ChristieBooks Videos

[Update, 5 February 2009: after rising costs meant that the archive almost disappeared from the web, I'm happy to say that ChristieBooks films are now hosted here. The links below are now redundant, but the videos are being re-encoded and uploaded gradually. Hopefully all the material I mention below will become available again on the new site in due course.]

I’ve been checking out just some of the many excellent films now being hosted by ChristieBooks via Brightcove.TV. While particularly strong on the history of anarchism (often in the context of Spain or Latin America), the subject-matter is highly eclectic. There’s a lot for us hispanophiles, including footage and newsreels from the Spanish Civil War and material on the wonderful Chilean singer Victor Jara (one of the first victims of Pinochet’s 1973 coup, and a hero of mine since I first conjugated the verb ‘recordar’). But there really is something for everyone with an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary history. I recommend a leisurely browse through the whole menu.

Here are direct links to just a handful that particularly caught my eye:

The Mp3 of the 1960s

Finding an authoritative, let alone definitive, version of the history of this beautiful and important little artefact has proved quite extraordinarily difficult. If anyone can point me in the right direction on this I really would be grateful. (I’ll make them a Rock Opera ‘mix tape’ as a reward: although we must always remember that ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’!)

Perhaps because it was so ubiquitous from the later 1960s until the early 1990s (and is still going strong, particularly in what we used to call ‘the Third World’) no-one has yet considered the history of the ‘Compact Cassette’ worth writing. Maybe there is a decent source which I just haven’t found. But after a three-day hunt (no kidding) simply to verify a footnote I strongly suspect this one has slipped through the historiographic net. There is, therefore, a rewarding little gap in the market waiting to be filled.

Dead grotty, man

Here’s a little lexical fact which may be well-known, but was completely new to me.

Rowana Agajanian’s excellent chapter in the very useful Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture edited by Aldgate, Chapman and Marwick (London: IB Taurus, 2000) reveals that the word “grotty” only entered general English usage in 1964 when it was put into the mouths of The Beatles (particularly George Harrison) by writer Alun Owen through his screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night. “Grotty” is, apparently, a contraction of ‘grotesque’.

Incidentally, while it is fairly widely known that Brian Epstein had asked Joe Orton to write an early (and rejected) version of the next Beatles film, Help!, A Hard Day’s Night was originally to be scripted by Johnny Speight, creator of Alf Garnett and Till Death Us Do Part. Speight was unavailable, hence the job fell to Alun Owen – a highly regarded contributor to ITV’s Armchair Theatre and a writer very much of the ‘Northern realist’ or ‘kitchen sink’ genre. Owen had a particularly acute ear for the vernacular. This, presumably, is why ‘grotty’ now sounds so natural in the mouths of The Beatles, even though, as Paul McCartney later told Barry Miles, none of them had ever heard let alone used the word prior to shooting A Hard Day’s Night.

Is this one of those linguistic facts which everyone except me already knew, I wonder?

This is all part of my attempt to get to grips with the linguistic tropes of the period. If some linguist type hasn’t already written a PhD on ‘hep talk’ of the 1960s they certainly should. In a nutshell, social-science heavy, quasi-Marcusian jargon combined with (often rather vague) ‘New Age’ and ‘mystical’ or ‘Eastern’ concepts seems fairly universal in British, American and (from what I’ve read in translation) West German ‘counter-cultural’ texts of the time. The US Yippies added a distinctive soupcon of Situationist humour. In Britain, much of any added humour which is on display comes from The Beatles, and particularly John Lennon. The influence of The Goons and even English Music Hall is often apparent, particularly in The Beatles’ love of blatant puns and double entendres. The title A Hard Day’s Night, leapt upon by Lennon, itself came from Ringo Starr, infamous for his subconscious malapropisms. I’ll leave this area to skilled writers who can step inside the first person and replicate such dialogue. Andrew O’Hagan captures the late-50s ‘jazz daddy-o’ school brilliantly in the character of Michael in his novel Personality and, as we’ve seen, Mike Myers has the ‘Swinging London hipster’ turn-of-phrase tripping from the tongue of Austin Powers.

The point is: we recognise it when we see or hear it even if, as in the case of ‘grotty’, we don’t know exactly where it started.

It’s not my job to make judgments, of course….but, innit, like, so much more entertaining and witty than, like, the ‘street talk’ of today, geez? (And certainly closer to grammatical correctness.) Or is I, like, dissin da kidz of da new millennium? Hang loose, man.

Two Virgins?

Uncanny. Just as I finish reading In the Sixties by Barry Miles (London: Jonathon Cape, 2002), BBC London’s evening TV news bulletin reports on a visit by Yoko Ono to a ‘re-creation’ in Soho of Indica, the “gallery where John met Yoko”. Indica was, of course, a bookshop and gallery run by John Dunbar (then married to Marianne Faithfull) and Barry Miles with financial input from Peter Asher of ‘Peter and Gordon’ fame. Peter was also the brother of actress Jane, who was then going out with Paul McCartney, who also helped to redecorate Indica, which rapidly became the place where everyone who was anyone hung out…

And so it goes on: and therein lies the problem with separating the wheat from the chaff of the plethora of memoirs of ‘counter-culturalists’ “who were there”. An affable and articulate man in the flesh, Barry Miles’ book provides an exceptionally detailed genealogy of what he considers to be the ‘counter-culture’ or ‘underground’, or ‘anti-Establishment culture’ (he uses the terms interchangeably). He chronicles who shared a flat with whom, who shared a bed with whom and who shared their drugs with whom.

What he never offers the reader, however, is any coherent explanation for a) why he and his friends behaved as they did b) why we should consider their behaviour in any way ‘counter-cultural’ c) why anyone other than those involved should now care about what they got up to.

As you may have gathered, I was highly frustrated by his book. The endless succession of drug anecdotes palls rapidly. Miles provides much evidence in favour of charges that none of us should care about (and publishers should not destroy so many trees over) the youthful japes of perhaps a couple of hundred predominantly bourgeois young people who happened to be in London between around 1965 and 1968. If only he could have told us why they did what they did, what it was that they actually achieved (or, at the very least, believed they were achieving), and why we should still care.

Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography, ghost-written with David Dalton (Faithfull, London: Michael Joseph, 1994) provides as many anecdotes and nearly as much genealogy. However, she casts a far more healthily cynical eye over what she now believes was actually going on. Miles is never po-faced and, to be fair to him, he has no need to justify why we should be interested in what a bunch of Beat poets (predominantly American), pop stars and minor aristocrats got up to while taking large amounts of drugs in their youth. After all, I am already interested: I bought his book, didn’t I?

What Marianne conveys better is the desire for exploration, experimentation, libertarianism and hedonism which underpinned the actions of her and many others. She conveys the combination of bourgeois rebellion, drugs (often courtesy of feckless minor aristocrats from the ‘Chelsea set’ which she identifies as the jeunesse doree) and pop star money which constituted her and Miles’ particular sub-section of the ‘counter-culture’.

Her candour about her naivete (even as she became a pop star) is refreshing:

“I was just a typical child of my time, I suppose – open to everything. I was being a teenager: curious, rebellious, in quest of the forbidden…From my little girl’s perspective, it was all connected to hipness. I was putting together a persona out of a lot of diverse elements. It was all unfocused. The sixties hadn’t happened yet, there were only hazy intimations of what was coming…I was hellbent on being there when it happened – whatever it was!” (p.21)

She stresses the importance of individual agency and the extent to which the ‘counter-culture’ could be considered merely the activities of a group of young people with too much time and money on their hands searching for individual and group identity through finding something (anything) to do:

“The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together. Sixties London actually has its own origin myth. All these people – gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristos and assorted talented layabouts – more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the Creation. The Ur myth was concocted, rather typically, in an espresso bar in Chelsea…Early in 1963, John {Dunbar} and a man called Paolo Leone, a left-wing beatnik type, and Barry Miles, John’s partner, put their heads together and hatched a plot. I was just a young girl watching these mad intellectuals all dressed in existential black charting the future of the globe.”

She offers, with more than a little self-irony, the closest we can perhaps get to a coherent ‘manifesto’: “They had it all worked out. ‘It’s going to be the psychic bloody centre of the world, man!’ ” (p.25)

I heard Miles acknowledge in a discussion at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2005 that, for him, the ‘counter-culture’ was predicated entirely upon the use of drugs. Drugs formed the key means of economic exchange and bound all participants in a culture of ‘oppositional’ behaviour. I took this to be a simplistic, ‘headline’ representation on his part. Unfortunately, 300 pages of his book offer us little more enlightenment or explanation than this, despite the claim of his publisher on the cover blurb that “this book tells the real story of the 1960s counterculture, from the inside”, or gushing Amazon reviewers, grateful that “Miles really makes you feel as though you are there.”

The moot point is: can such behaviour be considered in any way subversive in the political sense? Or was it merely a furtive and thrilling (for the participants) bond of illegal behaviour through drug use? It is difficult to conclude other than that what both Miles and Marianne describe was, more accurately, a sub-culture: on the strength of both books, it cannot be considered a ‘counter-culture’ at all.

Another accolade

It’s not only Dr Todman who gets praise from me. Following the lead of The Guardian last week, I feel the urge to lavish a little praise on Professor Peter Hennessy in advance of the release of his new book Having It So Good (Allen Lane, 2006) on Thursday 19th October. Peter has, in my humble opinion, a unique ability to combine rigorous historical research with journalistic pace and immediacy. His writing also has a degree of wit and panache which has, not surprisingly, earned him a large number of fans beyond the confines of the academy. I was one of them. Peter is one of the key reasons I decided that Queen Mary was the most worthwhile choice of university/college at which to gamble on a return to studying Contemporary History. And I’m glad I did – not least because Peter turned out to be a very generous, active and supportive teacher. Not only is he a considerate man; he’s great fun too. So if you haven’t read any of his books, why not start with this new one?

Le Roi Jen-kins

My relative quiet on the blogging front is due to my juggling of several mini-projects at the moment. All of these should come to fruition in the next few weeks. All will be revealed in due course.

However, here is a link to an insightful review by my fellow PhD-er Henry Miller of a new(ish) book on Roy Jenkins.

Jenkins – love or loathe him – was a pivotal figure in the shaping of British political, social and cultural life throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s. And if anyone is well-placed to pass judgement on Roy Jenkins: A Retrospective, edited by Andrew Adonis and Keith Thomas, (OUP, 2004), then it is Mr Miller. I’m delighted Henry has had this review published. He commends at least parts of the book, but rightly also namechecks Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Healey and Jenkins – a brilliant, highly readable account of the central trio of Labour intellectual ‘heavyweights’ and their roles in the upper echelons of the Party in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hoop Jumping II

A large part of my recent intellectual impasse is due to the H word – ‘historiography’. “I’m examining the historiography”. “I’m surveying the literature”. How these phrases make my heart sink. As grandiose and arrogant as it may sound, my function, surely, is not to praise or damn existing histories, some of which are useful and some of which are not. My job is to (attempt) to write new ones. If ‘the historiography’ was all bad I wouldn’t be working in this discipline at all. But if it was all good I would have nothing to add.

‘Reading is the enemy of writing’, says a certain Professor at Queen Mary (not, I should add, in the History department). How right he is. There comes a point when, having surveyed as much of the existing territory as is possible, one then has to move on, confident that what is relevant has been assimilated. I’ve yet to develop the confidence to know when I’ve reached this point. I’m not a natural rebel, and can be hamstrung by my own ‘conscientiousness’. I’m not good at ‘winging it’. I tend to slog on, trying to absorb it all, worrying that I may have missed something vitally ‘canonical’, until I reach a point where, frankly, I’ve sickened myself and my head is about to explode. Part of the make-up of those who revel in academic ‘Hoop Jumping’ is an almost orgasmic reaction to the word ‘historiography’. I, on the other hand, react to it with a sense of (non post-coital) depression. The Educating Rita definition of ‘What is Historiography?’ simply has to be: historians talking to historians about other historians. And yes, most of them are White, Male and Dead – although I’m never quite sure which ones. It all smacks of a Hierarchy (if not a self-perpetuating oligarchy), an Establishment, a Canon – which is, after all, what some of us are unashamedly seeking to challenge, and perhaps, at least in part, to smash. But even in the relativist, multi-culturalist, supposedly egalitarian and multi-vocal new millennium, this is dangerous talk: one will be labelled “An Old Leftie” or, worse still, what the culturalists would term “The Other”.

In order to be accepted by The Profession (as historians nowadays, like estate agents and hairdressers, love to call themselves) one has to submit to its discursive norms. This has proved as true as in my experience with the musical and theatrical Professions. One has to gain entry into the tent in order to then be able to piss all over it; or, at the very least, to re-arrange the furniture. This ‘entryist’ line is a tricky one to walk alone. Inspiration and support are required. To paraphrase Benjamin Britten, once one has learned the rules of Western harmony and counterpoint one can break them all – but only after they have been learned. Likewise, actors, despite what they may say on chat shows, very rarely subscribe to the polar opposites of The Method, or the Old School dictum of ‘learn your lines and don’t bump into the scenery’. They develop a system, a (lower-case) method, which works for them as individuals, and varies according to the role/project in hand. A bit of this and a bit of that; an eclectic cross-section of influences, plus the unashamed influence of personal experience (when it is relevant) – these are what fuse into an individual ‘voice’, in whatever field one is working. Don’t they?

Well, there is some real hope, in the contrasting and uber-canonical voices of Raymond Williams and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. FFN provides, for me, both realism and vindication:

“History, in short, has multiplied; indeed, it has exploded. The work of professional historians has never been as multifarious…Above all, the numbers of professional historians have exploded with the expansion of higher education. The results have been mixed. They include the curse of over-specialization: historians dig ever deeper, narrower furrows in ever more desiccated soil until the furrows collapse and they are buried under their own aridity…Deeper in the public arena, we seem to have forgotten how to influence debate and policy on the leading issues of the day…History is the most open and accessible of academic disciplines. Everybody can do it – indeed everybody does do it, because everybody has experience of the past and all people have privileged access to the sources of their own stories. It requires no special training, except in modest skills which any literate person can easily and quickly pick up without help. There are good reasons for being a graduate student in history, but the acquisition of peculiar professional competence, or of esoteric or hieratic knowledge, is not one of them…As well as including all people, history should include all disciplines. If I remember correctly, my reason for becoming a historian was the sheer voracity of my interests. Unable to choose between the disciplines which attracted me, I fixed on the one which included a little of all the others.”
F Fernandez-Armesto, ‘Epilogue: What is History Now?’, D Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp.149, 150, 152.

Williams famously wrote:
“I can work in these general fields only to the limit of my own interests, and do not suppose these to be ideally complete. Indeed I have already risked an extension and variety of themes will beyond the limits of any kind of academic prudence, for what seems to me the good reason that there is no academic subject within which the questions I am interested in can be followed through; I hope one day there might be, for it was quite obvious from the discussion of Culture and Society that the pressure of these questions was not only personal but general.”
R Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp.ix-x.

This is often interpreted as the clarion call which launched the discipline of Cultural Studies, from which I firmly believe all in the Humanities can learn an enormous amount. However, given that Williams was, in fact, a Professor of Drama, I prefer to adopt it as a manifesto which allows the moulding of any discipline to the task in hand, not vice versa. This discipline of ‘History’ is where I’ve landed. It is mine now, as much as anyone else’s. I’ve been allowed into the tent. The primary objective for 2006 is, therefore, some major spring-cleaning. Let’s see just how far ‘academic prudence’ can be stretched: how much ‘the one’ can be made to include ‘a little of all the others’.

Enough rumination for now. As of 9th January the Independent Research Proper begins, and this site will revert to a 1960s/70s smorgasbord. Ready or not, it is now time for nothing other than what the funding bodies would love to hear me call My Original Contribution To The Field.

Hoop Jumping I

This is the first of an occasional series of posts on the academic, personal and regulatory demands which are placed on MPhil/PhD candidates. This can, of course, only reflect my own experience of the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts of Actually Doing And Getting That PhD. These ‘Hoop Jumping’ posts will be unashamedly subjective, reflective, ruminative; sometimes optimistic, sometimes bitter – but undoubtedly cathartic. They may strike some chords with others going through similar experiences in the cathedrals, theme-parks, morgues and play-houses of academia around the country and the world. They may be of interest or use to no-one other than me.

But at the end of the first term and start of the second, where am I on the enthusiasm/progress/wisdom-of-starting-this-whole-endeavour scale? How does is it all feel? How can I fix what doesn’t feel good? How can I maintain what does? How can I cope better with jumping through the academic, regulatory hoops and deadlines which appear in my path, offering little help – and often hindrance by the bucket-load – in getting on with the job I am being funded to do?

I will offer one major piece of advice to anyone considering starting a PhD in the Humanities: don’t waste a moment of your time, let alone any of your money, on the plethora of “How to get/Should I do a PhD” books. Some are more intelligent and intelligible than others, but that’s not the point. The simple fact of the matter is this: if you need to read them you are not ready to do a PhD (and perhaps never will be). They stress only two key points: i) find a supervisor with whom you believe you can develop a productive working relationship ii) research a subject which engages you. Ye gods! Which ill-informed sadomasochist would choose to enter into PhD hell for a minimum of three years without both of these as prerequisites? Yet large numbers do. Numerous last-minute funding opportunities in an unknown university, working on a research topic of little interest to the candidate, with a supervisor they’ve never met (and will probably rarely meet) can be grasped every October. Or there is, for some, the ‘self-funding’ route – effectively, buy a PhD.

For my part, the idea of a candidate scrabbling after the letters DPhil at all costs – and an institution cynically helping them to do so – is utterly abhorrent. I couldn’t do it, but many can, which is why so many pointlessly microscopic theses are churned out every year by ‘Historians’ whose wider hinterland is non-existent. Regardless of their chronological age, many of these people are, in terms of their wider emotional and intellectual development, little more than children. Many have never functioned outwith the education system. Some never will. Many never want to. But by god, do these people know how to jump through academic hoops – which they should do, as the heart-breaking fact is that their objective is, or becomes, nothing other than getting a PhD in Getting A PhD. This term has made it abundantly clear to me that I am not one of them. Sometimes I envy them. For about five minutes.

I spent six months agonizing over whether I should even embark on a PhD. I did not jump at the first flattering noises which were made in my direction; nor should anyone, because they’re really not as flattering as they may sound at the time. All they signal is recognition of a basic level of competence. They do not signify the start of a glittering career, less still any interest in the proposed candidate as an individual – let alone a fulfilling and happy life. We should never forget that much of the life of the contemporary academic consists of getting ‘bums on seats’, be they undergraduate, postgraduate or research. That’s not cynicism, it’s reality. From the first moment I allowed myself seriously to entertain the thought of further research, I was adamant with myself and others that the right supervisor and research area were utterly essential to me. This first term has proved me absolutely correct on both of these counts.

I should, therefore, be celebrating these two achievements. I’ve made good progress in clarifying precisely what I’m going to be addressing in my thesis. And I’ll be saying little more about my supervisor other than that he has rarely put a foot wrong in relation to me so far. His is brilliant at his job, generous with his time and, in general, a bloody good bloke (see Trench Fever.) So I’m optimistic on those fronts.

But what else is there to deal with? Why the pervasive sense of frustration? And should I be panicking that I feel such frustration already? More to follow.