a spectre, is haunting, a spectre's haunting

I wrote this for the LRB blog, where by now I have four pieces, but I wrote it up too slowly for it to actually go on the website. I found it again today and thought I should put it up here. It's about the last tuition fee march.

There was some confusion when we reached Fetter Lane. The agreed demonstration route had us turning off the Strand and following the Lane up towards Holborn Circus, but some of the crowd had evidently hoped to reach St Pauls by the most direct route, and for a while there was a stand-off. The police were mystified for once. “Keep moving along please, we’re not kettling you,” one of them shouted.

On Fetter Lane we stopped again, this time involuntarily. A boy probably not out of his teens wearing a hoody and tracksuit bottoms, who with a couple of friends had climbed onto some scaffolding to look, shouted of the hold up: “We shouldn’t just wait here, we should go forward! Forward!” There was a general ‘Yeh!’ but no movement, and everybody waited for everybody else. “Whose streets? Our streets!” we chanted, while we waited for the police to let us walk through them.

The day before the march the Metropolitan Police had announced that they were using special powers under Section 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act to impose extra conditions on the demonstration. Anyone who left the agreed route, went within a hundred yards of Bank, or who stayed at the march endpoint for more than two hours would be committing a criminal offence and could be arrested. Protest in this country is now bound by the assumption that the police have a total right to determine its timing, place and manner.

At Holborn Circus the atmosphere had been ramped up. There were hundreds of police, most of them now in riot gear, and the windows of all the buildings around were full of office workers filming and taking pictures with their mobile phones. A fat man at a window above the branch of Natwest at the corner of Charterhouse Street was making ‘wanker’ gestures at us.

We chanted the now-familiar “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts”, which some people updated to “still no ifs,” and the call and response of “I say ‘Tory’, you say ‘scum’” was given an airing. A man behind me tried to raise the tone with “a spectre, is haunting, a spectre’s haunting Europe” as we crossed Holborn Viaduct and passed near to St Pauls – which was also out of bounds.

No Ideology

Not every UCL student will be joining the protest march tomorrow. There has always been a part of the student body, necessarily quiet (because it has little to articulate), but large nonetheless, that professes no interest in politics of any sort, student or otherwise. To try to win the votes of this valuable demographic, candidates in UCL Union elections use a language of common sense, or promise that they will “represent all 22,000 students without fear or favour” [1], which is code for ‘I am not friends with Michael Chessum.’

During the latest Union elections, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a poster for one of the candidates for the position of Student Trustee. It consisted of a black rectangle, on which was written in white: “Vote ____ for student trustee. No Ideology – interested in you!”

According to Terry Eagleton, ideology could be one, or perhaps several, of the following things:

a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;

b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;

c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

e) systematically distorted communication;

f) that which offers a position for a subject;

g) forms of thought motivated by social interests;

h) identity thinking;

i) socially necessary illusion;

j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;

k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;

l) action-oriented sets of belief;

m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;

n) semiotic closure;

o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;

p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

He wasn't elected.

---

[1] The candidate who made this promise is secretary of the UCL Union Conservative Society.

'Offcuts' - bits and pieces of a few ideas I was exploring over the summer

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

Eliot, The Waste Land

“In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”

Thomas Carlyle

In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia all the action happens in the same house, in the same room, with the same props. Except, it isn’t and they aren’t. Two hundred years separate the room in which Septimus teaches algebra to Thomasina from the room in which Hannah sketches out the proposal for her book on romanticism to Bernard. So, so, so close but impossibly far. I don’t understand how anyone can think about the past without being morbidly nostalgic.

The other week I was back at my parents’ house in Manchester for a few days, and I found myself going through the cupboards in my old bedroom. I’ve never been much of a hoarder, and over the years I’ve performed several ‘shitectomies’, as my dad calls a clearout, but there are still things there to find, mental inventories to draw up. I’ve lived in London for most of the last six years but never stayed in one place for more than nine months, and in all that time I’ve spread my stuff around, and never quite shifted it all out of home. I’ve spread my life around really in a way, subbing cash to my flatmate for Council Tax in Homerton, carrying a drivers licence that still puts me in a flat in Stroud Green, letting my bank statements arrive in Manchester. I’m starting a PhD in September and I’m planning to move to a much nicer flat in Brixton in July. I’m 25 and I need some permanency, and I need to take my things with me. I think my mum feels the same; family stuff has begun to drift into my room and jostle for space with my CDs and the t shirts I don’t wear anymore. Under my bed there are about four sleeping bags and a tent, next to my bookshelves is a collapseable cot that my parents keep for when my neice visits, in my wardrobe hangs my mum’s beekeeping outfit. My room is like a town by the sea slowly being covered by sand dunes.

I’d been spending a lot of time indoors lately and I needed some air to clear the dust out of my lungs. I walked down to Primark in Hackney to look for a pair of jogging bottoms. If I’m going to spend so much time around the flat I quite like the idea of having a pair of trousers that lets me get out of my pyjamas without really getting dressed. More than any other shop, Primark encapsulates cheap low quality disposable possessions. (There’s already a hole in the pocket of the joggers which I’ve had to shore up with masking tape, but on the plus side they only cost me a fiver.) Queueing for the tills you are led in a snaking line past a last selection of crap you look at out of boredom, and just might buy on impulse. On my right is a ‘wash mitt’, that looks like a small oven glove made out of a Winnie the Pooh towel. Behind me an American girl carrying two pillows and a duvet is talking to her friend. “I’ve bought so many pillows in my life. You know, every time you’re moving your things at college you throw stuff out. The bedding’s the first thing you get rid of.”

Sitting in Steve’s lounge, a rained off barbecue. Heavy rain and wind tugging at the gazebo in the back garden. It wants to get away. A small bureau in dark wood, from a workshop in Manchester where they take old furniture and get it restored by homeless people. They take an object and put extra symbolism and a story into it. There are trinkets on the shelves; two cigarette lighters, a tobacco tin, a cigarette case, hip flask, some kind of incense holder, pewter tea set with milk jug, a framed print of the Alfred Wallis painting the blue ship. Prints and photos on the walls. Flowers. A copy of ‘Lamb’s last essays’ on the bookshelf.

My sister Anna and her husband and daughter Nina will soon be moving to a new house in Manchester. She’s been in London for nearly ten years but she’s going back. Me, I just can’t leave yet. I’m taking over the lease on her flat in Brixton, and every time I visit at the moment I feel like I’m sizing it up, making my plans. I wonder if it annoys her. I’ll put my this there, I need to buy a that for the bedroom, I’ll probably get some of these.

Anna’s new house in Manchester isn’t ready to live in, and currently has builders hard at work on it. The other day, chipping old plaster off a wall one of them found an old page torn out of the Manchester Evening News from 1993 tucked into a cavity. There was a little piece on an event held by the Hallé orchestra, in which local schoolkids had visited for the day and had help composing their own piece of music. Pictured, and quoted, was my friend Ed’s mother Janet, the Hallé’s pianist. By coincidence, Ed came over for dinner the night Anna told me about this. I made bobotie, a South African dish my dad makes, and we watched the Apprentice, pissed ourselves laughing, and made stupid comments on the Guardian liveblog about the show. The candidates were making fools of themselves selling mostly shit British-designed products in Paris, so we opted for “un, deux, TWAT.”

I took Nina for a few hours this morning to get her out of her parents’ hair. We went up to the ‘play zone’ at the Brixton Rec. It’s much bigger than I expected, and loads more fun too. There were lots of plastic balls to flop around in, a kind of rope bridge, tunnels to crawl through, slopes to climb up, slides to woosh down. I wish we’d had one near me when I was a kid. “Look at me!” Nina shouts, “uncle Harry, look at me!”, and she jumps off a slide into a pool of balls. Eventually she hurt herself and insisted on going home, but she calmed down after a few minutes and we went for a drink at a café in Brixton Village instead. She sucked her ginger beer through a curly straw (“like a snake”) and offered me sugar for my coffee. We talked about their imminent move: “You can come and visit me if you like,” she said. And then, “Are you going to miss me?” she asked. I nodded, somehow I couldn’t speak.

I stayed at Anna’s for lunch. My brother in law had just heard that he’d passed his final exams. We cracked out the Cava and clinked glasses. “Here’s to Dr Cormack.”

I looked around and wondered what I’d leave behind in the walls when I finally make it out of here.

The Average British Family

The British press have a number of tried and tested stories they like to fall back on when there are column inches to fill. One popular genre is the reworked-press-release-plug-for-a-company-pseudo-scientific-study-reveals-shocka.

This week’s specimen was the news that a survey carried out by the home energy management service AlertMe (see what I did there?) had pinpointed the characteristics of the Average British Family. The ABF has 1.5 cars, has paid off 32% of the mortgage on their semi, watches nine hours of television a day, holidays twice a year, spends £12 a week on booze (is that all?), goes to bed before 11pm, and has two arguments a week.

You can see quite easily how they worked out the figures – they added up all the numbers and divided them by the appropriate amount to get the mean – but the statistics on the ABF’s average meal (it’s spag bol on Monday, for example) are a little more mystifying. The papers don’t specify, but presumably they’re talking about the mode rather than the mean here. Either that or there’s some special AlertMe mathematics that says that three chicken pies, two full englishes, seven cod and chips and a bangers and mash averages out to make a pasta bake, (Tuesday).

I heard about the ABF study from my friend N when I was round her parents’ house on Monday. I haven’t seen her since Christmas (she studies in New York now), but everything is as it always is at her parents’ house on one of the roads that slope down to the Mersey in south Manchester. It’s comfortable and chaotic in equal measure, the chaos coming partly because her parents run their businesses (a lingerie company and a scrap metal dealer) from an office in the front room, and partly because her dad is gradually filling it with paintings he buys online.

N has to get ready to go and model for a life drawing class in Littleborough and N’s mum is going to visit her Italian mother where she grew up in Rochdale. As N potters about the kitchen making a salad of tuna and chick peas they discuss the ABF study. “70% of people describe themselves as normal”, N tells her mum. “Would you describe us as normal mama?” “Definitely not,” she says. “We’re foreign.”

Why is life worth living?

“Well, alright, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile.

Like what?

Ok... for me...

Ooh I would say Groucho Marx to name one thing.

And Willie Mays

And Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues

Swedish movies, naturally.

Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra.

Those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne.

The crabs at Sam Wo's...

Tracy's face."

That's from one of the last scenes in the Woody Allen film Manhattan. Isaac (well, Woody really, is there any distinction between the character and the writer?) is lying on his back on the sofa talking into a tape recorder.

I’ve decided, vaguely, to gradually write a blog entry about each of these things. It’ll take quite a long time (and a bit of research), but it could be fun.

Figures and Fictions

Here's another article I wrote for the brilliant OhDearism blog, this time about an exhibition of South African photography at the V and A in London....

Recalling her childhood in Cape Town, the curator of Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Tamar Garb, observed that “one’s way of negotiating the place was over determined by the social and political structures that taught you who you could talk to, how you could talk to people, how you could behave.” In this profoundly disturbing, disturbed society, photography offered the possibility that the social, cultural and moral distortions of Apartheid could be exposed by a documentary art form that could bring those contradictions right into the viewer’s face.

In South Africa, Garb argues, photographers have traditionally used three distinct modes of representation to tell the story of the place. One of these, dominant during the middle of the twentieth century, is the documentary mode described above. Another is the tradition of portraiture – I have a photo of my great-great-great-grandfather shot in a studio in Cape Town at the turn of the last century that can attest to the long roots of this genre. The third is the ethnographic, which collected and catalogued people, particularly non-whites, as nothing more than types, exemplars, specimens; almost an extension of the flora and fauna, Garb argues.

Having begun to think about the richness of contemporary South African photography after curating a show on contemporary art in London in 2007, Garb approached the V & A with the idea of putting on an exhibition which could challenge the dominance of these three modes, and show the subtleties and richness of contemporary photography in South Africa. She has succeeded in unearthing a number of photographers who are well aware of the role of these three traditions and capable of exposing the ironies and contradictions in South Africa’s photographic heritage.

Read the rest here: http://www.ohdearism.com/2011/07/01/photography-figures-fictions/

Strangeways

Here's something I wrote recently about the ITV documentary 'Strangeways.'

In some ways, HM Prison Manchester (more commonly known as Strangeways) is a Manchester icon. After all it gave its name to a Smiths album (Strangeways Here We Come). The prison itself was built in 1868 by Alfred Waterhouse, who later designed the town hall – and if you think about it these two buildings are a neat embodiment of Victorian urban life. On the one hand, public works, clean water, slum clearances and municipal socialism; the promise of reform, and on the other hand a dysfunctional system riven with violence, upper class moralising, authority; the threat of punishment. The carrot and the stick. So it’s easy for a Manc to think about Strangeways in symbolic terms.

At first glance the recent three part documentary on the prison broadcast on ITV (‘Strangeways’, 9th, 16th and 23rd May) appears to belong somewhere in this tradition. In the opening credits the camera slowly zooms in on a shot of the prison gates at twilight, while over the top we hear the voices of a group of prisoners in prayer: “I confess to almighty God, and to my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned…”

Music plays while a young man is led through a yard with his hands cuffed behind his back, a child of about five wearing her best outfit to visit her dad is searched and scanned with a metal detector, a man is carried along a corridor by his hands and feet, a voice shouts “move to the back of the cell and drop your weapon”, a young black man folds his arms in front of him and bows his badly bruised head. A heavyset man in an Everlast sweater spreads his arms wide to be searched with a look on his face that seems to carry all the sorrow of the world, a dog barks, a man in a gym lifts weights, a visitor holds a prisoner’s hand. Then the shadow of a cell door shuts against a black background and the word comes up on the screen: ‘Strangeways.’

Read the rest here:

http://www.ohdearism.com/2011/06/01/society-itv%E2%80%99s-strangeways/

Palace Square

I have read somewhere that a defining characteristic of post modernity is the experience of multiple realities all on top of each other, the unloading into the world of millions of symbols, images and meanings. The presence, and in mass culture the use, of dozens of different aesthetics all at once with disregard for the need or even the idea of context. Look, a telephone cut from a magazine stuck on top of a photograph of an interior. Look, a historic building in London peeking through a gap between two sky scrapers. Look, a young woman in Istanbul wearing a headscarf talking on an iPhone, a rural migrant in Nairobi sending money by mobile phone to the mother who has never seen anything beyond her village. Post modernity is in other words the constant sensation of low-level irony.

More than this though, post modernity might yet be about something else. Perhaps this is simply a scene of kitsch, causing “two tears to flow in quick succession,” as Milan Kundera had it. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch." This criticism, the doubt that wracks me, is something else postmodern. Irony even in our observations of irony. The critical gaze of a culture that has turned in upon itself.

Tomorrow is Victory Day, the 9^th May, and Palace Square is being prepared for the celebrations. Parallel with the Winter Palace, on the same side of the square, three blocks of temporary seating have been erected in front of huge red banners. 1941 – 1945. CCCP. A hammer and sickle. On the opposite side, in front of the triumphal arch that divides the two wings of the General Staff Building, a team is putting the finishing touches to a huge stage. On the front of it they are building a fake colonnade in a shade of green to match the palace, a heavy piece of classical fibreglass. At the back of the stage there is a big computer screen. Mostly it is black or bears a vague repeating pattern of indistinct shapes, but occasionally you see a mouse moving on it and icons appearing and being clicked on as they test everything for tomorrow.

In the middle of the square is the Alexander Column, a single red granite block on top of which stands an angel with the face of Emperor Alexander I. “From a grateful Russia.” A bas-relief around the column base sprinkles symbols of Russian glory; Nevsky’s helmet, Prince Oleg’s shield, Alexander’s breastplate, Stalin’s moustache. I may have fabricated something. Other symbols of something or other are scattered through the square, not always deliberately. Temporary fencing has been put up around the base, wider still than the original iron railings removed by the communists, then restored by the 90s gangster capitalists. On this second layer of distance two policemen are leaning, talking about something or other. To the east, where the square partly opens towards the Moiki canal, around fifty dark green Soviet military vehicles are gathered. Mostly jeeps, a couple of trucks, and soldiers milling around them, waiting for the parade.

Hundreds of tourists, groups and individuals, wander through the square. Cameras are held out in front and take the place of eyes. Wealthy Russian teenagers pose and take pictures of each other. One of the girls ♥s NY. Men in 18^th century costumes offer themselves as photo opportunities. Fake antique carriages clatter around, circling the square - or squaring the circle. Look, Saint Petersburg is lots of places at once.

The sun is shining, it is a beautiful day in May. When I come out into the square from the Hermitage, the speakers by the stage are blasting out white noise that sounds like a jet engine. Indeed, I think at first this is a simulated test for a fly past, an invisible feat of aeronautical daring. Just as it becomes painful, it stops and they put on some music. I don’t know the tune but the opening lines are “sonny, sonny…”, or maybe it is “sunny, sunny…”

Just as Bruce Springsteen was foolish to write “redemption” into the lyrics of Thunder Road, a song about redemption, I must resist the urge to try to explain how this is making me feel. As Baudelaire said, when words are too precise, music is the art that expresses most perfectly the emotions. “Sunny…the dark times are gone, the bright days are here.” Three teenagers lie flat on their backs near me, close their eyes, and smoke. A group of soldiers, three men and one woman, chase each other through the square, horsing around. For a moment they gather into a circle and, no word of a lie, one of them dances while the others sing Kalinka.

Saint Lazare

This is something I began writing in Paris, where I spent a month last summer researching my MA dissertation at the Bibliotheque Nationale. I only finished it today however, having goaded myself out of inaction by the impending deadline for an application for a job at the London Review of Books, and by my desire to not be a hideously lazy sod.

Most weekday mornings for the past month I have been catching the 0859 train from Garches-Marne la Coquette to Saint-Lazare, and from there the line 14 metro to the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’ve become a regular, of a sort, on the commuter train which runs from St Nom La Bretèche through Garches, Saint Cloud, La Défense and finally Paris Saint Lazare. This summer my life went up and down the line: there were mornings, and there were evenings, 30 days. I only went further out of Paris on the line on two occasions: once when my friend Mark and I fell asleep on the first train home from the clubs on a Saturday morning; and once when I went to stand at the Vaucreson sliproad to the autoroute, with a cardboard ‘Normandie SVP’ sign and an outstretched thumb.

Courbevoie is not so far from civilisation as Garches, nor so close to sin as Clichy: it is twinned with Enfield.

After a while one learns where to sit, who to ignore, and when to look out of the window. Around Saint Cloud the Eiffel Tower, Montparnasse and Sacré Coeur flash you through the trees. Each morning I look at Paris from a distance and wish I really lived there, probably with a beautiful French woman. I wish I was not in Garches. We circle Paris to the northwest, passing the houses around La Défense that abut the skyscrapers curiously, before sneaking in, using la butte for cover.

Clichy Levallois reminds me of Ardwick, south Manchester. Train sheds, sidings, dozens of lines, shipping containers, empty lots, construction. Double deck regional trains from far flung places remind you that while Garches represents the terminus of your imagination, others think along different lines. Some people come from Le Havre, and Euston station means trains to Manchester, not tubes to Higher Barnet. This is what the women standing on the facade of the Gare du Nord are trying to tell you; the tower blocks with Lake District-themed names on Hampstead Road have arrived in London via a worm hole, and in the Place de Roubaix the provinces have leaked into Paris. When Monet painted Saint Lazare, I know he was thinking about Le Havre.

How the train reaches Paris from Clichy is a trade secret. It is sucked into a deep cutting and spat out at Saint Lazare, an engineer’s conjuring trick. The walls are close, sometimes we are roofed over, we sneak under Europe – where Madrid meets Budapest, and I am thinking about Lille, Le Havre, and Manchester. Nik la police and nik ta mère, nique Sarko, nique the train, nique the ticket inspectors, nique you for reading this: Europe is graffitied.

As the train trickles to a halt we gather round the doors, waiting for the driver to unlock them so we can appuyez ici and get out. Sometimes the doors are released while the train is still moving, and I jump off onto the platform, and keep on going; jogging in to Paris.