Student Revolt

The students have taken to the streets. The Coalition’s announcement that fees will rise to as much as £9000 per year, and that all teaching funding will be removed from everything but STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), has been met by determined and united opposition.

The first demonstration was a largely peaceful demonstration though some people stormed Conservative Party Headquarters at Millbank. The police was entirely outnumbered. At the second, another largely peaceful demonstration was opposed fiercely, with the notorious kettling tactic, where demonstrators are hemmed in in a confined space for a long time, unable to leave even to go to the loo. Schoolchildren had joined the demonstration and so the British police held children captive, without charge, for five hours in central London. An old police van was left in the middle of the kettle and, quite understandably, the demonstrators took their frustration out on it. Nina Power’s excellent blog entry captured the events in words and pictures. Today a third day of action was called, though coinciding with deep snows was less well attended.

Many universities faced student occupations for the first time in 25 years. At my own institution, Royal Holloway, students occupied a corridor in the administrative block, drawing up a list of demands. After many years of fearing that students had become more and more passive, less and less politically engaged, more bound into thinking of university purely as a means to a career, a better job, it is a remarkable awakening (for me, maybe they always knew this was simmering underneath). And remember, these students are not facing those fees. They are marching, and campaigning and occupying on behalf of the university system and the students to come.

The word ‘violence’ refers to damage done to people and property. So it is true to say that the demonstrations had violent elements. At the first demonstration, an idiot threw a fire extinguisher from the top of a building. Quite rightly, he has been arrested and charged with violent disorder. But the great majority of the demonstrators were peaceful and the great majority of the ‘violence’ was fairly minor vandalism, symbolic rather than actual. They broke the windows of Conservative HQ and, after breaking in, damaged some fixtures. Note that diners continued eating at the next door Pizza Express without any apparent fear for their safety.

And violence to property is simply not as significant as violence to people, though for the free marketeers they are on the same scale. What the violence against property represents is both the scale of the anger, the determination that we will not meekly accept the vandalism of a thousand years of university tradition, and also a contempt for the banal economism of the Coalition. Smashing a window may seem like a crude gesture but it is a statement that refuses passivity and asserts the priority of human values over cash values.

The Coalition may be in trouble. The Lib Dems all signed pledges not to increase student fees before the election. Now they’re in power they say they have no option but to break that promise because the situation is worse than it seemed. Unfortunately for them, today the Office for Budget Responsibilty (a public spending watchdog set up by George Osborne) reported yesterday that economic conditions are better than thought six months ago. Many Lib Dems are planning to abstain in the vote, including, bewilderingly, Vince Cable, the joint architect of the funding plan. The Lib Dems perhaps can be bought off and perhaps the vote will go through, but these demonstrations are a tremendous reminder to the government and to the rest of the country that these cuts are not inevitable, not just, and not acceptable.

Note that the police have been congratulating themselves on their handling of the dispute. Here’s some examples of their fine work:

• Police officer punching student in the head.
• Same incident from another angle
• Charging at peaceful students on horseback
• Surprisingly even-handed Sky News coverage with some casual police violence at 2’00”

San Diego

I went to Winchester on Saturday to give a talk about David Greig and to watch a production of San Diego, performed by second-year drama students at the university and directed by Marianne Sharp and Marilena Zaroulia, both lecturers there and former PhD students at Royal Holloway that I supervised and advised.

The production was extremely good. Fiercely committed performances by the students, who managed to capture that odd tone - simultaneously funny, strange, and sad - that runs right through the play. The directors kept the play moving; literally, there was a restless kinetic energy of migration, passing traffic, travel in the play. It was performed traverse, which is always a good configuration for journeys and movement, but they would cunningly keep flipping the configurations; a bed with a TV would be on one side of the stage then reappear, reversed on the other side. The actress playing Laura was particularly strong, committing hard to the difficult, bloody, beautiful emotions of the part, playing it bruised, angry and sexy all at once. The design was a white box, reminiscent actually of the original 2003 performance, and the opening image of the travel cases being wheeled through the space also recalled the Lyceum.

Most of all, I reflected watching it that San Diego might be the best play of the decade. It’s a masterpiece, really it is, and if it had gone on in London I’m sure it would be on everyone’s lips. It captures the 2000s the way Attempts on Her Life wrestled the 1990s to the ground. The global movement, the playfulness with authorship, the intimations of religion, the cutting, the romance, the intertwined stories, the fluidity and instability of character, the sheer fucking daring of the writing. It’s the most incredible pleasure to encounter this beautiful play again.

Word Watch # 1

Catching up with old issues of London Review of Books. In the 25 March edition, the philosopher Galen Strawson reviewed a new book by Rebecca Goldstein. In the course of the review, Strawson manages to insert the words vatic, lemniscate, prosopagnosic, exophthalmic and enthymeme. The review is titled ‘syzygy’ so I begin to think he is engaged in a private joke, like the 1998 England World Cup Squad who agreed with each other infiltrate song titles into their press interviews. (Gareth Southgate famously responded to Bob Wilson’s question about the England camp with the words ‘Well, it’s hardly Club Tropicana, Bob.’)

I knew syzygy and enthymeme, and exophthalmic is his sort-of witty way of saying ‘eye-popping’. But for the record:

Syzygy (n.) Conjunction and opposition of two heavenly bodies, or either of the points at which these take place, esp. in the case of the moon with the sun (new and full moon).

Vatic (adj.) Of or pertaining to, characteristic of, a prophet or seer; prophetic, inspired.

Lemniscate (adj.) [Geom.] The designation of certain closed curves, having a general resemblance to the figure 8.

Prosopagnosic (adj.) from Prosopagnosia A neurological abnormality characterized by the inability to recognize faces.

Enthymeme (n.) [Logic] An imperfect syllogism, often one with a suppressed premiss.

John Wyndham

I’m making a documentary about John Wyndham for Radio 4. Nicola Swords is the producer (we also made my Sarah Kane documentary together) and has done all the leg work setting up interviews and so on.

The documentary will feature original interviews as well as a bit of archive and some commentary from me. We’ve interviewed Sister Bede on the Isle of Wight, whose decision to convert to Catholicism and then to become a cloistered nun is said to have satirically inspired the miraculous conceptions of The Midwich Cuckoos. This week we interviewed Adam Roberts, my friend and colleague and great science fiction expert, and also went to Kew Gardens where I asked some pretty dumb questions (why can’t plants walk?) and was introduced to a range of monsterish and carnivorous plants. Another morning was spent at Bedales, the fascinating, progressive, co-educational school that Wyndham seems to have taken as a model for the ideal communities in the books. We also talked to Wyndham’s biographer, David Ketterer, who is interested in the books as ‘estranged biography’ working out some of his personal anxieties and regrets.

My line is, I think, that Wyndham is a much more complex writer than he seems, partly because we don’t notice how he’s working within the conventions of the 1950s English novel. Before the Obscene Publications Act 1959 which allowed some degree of sexual and other explicitness if there were artistic merit or a public good involved, it was impossible to discuss some of Wyndham’s key themes directly: sexuality, alternatives to marriage, as well as our evolution as a species and relations to others. Wyndham’s complexity lies in the way he allows subtext to generate his complexities.

Adam Roberts, in his superb short introduction to three new Folio Society editions of The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, is very alert to the way the books address post-war anxieties about genocide, nuclear destruction, the Cold War and so on. He observes that often there are logical lacunae and moments of hyperbole that one can use to complicate the stories and ask more difficult moral questions.

I’m struck also by Wyndham’s complicated sexual politics. The experience of Bedales seems to have left him with a clear-sighted delight in strong-willed, independent women. He is also rather uninterested in marriage, often representing married life as a chore (Midwich, Chocky) and entertaining alternative forms of family (Triffids, Consider Her Ways, Midwich, Chrysalids, Trouble with Lichen). In the long short story Consider Her Ways, a woman wakes in a hospital to find herself many years in the future where the men have died out and women rule, some of them being selected as mothers, baby machines, whose bodies are prepared exclusively for the production of children. When the devastated protagonist talks to one of the new rulers, the arguments against the way we organise sexuality and childbirth in our society are surprisingly, unsettlingly persuasive.

At moments I wonder if he visits horrors on the sleepy Middle England of his books because he is repelled by their complacency as much as to stress the uncanny in his vision. He is particularly fascinated and horrified by children, it would seem. Midwich of course is very much about the fear of children, their independence, that they will outgrow and outlive you, in some ways be better than you. The Chrysalids also. Chocky is a curious novel; it’s basically a story about a boy with an imaginary friend raised to another power.

But he also seems to fear women. It’s striking how often the threats in the novels are feminised. In Triffids, as Ketterer suggests, there’s an association between Triffids and female genitalia. Chocky is both sexually neuter and female, intriguingly. And in Midwich, the telepathic communication between the children is prefigured by the ability of the women of the village to arrange and hold a meeting on the subject of their pregnancy without ever actually saying what they’re talking about. Gossip mechanisms, it suggests, are alien, uncanny, unmanly.

Wyndham was somewhat dismissed by Brian Aldiss, who spoke perhaps for the new wave’s harder-edged science fiction when he talked of Wyndham’s ‘cosy catastrophes’. It’s true that the stories often seem to be opportunities for the characters to show off good old British pluck and Wyndham’s preference is for no-nonsense, brisk and wryly deprecating narrators. But the books are surprisingly unheroic, and often peculiarly open-ended (think of Kraken and Triffids) or - surely - deliberate in their refusal to offer satisfying endings (the weird conclusion of Midwich). 

Arvon

Just finished co-teaching Radio Drama for the Arvon Foundation at their base in Totleigh Barton, North Dorset. It’s been a hard-working week with fifteen extremely enthusiastic would-be radio dramatists.

The group is mainly women, age ranging from early 20s to late 50s, from across the country. There’s a range of experience too; some have written novels, others poetry, some stage plays. I don’t think anyone has had anything published though one woman has had a play performed by an amateur company, and another has written lots of sketches for comedy theatre groups to perform, and there’s lots of writing going on. There is a terrific sense of earnest determination to write which is very rewarding and there are some real moments of thoughtful invention and passion.

In some ways, the most tiring thing is not the teaching and responding, the long days and the intense one-to-one discussions; it’s the nervous energy involved in the transaction of showing work and commenting on it. The students are unsure, full of hope and a bit of ambition, needing feedback and recognition but fearful of a damning judgment. As a tutor, you’re having to both be completely honest but also respect people’s hopes and the precariousness of their confidence in talent. So each person is slightly second-guessing the other and, while it works, it creates an exhausting set of emotional dynamics.

That said, there are some really interesting plays coming out of this. One in particular that caught my ear and imagination concerns a 16-year-old boy in the West Yorkshire of the 1920s who falls in love with a Jewish girl. Written with great heart, observation and lyricism, but hugely evocative of place. Another tells a great yarn about the first panel doctor in Wisbeech who is resisted by the town doctors, accused of libel, and commits suicide, leading to an eruption from the townsfolk against the vested interests of the private doctors. A third has a troubled woman, eight months pregnant, visited by an eighteen-century lighthouse keeper. Oh and there’s an interesting one that explores the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And more... and more...

The Arvon centre at Totleigh Barton is an old set of farm buildings. The farmhouse is where some students live, where the food is cooked and eaten, and where some of the tutorials and a modest library are located. The barn is a good space for large-group meetings and classes. The other students live in a converted pigsty. The place is an hour from the nearest train station, has no wi-fi, no TV, and a couple of tiny pockets of precarious mobile phone signal. When else have I been an hour from a train station? True, I’m not particularly well-travelled, but still it felt like real isolation. A few of the students (and both the tutors) walked around on Monday night, eyes wide with perplexity, saying things like ‘are you getting a signal?’ ‘I don’t even have a bar’. It imposes a kind of intensity on things, a determination to write and to take the task seriously.

Arvon’s been going around 40 years. It’s a brilliant formula and a real honour to be part of it.