October 2010

Felix Gilman’s new book, _The Half-Made World_ is out (Powells, Amazon). I liked it very much indeed (but then, I’ve liked everything that Gilman has written since “stumbling across Thunderer”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/07/thunderer/ ). It’s a steampunk-inflected Western, with a fair dollop of HP Lovecraft thrown in (the malignant ‘Engines,’ whose physical appearance is mostly left undescribed, are genuinely unsettling). The writing is lovely, and the main character a genuinely complex and interesting woman.

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Chris’ post on the Browne reforms[1] in UK Higher Education has prompted me to write a post I’d half-planned a while ago, after seeing this familiar (to Australian eyes) claim.

Too many universities simply state a desire to “achieve excellence in teaching and research” and appear unable to carve out a market niche, Professor Beer said.

The idea that a pseudo-market system (centralised control but with sharper price incentives) will generate diversity is one of many illusions that were exposed during the Australian reform era of the 1990s. Faced with pressure to find a market niche and select a “flagship” program, 37 Australian universities (out of 37) decided that business education and a multitude of specifically labelled vocational degrees were the right niche and that an MBA would be a good flagship. This is scarcely surprising: given the incentives, business degrees were the obvious profit centre.

However, similar choices didn’t produce a homogenous outcome. Rather, the historical hierarchy (century-old sandstones at the top, former teachers colleges at the bottom) which had been somewhat muted when funding flowed a little more freely, re-emerged stronger than ever. At the top, there was enough surplus to maintain, more or less, the full range of disciplines as well as the long-established professional schools (law, pharmacy and so on). The further down the scale you went the less of the arts, humanities and sciences survived. This apparently came as a surprise to the Australian equivalents of Professor Beer (which would be a great name for an Oz Prof, BTW).

Even more bizarre was the shock expressed by some market advocates when they discovered that, with a customer base consisting of 18-year olds who understood their own preferences, and parents who mostly knew very little), the market produced very little demand for anything that was hard and didn’t purport to offer training for a well-paid job. Some of them seriously appeared to think that the market would kill off critical theory in favor of good old-fashioned classical education. In fact, provided the pill was sugar-coated with film studies and pop culture, critical theory didn’t do too badly, at least relative to old-style humanities.

Australia has a long history of importing policies that have already failed in the UK. It’s a source of mild schadenfreude to see the trade going in the opposite direction for once.

fn1. As always, I use “reform” to mean “change in structure” with no implication of approval or disapproval. Given the history of C20, most reforms consist, in large measure, of undoing some previous reform.

Must be something in the water. Just as Henry draws our attention to short books, I see AbeBooks is highlighting books with single-letter titles. I could take this as an occasion to mock-deplore the twitterifictation (twitterfaction?) of literature. But life’s too short.

Cross-posted from the New Statesman Culture blog (original)

It is hard to escape the worry that the arts, humanities and, almost certainly, many of the social sciences face a bleaker future in British higher education if Lord Browne’s report – “Securing a sustainable future for higher education in England” – is implemented. Browne isn’t explicit about this, but on page 25 of the report we find a chilling sentence: “In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefits they create.” The priority courses are listed as medicine, science and engineering. The arts, humanities and social sciences are on their own, and will have to support themselves from student fee income, from research grants and from so-called “QR funding” – allocated by government on the basis of past research performance.
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“Ars Technica”:http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/10/amazon-aims-to-publish-shorter-content-as-kindle-singles.ars

bq. Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter content—meatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called “Kindle Singles,” the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will likely fall between 10,000 and 30,000 words, or the equivalent of a few chapters from a novel. The company believes that some of the best ideas don’t need to be stretched to more than 50,000 words in order to get in front of readers, nor do they need to be chopped down to the length of a magazine article. “Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. (Anyone who has ever read a terrible “business” or “self-help” book consisting of a single idea furiously puffed up into 200 pages of pabulum will no doubt agree with this sentiment.)

While I’m not greatly enthusiastic about Amazon as a company, I am hopeful that this form of publishing takes off (for reasons I “laid out”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/09/towards-a-world-of-smaller-books/ a couple of years ago). I don’t particularly object to overly long self-help books or business books, since even if they were pithier, they usually would not be worth reading. I presume that the actual functions of these books is (in the case of business books) to provide a common, if conceptually empty, jargon for interacting with work colleagues, and (in the case of self-help books) to provide a symbolic substitute for actual self-help. Shorter electronic versions would not necessarily contribute to either of these functions.

However, I _do_ object to books which have an interesting insight, but pad it out across several chapters to make it publishable. More essays around the 20,000 word mark, taking an interesting point and elaborating it more than would be possible in a standard magazine article, would be a very good thing.

I was very shocked reading “this account of police brutalities in Belgium”:http://www.mo.be/index.php?id=340&tx_uwnews_pi2[art_id]=29989&cHash=c7f254ce3e. I really have nothing to add, except that I am going to write, tonight, to the two members of parliament I voted for (one for the senate and one for the chamber), and will ask them (1) what we, concerned citizens, can do, and (2) what they can do to make sure this is properly being investigated. I know most Belgian politicians have other things on their mind (the political difficulties of forming a majority coalition look more insurmountable each day), but surely that cannot be an excuse for letting the police getting away with treating innocent people like this.

Regular commenter Tom Hurka expressed complete dismay a couple of years ago when I told him that I hadn’t seen any live music for 16 years or so (the last concert being Pentangle at the late lamented Palms in Davis CA). I did nothing to correct this omission at the time. But in February one of my undergraduate students invited me to go see her and her dad perform together at a local coffee shop: the kids (who know her a little as a babysitter) were riveted, so much so that the girls wouldn’t leave, and forced me to come back and pick them up an hour after we’d had to leave with the little horror (quite understandably, as you can tell from listening to her here — our horror was singing Jolene, with most of the lyrics gleaned from a single hearing, for months afterward, and her version of “Bad Romance” inspired our 13 year old to start playing Lady GaGa songs on the ukulele at her school talent shows). This experience prompted my wife to say we should go to live music sometimes which, indeed, we have started doing (our first outing, oddly enough, being to see Neil Young, supported by Bert Jansch who, therefore, constituted the bookends to our long drought of live music, and there’s no-one I’d sooner play that role).

So we went to see Suzanne Vega last night, with a couple of friends. I had completely forgotten that I once owned her first two albums (when they were actual records), and was therefore surprised to find that I knew about half the songs she sang, rather than just the three hits I had in my head. The venue was what I think they call “intimate” — in other words, she can’t have made much money from it (I reckon there were around 300 people in a 500 capacity theater, with tickets selling at $30 each, and she is touring with a sound mixer, a bassist, a guitarist and someone else). Anyway, she was great — her voice still pure, her songs good enough to please my wife and our friends, none of whom had as much prior interest as I did, and, most surprisingly, her stage persona quite at odds with the tenor of her songs. While the songs are reserved, reflective and not really cheerful for the most part, she is, herself, funny, self-deprecating but confident, and relaxed. After listening to a somewhat harrowing song the audience would burst out laughing at her stories and jokes.

She was promoting a series of retrospective albums that started coming out a few months ago. The second is released tomorrow, but, looking for it, I saw that the mp3 version of Close-Up, Vol 2, People and Places (Deluxe Edition) is for sale for only $3.99, today and tomorrow only. Worth it, if you have fond memories of her. UPDATE: I found a plausible explanation of the economics of the tour and album here.

Sad news.

A few days ago, Germany made the final payment on the reparations imposed in the Treaty of Versailles, bringing to an end the formal consequences of the Great War that began in 1914 and continued, in one form or another, throughout the 20th century.[1] Many of the new states that emerged from the war (the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) have now disappeared, though the consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement are very much still with us. I don’t really have the basis for a post on this, but I thought this event deserved some kind of acknowledgement anyway.

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Following up my Trolley post: I didn’t realize until just now that Philippa Foot died on October 3. So let’s have a separate, more serious thread for anyone with thoughts about that.

My 9-year old daughter was rather curious about my Trolley cartoons, so we made a podcast. Her art criticism is spot-on, no question, and she makes some pretty strong moral claims. What do you think? (Don’t worry. I have her permission to post this. I interviewed my 6-year old, as well, but she declined to give consent to publish her philosophical work at this time.)

Here’s how you grade a hundred and twenty five papers. Grade five. Take a break. Grade another five. Take a longer break. Repeat.

Really I should be doing yoga or swimming, not looking at any sort of screen at all – but things are a bit slow around here, so …

I like this train. Click link for larger – it’s part of the Field Museum collection.

In other graphical science news, I just finished Atomic Robo Volume 4: Other Strangeness [amazon]. It’s fun! [click to continue…]

For those of us of a certain age, Sunday afternoons were spent watching old films on telly (where on earth were our parents, I wonder?). The best films starred Jack Hawkins or George Formby, but for me the most keenly anticipated were Norman Wisdom’s films. It was only for Wisdom that I noted the time in the Radio Times to be sure to see the whole thing. Looking back, I imagine they all had the same plot, and the same jokes, and the same pratfalls. But who cared? They were all funny, all innocent, all brilliant. Sorry to see him go. But glad that the DVD revolution means I can watch whenever I want. Guardian obit here. Clips, wonderfully arranged, here. Brian Logan’s appreciation.

Charles Ferguson has “a nice piece”:http://chronicle.com/article/Larry-Summersthe/124790/ in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ about Larry Summers, the economics profession and their position in American public life. Definitely worth a read.