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11/06/03--09:04: friends-only (chan 2136388)

say hi be nice


04/05/09--01:15: sharing The Rage (chan 2136388)

Hello! I posted this to Facebook, but still feel enraged, so thought I could share my ire with you lot too. From the Grauniad 'Family' supplement yesterday, also, of course, known as the Grauniad 'Smug Middle-Class Heterosexual' supplement, the first article in years that I can remember that actually deals with a queer issue:



Gay godfathers rule

"David Waters is a godfather four times over. Why is he so popular? Well, he makes a mean fruit crumble, he's got great taste (for presents), has plenty of money (for the inheritance) - and no kids of his own
...
Dave is solvent. He's in a stable relationship with Jaye, who's also great. They have two homes - a neat flat in central London, for educational museum and gallery jaunts, plus a picture-book cottage by the sea - the perfect bolt hole for part of the summer holidays. And Dave works in the fashion industry so he has good taste, ensuring that all his gifts are likely to be a) expensive, though he will have bought them with a discount card, so we won't need to feel guilty, and b) tasteful, so it won't be a quick dash to Baby Gap but something unique and special, perhaps even from Tiffany. Also, Dave isn't likely to be distracted by his own children as - brilliant! - he doesn't have any and nor is he likely to at his highly advanced age. I bet he's barely fertile."


This written without a trace of irony. Who is this self-hating gay man? Two points: one, contrary to the gay yuppie cliché, recent research in America shows that in general, people in same-sex relationships are far less socio-economically privileged than people in opposite-sex ones.

After adjusting for a range of family characteristics that help explain poverty, gay and lesbian couple families are significantly more likely to be poor than are heterosexual married couple families.
- Notably, lesbian couples and their families are much more likely to be poor than heterosexual couples and their families.
- Children in gay and lesbian couple households have poverty rates twice those of children in heterosexual married couple households.
- Within the LGB population, several groups are much more likely to be poor than others. African American people in same-sex couples and same-sex couples who live in rural areas are much more likely to be poor than white or urban same-sex couples.


And secondly, even if we queer people are not rolling in pink cash, not in stable relationships, don't own chic property portfolios, don't have fabulous jobs, are not arbiters of taste and do have children, we are still valuable members of society and still can be loving godparents to children. Rather than being patronised as 'add-ons', tolerated on account of our slightly excessive wealth (so unlike the worthy poverty of hard-working families, another New Labour phrase I loathe, detest and wish to scorch from the lexicon. It makes me think of austere Victorian prelates preaching to ragged Victorian families that they should be poor but honest, let the three-year-old handle the child care and the six year old go up the chimneys. Or of a smug heterosexual middle-class New Labour viewpoint that refuses to imagine people as dignified citizens and valuable human beings if they are not married, procreating and engaged in taxable labour.)

So yes. Thanks for the toxic clichés, Guardian! Way to fulfil your progressive mandate!


07/06/09--05:23: In which I am annoyed. (chan 2136388)

Annoyed at 1., Brenda Power's hatefilled article in the Sunday Times. But more, actually, annoyed with the Times for publishing it. Brenda Power and the Iona institute churn out ignorant, homophobic bile to order, bile of a low quality and with a gratingly sickly sauce of Christian tolerance poured on top. They don't represent anyone except themselves. And yet, the Irish media constantly turn to them to provide 'balance' in their Punch and Judy idea of a debate on gay marriage. Publishing Power's article just gives the homophobic arguments she peddles legitimacy. The Irish media should know better.

Annoyed also at 2., an illadvised viewing session of a puff documentary on Sacha Baron Cohen on Channel 4 on Saturday night. This showed a brief clip from Brüno, in which Baron Cohen performs a camp cheerleader dance in front of a vast crowd of American sports fans. The crowd, faces twisted in hate, roar "Faggot!" at him, as he beams beatifically and cartwheels on. The clip can't have lasted more than thirty seconds, but it was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I'm trying to figure out how to read it:



• According to Baron Cohen's adoring friends and admirers, featured on the programme, Baron Cohen is a passionate liberal trying to unmask prejudice. If so, then he thinks that this stunt is revealing the true extent and ugly face of homophobia to a world that would prefer to think that it doesn't really exist, while simultaneously celebrating joyfully silly high camp and unabashed gay sex. That's a noble aim, and I completely support it.


• But. This film is made in a context, and that context is a homophobic one. I don't know how many of you read the lengthy Guardian article by gay journalist Philip Hensher, trying to prove that the film really wasn't homophobic and that he, Hensher, was in on the joke, but it was a profoundly disturbing read.

  Brüno describes, with great care, what may be termed the "homosexual body", and describes what may be called envisaged homosexual sex. Neither of these, it seems to me, are intended to have anything at all to do with the bodies, or the real sexual habits, of homosexual men. They are delirious external fantasies.

  So Hensher is suggesting that it's OK to laugh at Brüno, because he's a parody of heterosexual fears. Real gay men, as he goes on to say, are mostly straight-acting and bourgeois and dull. But that's not quite OK, because Power's article shows that part of the homophobic case against gay rights is built on fear of the shrill and the camp:

  Homosexuals insist that their nature is an inherent, essential reality, and not a lifestyle choice. But if we were to judge by the get-up and carry-on of some of those in the Pride march last week, that’s hard to believe. Some are definitely choosing to pursue a way of life that is quite alien to the majority of married heterosexual parents in this country, indeed deliberately and defiantly so.

  Power suggests that if we want our demands for marriage to be taken seriously, we shouldn't have an outrageous tranny like Panti as our spokesperson. Now, Baron Cohen may well be on Panti's side. He may be a fan of genderqueer performance and of viciously funny, bitingly intelligent activism. But if a gay reporter can argue that the film is saying that it's OK to poke fun at high camp and transgressive behaviour, a pro-Panti messsage is not the message viewers of the film are necessarily going to hear. And the final paragraph of Hensher's article was heartbreaking:

  And yet there is the audience. Towards the end of the film, Brüno tries to marry his faithful assistant, Lutz, who turns up in a wedding dress. The audience laughed as if they had never seen anything so funny in their lives. As it happens, I married a man last month.

  I found this desperately sad, and again, terrifying: I cannot imagine how scary it would be to sit in a cinema, next to my civil partner, with that homophobic laughter baying around me. (Which is why I don't think I'm going to see the film.) This paragraph suggests that poor Hensher is trying so hard to prove that he gets the joke and isn't a humourless bitter old queen that he's swallowing his fear and anger. Baron Cohen may well be meaning to satirise heterosexual fears about homosexuality. But if his satire is effectively granting the public permission to mock gay marriage, Baron Cohen might want to rethink his strategy. The joke may be on the audience, but they don't seem to give a toss. The message I am hearing from Hensher's report is that Brüno says that it's OK to dismiss and hate campness, and demand that queer people conform in order to be accepted; and that it's OK to laugh at queer marriage, because sure don't we have all the rights now. That's a pretty dangerous idea to promulgate.


• Or, alternatively, Brüno will simply publicise homophobic acts and provide lots of useful incitements and models for bullying and hating gay people. (Just as Walliams's Lucas's "the only gay in the village" sketch provides a good stick to beat gay people with, because the joke's on the silly pink-rubber-clad self-obsessed gayer, isn't it, now stop whinging.) In which case, Baron Cohen has made a fortune by endangering the safety of queers in schoolyards and streets and families across the world, and he can fuck right off, so.


I'm not sure what to think. I know that Baron Cohen's humour is that tiresome thing, 'edgy', which sits between cringe and 'political incorrectness' and the boundaries of acceptability, and that it's designed to provoke exactly this kind of uncomfortable reaction in bourgeois prissy me. Even if 'edgy' comedy isn't homophobic (which it so frequently is), I don't enjoy it. With Brüno, though, it seems to me that Baron Cohen might be ramping up the stakes to a scary degree. But I do know I'm not paying Baron Cohen £7 in cinema ticket fees to find out exactly how subversive the film is, if finding out means sitting in the midst of a cinema filled with homophobic hilarity.


07/10/09--02:00: I know I should let this go (chan 2136388)

Brenda Power, interviewed on Liveline (roughly paraphrased, but not by much): "We have a huge problem with abortion in this country, and it doesn't help when young single mothers that were being encouraged to give their child up for adoption rather than have an abortion would think twice if they thought the baby might end up with Miss Panti and her boyfriend".

Question: That crazy hatefilled logic, weaving together homophobia and anti-choice thinking and patronising misogyny into a toxic parcel, was all about when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. (In fact, those of you who have known me long enough will know I got sucked into it for a while.) But now? Is Power a lone offensive voice, trying to carve out a shock-jock niche in the Irish media? Or do people really still think like her? ideealisme, I know you would say that Power is more widely representative of the New Ireland than I think, but is she really that representative?

On the good side, the Irish queer community really seem galvanised by this. I'm still not about to thank Power, though.


08/16/09--11:10: Manchester Jewry (chan 2136388)

We live right on the edge of glitzy New Labour Manchester, here. Five minutes to the south, Harvey Nicks, the Gomorrah that is the Printworks, Selfridges and the cathedral; five minutes to the north, Strangeways and a mass of rag-trade warehouses, empty parking lots with forbidding barbed wire surrounding it and armoured loudspeakers that bark 'Caution! Car thieves operate in this area!'. It baffles me, coming as I do from Dublin, where the inner city dissolves into tightly-packed working class villages, then redbrick villages, the suburbs and finally the industrial wasteland, three to ten miles out. Out of my window, which is situated on the very edge of the inner city, I should be looking down on a lively working class district like Leonard's Corner or Inchicore, not on... nothingness. It baffles me.

One time, driving into the city through the wasteland, I saw a sign for the Manchester Jewish Museum, and this grey moody Sunday I decided to visit. It's in the old Sephardic synagogue, ten minutes' walk north from here; full of relics of a lively Jewish community, complete, in that very British twentieth century fashion, with a flurry of self-improving organisations: schools, charitable organisations, amateur dramatic societies, working men's clubs, all the trappings of a lost community life.

But Jewish Manchester hasn't gone. I am sadly used to wandering around the Scheunenviertel in Berlin and its equivalents in other European cities, stumbling over the Stolpersteine and realising the extent of the lives and communities destroyed by the Nazis. Manchester, though, is still one of the Jewish cultural centres of Britain. So why was this area - Red Bank and Strangeways, as it is properly called - so devastated, so triste and empty where once it was full of working-class Eastern European Ashkenazis, Sephardic lords of industry and Gentile Mancunians besides? The guide at the museum explained that it had been designated a light industrial zone after the war, so the dwellings were pulled down.

"Didn't the Jewish community feel attacked?" I asked, the forced resettlements and ethnic cleansings of Europe on my mind. "Oh no," she said breezily, "people were upwardly mobile, and most of them had moved to the leafy suburbs already." The same story, then, as with Dublin's Little Jerusalem, full of Ostjuden in 1900 who had mostly become middle-class and moved to Terenure and similarly salubrious pastures by 1930. No tragic tale, then, just... rezoning. But Little Jerusalem is still an immigrant district, boasting Ireland's first mosque, full of halal southern fried chicken shops and callshops and African hairdressers. One set of immigrants moves up in society, another moves in; it's the multi-cultural urban dream, right? And the energetic clash of cultures and influx of new citizens keeps areas alive? Whereas this utter abandonment of a district within ten minutes' walk of the city centre to shabby warehousing, import-export businesses and decaying surface carpark is baffling to me.

Armed with a map of the old Jewish Quarter, I wandered around the district, and realised that it's not dead at all. There's the Sikh temple, for one thing, and the erstwhile Red Bank is now brimming with independent businesses - car hire or storage warehouses, but mostly the rag trade, with Asian names and hard-nosed discounts on the signs stacked up on the frontages of a wild array of disreputable buildings. These range from corrugated iron shacks, brave 1990s one-story brick buildings to mouldering palaces of industry of indeterminate age. And among them are the lost Jewish buildings: that is, those that remain and haven't been used and re-used until they've been condemned and replaced. I'm still bewildered by the mentality that sternly deems the area for industry only, not for dwellings or heritage or art or leisure, but that's the learning experience of emigration for you. Andere Länder, andere Sitten. And hey, there's always the inexorable onward march of buy-to-let apartmentland to revive the area, right?




Archived/Talmud Torah School, Bent Street Founded in 1894 for teaching Hebrew and religion to the poor. Still standing and in use, just; the upper windows have no glass, and trees are growing out of the roof

Talmud Torah School, II The Memorial Stones Of This Building

Talmud Torah School III Were Laid August 6th 1894

Workpeople (Nathan Hope factory) Workpeople's entrance round the side, thanks

Ajaz Brothers Cash & Carry/ Jews' School, Derby St Built 1869, with the aim to educate and anglicise eastern European Jews. The use of Yiddish was banned

Immigrant rag trade: B & A Fashions/ Marks & Spencer warehouse/headquarters, Derby Street Russian Jewish immigrant Michael Marks built this warehouse as the headquarters of his partnership with Gentile Tom Spencer. It was M&S HQ until 1923

Jordah Ltd, Manufacturers, Importers and Wholesalers of Ethnic & Alternative Clothing/ New Synagogue, built by eastern European Jews in 1889

Asian Community Radio/ Philanthropic Hall, Empire Street Jewish soup kitchen, offered free soup and food to workers in the local factories

Allwood Furniture/Central Synagogue, Cheetham Hill Road I couldn't find a single trace on this building that revealed its former use as a place of worship, though the building is, of course, markedly more fancy than the majority of cheap furniture dealerships





08/17/09--01:18: Manchester Jewry II: the remains of Strangeways and Redbank (chan 2136388)




Bent St CCTV UK

& Southall Street

Sign O The Times Cheetham Hill Road

Reasons to Shop At Excel Shop Fittings Cheetham Hill

developer's dream Old dairy site, due for redevelopment, any time now, honest. Strangeways in the background

Manchester Ice Palace Derby St. Now mostly rag trade

Clarence Hatworks Carnavon Street

Co-Operative Wholesale Society Limited Balloon Street. I just popped into the local co-op for a pint of milk on my way home...

Robert Owen This is the customer building, sadly. Not quite as fancy. But it cheers the heart to see kindly paternalist Owen outside

ishbel The museum was having some issues with the alarm, so I decided to photograph my Ishbel beret while waiting. Details on Ravelry!





10/16/09--13:48: you know you're thirty-four when (chan 2136388)

Dear Grauniad,

I am disgusted to see that what passes for 'comedy' these days has sunk so far that Armstrong and Miller traduce the memory of Flanders and Swann by dressing up as the classic duo in order to give their cheap, unfunny misogynist songs the patina of humour. Funny, isn't it, how Flanders and Swann never saw the need to make insulting fat jokes about women, and yet their parlour songs kept people convulsed with laughter in the golden days of BBC entertainment?

Yours,

Disgusted of Manchester

___

And the worst of it is, this is a true reflection of my feelings.


03/13/10--12:30: If I had been in Munich (chan 2136388)

We were wandering around the cold bright cloisters of I Can't Believe It's Not Oxbridge, when a plump, greasy-haired man shambling in my direction caught my eye. "Is that who I think it is?" I muttered to my companion, who looked, did a double take, said "Oh my God, it is!". We did our best not to look conspicuous as Nick Griffin walked along the cathedral precinct, flanked incongrously by teenaged girls. "I bet he's shadowed by fascist goons," I added, and now we're on a BNP watch list for having noticed him. Shit."

"But where is he going?!" asked a shocked companion. We chased after him into the castle yard, but he was gone. Was he going to Evensong too? We didn't see him, and couldn't decide whether it was his thing; on the one hand, what more English than Evensong? but on the other, isn't he a proper blood and runes Nazi? We didn't have to walk out in protest at least.

Anyway. I can confirm that he is as swivel-eyed and dodgy looking in person as he is in the media. And that I am a craven conformist. How often have you heard someone argue passionately, If only I had been in Munich in 1922, I could have shot Hitler and then the whole terrible Nazi history need never have happened. Did I shoot Nick Griffin? No. I did not even spit at him. If all non-white people are expelled from Britain in ten years time, you have me to blame.

In other news, in bed this morning I dreamt I was writing an article, using my hangover as a source. "Glitz (2010) thinks that she just needs to sleep it out," I wrote. "But Glitz (2010) is of the opinion that this will be one of those creeping hangovers that builds all day and crucifies her at three in the afternoon." Sigh.




10/15/10--05:30: Higher Education in the UK (chan 2136388)

I am not the best authority to comment on the Browne report or the spending review in higher education, but here are my thoughts, anyway:


• The proposal to strip funding from all but 'core' subjects in the Browne report will necessarily hit languages very hard, and arts subjects in general hard, as we are and will continue to be heavily dependent on teaching funding from the government. It is generally acknowledged that the proposed rise in the fees to a 'soft cap' of £6000 will not cover teaching costs once the government cuts our teaching funding. Departments, faculties and schools will close.


• There is a myth surrounding arts degrees: the graffiti over the toilet roll holder, saying Arts degrees, please take one. Employers, in the private sector as well as the public sector, love arts graduates, for their critical thinking skills, self-motivation, writing skills, research skills and the rest of the package. Arts graduates are to be found in the most influential positions around the world - Obama, for instance, and if we were to go through the UK cabinet present and past, the number of arts graduates would be very high. Arts skills are essential to the economy, but so far employers aren't prepared to fund them, in the way that they are happy to cross-fund science graduates via industry collaborations with universities. So when departments, faculties and universities shut, unless industry and public sector bodies start funding the arts students they desperately need, the economy will lose a proven, essential high-skills resource. Very foolish.


• Apparently, free fees in Scotland haven't widened participation; free fees have widened participation mildly in Ireland; moderate fees in England have widened participation significantly. So there is a case to be made for fees. However, the premium promised to graduates at present is only £100,000 increase in earnings over a lifetime, an unlikely figure in any case, and this will shrink as more people have degrees. Further, once students graduate with £50,000 in debt, the attractiveness of that premium will shrink. So I cannot see how this massive hike in fees will not dissuade people on low incomes, and condemn them to a life at the bottom of an economy that, increasingly, relies on graduates, not unskilled or low-skilled workers.


• Further, has anyone gender-proofed this proposed fees hike? Men may earn enough to pay off their debt and realise a profit; women, who earn less in general and in particular once they have children, may well not.


• Finally, as Jonathan Freedland said, the entire argument for raising fees is an individualistic one that sees a degree as a commodity, and a university as a service provider for a rational, discriminating sixteen year old consumer. (I have yet to meet this sixteen year old, but if you know the one who does patient, disinterested research into their degree without being influenced at all by their family, class and social group, please let me know.)
  
  But a degree is a social and personal good. We provide free primary and secondary education because society as a whole could not function without them; increasingly, the same is true of tertiary education, and every other European country subsidises higher education for this reason. Eastern Europe has poured money into higher education in the past ten years, Germany is stepping up its investment; they will reap the rewards, and English young people will be left crushed by a choice between unemployability or massive debt that Czech and French young people will never need to be worried by. This does not strike me as the way to ensure national prosperity.
  
  Further, higher education provides a cultural resource for a society, of a graduate cohort who have engaged with and created cultural and scientific knowledge, who bring that knowledge into their careers and families and use the skills they have learned at university to better society and the economy. That seems irrelevant to the government, too.
  
  I am beginning to think that the only way to sell an arts degree to a student in future will not be in terms of value for money - because no non-professional degree will be able to guarantee value for money at £50,000 a pop - nor in terms of employability, but more in the good old-fashioned terms of higher education: the three years at university are valuable in themselves as a wonderful time spent developing the mind. I genuinely believe that this is true. Unfortunately, in the future it looks as though only the very, very privileged English will be able to afford it.



Me, I'm happy to emigrate, as are many other scientists and academics. And I suspect many students will begin to do the same. Why would an English student pay £50,000 for a British degree when they could do a degree at Ghent or Uppsala, in English, for a fraction of the price?

Es wird nichts so heiss gegessen wie es gekocht wird; we will see what will really happen. But these new suggestions are ridiculous.


10/22/10--08:04: anonycomments (chan 2136388)

Why is no-one anonymising today? Here's anonycomments with a difference: if you met a member of the British cabinet or the Irish government on your commute home this afternoon, what would you say to them in person? Unpopular political opinions can be uttered without fear of personal retribution!


12/05/10--09:04: Women's Work is Worthless (chan 2136388)

(Note: I know that Sunday evening is a dead time to post, but I won't have a chance again before Tuesday. And my rage will not wait that long.)

Yesterday's Guardian carried a piece with the arresting title, £26,000: the salary you need just to cover childcare. The article continued, The British pay more for childcare than anywhere else in the world – and planned cuts in tax credits will discourage women from returning to work. It had me in rage all afternoon. Rage, firstly, because childcare in Britain is so damned expensive, and the Tories have let slip that they have no interest whatever in making it easier for mothers to return to work, for after all would they not be better off at home minding the kids in classic 1950s fashion. Rage that the government are once again cutting tax credits in a way that hurts the poorest most. It is not an appealing choice that the Guardian outlines for a single mother on the minimum wage, that of either being trapped at home on benefits or working to sink further into debt; if this government is working on the nudge principle rather than the choice principle, it's clear which way the poor are being nudged, no matter what rhetoric they may have about making work pay.

And then there's the question of how hard it is for a woman to earn £26k and above, even in London, which is where that cost is calculated. I earn well over that, but I have a background of rock-solid middle class privilege, three degrees and - crucially - I am in my mid-thirties. Most heterosexual women have children far before they reach my age. Their chances of earning over £26k are eroded by education, expectations (do what you love, not what's mercenary! do caring feminine work, not mathsy managerial manly work!), and missing out on the crucial career- and income- building years between 25 and 35 if they have children in that window. Median earnings for women aged 30-39, according to the UK National Statistics Agency, are £25896 - almost exactly the cost of childcare for two children in London. Median earnings for women outside of this golden age group are £22152, far below this cost.

But it's not even this that enrages me. I come from Ireland, where child care is just as prohibitively expensive. We know that neither Ireland nor the UK has been prepared to fund childcare via the State in any meaningful way. And we know that the Tories hate women and want them to stay barefoot and pregnant, or possibly pregnant and fragrant. That's not news. What's horrifying, in an insidious, creeping way, is the tone the Guardian takes on the story: if women don't earn above the magic £26k, they might as well give up their jobs. Depressingly, their reasoning for doing so is clear: 'While childcare should be seen as the responsibility of both parents in a double-income household, in reality, the mother's wage is often weighed against the costs.' The article continues, and here is where the real poison lies:

Of course, there are long-term career, monetary and psychological benefits. These include payments into pension plans; the security of a job that will be worth more once the preschool stage is over, and which can hopefully be retained in a recession; and a sense of identity beyond motherhood [...] But when totting up childcare costs [...] these may not come into play.


Avoiding the depressingly frequent trap of female poverty in old age? Building financial security and a meaningful career? Having a strong sense of self beyond the biological function of motherhood? I always thought these were among the core goals of feminism, but no, they don't really count. Women's paid work isn't really meaningful, in the way that men's paid work is; women's work is only ever set against that of a nursery nurse, and no matter what the skills a woman might learn in the workplace while her children are in childcare, what good she might achieve at work, what pension contributions she might make for an independent old age, what promotions she might attain, what a social network she might build up, these are all irrelevant if her salary is less than the cost of childcare. The government says so, the heterosexual couples interviewed appear to say so, and most depressingly, the bastion of left-wing journalism, the Guardian says so. Women don't have careers, they just have jobs for pin-money, and mothering is always the most suitable career for them really.

I think this is massively dangerous. Dropping out of the workforce puts women at risk of poverty in old age, of unemployability if they return to work after a long career gap, makes them dependent on a male partner who may very well become ill, lose his job or leave her, and tells her that a sense of identity outside the home is a frivolous luxury. Why are feminists not screaming about these very real risks, and the dangerous media culture that is promoting them - as well as the government who is exacerbating them? It's this silence that causes me to lose patience with young feminists on the The F Word, who frequently put issues of body image and sex work above those of female poverty, and above all with Laurie Penny, with her talk about how her generation of young women has been uniquely abandoned and isolated by older feminists, whose work is irrelevant to their realities. Younger sisters, wake up! These risks - of poverty, unemployment and erasure of identity - are yours as much as they are ours. Rape culture and poverty in old age, misogynist advertising and the glass ceiling, sexual liberation and economic agencies - these aren't issues that exist in isolation from each other, they are part of a whole patriarchal matrix. A little intergenerational solidarity is required, if we are ever to fight back.

And finally, the obvious disclaimer: I know that women choose to work as mothers for lots of very good reasons. This rant is not intended to attack those choices; it is to point out that it is a choice, and a choice made in a patriarchal context, a choice that has consequences like any other, rather than the natural destiny of women in the Big Society.


03/26/11--09:12: Goodbye, lovely Diana Wynne Jones (chan 2136388)

Diana Wynne Jones has died. I find it very hard to say quite how much her work meant to me. When I first met and fell in love with erisian, he gave me books by Robert Anton Wilson and Hunter S. Thompson to read, grown-up bad-boy books; I gave him The Time of the Ghost, the pinnacle of teenage girl gothness, pitched somewhere magical between Jane Eyre, Flowers in the Attic and Five Children and It. I'm not sure he ever read it or got it; perhaps you had to be a teenage girl to understand. Certainly, although I've giggled at her more recent books, they don't create a core at the heart of me the way that Charmed Life, Powers of Three and Howl's Moving Castle do, the ones I read when I was ten and thirteen.

I loved her books for so many reasons; the beautiful writing, the bone-dry and perfectly timed humour, the truculent, clever characters, the utterly convincing depictions of other magical worlds silly and sublime, the light-hearted references to a range of myths and literature, the rich variety of tone in her books from frothy and fun (The Magicians of Caprona) to unbearably bleak (The Homeward Bounders). Part of me was simply overjoyed that such rich magical writing was being produced in my era, long after the golden days of E. Nesbit and even Alan Garner, a wonderful survival in what seemed to me a children's literature drought of the 1980s.

What I loved most about her books, though, was the truth about families they contained, how utterly wretched and destructive and dysfunctional they can be. In so much children's writing, parents are rendered conveniently absent but saintly (Harry Potter, Narnia), or possibly distant but benevolent (The Treasure Seekers). Diana Wynne Jones's parents and families are spectacularly toxic: the furious and neglectful parents in The Time of the Ghost, the cold and uncaring mother in The Lives of Christopher Chant, the outrageously selfish and uncaring parents in Fire and Hemlock, of the murderous sister in Charmed Life. Even her happy families, in Archer's Goon, or Powers of Three, feature parents who are frequently silly, irresponsible, selfish or slightly crap. It seems an odd thing to praise a children's writer for, but for a teenager who didn't feel particularly at home at home and who often wrestled with an psychologically complex family life that she rarely saw reflected in books, Diana Wynne Jones told a truth that few would acknowledge, while refusing to regress to the tedious gritty realism fashionable in so much other children's literature. You could come from a crap family, be a stroppy self-involved child who makes selfish and arrogant decisions, have genuinely bad things happen to you and still have meaningful, magical, fun adventures that ended in the formation of rich relationships. Wonderful.

And then, possibly the most touching tribute: a dear friend telling me that Witch Week gave him more courage than any other book as a teenager, as the most knowing and powerful allegory for being a gay teenager in a homophobic world. I never even read it that way, I just thought it captured the grinding general misery of school in a dank October perfectly. That's perfect children's writing right there, that can speak to two people very differently, contain a coded but powerful political message, while at the same time reducing them to tears of laughter (that's you, Nirupam Singh on the hoe). I will miss you so much, Diana. Thank you for knowing.


05/24/11--01:51: Women's Work is Worthless, part II (chan 2136388)

A propos of this excellent post on the Anti-Room about motherhood and careers, but also in response to many, many debates in the media about the choice between motherhood and careers. You know the way these debates play out: some point out, rightly, that it is never a choice between fatherhood and careers, now is it? some that most women cannot financially afford the choice not to work, some that the idea of a choice is laughable, because a working mother is still a mother, she doesn't choose not to be one. Some argue that motherhood often involves a profound shift in priorities, and that women often gladly embrace a meaningful existence with their children that they felt was denied them in the cold world of paid work, some that small children are best taken care of by their mothers, some that women are stealing jobs that rightfully belong to male breadwinners, some that money isn't everything.

What infuriates me about all of these motherhood v. career debates is that no-one ever, ever suggests that women’s paid work has some inherent actual value. No, it’s always the woman’s selfish, or rightful, desire to have an activity outside the home, or her desperate need to earn money, that motivates her. No-one ever suggests that a woman’s journalism might have value to society, that being a cleaner, an engineer, an administrator, a politician, an entrepreneur, a nanny is actually contributing to society and the economy in a profoundly important way. A woman with a career is either a juggling marvel or a hard-hearted harridan; in either case, her work affects only herself, her children and her husband. (In these debates, it seems that the mother is almost inevitably allied to a man, though I'd be delighted to be pointed in the direction of lesbian-themed counter-examples.) At the very best, she is a wonderful role model for us all.

But she is never someone who does something that is essential to our lives, such as providing us with higher education, writing novels that entrance us, providing us with efficient service at supermarkets, driving us home at night safely, writing software to help us maximise our profit margins, fighting for our rights in an NGO. No. And because a woman's work is essentially valueless in monetary terms, except to herself, there's another good reason to pay women less and dismiss their work.


(Increasingly, as I get older, while I have solidarity with the debates about female representations in the media, about sexual harassment, about the beauty myth, and most certainly with debates about rape and about access to abortion - all the issues that exercise younger feminists - I feel, profoundly, that in European countries with largely equal legal rights for women, female poverty is the massive, the most important feminist issue. I am in awe with Yvette Cooper and the UK Fawcett Society for campaigning on
his unglamorous issue, because it needs to be fought for, hard.)

(Women's Work is Worthless, part I)


08/01/11--03:14: l'affair Norris (chan 2136388)

I've been meaning to post about David Norris for a while, friends. For non-Irish readers, Norris is an Irish gay rights campaigner, Senator, Protestant, Joycean scholar and all-round raconteur and wit who is running for the Irish presidency. Quite astonishingly, this - to be frank - flaming queen and thorn in the side of the conservative establishment has until this weekend been flying ahead in the presidential race, even though he hasn't yet passed the hurdles required to become an official candidate. If you're not Irish, you may find the rest of the post a little dull, but if you are - or even if you're not - I'd be interested in your thoughts.

There have been two major blows to the Norris campaign so far. Firstly, in May, a nasty Irish journalist by the name of Helen Lucy Burke drew attention to excerpts of an old interview she had done with Norris in which he had suggested that there was some merit in Greek love, viz., not sex with underage boys, but a younger man being initiated into sex by an older one. The interview had been abstract and playful, done long before Norris had declared for the presidency; an Irish Sunday not only ran with the 'Norris supports paedophilia!' line, but, worse, also asked a child abuse survivor for a comment on the issue, which they ran on the front page. Exploitative and horrible; Norris was in no way advocating paedophilia, but discussing the long cultural history of homosexuality. The question does arise though, can an academic ever become president? Our job is to play with ideas, push at received notions and suggest unpalatable alternatives. A good academic must be a heretic who's not afraid of opprobrium or intellectual failure; a president must be above reproach.

The campaign survived, but this weekend, another crisis blew up, and senior staffers quit the campaign as a result. In brief, fourteen years ago, Norris sent a letter to Israeli authorities pleading for clemency for his ex-boyfriend, an Israeli who was charged with having sex with a 15-year-old Palestinian. This time, the crisis hasn't gone away yet.

So here is what I think, in hopefully brief bullet points:



• Maman Poulet, often very wise and reasonable, says the latest affair shows a lack of character. I disagree. I think Norris's character is strong as ever it was. Norris is a tireless human rights campaigner, a man who has never been afraid to say the unfashionable thing if it was morally right, a man who accepts the moral ambiguities in life. I admire that unreservedly.
  
  But it does show that he is a weak political operator. Possibly not unlike another presidential candidate on the other side of the Atlantic, he is a fantastic maverick independent senator, but seems to have little idea as to how to manage the presidential role. That's worrying.



• Maman Poulet also says 'The letter he wrote in defence of Ezra is very David, full of mentions of himself and his thoughts and opinions'. I haven't ploughed through the letter myself, but this analysis rings very true. Norris is very fond of the sound of his own voice. He is very fond of his own funny lines and his own verbiage. I have yet to be convinced that he is that fond of listening. And listening is an essential skill for a non-executive president; it's the skill that McAleese has perfected, that makes her almost universally beloved. Eloquence and brilliant speechifying are excellent traits for a maverick campaigner, for an academic, for a Joycean; they're not good for a representative of an entire nation, who needs to combine dignity with the art of saying precisely the right thing and no more on every occasion.
  
  ETA: Eoin Butler makes just this point, and more jauntily, here: David Norris would make a terrible, terrible president.
  
  Further, I have had a look at his campaign website, and it's thin. I am not convinced that he has a vision for Ireland, beyond the sense that it would be good for the country if he became its president. I'm not convinced that he has a profound understanding of the country and its needs, and a genuine plan for how he could use the peculiar, extremely limited but highly symbolic office of the presidency to transform the country. Like Maman Poulet, I don't think he deserves the presidency just because Ireland wants to prove it's ready for a gay president. Even though he's a fellow-Protestant Dubliner to boot, I don't think I'd vote for him.



• But this doesn't mean that I don't think there's a homophobic hate campaign against him. I do. If you google for his website, Norris for President, the first hit is a homophobic hate site set up to attack him. It is true that presidential candidates have been shot down on obscure and aged scandals before - Brian Lenihan senior is the example I remember - but no-one has been shot down for sexually related issues. In Ireland, sexuality is not a scandal, and not in the French sense of conflating 'rapist' with 'ladies' man'. Private lives have traditionally been genuinely private, as far as the Irish media are concerned... unless, of course, you're gay.
  
  So, the Irish media and conservative establishment seem to have arrived at the point of tolerance where it's fine to be gay so long as you're just like a straight person. Gay and seemingly sexless, a la Graham Norton? Fantastic. Gay and in a nuclear family arrangement, a la Colm O'Gorman? Wonderful and heartwarming. Gay and with a genuinely different sexual history behind you, an irregular sexual history involving on-off partners, secrecy and intergenerational sex? Not OK at all. Weird and gross and probably paedophile. Let's not acknowledge that an older gay man's sexual and romantic experience must of necessity have been radically different to those of a heterosexual Catholic. Let's not acknowledge that it must often have involved breaking the law, given that gay sex was criminal until 1993, that intergenerational love and solidarity must have been essential in a marginalised and terrified community, that gay culture in the mid-twentieth-century had its own very different rituals and mores and customs, that gay life is different and that difference is strength. No. Let's demonise a gay man as a paedophile, again.



So those are my thoughts. I don't have a vote, as an emigrant, but I wouldn't give it to Norris; I'd love Michael D. Higgins for president. Of course, this entire affair has to be seen in the context of the Cloyne report and Irish outrage about clerical child abuse, and I understand that entirely. But this hate campaign disgusts and worries me. A lot.


08/10/11--00:33: Stupid pooey riots (chan 2136388)

From about 4.00, biascut was getting a bit agitated on Facebook worrying about the rumours on Twitter. This struck me as a little too much social media fussing, so when she came home at five, I told her to stop being silly and to go out to her pottery class in the leafy suburbs. Sure if she would be safe anywhere, it would be in posh Chorlton! I sent her on her way, and decided to finish up work in favour of going to Boots for medicine for a very minor complaint. It's ten minutes' walk into the city centre from the houseen, and once I had crossed the boundary into the shopping area, the streets were thrumming with riot police. Glitzy Cathedral Street was filled with nervy teenagers and shoppers; all the high-end shops were shut up, apart from that palace of classiness, the UGG shop, smashed in and looted. Walking on, M&S had a smashed window, JB Sports was boarding itself up, and Boots was shut. Everything was shut. Well, shite. Home for me, dinner and more work.

Except as I came in, biascut came in too. She'd gone to meet her pottery chum @maerk for their ritual burrito-before-pottery at Piccadilly Gardens, locked up her bike, come out to find it turned upside down and the frame dented. Also, the busses to the leafy suburbs were cancelled. So that was that, and she was a little rattled. My father's hotel was on Piccadilly, and I started ringing him to no avail; probably, I consoled myself, he was in a lecture theatre, blissfully unaware of events.

The rest of the night was mostly Twitter, really, and trying to ring my father. I rang my mother in Dublin, who was maddeningly unconcerned, and said, 'Maybe your father is holed up in the university with a gun poking out of the castellated turrets!' Twitter told me Miss Selfridge was up in flames; the Arndale was broken into; Affleck's, the alternative market, was being looted; the shops under Brideshead Revisited's flat being looted (he was fine, but holed up in some alarm); Oxfam was being trashed; the police were chasing gangs of gurriers. Around eleven, I finally got through to my father, who had been at dinner in town only a few metres from the BBC's live riot cam.

'Do you want to come here, Daddy?' I asked, worried. 'It's quiet here, and I know it's hairy in Piccadilly'. 'Oh no, not after the Arndale!' he said. 'It's safer here... erm... there's a crowd of rioters running down the street outside my window... I've never seen so many... they must be organised... oh, there's riot police chasing them down the street... and now they're being encircled against my hotel...'

'Eek, you stay put!' I said, 'we're safe here at least... erm... is that smoke I smell? Oh look, a huge plume of smoke outside my bedroom window... erm... maybe I'd best investigate that'.

Damage done: a rather handsome but derelict Victorian pub set on fire at the edge of our estate, all the streets filled with smoke. I'm about to walk down Piccadilly to get the train, so that will be a little heartbreaking. My mother was supposed to come to Manchester tonight till Saturday, but she's not going to come now; the plan was to shop, and what's the point in that now?

In London, marginalised black people turned on their own areas in a horrifying exhibition of rage and nihilism. Here in Manchester, white kids came in from the suburbs to loot Armani and Ugg. Teenagers testing boundaries, as teenagers do, and going that little bit further than underage drinking in underpasses and smash-and-grab raids on parked cars. It didn't take these riots to tell me that there's an enormous amount of social deprivation and exclusion in Greater Manchester, sure there always has been, since the industrial revolution. Yes, UK society needs changing, and my friend English Thomas optimistically hopes that these events will unmask the bankruptcy of aristocratic rule, but the riots tell us nothing other than that teenagers running riot can go way too far. Shite.

I had grown so proud of the handsome fabric of Manchester and the ambitious building projects that even now, in the thick of the recession, were springing up everywhere around my house. I can only hope that the vandalism acts as a catalyst for renewal, like the IRA bomb. And the worst of it was thinking of my elderly nervy father, alone in his glass tower in the heart of the violence, and me unable to help him one bit other than being on the other end of the phone. Awful. I wonder if my parents will ever come back.


08/15/11--02:06: Scroll past swiftly, grandiose generalisation about the riots alert (chan 2136388)

I HAVE A NEW THEORY ABOUT THE RIOTS. And I will mention it briefly, then move on, because the analysis and reconstruction are much much better left to wiser, more patient, more experienced people than an armchair middle-classnik like me. (Read ultraruby, for instance.) But anyway, I am wondering to what extent the Great British Narrative of Decline informs the situation, at every level. Tories spouting that family breakdown and liberal policing have caused the misery, unlike an imagined golden age in the past where paterfamilias kept order and your friendly local white bobby just had to frown at one of the dastardly gypsies from Enid Blyton and crime was averted. Lefties blaming the cuts in EMA and youth services, as though there were never any riots, any theft or any deprivation in the glorious Blair years or in the 1950s, as though people weren't still dying young of TB and as though all those vaunted manufacturing industry jobs didn't also routinely cause hideous industrial accidents and life-long disability. Liberals talking about poverty of aspiration in an increasingly unequal society, as though the "more equal" Britain of the 1960s wasn't built on a toxic practice of empire and on trade protectionism; just look at Britain's filthy little satrapy in Northern Ireland in those years for a flipside to the narrative of the "age of opportunity", never mind the ways in which Jamaican immigrants or Kenyan freedom fighters were treated.

Britain was better, then. People worked harder, aspired more, had decent jobs to go to, respected community more, were wealthier, healthier, less in thrall to television. Not like today's broken Britain. All the coalition government and the UK media have to offer the British public is a non-stop narrative of misery, austerity, corruption, sinking living standards, cuts in services, poverty in old age, massive middle-class debt, the pauperisation of social tenants, decline and fall.

Maybe I'm wrong, but thinking back to the 1980s Ireland of my childhood, where there was an enormous amount of poverty but not so much social unrest (we exported it to the North), I think that narratives of decline and fall had no place. There was no golden age for us to hark back to; there was the grinding poverty of the 1950s, the unsustainable and preposterous separatism of the 1930s, and the humiliation of colonisation. Whether or not things had been better under the British in the 1910s than under de Valera in the 1940s (as I sometimes suspect they must have been), no Irish citizen in the 1980s and no Irish citizen now yearns to return to British imperial rule. Even now, I don't hear many Irish people saying "if only we could return to the glorious Tiger days of 1999". We know we've messed up, but the only way is forward, hoping and planning for a new better Ireland. And I suspect - though what would I know? - that this is why the Irish culture of education is so much stronger than the British one, where 50% going to university is only an abandoned aspiration (in Ireland, it's the norm, and numbers are going up year on year). Maybe I'm just a big Hegelian banging on about narratives of progress here, but the British narrative of decline just seems to be leading to despair and rancour. I am very tired of it.


09/28/11--00:55: a small aside (chan 2136388)

ME: Why did the Today programme just ask Ed Miliband why people thought he was weird? He's not weird! He's perfectly normal! What an odd question.

biascut: Because he's Jewish. Sorry, am I obsessed?

ME: No, you're quite right. Of course.

*both girls sigh*


10/26/11--09:17: Dear Facebook Friends (chan 2136388)

Please stop posting that wanky macro about how Assange is a HERO and yet treated like a VILLAIN, whereas Zuckerberg is the real CROOK HERE.


Then, when I point out that there are outstanding rape allegations against Assange, and that he has wantonly endangered the lives of human rights defenders by leaking their details, do not respond by saying 'we are all entitled to a fair trial'. We are all indeed entitled to due process, indeed, but skulking abroad evading trial, complaining that we are 'emasculated' by having to wear an ankle tag and playing the martyr does not add to our heroism. Instead, it makes us look like a rapey wanker.

Also, no-one is forcing us to sign up to Facebook. By doing so, we enter into a contract with Zuckerberg willingly - unlike the women who may not have been allowed to consent to sex with Assange, or the defenders who did not consent to the endangerment of their lives.

Seriously, so-called 'friends'. THREE TIMES? Could somebody kill this rapey macro now, please?