@AlexHardwick95
Fond memories from undergrad days in the 1980s where the lecturer turned on a slide machine, the slides all popped out like toast, + as she stepped back to assess the disaster leant on a door + fell into a cupboard full of cleaning equipment, neatly locking the door behind her.
…which is to teach the ineffectual youngest sons of the minor aristocracy how to be curates agonising about transubstantiation in minor parishes in and around the Cotswolds, yeah?
In a burst of nostalgia for actual books, just popped into Gower Street Waterstone's. In the science fiction section there's a giant Dalek which, if you get within ten feet of it, barks 'SANITISE!' at you very suddenly. Well played.
Royal Mail are doing a classics of British science fiction set of stamps on Friday — books selected by me, with weirdly active involvement in the design of the stamps too! 1/3
David Remnick, on New Yorker Radio Hour, trying to sum up
#Brexit
:
‘It sounds to me like it’s a ... giant bollocks’
English guest: [long silence] ‘No one in England would use that idiom, David, although it is indeed, as you say, “a giant bollocks”’
There's an advert out there for a Senior Lecturer in literature at Geneva University with the salary range of £108-146k. Ever get the feeling you're in the wrong country at the wrong time with the wrong job under the wrong government?
Here’s the official announcement by my college that we are withdrawing from UK league tables. Fantastic decision for a college committed to radical democratic access to higher ed, not divisive hierarchies. Good job!
Scenes from the British Library, no. 1: there’s a woman over there reading Diderot in the original French through a GIANT magnifying glass, chortling madly. Next up, she has a huge biog of Jane Fonda.
For 197 years my college
#Birkbeck
has basically said: you know what, forget what your
#AlevelResults
are, let’s just have a conversation about your aims and ambitions instead. Take a look, give us a call.
For anyone in university arts busy internalising Sunak's mean-spirited attack on 'low-value degrees', my English dept more than meets the measures of completion and success in further study or jobs, thank you for asking. It's business + computing that can be concerning 1/2
@BellaHonessRoe
@AlexHardwick95
Best unscripted pratfall I've ever seen, and I've seen a poor woman sit down with a grande latte, only for her handbag to fall off her shoulder jolting her arm, causing her to very tidily tip her grande into said handbag.
@TheProfRog
@TheProfRog
Hi Roger, The Sun Online would like to feature your Tesco Tweet with a credit. If you could let me know if that's okay, it'd be very much appreciated. Thanks, TC.
Nine month job, 4 hours teaching per week for two terms + to act as Director of Studies for all English students in the college: yours for exactly £7188 — a fraction of what’s spent on a single term at a public school to get many of those students to Oxford in the first place.
Senior resignations from UUK must surely follow this strike — and we all need to step up to matters of governance to stop these pirates taking over the future of the university
#ussstrike
Hey, I wonder if Rees-Mogg was deliberately trying to echo the doomed hero of the 1885 Gordon Relief, Frederick Burnaby, killed in a deeply pointless expression of national pride?
Also, the correct prefixing honorific for any Rees-Mogg is ‘that cunt’, with no comma e.g. ‘that cunt Jacob Rees-Mogg’. During Michaelmas term only it is acceptable to use intensifiers, e. g. ‘that absolute cunt Jacob Rees-Mogg’. Check your work.
ITV News exclusive:
@Jacob_Rees_Mogg
issues new style guide to his staff demanding male MPs are called Esq, the use of imperial measurements and which words are banned (but not 'not fit for purpose'), reports
@PaulBrandITV
@geraintgriffith
UPS — we experimentally delivered this by drone, it’s now in a field outside Mosul, do you have time to answer this 850-question customer satisfaction survey?
Sudden pang to be in a minor German city, walking slightly too far in bad shoes to a museum that remains mystifyingly closed despite repeatedly checking opening times, then ordering a mildly disappointing lunch with weird-tasting sauerkraut
The military to be called in to universities to break the strikes: “C’MON YOU ORRIBLE TOE-RAGS GIVE ME SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY NOW OR YOU’LL ALL FIND OUT WHAT THE ROMANTIC AGONY REALLY IS”
No one tells you that if you spend 25 years in academia you eventually get promoted all the way to being a data entry clerk on clunky digital interfaces for 10 hours a day. It's really very exciting.
Awful news from Goldsmiths College, back for another 130 job cuts, and another sign of systemic collapse in arts and humanities at universities outside the elite circle. Yet we seem okay with this slow, deadly impoverishment of cultural life. Just awful.
In a migraine cluster: here’s a good representation of the scintillating visual aura that unfolds in my eye for c20 minutes before spooling out to the periphery of vision. Very weird, freaky and uncanny every damn time it comes to visit.
Many universities remain on strike for the whole of this week. Support your local
#UCUstrike
. You may not give a shit about our pensions, but let’s at least try to get more stable working conditions for young people entering the profession
Lovely project ‘Hospital Senses’ by Victoria Bates et al over in Bristol: six booklets on hospital spaces, with Corridors, OBVIOUSLY, the most important.
Theresa May only needs to be defeated another 8 times, then she’ll have the exact experience most of us have of applying to the AHRC for grants
#NicheAcademicBitterness
So universities, as well as somehow being tasked to solve social inequalities ingrained in an intrinsically unequal school system, now also have to be responsible for the career choices students make after graduation. We also do juggling, bar mitzvahs and world peace.
Hey, I guess I should tell you that I've been asked to step in to the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of 19th Century Studies at Birkbeck, with the retirement of Hilary Fraser. Amazing! As you know, you must approach an established chair backwards, respectfully showing yr arse to chair.
Moderating marks of a colleague, who comments to a student: 'Whenever someone uses "interestingly" in an essay, it's a sign they still need to think something through a little more' *breaks out in cold sweat of appalled self-recognition*
I once saw
#BorisJohnson
get on a tube, just before the Mayoral election, to show he was a man of the people. He looked immensely pleased with himself for at least 20 seconds before someone shouted: 'You may be on the tube, Boris, but you're still an absolute c*nt!'
Thinking a lot about Mark Fisher’s project ‘Boring Dystopia’ recently. Who knew that the definitive onset of climate collapse would be so tedious, so bureaucratic, our last years of security filling out online forms and converting docs to PDFs and back again, all day? It’s weird.
Congrats to my old mate Sherryl for this coming out — I wrote a chapter for it about Bucky Fuller geodesic domes and how the hippy counterculture took them up in the architecture of Drop City onwards.
Novelist Christopher Priest died yesterday. He could make reality slide out from underneath you like nobody else, always putting out deeply unsettling, provoking reads. He was one of very few writers I bought the *instant* his books came out. RIP.
Perhaps now is the time to admit I only got my job at Birkbeck in 1994 because Laura Marcus liked my boots. Lord knows, it wasn’t my presentation, which was utterly, utterly shit. RIP
You know, I’ve just re-read Goblin Market for the first time since I was an undergrad and I have the sneaking suspicion that it may not be about juicy fruit after all.
My first two PhD students back in the 90s, brilliant scholars and teachers both, have now taken voluntary redundancy rather than enter a Darwinian fight for their own jobs. The talent and commitment lost. The sheer waste of it. It’s happening everywhere. Fuck this government.
Here’s the Lucien Freud painting I was looking at when I got the news my father had died. John Bernard Sinclair Luckhurst 21.06.1932–27.12.2022. Peace out x
I'm giving a talk tonight about the life and work of Philip K. Dick, and I was literally seconds away from pressing send on an email of my Powerpoint images to the organiser under the title 'Dick pics'
It’s only a couple of weeks away to my Gothic: An Illustrated History coming out. People often ask me: “But will there be double spread images where the book stares back at me in a malignant manner?” and I’m here to reassure you that will never, ever happen
on some measures ... so why not recommend doing a classic, wide-ranging and highly flexible humanities degree to anyone thinking about going (or going back) to university this autumn?
#EnglishCreates
Today thinking about the valuable advice my PhD supervisor gave me 30 years ago: “If you ever have to lecture on something you’re not at all confident about, wear a very loud shirt”
“I know, Natalie, it *is* an unusual meeting room, isn’t it, but the Parliamentary Labour Party always holds its meetings in here, I can assure you. Please, after you.”
The replacement for the EU ‘Erasmus’ student exchange scheme with a UK ‘Turing’ scheme is so perfectly named: toleration of brilliance while never properly funding it, followed by some state persecution, and a belated apology for screwing it all up over 50 years later.
I know there are several urgent issues facing the world currently, but I need to alert you that there is an ABSENT-MINDED, LOUD, TUNELESS HUMMER at large in one of the British Library reading rooms RIGHT NOW.
That’s an amazingly diverse Cabinet: the first time in history all four horsemen of the apocalypse have held the top posts (also a promotion for Pestilence, congrats!)
We’re proud to reveal a world first in global rankings and a step towards a more sophisticated view of international higher education: the Times Higher Education Europe Teaching Rankings
#TeachingEx
#THEunirankings
Today is the first day of term at my college, which means today is the day I mark 25 years working at Birkbeck College. It also means that *this* Kit-Kat here in front of me is the 18, 457th Kit-Kat I have eaten at Birkbeck College.
Apologetic note from Swedish academic that they can only offer £850 for a PhD viva, followed by deeply apologetic note from Italy: merely £400. We are such absolute mugs in the UK, complicit in the devaluing of academic labour!
Genuine PhD viva question I was in the room for this week: “if you were to burn your thesis on a sacrificial altar not everything would disappear in the smoke of its own meaning: there would be a residue. What would that residue be made of?”
My favourite thing this week: one of the local baristas is venturing into English idiomatic usage after a very hesitant start. For the last two days he has welcomed me with the salutation “Hello, girlfriend!” If anyone ever corrects him on this, I will be peeved.
Just sat on a park bench and a had a chat with a smiley biddy who told me about the time her dad went to the local working men’s club in 1905, and had a bit of a row with the guest speaker, Lenin. Extraordinary
‘Ah no, Professor Luckhurst, you are merely *in scope* for redundancy, no more than that, perhaps we could discuss this more in the special meeting room we’ve set up?’
“Keir Starmer: I wouldn’t be able to go to university today.”
One thing he cd do in his own constituency is fight to keep Birkbeck College alive as its mission of access to higher education for working Londoners is ground under the heel of Tory policy
We got my dad in the Guardian today, and happenstance put the announcement next to the obit of the great travel writer Jonathan Raban. The sun shone and the Mendips were beautiful. Peace out xxx
Thank heavens universities have been ranked for something this week, it's been at least 5 days since the last one and I was beginning to worry those feelings of worthlessness and despair were receding
#TEF