Maya Angelou – a great human voice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 1972, I was working in the Merit Distribution Warehouse as a general dogsbody / janitor.  The warehouse had a low concrete profile at the heart of a web of railways, trunk roads and skyways heading into, and out of, Manhattan island.  I remember clearly leaning on my yard brush and the steamy summer sun glinting off the windscreens of the cars queuing on the Pulaski Skyway – even then it looked as if it had been assembled from someone’s giant Meccano set, striding across the edgeland of factories, warehouses and urban decay from which New Joisey’s  people serviced the needs of New York City.

At school in the late 60s and as a student in the early 70s I had devoured many of the civil rights authors.  Now, while living and working in the US that summer, staying with my Uncle John and his family, I was taking the chance whenever I could get it to read some more, to soak myself in the strange reality of American life.  Employment in the warehouse was strictly along ethnic lines – Jewish owners, white admin staff, Italian foremen in charge of the loading deck, mostly white fork lift drivers – every one of which knew their European identity.  Banter around the stereotyped characteristics, of the Polaks or Ruskies or whoever, was a major part of the conversation.   There was a Spanish motor mechanic worked on the lorries, and most of the lorry drivers bringing in the goods, or taking them away, were black.  It was hot sweaty work.  Dragonflies the size of blackbirds patrolled the skies.  I learned a lot that summer about how America worked but almost nothing about how America played – we lived and worked together but then went back to our very separate lives.   There were some other, American, students working there – Joey Brignola  Frankie something, one of the bosses sons as well.  They got to unload the Samsonite wagons off the railway siding at the back of the warehouse – an easier job.   In the weekends, they headed up to the Poconos to their family summerhomes, smoked weed and partied.  I read the  American press – McGovern’s campaign, Vietnam, Tricky Dicky.  I also read Maya Angelou for the first time and, like so many others, I was entranced from the beginning.

I know why the caged bird sings sang to me.   Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton or Malcolm X – they all had something to say, something to learn from.  But Maya Angelou spoke to the heart as well as the head.   In the 42 years since then, she has cemented her place in the hearts of millions throughout the globe who love her use of language, who have cried with her in her adversity,who have learned from her the true meaning of wisdom and respect.

I mourn her passing and celebrate the rich gift of her life, her writing and her teaching.

Some other links for Maya Angelou – go on, treat yourself.

Gary Younge’s 2009 interview

Reading her poems….

If you’ve never read I know why the caged bird sings, you should.

So It Is

Liam Bell’s first novel, So It Is, is set in a Belfast scarred by war.  Its central character is a clever, damaged, young Catholic girl Aoife. Two parallel narratives run through ‘Book 1’:  one, a third person account of a young girl, Aoife, whose growing is marred by family troubles and the dilemmas posed to her and to those she loves by the circumstances of life in Belfast in the 80s and 90s; the other, the first person internal voice of a hardened young woman, Cassie, who seeks out terrorists from the other community for a grisly revenge.  As the story of Aoife progresses through her teenage years, we understand how Aoife has turned or been turned into Cassie.   It is a sympathetic evocation of growing up in the midst of that strange civil war that was ‘The Troubles’.

Book 2 focuses on Cassie and her increasingly systematic approach to revenge, tutored and supported by her ex-provo psychopath lover, Baldy.  Here the novel really takes off and develops a dark insight into deeper themes.   The structure of Book 2, one chapter for each of the ten killlers on Baldy’s revenge ‘hit list’, racks up the tension – with each new story, another name is scored off the list.    The conversations between the characters explore the moral challenges of peace and reconciliation for those scarred by nihilistic violence.  Baldy and Cassie pursue their grim task against a backdrop of the Good Friday agreement and steps towards power-sharing.  Ciáran, the young lad down the street whom Aoife might have fallen in love with and married in earlier more peaceful times, has learned to move into the new era and reaches out to Cassie, trying to revive Aoife, to bring her back.  But it is Aaron, an ex-UDA man on Baldy’s list, who reaches deepest into Cassie to find Aoife again.  In the novel’s surprising ending, peace and pain are reconciled – both hopeful and tragic.

Marx the Journalist

During after dinner chat last night, we got onto talking about how well Karl Marx, the journalist, wrote.  We had been looking for his quote on historical events repeating themselves, and I went back to my much abused copy of ‘Basic Writings’ to look up his take on the 1848 revolution in France… I was sure it was in there somewhere.  Eventually, this morning, I found it at the beginning of his extensive essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ – a fabulous piece of sustained journalistic polemic.

Marx was so much better as a journalist than he was as an economist, his incisive analytical commentaries on the key events of the day based directly on his deeper philosophical writings, but not weighed down with the ponderous prose of economic theory.  Racy, exciting, opinionated but often right on the button.  Here are some sample quotes: the first is the one I was looking up, from the start of his essay on the seizure of power by Louis Napoleon, mimicking his uncle’s seizure of power in the 1790s:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.  Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the ‘Montagne’ of 1848-1851 for the ‘Montagne’ of 1793-1795, the nephew for the uncle.”

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.. but under circumstances encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living..”

“It is not enough to say, as the French do that their nation was taken unawares…  It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six million can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Pure political and philosophical gold.

“Dilemmas” Reviewed

Very gratifying to find a good review of ‘Dilemmas’ in the latest EMAL journal.   Full text in Educational Management Administration & Leadership, March 2014, 42: 314-315, but some key extracts of the review below….

If this whets your appetite, search this blog on ‘dilemmas’ and you’ll get some extracts.

Book Review: Professional School Leadership: Dealing with Dilemmas (2nd edition) Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2013; 176 pp.: ISBN 978-1-78046-018-5 (pbk).   Reviewed by: Karen Stephens, University of Leicester, UK

Murphy’s second edition develops previous insights into how teachers and school leaders perceive and approach the tensions and dilemmas encountered in the daily life of modern schools….  he paints a clear picture of the expectations, aspirations and practicalities that compete for attention, thereby producing potential experiences of dilemma…….

The book is divided into two clear sections, the first dealing in detail with the theory underpinning Murphy’s model followed by a practical application of this model. …… A range of vignettes, taken from the real life experiences of school leaders in a variety of schools and career stages…….help illustrate and …. provide examples for further discussion and reflection……

 Murphy emphasises the evolving, developing nature of wisdom and insight that leaders accumulate as they engage with dilemmas, making the structure of the book useful both as an initial training resource and as a continuing guide…..

I found this book very interesting and inspiring ….. School leaders, especially those finding themselves grappling with dilemmas, would find may useful insights here……

The book makes a timely and useful contribution to the profession at a time when schools and school leaders face huge change and challenges.

Pete Seeger remembered

12 years a slave

Joan and I watched this film at a crowded Cinema 3 in Glasgow’s Renfrew Street Cineworld on Sunday evening.  I have added Solomon Northrop’s account of his captivity, subjugation and eventual escape (click here to read online) to my ever expanding list of ‘must reads’.

The film was compelling viewing with script, cinematography, music and actors combining to deliver a moving personal story in the most powerful medium.   Like the story of Kunta Kinte (here), the hero of Alex Haley’s 1970s novel ‘Roots’, it brought the worst reality of the slave trade straight to the heart.

Of course, as a onetime student of History, I think I know a great deal about the Atlantic slave trade, and its many parallels in other parts of the world and other eras such as the Muslim Indian Ocean equivalent (less publicised and active much longer).  But  the emotionally engaging technology of a well-made full size film touches the heart in quite a different way.

As a onetime teacher of History, I can only envy the capacity of the film maker to spin the story of the past, whether evidenced or imagined or a mixture of both, to tell an important truth about humanity in such a powerful and affecting way.  The proper study of history, with due attention to evidence, is a necessary part of the truth of the past, ensuring that those with access to the most powerful media do not distort the story for their own ends.   Yet film can communicate in a way that a history book never can.

I like to believe that had I been a Scottish or Irish gentleman of the 18th or 19th Century, forced to seek my fortune elsewhere by family poverty, I would have avoided the southern states or the West Indies and gone for the clean living honest labour of the frontier, like John Muir, though I acknowledge that even he had the advantage of being able to follow a peaceful path across the continent, as his predecessors had already eliminated most of the original inhabitants!

In fact, I have my own ancestral ‘get-out’ clause, an easy route to an easier conscience.  When Solomon Northrop was labouring as a cotton picker on the Louisiana plantation where much of the action is set, many of my ancestors were starving in the Irish potato famine, or fleeing Ireland to settle in the worst slums of Victorian Edinburgh.   Yet I still feel a strong sense of ‘guilt by association’, as a child of a country that profited more than most from the slave trade.  This is not about race.  It is important to recognise the conceptual trickery by which a false, ‘white’ identity can be assumed. I completely reject such a ‘white’ identity.  I equally dislike the false prison of ‘national’ identity, one of the reasons I am uncomfortable with the nationalist undertones of ‘Scottish independence’.  I assert a human identity.  Pale skin cannot make me responsible for the crimes of the 19th Century slavers.

However there is some responsibility.  The wealth of contemporary Scotland was built not just on the labour of the cotton factories or coal mines, or the Irish navigators who built the railways and canals, but  also in part on the backs of the sugar and tobacco plantations of the New World.   My current wealth and ease is built on the stories of the past.

We, who live today in comfort, must acknowledge the harm that was done, empathise with the sense of loss and injustice of those who share a slave heritage and ensure that the future is built on stronger foundations of human dignity and rights, our shared humanity and our shared responsibility for each other.

I commend both the film and the book.  I want now to read his story, to hear Solomon Northrop speak to me down the ages; to hear him speak for himself.   The following extract from the book, faithfully portrayed in Steve McQueen ‘s film, finds Solomon at the point when he has been kidnapped into captivity and refuses to accept the demands of the slave trader, Burch, that he should acknowledge his new identity as a slave:

As soon as these formidable whips appeared, I was seized by both of them, and roughly divested of my clothing. My feet, as has been stated, were fastened to the floor. Drawing me over the bench, face down-wards, Kadbum placed his heavy foot upon the fetters, between my wrists, holding them painfully to the floor. With the paddle, Burch commenced beating me. Blow after blow was inflicted upon my naked body. When his unrelenting arm grew tired, he stopped and asked if I still insisted I was a free man. I did insist upon it, and then the blows were renewed, faster and more energetically, if possible, than before. When again tired, he would repeat the same question, and receiving the same answer, continue his labor. All this time, the incarnate devil was uttering most fiendish oaths. At length the paddle broke, leaving the useless handle in his hand. Still I would not yield. All his brutal blows could not force from my lips that I was a slave. Casting madly on the floor the handle of the broken paddle, he seized the rope. This was far more painful than the other. I struggled with all my power, but it was in vain. I prayed for mercy, but my prayer was only answered with imprecations and with stripes. I thought I must die beneath the lashes of the accursed brute. Even now the flesh crawls upon my bones, as I recall the scene. I was all on fire. My sufferings I can compare to nothing else than the burning agonies of hell!

 

At last I became silent to his repeated questions. I would make no reply. In fact, I was becoming almost unable to speak. Still he plied the lash without stint upon my poor body, until it seemed that the lacerated flesh was stripped from my bones at every stroke. A man with a particle of mercy in his soul would not have beaten even a dog so cruelly. At length Eadbum said that it was useless to whip me any more — that I would be sore enough. Thereupon, Burch desisted, saying, with an admonitory fist in my face, and hissing the words through his firm-set teeth, that if ever I dared to utter again that I was entitled to my freedom, that I had been kidnapped, or any thing whatever of the kind, the castigation I had just received was nothing in comparison with what might follow. He swore that he would either conquer or kill me.

Chris and Bessie…. to a letter….

In e.mail correspondence with Bernard Barker, a friend and education colleague today, he told me that much to his surprise, his father’s wartime letters to his mother have gained recent literary success.  He told me that after his father’s death, he had …

“… deposited 500 letters (fully archived) at Mass Observation – they have been found and published in Simon Garfield’s To The Letter (see here ); and promoted assiduously in various ways. The reviews, from the Washington Post to the Guardian have celebrated my parents as wonderful writers and now there is talk of a freestanding book and an audio version with Benedict and Kerry Fox. I had envisaged the letters providing verite for second world war historians in years to come, the odd footnote; I had not anticipated a sensation. The experience is surreal but very exciting and enjoyable…..”

Here is Benedict Cumberbatch reading from one of the letters:

Here is a link to the reviews:

Guardian

Washington Post

While there’s inevitably a slightly intrusive feeling about listening in on intimate conversation (unless it’s a publicity seeking celebrity), there is something about this intimacy that warms the spirit – it is a gift from those who have passed away to us who still live.

Thank you Bessie and Chris and and thank you Bernard.  Your sharing has enriched us all.

Old Long Syne – who’s heard it?

I loved today’s ‘Poem of the Day‘ in the Herald (see below)  – thanks Lesley Duncan!

I love Burns – particularly so after my recent visit to the new Burns Museum which, in among the instant amusement items such as the Burns juke box – choose your favourite song and a new one after five seconds, has some fantastic exhibits, particularly the letters, songs and poems in Burns’ own hand.  But today’s poem, which gives us a precursor to Burns’ most famous song, reminds us that all artistic genius comes from somewhere.

Here’s Lesley Duncan’s introduction, then the poem.

No, this is not a Morningside version of Burns’s global favourite but a precursor, by Sir Robert Ayton (1569-1638), a poet at the court of James VI and I.  Unlike Burns’s lines, which deal with friendship rather than love, this is an intensely personal plea and pledge, particularly the third verse.

OLD-LONG-SYNE

Should old Acquaintance be forgot,

And never thought upon,

The Flames of Love extinguished,

And freely past and gone?

Is thy kind Heart now grown so coldIn that

Loving Breast of thine,

That thou canst never once reflect

On Old-long-syne?

Where are thy Protestations,

Thy Vows and Oaths, my Dear,

Thou made to me, and I to thee,

In Register yet clear?

Is Faith and Truth so violate

To the Immortal Gods Divine,

That thou canst never once reflect

On Old-long-syne?

If e’er I have a House, my Dear,

That truly is call’d mine,

And can afford but Country Cheer,

Or ought that’s good therein;

Tho’ thou were Rebel to the King,

And beat with Wind and Rain,

Assure thy self of Welcome Love,

For Old-long-syne.

Oh.. and a happy New Year to all our readers!

Postcards from Scotland – #5: ‘Letting Go’

The series Postcards from Scotland (click to link) has five titles published so far, and more planned.  The idea behind the series, edited by Carol Craig, is to generate debate and discussion about important issues for Scottish society, whatever the result of the referendum on independence next year.  Issues covered so far include Scotland’s health, diet, consumer culture and community action.  The fifth in the series, Letting Go (by Tony Miller and Gordon Hall), doesn’t initially sound like a riveting read – it’s about management and organisations.  But it has some really important messages for all of us – it’s about working culture and how too many workplaces alienate or demean people.  It takes a fresh look at organisational culture using the ideas of W E Deming, arguing that too few workplaces get the best from their employees,  grinding their enthusiasm and creativity out of them through imposed uniformity.   Which of us hasn’t felt that, in one workplace or another?

Like all the books in the series. it’s short and readable. – key ideas presented in a thought-provoking way.  The authors are steeped in the Deming worldview – a very attractive alternative to the ‘managerialism’ which clogs the arteries of so many of our workplaces.  There are some beautifully phrased pearls of wisdom sprinkled through the text, particularly in the short chapter which pulls to bits the culture of targets, tickboxes and inspection/accountability.  This is illustrated by some well drawn examples of how the target culture generates perverse incentives, so that the target is met, but at the expense of the intended outcome – council drain cleaning workers are set a target to increase the number of drains they clean.. what do they do?  They avoid the difficult drains which will take up more time, so there are more and more clogged drains since it’s the difficult ones that cause all the problems.  Generalist managers understood how to set targets, but did not understand the context-specific issues involved.  What organisations need is people who know about and  understand the balance of people, process and environment in specific contexts.

The next chapter illustrates Deming’s contention that most of the problems in organisational performance are system-based and not the responsibility of the individuals involved.    “Instead of thinking that the performance of the organisation depends on the behaviour of individuals, and therefore focus on managing the individuals, it is better to start the other way round, from appreciating that the behaviour of the individual workers is likely best explained in terms of the system or context they work in.”   People generally make their decisions, not because they deliberately want to screw up, but in order to adapt to the work system they find themselves in, a system which they may well feel makes no sense but feel powerless to change.

Across the book, Miller and Hall overemphasize their message.  This is not the only relevant or valuable perspective on organisational culture: organisations need structure and predictability, and people working in organisations benefit from benchmarking and an external as well as an internal challenge to do better.  But the ideas and values that underpin the author’s arguments are sound.  This may not be the only valuable perspective, but it is an essential one.   The challenge in any organisation is one of balance, between empowering the individuals who do the job and providing the kinds of structure and support which ‘raise the floor’ without ‘lowering the ceiling.’

Watch out for the Postcard on School Education coming out in 2014!!!

Morgan Freeman on Mandela and Invictus

A great link to Morgan Freeman discussing Madiba, including a recitation of his favourite poem, Invictus.

 

Here is an article by Ian Jack, with the story of the poem.  It’s a great story:

Inspiration for a ‘wavering and fearful heart’

Adam Murphy – one of Time Magazine’s best of 2013!

One of Adam’s contracts as a freelance artist is to write/draw a weekly strip in the children’s comic ‘The Phoenix’ (click here )

This year Time Magazine listed it as 2nd best of the Top 10 Graphic Novels/Comics of 2013 .  Here’s the citation:

The Phoenix:  You can only get it as an iPad subscription in the States, but this weekly British series is aimed straight at 7-to-10-year-olds’ sweet spot: multiple, ongoing adventure and comedy serials, plus how-to-draw features, puzzles and banter from cartoon-animal editors Tabs Inkspot and Bruno Barker. It’s a beautifully executed cluster of variations on the classic Euro-comics tradition, crafted with obvious affection for kids and their parents. Best feature: “Corpse Talk,” in which Adam Murphy interviews the corpses of historical figures from Boudicca to Nikola Tesla.

You’ll get a flavour of Corpse Talk here  or read about Albert Einstein here.

I’m really pleased for Adam.  He took a lot of risks to pursue his dream as a comic artist and he’s worked incredibly hard.  It’s great to see that he’s beginning to get the recognition he deserves!!

PS I think The Phoenix is way better than the one that got the #1 spot!.. not that I am biased or anything…..

Franzen on Kraus #3: contemporary apocalypse

My final extended quotation from Franzen on Kraus.  After his explosive and apt diatribe against the effects of Amazon on literature, there is much to ponder in Franzen’s conclusion – does the rapid acceleration and constant restless quest for novelty of contemporary culture lead inevitably to personal apocalypse and/or individual retreat into a postmodern anomie, where rational (as opposed to faith) meaning is ultimately established only through the narrative of the individual life, rather than a common purposeful project?

“And so, sometime in the 90s, I took my bad Kraus translations out of my active file cabinet and put them into deeper storage. Kraus’s sentences never stopped running through my head, but I felt that I’d outgrown Kraus, felt that he was an angry young man’s kind of writer, ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer. What has drawn me back to him now is, in part, my nagging sense that apocalypse, after seeming to recede for a while, is still in the picture.

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (“Overnight free shipping!”).

But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores disappear, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers. Plus it’s possible that the story isn’t over. Maybe the internet experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamour for the return of professional reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of readers will come to recognise the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.

I could, it’s true, make a larger apocalyptic argument about the logic of the machine, which has now gone global and is accelerating the denaturisation of the planet and sterilisation of its oceans. I could point to the transformation of Canada’s boreal forest into a toxic lake of tar-sands byproducts, the levelling of Asia’s remaining forests for Chinese-made ultra-low-cost porch furniture at Home Depot, the damming of the Amazon and the endgame clear-cutting of its forests for beef and mineral production, the whole mindset of “Screw the consequences, we want to buy a lot of crap and we want to buy it cheap, with overnight free shipping.” And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

But apocalypse isn’t necessarily the physical end of the world. Indeed, the word more directly implies an element of final cosmic judgment. In Kraus’s chronicling of crimes against truth and language in The Last Days of Mankind, he’s referring not merely to physical destruction. In fact, the title of his play would be better rendered in English as The Last Days of Humanity: “dehumanised” doesn’t mean “depopulated”, and if the first world war spelled the end of humanity in Austria, it wasn’t because there were no longer any people there. Kraus was appalled by the carnage, but he saw it as the result, not the cause, of a loss of humanity by people who were still living. Living but damned, cosmically damned.

But a judgment like this obviously depends on what you mean by “humanity”. Whether I like it or not, the world being created by the infernal machine of technoconsumerism is still a world made by human beings. As I write this, it seems like half the advertisements on network television are featuring people bending over smartphones; there’s a particularly noxious/great one in which all the twentysomethings at a wedding reception are doing nothing but taking smartphone photos and texting them to one another. To describe this dismal spectacle in apocalyptic terms, as a “dehumanisation” of a wedding, is to advance a particular moral conception of humanity; and if you follow Nietzsche and reject the moral judgment in favour of an aesthetic one, you’re immediately confronted by Bourdieu’s persuasive connection of asethetics with class and privilege; and, the next thing you know, you’re translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful.

And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. If I’d been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at 53, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows. It wasn’t necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer. And so today, 53 years later, Kraus’s signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past – can’t help ringing true to me. Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.”

• The Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen was published by Harper Collins on 1 October. To pre-order it for £15.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

Franzen on Kraus #2: the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

As my ageing brain increasingly depends on my Google Calendar for reminders of everything from a doctor’s appointment to a library book due for return, I know exactly what this extract is saying.

From the Franzen article – see previous post here.

“Nowadays, the refrain is that “there’s no stopping our powerful new technologies”. Grassroots resistance to these technologies is almost entirely confined to health and safety issues, and meanwhile various logics – of war theory, of technology, of the marketplace – keep unfolding automatically. We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren’t going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and emailing and Tweeting and posting on colour-screen gadgets because Moore’s law said we could. We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly re-educating themselves to keep up with it. The logic says that if we want things like Zappos.com or home DVR capability – and who wouldn’t want them? – we need to say goodbye to job stability and hello to a lifetime of anxiety. We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.

Not only am I not a Luddite, I’m not even sure the original Luddites were Luddites. (It simply seemed practical to them to smash the steam-powered looms that were putting them out of work.) I spend all day every day using software and silicon, and I’m enchanted with everything about my new Lenovo ultrabook computer except its name. (Working on something called an IdeaPad tempts me to refuse to have ideas.) But not long ago, when I was intemperate enough to call Twitter “dumb” in public, the response of Twitter addicts was to call me a Luddite. Nyah, nyah, nyah! It was as if I’d said it was “dumb” to smoke cigarettes, except that in this case I had no medical evidence to back me up. People did worry, for a while, that cellphones might cause brain cancer, but the link has been revealed to be feeble-to-nonexistent, and now nobody has to worry any more.

“This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself. Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then … There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math. To look the question “What then?” resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming, until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word. For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself. If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Ocean Calm.” But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out. “Something that never before existed must have entered the world. An infernal machine of humanity.”

Of all of Kraus’s lines, this is probably the one that has meant the most to me. Kraus in this passage is evoking the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – the unintended unleashing of supernaturally destructive consequences. Although he’s talking about the modern newspaper, his critique applies, if anything, even better to contemporary technoconsumerism. For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and “democracy” abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were. Indeed, what Kraus will later say of Nestroy could now be said of Kraus himself: “he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause.” The profits and reach of the Viennese press were pitifully small by the standards of today’s tech and media giants. The sea of trivial or false or empty data is millions of times larger now. Kraus was merely prognosticating when he envisioned a day when people had forgotten how to add and subtract; now it’s hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember. The techno-boosters, of course, see nothing wrong here. They point out that human beings have always outsourced memory – to poets, historians, spouses, books. But I’m enough of a child of the 60s to see a difference between letting your spouse remember your nieces’ birthdays and handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control.”

Find the full original article here.

The Poor Had No Lawyers by Andy Wightman

The Poor had no lawyers by Andy Wightman (Birlinn 2013)

This book makes for compulsive reading.  I had seen / skimmed a number of ‘who owns Scotland’ resources over the past 15 years or so, and readily accepted as a general truth that most of Scotland is owned by a very small number of people, including some families who have been in charge for centuries.  However a reading of this well researched study (Wightman’s life project) provides astonishing detail on just how much Scotland needs further land reform.  The argument, in short, is that Scotland’s noble families acquired (from various sources including seizures of Church land in the 1500s or of common land at other times) and held on to their present holdings  through developing legal processes, such as right of possession, primogeniture and entail which legalised and protected their ownership.   They made the laws in the Scottish parliament of the early 1600s to suit their own interests, and have, by and large, been continuing to do so ever since.  These laws continue to protect and outdated, inefficient and grossly unfair system of landholding which has had distorting effects on Scotland’s development.  It is time, he argues, to take land reform seriously.  At its heart he proposes a land value tax, which would be levied where unearned increases in value had occurred (such as by the house owners on the publicly funded Crossail project in London).  Every Scot with a vote should read this book.  Some of my brief notes are appended below.

Also check out the website:  Who Owns Scotland

 

From David 1 onwards, there was a gradual replacement of traditional landholding with feudal tenure.  1597, James VI passed final act = all Highland land to be feudal.  ‘By 1900 half the land area of the Highlands was owned by just 15 landowners’ (p64)

 Nobles became protectors of bishoprics and abbeys and later took church land after reformation.  By ‘prescription’ (1617), they were able to assume legal control of land without clear title (some of which had been ‘seized’) by right of possession (‘owned’ in this way for 40 years): recording in register of sassines (1617) and land register made this ‘theft’ legal.   Primogeniture protected estate holdings.  Entailed estates were protected from creditors – protected against forfeiture etc by establishing succession – by early 1800s, over 50% estates were entailed.  Primogeniture and entail led to Scotland having the heaviest concentration of land in a small number of private hands of any country in Western Europe.  Entails were abolished in 2004.  He estimates that at least 25% of estates over 1000 acres have been in the same family for over 400 years; the majority of aristocratic families that owned land in 1872 still do so today – predominantly in the Lowlands, owning 28.1% of the land held in estates of 5000 acres or more.  Institutional and overseas investors own significant amounts of land.  There has been very little change in the ownership of large estates since 1995, but community ownership and conservation bodies have increased in size (p166).  

Commonty land served a number of uses – building materials, fuel, grazings, blossoms, berries, medicaments, dyes… as well sometimes acting as areas of free access for preaching.  Much has disappeared.  Many ‘common good funds’ have been plundered for other purposes – Scotland’s 196 burghs all had such a fund.  He gives the example of Edinburgh’s CG Fund which used to own Waverley Market, which now seems to be let for a penny a year, while the CG Fund made £2million profit at today’s prices in 1904, but in 2009 made a loss of £half a million.

 Land Reform:  He praises the work in this area of the first and second devolved parliaments, but suggests that necessary land reform has slowed down considerably.  The Scottish model we have just now for buyout has many weaknesses – overcentralised, relying on Ministerial consent, complex, requires a limited company to be set up, and only applies in certain rural areas and not urban areas.  Pages 405ff he proposes some significant further changes to the law to allow the land to work for all the people not just the elite owners, who are still very clever at using the law to their advantage.  He also wants Town Councils restored, with their commonties restored and used for ‘public good’.  Other public land (such as that Scottish Natural Heritage, Crown Estate Commissioners etc) should be managed by locally elected regional land boards).

 Tax Avoidance: pp368ff – he lists and comments on a number of these – companies registered overseas, all kinds of dodges to prevent estates/large landowners paying their dues.  He proposes a simple Land Value Tax to capture the gains in land value and reflect that back into the prices paid.  He thinks this is fairer (as often gains in value are caused by public investment elsewhere e.g. value of property on the London Crossrail route was just a windfall for private owners who had to do nothing) and would also stop land price inflation.  Only the Co-operative party had it in their 2010 manifesto. 

Community land ownership – while welcoming some of what has gone on recently, he argues how this could be further encouraged.

Hunting:   Prior to 1811 there were less than 10 estates used only for hunting.  By 1900 there were between 130 and 150 deer forests covering 2.5 million acres.   By 2002, 4.5 million acres devoted to hunting (incl grouse etc).

Farming:  Current farming subsidy rules, which pay the most to those with the most capacity to produce for market, advantages the ‘haves’ even further.  Also subsidies can be traded so the original subsidy holder can do nothing and still get the subsidy – new round not yet known, but present likely to carry into 2020 at least (p246ff explains complexity of this).

Forestry:  67% privately owned of which 91% landed estates or investors, 55% absentee owners and 32% from outwith Scotland.  Scotland’s forestry resources dominated by the State (managed through FC), landed estates and investors, the last two of which invest to shelter capital from tax as forestry is still outwith the tax system, though no longer as much subsidised as in the Terry Wogan days.

Edinburgh schools – Heriots, Watsons, Merchant Company etc own significant land in and around Edinburgh.

‘Close Your Eyes’ by Ewan Morrison

‘Close Your Eyes’ won the Scottish Book of the Year (Fiction) Award earlier this year.  An intense psychological page-turner, the story follows a first time mother struggling to cope with her relationship with her baby.  I read the book in one sitting as I didn’t want to leave her troubled soul until she had found peace.  I posted the following review on Amazon.

What a fabulous read this is.  I can’t recommend it highly enough, but if you don’t believe me, then maybe you’ll take the recommendation of the judges who awarded it the Scottish book of the year award (fiction) for 2013. (Scottish Book Awards 2013).  Three voices give us the story.  Each voice is the same person.  In the first person, she (Rowan) tells the story of her childhood growing up in a new age commune in the North of Scotland in the 1970s.  In the second person, she is addressed in the present tense as a mother struggling to cope with the emotional demands of motherhood.  In the third person, she tells various versions of her own mother’s mysterious disappearance when she was 11.  A mother disappears and leaves her child and orphan; the child has become a mother; the new mother fails her child; the new mother goes back to her life as a child to find her own mother.  This may not sound very interesting in my less than sparky summary, but believe me, the tension is there from the start.  I picked the book up late in the afternoon, and only put it down after midnight when it was finished.  Page after page shoots by, as Rowan careers further and further into a depression that can only be lifted by discovering the suppressed secrets of her childhood.  The reader is brought right up close to, in fact inside the head of, a woman on the verge as she runs away from her comfortable Islington life, her baby, her well balanced husband and seeks the truth of her past in a journey of exploration, back to the commune of her youth.  There are some lighter moments, particularly as the encounter group in the contemporary commune go through their bonding workshops and salivate at the prospect of meeting the 70s new age guru, Eva, who is now the mother superior of the commune, and was Rowan’s mother’s nemesis.  For those of us alive in those years, memories are stirred – an interesting name-check through the music and the causes of the naïve social left, part individualistic self-indulgence, part romantic protest against the impersonal forces of the post-modern world ahead.  Throughout, Rowan struggles to open her eyes to who she is and what she is for.  Ewan Morrison clearly is in command of the writer’s craft.  His style is at times pacy but necessary, spare but detailed.  A compelling emotional intensity is generated through Rowan’s sustained minute by minute internal monologues.  The reader, washed out by the end, will emerge with more insight and more questions than before, and just a little bit of hope that Rowan’s future will be better, that all our futures will be better.

“School Leadership: Dealing with Dilemmas 2.0” now ready for publication.

Dealing with Dilemmas 2.0 advance copies are printed already.  The official launch at the University of Edinburgh is tomorrow evening (13th).  I’m excited about it.  When the first edition was published in 2007, Christine Forde of Univ of Glasgow told me

“Your book is going down a storm with SQH candidates – it has answered a lot
of questions for them.”

This gave me a lot of pleasure, as I had set out to write the book to answer some questions that were bothering me! In particular, I wanted to explore why there is such a gap between the real life experience of school leadership (not just of the the headteacher, but all those who take on leadership roles) and what is written on bits of paper such as policies or guidelines or quality indicators.   In the real world of lived experience, everything is much messier but also so much more real and exciting. This book goes some towards explaining ‘why?’

The new second edition is revised, updated and expanded, with many more exemplars.  It’s also physically bigger and aesthetically more pleasing.  I hope it continues to answer important questions for those who lead in our schools.

My thanks to the publisher, Dunedin Academic Press (click here), for their faith in the book and the importance of its message.

2nd edition

I can’t believe it’s been six weeks since the last blog.  Assessment, holiday, assessment, Mum’s illness, more assessment and some time in the garden and this is where I’ve got to….

Eric Hobsbawm – Great History, Great Writing

If you haven’t come across Eric Hobsbawm, add his work to your list of ‘must reads’.

 

 

 

 

The posthumous collection of essays, ‘Fractured Times’, promises much.  See the review here:

Fractured Times, a review

… and an extract here:

Myth of the cowboy

Remembrance Exhibition – the Stirling 100

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fabulous new exhibition at Pathfoot Building, Stirling University, based on a community history project, ‘The Stirling 100’.  The project team researched the life history and newspaper notices connected with the deaths of 100 Stirling men, chosen from all parishes of the Stirling area.  Each serviceman is accorded his own display.  It was a very impressive and moving.  Well worth a visit!  We remember and grieve for all those young men and their families.  The photos, tributes and letters speak for themselves.  Three of the men, at random….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Sennett – understanding the challenges of contemporary living

How come I got to be this old without every having read Richard Sennett. I was still studying this kind of stuff myself as an undergrad in the early 70s when his book (with Jonathan Cobb), ‘The Hidden Injuries of Class’, came out in 1972. It was based on interviews with white working class Bostonians, who had confused and damaged understandings of themselves, who they were, what they were for, where they fitted in to the society in which they worked.   In and among the sociological jargon that sometimes obscures, the insights arising from these ‘conversations’ express important truths about individual experience in a complex world.  An example: ” It is difficult for Ricca Kartides , even as he creates some measure of material security in his life [obviously not written after globalisation and financial crisis!!!!], to feel that his quantitative gains translate into the emotional sense of independence and assurance he wants form these material improvements.  He sees himself as receiving the ultimate form of contempt from those who stand above him in society.  He is a function, “Ricca the janitor”, he is a part of the woodwork, even though he makes $10000 a year, owns a home, drives a car and has some money in the bank for his children’s education…” (p50)

Sennett has written books with great titles – “Respect; the formation of character in an age of inequality” (a mixed autobiographical and academic reflection on identity, dignity, respect and character across the ages, with particular reference to the changes of the last 30 years), “Together: the rituals, politics and pleasures of co-operation”, “The corrosion of character” (again based on interviews with ordinary people). .. and the titles flag up the great insights.  He’s been making a difference in academic understanding and public awareness over many years.  .he deserves to be widely read for his humanity, his ability to make sociology accessible, his insight into contemporary living.

You can find lots more online – wikpedia,  or   his own website.  

I stumbled into his work through listening to the LSE podcast ‘tribute’, on his ‘retiral’:  The Sociology of Public Life.

If you only read one great contemporary sociologist I still recommend Baumann (click here  for my earlier post) but Sennet’s work, particularly the sections derived from his detailed probing interviews with ordinary people about their work, their lives and from his memories of his own development, is probably more accessible and certainly stands up there.

As I said at the start, how come it took me so long to come across him and learn from his insights.  Long may he continue to publish!

Jesus Christ Superstar – the new stageshow

At Glasgow (the cavernous SECC) last night to see the new stageshow of Jesus Christ Superstar, on a national tour.  This was a birthday present from my daughters Beth and Anna.  Since Joan was away in Leicester with work,  Anna agreed to come with me – it’s great to be the father of daughters!!

Monday’s Guardian had tanked the show (from the O2 performance) in a highly critical review but despite being about 100 yards from the stage and having my view restricted by a nest of massive hanging speakers, I was moved and inspired by the production.  Some of the highlights were: the setting – forget Israel under the Romans (though the lyrics were kept), the stage was a set of steps leading up to a nameless Bank, with Jesus’ followers as members of the Occupy movement, Annas and Caiphas as grey-besuited bankers and Pilate as a High Court judge; the visuals projected on the rear of the stage, allowing those far away to see the faces of the performers up close;  the carefully crafted words, familiar but always so many new insights to be gained; the clashing raucous music, with its screamy high notes, balanced with melodic arias, set off by a brilliant electric guitar and some interesting brass; the sound – so clear despite the echoing concrete barn that is Hall No. 4 of the SECC; the spontaneous cheers of the crowd for the excellent solo performances – even cheering Judas’ death!  Ben Forster, the people’s choice as Jesus, stood up well, with a convincing performance.  While much of the attention no doubt goes on Tim Minchin’s Judas and Chris Moyles’ Herod, it was Alex Hanson as Pilate and Pete Gallagher as Caiaphas who matched voice to character best.  But I’ve kept the best to last.

Mel C as Mary Magdalene

Spice Girl Mel C’s Mary Magdalene was my highlight – she caught the confused vulnerabilty of the part and sang with depth and intensity:  I Don’t Know How To Love Him and Could We Start Again Please – great songs sung beautifully.