, a periodic fix, as with poetry, but a little goes a long way.

This ends up a rambling as Montaigne. Does that make me a true essayist?

Walworth / Mina Rd responses

2011-04-12T16:10:00.002+01:00

June kindly emailed me the following, which she's given me permission to post:

I was at Mina Road from 1953 to 1958. My first year was in 1E(Miss Eggleston.'she was Australian') that class room was on the ground floor of the Lower School.

Then I went into 2 H.(Miss Harvey) and that room was on the first floor of the lower school. Then we moved to the Upper School and I was in 3W(Miss Wallace) I believe that to have been up on the first floor. Also on the first floor was the Library and staff room, they were near the sewing rooms - they always seemed bigger to me than a normal class room with a long table in there for cutting out. I do not believe there was a hall, the hall was on the next(top) floor where we

had assemblies. The Domestic Science (Housecraft) rooms were a separate single storey building near the lower school. The hall in the Lower School I believe as on the ground floor. I do not know if this is of any help at all.

More on Walworth School/ Mina Road

2011-04-10T17:27:00.003+01:00

First, as I've mentioned before, there’s a website about some research about the history of three London schools (1945-65) of which Walworth or Mina Road is one. It gives you an email to contact if you want to know more or have stuff to tell us; or you can email walworthresearch@me.com.

Also, if you look down the right hand side of this screen, some way down there’s a long list of ‘labels’. These are links to other postings on my blog. Try clicking on Walworth and Mina Road.

Now, here’s a question for those of you who remember the main old building, used as the upper school -- the one nearest the Old Kent Road.

Here’s a picture of it from 1905, from the brochure for the opening of the other building (the only one that’s still there).

At that date this building was what would now be called a primary school -- infants, boys and girls (with a wall to separate them in the playground). The new building was called a Higher Grade or HIgher Elementary school, and was what we’d call a secondary school for children of 11, 12 and 13: Mina Road Higher Grade School.

We want to know more about the older building, demolished in the early 1960s. It looks as if it has only two real storeys, ground and first, with perhaps a hall on each floor (those big windows). The second floor looks much lower, with dormer windows. So what went on up there?

And how many classrooms do you remember on each floor? and who taught in each, if you can really stretch your memory? We think the middle hall became the library -- is that right?

Here to help you is a much later shot of the same building, taken from the Mina Road side. Here it looks like three main storeys, not two, with five classrooms on each floor, but it would be nice to be sure.

photo

There may, of course, have been major alterations since 1905.

More on the strangeness of grammar schools

2011-03-30T12:10:00.001+01:00

At Bradford Grammar School the headmaster and ‘second master’ (deputy) maintained strict order and were feared. That went also for a fair proportion of the ‘masters’, but not all. One of the oddest features of the grammar school was that for all its lofty academic aspirations a teacher once recruited had a job for life. Quite a number were more or less incompetent; some couldn’t control the boys, some simply didn’t do their job. Yet I don’t recall any being sacked. You could be incompetent or lazy for forty years, no questions asked.

I suppose complaining parents, even three-quarters of them (I think) were paying fees and might be thought to have had the whip hand, could simply be told, ‘Well, take your child elsewhere if you don’t like it.’ An effective threat in that there wasn’t an elsewhere within reach that was thought to be as good.

I've just thought of a couple of other instances, to do with the morning assemblies when many hundreds of boys were seated in the faux-Tudor hall. With the head and prefects on the stage and the masters seated at the ends of each row in the body of the hall, the possibility of major disorder was effectively closed off. However, there were two sorts of occasion when it could at least feel real. One was when a master was retiring after long service in the school. The custom was that at the end of an assembly the head and staff would withdraw while the head prefect addressed an appeal to the school to contribute to a collection for a present. (One suspected this may not have reflected a spontaneous upsurge of affection and gratitude from the boys.) Though the prefects were re-positioned in the place of the masters down the sides, but standing not sitting, containing the erupting din of shouts, stamping, clapping and hilarity was a hopeless task and I imagine the head prefect simply terminated the proceedings and got everyone out as fast as possible. With a less constitutionally docile pupil body, the disorder might have bordered on the dangerous. Why was this practice tolerated by the head?

The other moment of potential carnival was when both the head and second master were off sick or otherwise absent. Then it was revealed there was such a being as a previously unsuspected ‘third master’ who -- his sole function in the post, it appeared -- had to take the assembly, marching through the back doors and down the middle of the hall to gasps and titters, then mount the stage and, when the prefects had peeled off one by one from their positions in the aisles and taken their seats up there with him, find a voice unshaky enough to announce that we would sing hymn number X.

An intimidating assignment for the poor fellow thus tasked, especially since he had evidently attained the post not on the basis of competence -- often severely lacking -- but of seniority, whether of age or service. The unenthusiastic quality of the singing was an index of the lack of esteem in which this person was held. So on one occasion I recall it was Mr Witham, the ancient, ineffective, boring and nose-dripping Spanish and French teacher, and on another Reggie Maddox, the unimposing senior art master. The situation was saved from disaster, however, by the continued presence of the masters in the body of the hall, a stare from some of whom -- the ones from whom the third master would have been chosen on any rational system -- was quite enough to quell any incipient uprising.

What’s interesting about these strange occurrences is that since the school was purportedly placed on, precisely, a rational modern basis in the 1880s, ending the long decline from its Tudor origins and its Stuart charter, the maintenance of what seem like ancient customary practices was a glaring anomaly. No comprehensive school of the time (there were a few), let alone an efficient business, would have ran such risks, or indeed have tolerated hopeless teaching and the promotion of people on long service alone.

But -- and this seems to be the key (I’m guessing) -- it was the decent thing to recognise long service, and allowing the boys to be on their own as a full body while not normally policed was a civilised procedure. In some nook of the official thinking these values must have still counted; to give them up would have been to surrender something important. These odd practices represented a minimal and symbolic resistance to the logic of enlightened progress. The retention of gowns and ritual assemblies were perhaps in the same class.

Perhaps, then, the way to see these these prestigious grammar schools might be as hollowed out shells of archaic custom in which lively and up-to-date proceedings could securely thrive in the odd classroom and some atypical teacher-pupil relationships.

Closing public libraries

2011-03-30T12:04:00.001+01:00

On the Today programme this morning (Radio 4) Zadie Smith had these things to say amongst her comments about the closure of public libraries:

I would never have seen a single university carrel if I had not grown up living 100 yards from the library in Willesden Green.

[It’s] difficult to explain to people with money what it means not to have money. ‘If education matters to you, they ask, if libraries matter to you, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay them if you value them?’ They’re the kind of people who believe value can only be measured in money.

Like many people without money, we relied on public services... as a necessary gateway to better opportunities. We paid our taxes in the hope that they’d be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.

Community is a partnership between government and the people and it’s depressing to hear the language of community, the so-called big society, being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership as it attempts to renege on the deal.

To listen look for ‘People voting with their feet’ on library cuts Wed, 30 Mar 11 here.

Boris bikes

2011-03-30T11:14:00.002+01:00

Iain Sinclair, on a Thinking Allowed podcast, speaking of the London bike scheme introduced by mayor Boris Johnson and sponsored by Barclays Bank: something to the effect that ‘The bikes have a big sign on so we ride around advertising Barclays like sandwich-board men, and what's more, have to pay for the privilege.’
Image from http://www.google.co.uk/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=boris+bikes+photo&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=eQOTTbPtBIaWhQfz9cSJDw&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=988&bih=849

Jacob Behrens and my education

2011-03-30T08:11:00.001+01:00

Behrens, Jacob: 19th century Bradford wool man. I'm finding myself, after my recent couple of days in Bradford, interested in the city’s 19th century history, to which Behrens was important. (He was apparently involved in reforming Bradford Grammar School and putting it on a modern footing.) An intelligent, vigorous, warm and humane man, it appears. I vaguely knew that the Behrenses were one of the German families who moved to Bradford and contributing to building up the wool trade and city.

I’ve just bought his biography second-hand and have read the first part, about his early life (born 1806), up until I think his late 20s, in Hamburg, and emerge from this with a few miscellaneous observations.

Germany at the time was a mess of small states run for the most part by an outrageously rich, privileged and reactionary class of nobles. I hadn’t realised, a point the book makes clear, what a huge improvement Napoleon’s administration had made in that, what -- decade? --of occupation: abolishing arbitrary customs levies, banning discrimination against Jews (the Behrens family were Jewish, hence in trade, practically the only occupation that had been permitted for Jews), providing schools, building bridges. (I knew something of this in relation to the French occupation of Yugoslavia, from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, and have since looked for a book on Napoleon’s administrative innovations in France and beyond, but haven’t found one.) And then the callousness and stupidity of the restored princely and aristocratic regimes after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna (did I ever do that in history?) -- under the ‘Austrian Peace’, so-called because it was mainly Metternich’s doing, and he was an Austrian -- I didn’t know that either. Not only the rulers but the old ways and privileges and bans were restored -- to the extent of pulling down the French-built bridge in Hamburg so the ferrymen could resume their customary trade and the people could resume their hazardous and expensive half-hour crossings in open boats in wind, rain and snow. (Big society?)

I also realise I know nothing about Germany. All those names: Pomerania, Saxony, Hanover, Silesia, Prussia... I've very little idea where they are. Nor could I draw a map of Germany which always seems to me to be a featureless mass without anything to get your bearings with. Well, just some rivers, I suppose, and the Black Mountains. So I need a geography book and atlas as well as a history. Come to think of it, we only did one year of geography in grammar school, and I think that was the British Isles -- which I'm glad to have done but it wasn’t enough.

Now a pedagogic observation. I sort of knew before opening the book that the Behrenses had been in textiles in Germany, and, having in mind I suppose that Jacob Behrens had a mill in Bradford - still there in my youth, perhaps it still is -- or I thought it was a mill (it may have been a warehouse) I simply assumed that the family manufactured yarn or cloth in Hamburg. Then I read without paying particular attention something about the firm importing its cloth from England, and only afterwards registered the significance of that statement: so they weren’t manufacturers, they were merchants, buying and selling.

Now: imagine -- I'm a teacher and my class has been ordered to read the chapter. When they’ve finished I might normally be inclined to ask them, ‘Where did they get their cloth from?’ ‘England, sir’ -- no problem. After the reading I’d actually had, in which on reflection I’d noted a particular significance in what I was being told, I might ask them rather, ‘What business were the Behrens in in Hamburg?’ -- in order for them to realise that, whatever they might have unquestioningly assumed, like me, it wasn’t manufacture. But what I should be trying to do is bring about in my students the sort of learning that I experienced -- and the difference is that no one asked me the question that made that happen. My learning, in fact, was precisely realising that there was a question to be asked.

A huge part of my effort in teaching humanities in school , including English, was to get the kids to have questions.

I was reminded of this the other day when Simon Clements, recalling his time as an HMI (inspecting schools, not just English), said that if he had one fundamental question for teachers in relation to their teaching, it was ‘Whose questions?’ Exactly right.

Stuart Hall idea

2011-03-19T16:58:00.001Z

Stuart Hall, interviewed by Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed, said revolutions are not to be judged solely by their outcomes (assuming we are in a position to know what they are). 1968 may not have ‘succeeded’ -- but after it the world was different in various ways. So it was with 1848, and so it will be with the current Arab revolutions, whatever the ‘outcome’.

A hopeful message, no?

Arendt and English

2011-03-14T08:29:00.001Z

Been re-reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. I say re-reading because marginal marks indicate I've read it before, but for all the memory I have of it I might as well not have bothered -- these days I have to make notes if I’m to get anything out of a book.

A big theme in the book is the idea of the public sphere, as opposed to both family and intimate relations on the one hand and, on the other, the general mainly work-based swirlings around that constitute ‘society’, a formation and a notion that have emerged only in modern -- post-Renaissance, scientific etc -- times. In ancient Greece, she says, there were only the prized public sphere of the polis, where men (only) could be fully human, and the despised family or household sphere where women and slaves performed the labour (including that of procreation) necessary to sustain mere animal life. Virtue, honour, morality all related to one’s conduct in the public sphere, one’s action (e.g. in war) and one’s speech (in legislative and judicial deliberation).

It’s surely those features of Greece (and of Rome -- essentially similar in its ideas and values, she says, apart from eventually losing democracy) that made classical education so irrelevant to people of my generation who got a load of it at grammar school. The likes of us were a good two centuries into a world -- society, capitalism, individualism, prizing of intimacy -- to which ancient social structures and values were irrelevant. Horace feeling fulfilled because in his poetry he’d ‘built a monument more lasting than bronze’ -- how could a British teenager be expected to care about that? Or glory in war?

The British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries still, it’s true, maintained its adherence to classical ideals: politicians wearing togas in their statues, Parliament seeing itself as the equal of the Roman Senate and so on. But that adherence was already being undermined by the quite different set of ideas, values and preoccupations embodied in the new novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson.

So, classics being no longer capable of performing its traditional educational function, English had to be invented -- though it took some time for novels to gain the valued position within it that they now, rightly, hold.

Manningham & Heaton (Bradford) photos

2011-03-13T17:52:00.001Z

I've posted photos of my recent Bradford trip here, entirely buildings and views. Since photos are poor (dull weather, new camera) this is only for those with an interest in Bradford or architecture. Not sure how to suggest you view it: slide shows are nice but you have to set the time per slide and some of my captions are longer than others. So perhaps best to view one by one, on Full Screen setting. (The album title is wrong, by the way: my visit was at the end of Feb, not in March.)

Perfunctory didactics

2011-03-10T10:22:00.003Z

Outside Hampton Court a couple of days ago, at the gate into the forecourt, a cluster of junior school pupils (aged 9-10) being got into the zone by their teacher: ‘And as you were approaching that massive great gatehouse, what would you be feeling?’ Confused muttering. ‘What would you be feeling?’ Kids indifferent, gazing around at the river and at nothing. A girl offers something I can’t hear. ‘Yes, exactly, that’s a lovely word.’ Not clear that the others find it lovely.

It’s now standard practice to ask, instead of ‘Who was the first Tudor king?’, ‘How would you feel if you had to serve Henry VIII his soup without spilling any?’ But it’s evident that this newer pedagogy, if implemented, as here, in the same perfunctory and ritualised manner, is no more effective. That teacher doesn’t want to know how they’d feel, and they know she doesn’t want to know and there’s no point in expending the effort to satisfy her. Except for the same one or two there still is and always will be.

There are circumstances -- we all know them -- in which A can ask B ‘How would you feel if...?’ and it’s a real and legitimate question, one that puts you on the spot or invites you into interesting speculation. But questions that have degenerated into stock elements in a teacher’s routine don’t work like that. Devising non-routinised ways of eliciting kids’ engagement is a perennial problem for teachers, and one, it seems, as no nearer solution -- or even recognition -- than it ever was.

And how would you feel if you received the following response to your response to such a question?

‘How would you feel if you’d been stuck at home all day with crying kids and dirty nappies and I swanned in two hours after I’d finished work stinking of beer?’

‘Resentful?’

‘Yes, that’s a lovely word, isn’t it! Resentful.’

Neil Oliver

2011-03-10T09:11:00.001Z

He’s a BBC TV presenter known mainly for the boring Coast but he’s just done a two-programme series, A History of Ancient Britain. It follows neatly on the geological programme, The Making of Britain (I think), presented by Tony Robinson, and takes the story forward into (human) prehistory.

In this series Oliver is, at last, terrific, and the reason is that he’s dealing with his own specialism: he’s an archaeologist. Accordingly, he can ad lib convincingly, talk knowingly to other archaeologists and react appropriately to the uniqueness or run-of-the-millness of the finds they show him. And he has an archaeologist’s emotions of delight and wonder. I wish we’d had six programmes, not two, so he could have taken time to discuss at more leisure such items as the significance of the construction of the Dover boat relic of which the huge, axe-hewn planks were sewn together with withies, not nailed or jointed. (Was this because nails hadn’t been invented, because wooden nails were too difficult to make or ineffective or because metal ones -- bronze, they would have been at that point -- were too expensive?)

He stopped with the bronze age, 1500BC, but I wish he’s gone on the iron and difference it made, and the Celts.

BBC, learn the lesson: give us experts setting their expert minds to work in their own field. Wouldn’t anyone prefer this to the middle-brow blandness of mere tourist stuff like Coast -- which is worth watching, if at all, for the aerial filming? We want to see archaeologists being archaeologists, and physicists (Brian Cox) being physicists -- same as in fictional form we like watching police being police and hospital doctors being hospital doctors.

Finding a netbook

2011-03-05T10:40:00.002Z

I wrote before somewhere that I could do with a very small and light laptop that at minimum would provide for typing text and storing it for transferring to a serious computer, and beyond that might provide internet for browsing -- maybe email but that’s a lower priority. This would be to take on trips, into libraries, just while out of the house.

And of course you can’t get such a thing without paying for a load of extras like webcams and more power than you need. I was thinking there should be something for up to GBP100 but I'm going to have to pay 250 for what is called a netbook.

Best bet seems the Asus but deciding which version is a nightmare. The thing I think I want is called the Eee 1015 -- but do I want the 1015PE or PX or PEM...? and what difference would the differences make? Then, there’s tracking down where in London I can see and try them, which I'm told is essential with such devices because some keyboards and trackpads don’t feel right, some have screen glare or casing glare...

It’s one of those situations in which I’d like to just send my man out with instructions to come back with the right one. Can’t quite manage that but I am benefiting from expert handholding from an old friend, James. But it’s not convenient for him to come shopping with me (Totten Court Road next week, I reckon) since he’s in Hong Kong, where of course I’d be better off getting it. (No sales tax, he tells me -- I didn’t know that.)

The more I browse on the topic the more complicated it gets. Now I find a forum where it’s stated (in 2009) that tech support for Asus in the UK sucks. But what can you do?

Slideshow forthcoming

2011-03-05T10:27:00.001Z

My pics of Bradford (Manningham and Heaton) will be available ‘before long’ but I'm learning as I go and it’s a slow business. Where do I publish a set of photos that can be viewed as a slideshow? I tried Apple’s Mobile Me Gallery and iWeb because they were linked handily with iPhoto, but they seemed a bit quirky and minorityish and in any case I find I'm now using the software that came with my Nikon Coolpix for editing and organising.

So then to Flickr, but too complicated and a slideshow on it doesn’t display captions as far as I could see, and what I have in mind -- a tour of places and sights -- needs them. So I'm settling for Picasa: uploading to it is straightforward from the folders that the Nikon creates, and some of our family stuff is on there anyway.

So now I'm selecting and editing and captioning. But don’t raise your expectations: I'm no photographer, I wasn’t used to the camera and the weather was dull till right at the end.

Jamie's Dream School

2011-03-02T22:17:00.001Z

Jamie Oliver -- good guy -- has set up a small school that’s to run for two weeks and attempt to rescue 20 teenage ‘academic failures’, and to ‘light their fire’, as he puts it, he’s engaged distinguished experts as teachers. Just seen the first programme and they didn’t do well, except the yachtsperson who only had four kids to deal with -- and no school subject to teach.

Might that be something to do with the fact that the experts aren’t teachers? might they not have been more successful if they’d been shown how to do it on a PGCE?

To which, sadly, Jamie’s answer might justifiably be that the people the kids have just come are all trained teachers, and what good did that do.

His scheme isn’t silly because we know that there are loads of ‘born teachers’ who aren’t teaching as a job, and some of his experts might have turned out to be among them as well as being expert in science, art, history and sailing.

Still, it’s also rather typical of the standing of the profession that the idea can even get a hearing that non-teachers could be given a bunch of kids to teach, whereas we wouldn’t (or would we, these days?) set non-medics to do surgery or non-musicians to conduct... Etc.

Shows we lack a clear concept of what the expertise in teaching actually is. But a prerequisite must surely be that someone understands teenagers and is used to being with them. I got the impression that none of these four did, except perhaps the yacht person whose name I should know but have forgotten.

Come to think of them, Jamie himself seemed by far the best with the kids, but then he’s taught similar kids for years in his restaurant.

Manningham Part 2

2011-03-02T16:52:00.005Z

Click to get photos a decent size.

It was good to find this small 17th century cluster (weavers’ cottages?) well preserved, while up in the village there was a bakery, the Village Bakery, of a type I've never yet found in London, with homemade pies and proper confectionary like jam and raisin slices (that’s two items) and Eccles cakes. And the rec at the top of the hill had views of Ilkley Moor.

Turning back I inspected a row of high-quality back-to-backs on Heaton Road.

The two houses you see don’t go right through to the back: half way back, another one-room-per-floor house starts, with access to its ‘front’ door through the tunnel that was required by Bradford’s by-laws from the 1860s.

Finally I called in at Lilycroft Primary School (Bradford School Board, 1872-3 -- thus very early; I’d done my preliminary teaching practice there in 1963 when I lived just down the road) and admired the angels in the hall.

By this time the sun was out, everything looked wonderful -- and my battery ran out. So I'll have to go back. As if I need an excuse. Bradford, if often shabby, is magnificent: topography exhilarating -- unlike Leeds it’s a true Pennine town, on the edge of the big hills; the buildings a feast for the eyes; and the history -- which I now know a bit about for the first time (why didn’t they teach me it in school? typical grammar school...) -- adds such richness to what’s there to see.

Manningham Part 1

2011-02-28T09:06:00.002Z

That’s where I lived - though my parents said it was Heaton -- from the age of 12 till I left home for university, never to return except for holidays. Manningham was a suburb of Bradford, though by my time it had had at least 50 years as one of the main districts of Bradford, industrial as well as residential. Manningham in the 17th century had been a village -- farming and a bit of hand loom weaving; Heaton, a bit further out, still was and is a village, sort of, though with plenty of late Victorian and 20th century housing added, and in the way that Highgate in London is a village.

My return visit last week is an example of the difference a good book can make to perception and experience.
The authors are Simon Taylor and Kathryn Gibson; it came out in 2010 and is scholarly, readable and intelligent -- simply a fine piece of work by English Heritage, who have had conservation projects in the area. Cheap, too -- £9.99.

As a teenager I knew Manningham and Heaton well but never appreciated their architectural distinction. I got the book for Christmas, read it in soft southern suburban Surbiton where I now live and was inspired to go back and have a fresh look. So I did, last week, and this time what I saw was richly meaningful because of the explanations and historical maps in the book. What we see depends not just on perception (at least if that refers to light falling on eyeballs) but on the semiotic chains that are activated by the incoming ‘messages’-- the image evokes ideas or associations already there, which in turn evoke others...

In 1950s Bradford, old buildings -- working-class cottages, Victorian mills, 19th century co-op stores -- were smoke-blackened and shabby. They felt clapped-out when what we pined for -- or Stibbs and me and our AA architecture student friend Colin Bottomley did -- was Bauhaus and Corb, European modernism, clean lines, whiteness. This was before Asa Briggs’s (1965) celebration of Victorian Cities, and before the cream of cameramen started their black and white luxuriating in the north in films like A Taste of Honey.

I took my new compact camera, a cheap Nikon that I’d after placing portability above features. I suppose it did ok but I missed the viewfinder that such cameras no longer have -- the screen or monitor is useless when you’re looking into a bright scene -- simply can’t see what the camera’s going to take. That seems to be the case a lot of the time. But the main disappointment was that the weather was dull and non-photographic. Still, I offer a few shots here...

Bradford has fallen on hard times (nothing has replaced the textile industry) as can be seen from the run-down streets, though the Asian families (in Britain that means from the Indian subcontinent and not, as in North America, east Asia) are apparently very attached to the place. It means some fine buildings and squares are overgrown, neglected or derelict, like the wonderful Victorian Southfield Square off Lumb Lane (click to get photos a decent size):

Fairmount, an elegant 1853 development built in open fields, is a particularly sad case.

Further out from the centre I passed through Lister Park and up into Heaton, past several fine villas on Emm Lane.
No more pics allowed in a single post so continuing in Part 2.

What happened to libraries?

2011-02-28T08:30:00.001Z

Time was when you’d go into a public library of the older sort -- Bradford Central Library as was on Darley Street, Bradford Carlisle Road Library, Surbiton Library -- and you’d find people sitting down and reading for extended periods of time, surrounded by ceiling-high shelves of books, many very old (e.g. 1840). This group would include business people on their lunch hours, housewives in the middle of a morning’s shopping, retired persons, unemployed men and school and college students.

It would be pretty well unthinkable to use a public library like that today. There are far fewer books and most of them appear to be newish, colourful and plastic-covered -- ‘attractive’ seems to be the watchword, whereas for me one category of the attractive has always been the unattractive. Older volumes have been disposed of and can be had for bargain prices on Amazon and other sites. The shelves are easy-reaching height and there are computers and kids everywhere. People do sit and flick through books but no one stays for a serious read. The atmosphere is ‘fun’ rather than contemplation.

So has the possibility of picking out and reading a book you don’t own for an hour or more at a stretch in some public space disappeared? no, the readers have moved to Waterstones. Waterstones in Leeds (a great shop ever since it opened -- even though we’re supposed to hate Waterstones, for some good reasons) -- is a fine example. I went in the other afternoon with a couple of hours to kill before catching a train and the place was full of readers in comfortable chairs or in less comfortable ones but with tables in the Costa Coffee area, and many of them were deeply engrossed. True, the books are all new -- and we understand new titles have a very short shelf life in which to prove they sell before they’re whipped away and remaindered or pulped -- but there are masses of them and the shelves go up to ceiling height so that you need stools to reach the top ones. Not a computer in sight except customers’ lap tops and the ones the staff use; and the staff know their stuff.

I was able to read a big chunk of the Bradford section in the new Pevsner Buildings of the West Riding -- a huge improvement on the original, which I got second-hand years ago, and I wanted it but the price was prohibitive (even on Amazon, I found later). But I'll get it one day.

Why I picked that book out to read will become clear in another posting, soon.

Walworth School research

2011-02-28T08:25:00.001Z

We now have a website:
http://remakingenglish.org/

It’s about our research on English teaching in three schools, of which one is Walworth School (Mina Road).

It has a form on which people can comment and send in fresh information. We intend to keep adding stuff to the site.

Theatre under the arches

2011-02-16T09:05:00.001Z

All my miserablings about theatre still stand but with this big exception: small theatre by small groups in intimate sessions. Last night I was at the opening night of Irish Blood, English Heart by Darren Murphy in the Union Theatre underneath the railway arches on Union Street, Southwark -- audience 25, cast 4; dramatic, electric, sparkling writing. And then mingling with case, writer and producer in the bar.

New camera

2011-02-13T07:28:00.001Z

I decided that in my choice of a new camera portability had to have priority over a good lens that could only be had at the price of bulk. If I can’t carry a camera casually and without it being a burden, I judge that I'm unlikely to use it much. The fact that a Nikon that seemed vastly superior to my years-old Olympus was only £70 (plus card) decided me. So far I've had little chance to use it -- weather’s been gloomy or rainy, no incentive to take pictures. Photographing documents in the National Archives seems to have gone ok, but it’s something I didn’t do with the old one so can’t compare.

Here’s one I took on the way to the archives at Kew.

This was on a railway route that I used to know as the North London line but I now find is called the Overground, which I presume is a new train company. I’d seen signs on the Underground directing passengers to the Overground and had assumed it was simply a convenient term for trains that weren’t underground. Evidently not. Stupid name, in that case.

Anyway, I don’t much like it. This sort of carriage, with seats along the side, isn’t what you expect in a train as opposed to a bus or tram. Fortunately I only have to use it for one stop, from Richmond to Kew. The rest is good old South West Trains, which I like and is comfortable and apparently well run.

Estates -- correction

2011-02-11T06:53:00.001Z

That should have been Boundary Street Estate. I've re-read that chapter in Hanley and it’s very good still. The other book I read, some time ago, that dealt with public housing as well as other planning and architecture matters, was Lionel Esher, A broken wave: the rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (1981).

Estates

2011-02-10T07:23:00.001Z

I didn’t buy this because of the cover -- I ordered it blind from Amazon -- but it’s lovely, isn’t it. Is that Gill Sans?

It’s good. The first chapter’s about her own and her family’s experience of public housing (for North American bloggees, the ‘estates’ of the title are ‘council estates’ which means public housing developments/projects built and run by local authorities, the councils). The second is the best history I've seen of public housing in Britain -- a sad story. Wonderful development to start with -- Boundary Row in Bethnal Green which I've often walked through and admired -- by the LCC at the end of the 19th century. ‘Homes fit for heroes’ after the first war, built to the highest standards (‘Tudor Walters’), as were those provided by Bevan (Minister of Health and Housing) after the second -- but in both cases the gain in space and fresh air (the developments were on the edges of cities) were at the price of remoteness from family and work. In both cases, too, the standards of building were relaxed after a few years out of a need for economy, more rapid provision and higher density, so that whereas at first the council houses looked and were as good as those the spec builders were selling to private buyers, before long they were standing out a mile and attracting the social stigma that they’ve never since thrown off.

Then came ‘systems building’ (prefabricated units) and tower blocks and the familiar scene around us today in the inner as well as the outer city.

Consciousness

2011-02-10T07:00:00.001Z

About ten years ago I had something called an iPaq, made by Compaq. It was a PDA but the beauty of it was you could buy a folding keyboard for it, called a Target Stowaway. It was in three parts and when folded it was the same size as the iPaq, comfortable pocket size, and I could easily take it into libraries, on trains etc. I had to abandon it when I switched from PCs to Macs and couldn’t get it to communicate.

I wish I could find something like that now. A virtual keyboard on a screen (iPhone, iPad) is no good for writing more that a few words. So when the muse or some other harridan strikes when I'm out, I’m reduced to writing in a notebook and then typing it on the computer when I get home.

If there’s time, that is, which often there isn’t, which is why you didn’t get what I scribbled on 27 January, which was:

‘The claim that the self is an illusion is philosophically incoherent -- i.e. bollocks.’

I noted down a trivial and rather annoying train of thought I’d just had -- some puzzle about the ticket barriers worked at Waterloo -- and wrote ‘It’s impossible to see these thoughts as just material movements. There was intentionality, desire, a form of wanting to know. If there was a chattering monkey -- which there was in that these weren’t thoughts I was wanting to have and they were distracting: I’d have preferred my mind to be still -- the monkey was me.

‘The incoherence in the statement that the self is an illusion is revealed in the observation that who can register that statement in consciousness -- evaluate it as true or false, accept it or reject it -- except a self, a consciousness?’

Now I see Mary Midgley reviewing a book on consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey (Guardian Review. Saturday 5 February) and observing that ‘Humphrey... still rules that this everyday consciousness is indeed an illusion. He seems not to notice that illusions are impossible unless somebody conscious is there to be deluded.’

Exactly. Good to find one’s idea anticipated those of a real thinker. Which is what has motivated me at last to get down to it and type out my scribble.

She needs a word ‘illuded’, doesn’t she.

The meaning of meaning

2011-02-02T10:19:00.001Z

I’ve always had trouble with English teachers, primary school teachers, advisers, lecturers and the like who talked about children ‘making meaning’. I still hear it now occasionally but did a lot in the 70s and 80s and indeed there were books and articles with the expression in the title. Those who used it may have known what they meant but I never thought I did, which makes me think, still, that it was a mystificatory idea that served to conceal confusion.

Previously, people had only used the term ‘meaning’ in phrases like ‘the meaning of so-and-so’. As for ‘meanings’ plural, you got it in ‘word meanings’ and expressions like that -- ‘words and their meanings’ -- but never, I think, in isolation. Meanings were pretty well what you could find in the dictionary.

So what were these meanings that children were supposed to making? Well, I suppose they were the meanings of their written and spoken utterances or improvised dramatic actions, since it was always in relation to language or drama that the expression was used. There seemed to be a whole implicit theory in this way of speaking, that ‘behind’ the language was a non-language something that either preceded the utterance (less preferred version) or was precipitated by the utterance, in the course of speaking.

Well, then. First: if that was the implicit theory, it seems to have huge implications and needed spelling out -- and I don’t think it ever was. If it wasn’t, then ‘meanings’ were just a placeholder, like an algebraic x, for whatever the language or gesture meant, in the usual sense. It’s the implication that there’s some separate entity that children are making, to which language etc may be contributory in production but finally inessential, to which I object. Or rather, I object to the undeclared smuggling in, as if it’s unproblematic, of such a vast notion about the constitution of ideas.

I once took ages working in detail, in an effort to understand it, through the final chapter of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, the classic source of insights into this area, and concluded that I didn’t understand it and that it was either seriously defective in failing to explain some essentials or was incoherent. Vygotsky can’t be blamed: he was dying and in a rush. But I've never found what to turn to by way of a satisfactory modern (post-1935!) treatment of the problem and I remain seriously confused.

As others surely must be, but I don’t hear much worry being expressed. The issue is almost never addressed in any contemporary writings on the teaching of English, for any theory of which one would have thought some account of language and thought would be essential. Essential, too, to an evaluation of how important the much-celebrated ‘multimodality’ is: is the role of visual media, for instance, in ‘making meanings’ as significant as that of language? on that depends (in part) the weight that should be given to it in education -- and how much time should go to media studies.

Chekhov world-weariness

2011-01-30T17:52:00.001Z

This is rather how I felt in some of the places I've lived:

ANDREY: Oh where is it now, where has my past gone, the time when I was young, merry, clever, when I had fine thoughts, fine dreams, when my present and my future were lit up by hope? Why is it that no sooner have we begun to live, we become boring, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy . . . Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants - and not one of them who isn't exactly like the others, not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist, not one who stands out in the slightest bit, who might inspire envy or a passionate desire to emulate him. They just eat, drink, sleep, then they die . . . others are born and they too eat, drink, sleep, and in order not to be dulled by boredom, they diversify their life with vile gossip, vodka, cards, law suits, and the wives deceive their husbands and the husbands lie, pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and an irremediably coarse influence weighs down on the children, and the spark of God's spirit dies in them and they become the same kind of pitiful corpses, one like another, as their mothers and fathers . . .

Chekhov Three Sisters, Act 4

The feel of ordinary life

2011-01-24T12:32:00.001Z

Philip Pullman said something good about about the Chekhov story he’d read (Guardian short stories podcasts, ‘The Beauties’), about the plot not being the point but rather the often inconsequential texture of ordinary life. It’s true of Chekhov’s plays, too -- that’s one way he was a Modernist innovator. The story, says Pullman, is like the man said about Waiting for Godot, ‘In this play nothing happens -- twice.’

I recalled this when looking at a kids’ comic strip by Jim Medway, in which nothing happens five times, on successive days.

Now I've hit on another good quote from much earlier, as it happens in the introduction to Chekhov’s plays that I'm reading as preparation for seeing The Three Sisters tomorrow (by the Russian company again, so we’ll see what they do with something good). The author writes:

Chekhov surely must have read Gogol's famous 1836 denunciation of theatre in Russia during the early nineteenth century and beyond. After deploring the stage's corruption by 'the monster . . . melodrama', Gogol went on to ask 'where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?'…. 'The melodrama is lying most impudently,' Gogol went on. 'Only a great, rare, deep genius can catch what surrounds us daily, what always accompanies us, what is ordinary — while mediocrity grabs with both hands all that is out of rule, what happens only seldom and catches the eye by its ugliness and disharmony . . . The strange has become the subject-matter of our drama. The whole point is to tell a new, strange, unheard-of incident: murder, fire, wild passions . . . poisons. Effects, eternal effects!'

Voltaire DID care about liberty

2011-01-24T12:00:00.001Z

I said (here) that De Tocqueville said that the philosophes weren’t interested in England, and (somewhere) that I've started reading Voltaire’s Letters on England. Well, the latter seem to refute Voltaire: see the following (Penguin, 44-5):

Here is a more essential difference between Rome and England which gives all the advantage to the latter: the outcome of civil wars in Rome was slavery, and that of the troubles in England liberty. The English nation is the only one on earth which has succeeded in controlling the power of kings by resisting them, which by effort after effort has at last established this wise system of government in which the prince, all-powerful for doing good, has his hands tied for doing evil, in which the aristocrats are great without arrogance and vassals, and in which the people share in the government without confusion….

The government of England is not made for such great glory [as Roman conquests] nor for such a terrible end [as the suppression of the plebs]; its object is not the brilliant folly of making conquests, but to prevent its neighbours from making any. These people are not only jealous of their own liberty but also of that of others. The English were fiercely hostile to Louis XIV simply because they thought he was ambitious. They made war against him with a light heart, certainly without self- interest. No doubt liberty has only been established in England at a heavy cost, and the idol of despotic power has been drowned in seas of blood, but the English do not feel they have paid too high a price for good laws. The other nations have had no fewer troubles and have shed no less blood, but the blood they have poured out in the cause of their liberty has only cemented their servitude.

The Cézanne book

2011-01-24T10:59:00.001Z

I said I’d bought the catalogue -- a lavish and lovely production and value for money, I’d say -- and I turned to the chapter by Richard Shiff, ‘He Painted’, in the hope that it would tell me more than its title. It starts rather uninterestingly, for me, about Cézanne’s early reputation, but soon starts to say some helpful stuff, first by quotes and then in his own explanations.

So, Duret (1906) calls his technique, ‘strokes next to each other, then on top of each other’ - as if ‘he lays his painting with bricks’. Then Shiff asserts that ‘the historical trajectory’ of this technique (Courbet, perhaps) ‘need not engage the forces driving social history at any given time.’ (So somebody suggests or could suggest it might? interesting....) ‘The possibility of aligning aesthetic and social stars hardly motivated Cézanne’ (so it might, or did, others? I’d like to know more -- should read more art books....)

Then there’s stuff on whether Cézanne dehumanises his figures -- again, not something that worries me. This concern comes from Meyer Schapiro (1952), who then is quoted with this lovely formulation about The Card Players: ‘The inherent rigidity of the theme is overcome also by the remarkable life of the surface. There is a beautiful flicker and play of small contrasts.’ Shiff comments that ‘fllicker’ is right, and it is, and says that it has the effect of making the surface appear to ‘warp’, which it does.

Then, to my delight, he confirms that, as I said in the first post, Cézanne’s marks aren’t all representational: ‘Yet Cézanne’s characteristic warp does not necessarily adhere to the representational anatomy or the logical arrangement of a figure in the space of a room.’ Rather what happens is an ‘insistent sequencing of parallel marks and alternating colours’, regardless of ‘the depicted subject’.

What follows is then terrific and just the sort of art criticism I need. Best if I try to reproduce a couple of pages. Start at the second para on p.79. Click on images to enlarge.

Another anti-theatre rant

2011-01-24T05:56:00.004Z

Theatre on Saturday night almost resolved me (again) to give it up completely. Although it was the Sovremennik company from Moscow of whom great things were expected -- and evidently, for most of the audience (admittedly including many Russians) delivered -- for me it was the usual theatre stuff -- actors, producers and designers so evidently pleased with themselves; all that fussing around with sets and machinery; that studied standing very still when not part of the action; the long boring passages where someone is having emotions or thoughts. ‘Now pretend to be sad,’ ‘You pretend to snub her’, ‘You pretend to wash the floor’ etc. I found it boring, unmoving, undramatic and predictable -- or, where it wasn’t predictable, of no consequence either way. And primitive, childish, not in a good way.

It simply doesn’t work for me as it’s supposed to -- by contrast with television plays, of which every one that the BBC has done recently has been superb.

I suspect my revulsion is like what the Modernists felt towards conventional representational art and fiction and drama -- see Josipovici label-- an outdated and non-working convention, incapable of conveying anything recognisable as our condition. However, to be fair, this did seem a particularly poor play, Into the Whirlwind, though based on what is said to be a fine memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg about a life marked by unspeakable sufferings and courage under the Soviet system.

Why would you want to try to represent life on a stage with sets when you could do it in a real prison or field or city and record it with a camera? Well, I know why, of course -- it’s precisely for the sake of the non-representational element of expressiveness and abstract order that a built and painted construction can deliver. But that only makes sense if the actions within the set don’t pretend to be real behaviour: the speech should be in verse, recited not acted, perhaps read from the scripts; the actors masked and not in ‘costumes’ but in ordinary clothes or actors’ uniforms analogous to orchestral players’ formal gear. Like oratorio.

I enjoy opera best in versions that are termed ‘semi-staged’: no sets, singers in concert gear standing with the orchestra, a bit of movement, certainly expressiveness in the singing. I was due to see The Miraculous Mandarin by Bartok semi-staged on Thursday - but we’ve had a letter from the Philharmonia Orchestra to say that ‘this is no longer the case’, very disappointing. There was Stravinsky’s Pulcinella at the Proms last year on television, semi-staged, thrilling, hair-raising. Similarly, I like the earliest opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, from an age before they did full staging (I think).

There’s also something about us posh, comfortable people flocking to an expensive production in central London to watch a depiction by other comfortable people of suffering, cruelty and bravery in conditions we’ve never experienced. For some reason film and television don’t seem objectionable in the same way -- not just, presumably, because we don’t dress up for them. But I don’t think that line of objection will stand up if I follow it through.

Or, I may have to conclude, my revulsion may just be a blind spot in me.

Christmas joke

2011-01-22T09:45:00.000Z

A good one, from the LRB letter’s -- even better as improved by me and useful for old-fashioned grammar lessons:

There’s the chief Christmas guy, Santa, and his little helpers, the subordinate Clauses.

De Tocqueville Ancien Régime: last word

2011-01-20T08:46:00.001Z

Over the two centuries before 1789 political life was abolished; no way remained in which the ordinary people of France could participate in public affairs. As for the aristocracy, they retained their privileges (exemption from tax), lost much of their wealth and practically all of their power. Power was sucked entirely into the state: i.e. the king, operating a bureaucracy so centralised and all-pervasive that De T calls it ‘in effect socialist’ (not a good word in his vocabulary); the state we associate with modern France (and later the Soviet Union) was in fact completely in place before the revolution; only the class structure changed.

So: a population with no political or civic experience within the memory of several generations, and no political debate or discourse except the highly abstract, rarified, reason-driven disquisitions of the politically naive, inexperience and irresponsible philosophes with their all-or-nothing, everything-by-reason, clean-slate, rebuild-human-nature ideas -- which one way and another got through to the rural and urban poor and, in the absence of the moral inhibition and sense of proportion that come with living in communities that regulate themselves, licensed the ruthless implementation of abstract schemes in the revolution and, during the Terror, the unrestrained indulgence of the most savage impulses.

What was established thereby, De T says, was a new régime in which equality was the watchword -- equality as subjects of the state -- and liberty featured not at all, having been ignored as by all the 18th century treatises (the philosophes had only contempt for the idea of popular participation in government). And we ended up with the revival in a new guise of the absolutist state, equally unchallengeable and equally oppressive.

Discuss.