6 – The Slow Professor – Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy
The Slow Professor is a slim, bordering on slight, treatise on the growing bureaucratic managerialism that infects University thinking in many countries. It forms, along with Stefan Collini’s ‘What are Universities For’ (which it liberally references) a compelling and insightful deconstruction of why universities are often failing in their core duty. That is to produce generations of scholars (professional and otherwise) who are in a position to ask informed, impertinent questions in the hope of arriving at pertinent answers. I found it very convincing, but partially I expect because it was like someone had taken my own thoughts over the years and pinned them to paper.
The basic thesis of the book is this – the life of an academic is fragmented to the point it is no longer really possible to think deeply about anything. That’s true whether it’s teaching, research, general scholarship or simply understanding a topic. That the corporate forces that have infected universities have even changed the way we talk about the job, which in turn has mangled the way we think about the job. And it makes a strong case for joy as a primary motivator for quality – that we are at our best as teachers and scholars when we love what we do. It doesn’t advocate working less. It advocates working better.
I find it a little frustrating to be an academic in Sweden. To harken back to the first book I read for this project (A Thousand Ships), I often feel like Cassandra of Greek myth – blessed with visions of the future but cursed to be disbelieved. And I feel that way because I came from the UK system, which I often describe as ‘twenty years along the trajectory Swedish universities are following’. As in, I know the future. I know where a lot of the early, nascent discussions within the academy end up going. And I see the same utterly predictable catastrophes-in-waiting being set in motion for exactly the same reasons as they were elsewhere. UK academia is unbearable – my time at RGU was miserable, certainly in the last couple of years. Academia in Sweden – at least, as I experience it here in Gothenburg – is awesome. But it’s starting to list towards managerialism and all my predictions and prognostications are often met with, admittedly polite, dismissal. It’s like seeing a car crash an hour before it happens and knowing that nobody is going to even nudge their steering wheels away from the disaster.
So reading The Slow Professor is *weird*, because it’s a discussion of how to fix academic maladies, written for systems already likely unsalvageable, while I’m essentially watching the prologue to those maladies play out. But also I can see myself and the scars I bear from the UK system reflected in the writing. Collini, of ‘What Are Universities For?’ authorship makes the point that the classical model of university scholarship used to focus on the production of understanding, as opposed to the construction of knowledge. And the corporatisation of the University has further robbed it of its ‘corrective’ function – that we’re so focused now on the production of ‘impactful’ ‘outputs’ that we rarely stop to error-check the ‘knowledge’ that has been produced in the fight for citations. And that feels like an important point, one certainly that this book keeps circling around.
One of its deeper arguments, and one that relates to discussions I’ve had with colleagues over the years, relates to the diminishing collegiality at the heart of academia. I hold the real reason that I can function in a university is that it is a collegial environment – one that is supposed to be collective and respectful (even if it often isn’t) and driven by a sense that we succeed together or fail alone. The reward structures of academia no longer incentivise this, because everything is focused on what can be quantified. Collini, as quoted in this book, points out that ‘That which counts can’t always be counted’ which is a slight evolution of the managerial principle ‘we value what we can measure, we do not measure what we value’. But also in this is another managerial truth – when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a valuable measure. There’s a lot of focus in universities on number of papers written, grants acquired, student course evaluations. That’s all measurable, and so it’s valued. But there’s no way to measure paper quality outside of cold stats and unconvincing bibliometrics. A failed grant application might be more valuable – in terms of collegial goodwill and network building – than its actual award would be. And student course evaluations, while occasionally valuable, don’t capture anything of the experience of teaching. None of that stuff is important to an employee review form, and so by diminishing its value we discourage its cultivation. As the book points out, ‘a good conversation isn’t something you can put on a CV’, and ‘spent a day critiquing a colleague’s grant application’ doesn’t have an impact on your salary raise. Instead, the raises go disproportionately to those that game the system. Those that leave their colleagues to shoulder the meaningful responsibilities that they shirk so as to focus on their own ‘sellable’ accomplishments.
The Slow Professor, in other words, is the book I think everyone in academia needs to read to remind themselves of how it’s all supposed to work. It doesn’t contribute knowledge, it inculcates understanding. And more than that, it’s a book that is convincing in outlining why we have a duty as academics to view the context of our discipline as irrevocably linked to the study of it.
I don’t think anyone outside of a university would find this interesting, but I do recommend it wholeheartedly to those of us within them – especially if we’re worried about the academic environment that younger scholars will inherit from us.
7 – The Bird and the Sword
The Bird and the Sword is a pleasantly written book that I found intensely irritating. It’s a shame – there’s nothing dramatically wrong with it in any of its individual elements, but they come together in a way that seems almost schizophrenic. The book can’t really decide if it’s a sweeping fantasy epic, a problematic romance, or a book of the worst poetry you have ever experienced. It doesn’t know if it’s dark and brooding or uplifting. It doesn’t know if it’s main character is a victim, or proudly in charge of her own destiny. It doesn’t know if it wants to be lyrical, or gritty. It’s got an identity crisis threaded all the way through it.
So, let’s begin with the worldbuilding. It’s fine. It’s a word where those that can use magic are feared by the populace and executed on sight. Nothing new or innovative about that, it’s a staple. And it’s actually a reasonably well executed staple. As a backdrop for a fantasy epic, I was willing to be convinced.
Then we have the ‘romance’, which is marked by being absolutely cringeworthy in its dialog and horrifying in its content. It’s not a romance, it’s a budding tale of Stockholm syndrome. But that’s what I mean when I talk about the character. It’s hard to tell if she’s into it, or repulsed by it, because it seems to change line to line. The characters are bound together purely by what seems like narrative expectation. It’s kind of a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, except the Beast has none of the redeeming qualities that make a romance semi-understandable. The characters don’t seem as if there’s any spark or friction between them. They seem to be persistently irritated by each other, and not in the ‘oh, that’s a mask for something deeper’ way. She comes across as alternately disliking or loving the guy, and the guy comes across as the future wanted poster of an Internet murderer. And hoo boy, that dialog. I literally winced at… well, perhaps pretty much all of it. Which is kind of ironic given how much the story is about the use and misuse of words.
But worse than the dialog is the magic in the setting, which is constantly set to ‘rhyme’ in a way that would make a five year old say ‘No, come on. We can do better’. Every one is an atrocity against scansion. Did you know you can rhyme fly with die? Yeah, the book gets a lot of mileage out of that pound-shop insight. Every time a spell was in the offing, I had to mentally prepare myself… like taking a mouthful of a foul-tasting medicine you just need to be done with.
But as bad as all of this is, the book still has… something. Something frustrating, trapped in the pages like a fly in amber. It starts off with a strong premise, a good prologue, and some clearly competent writing. It’s just that it feels like everything else is on predictable rails, taken to an unconvincing destination by a barely-interested driver. There’s no… spark of anything remarkable, or any seeming desire to be remarkable. It’s the kind of book I could imagine a talented writer creating because someone has a gun to the head of their favourite family member. Workaday. Readable – with some eye-rolls – but never particularly likable. Not attempting to surprise, or enthral. Or worse, given the setting – no willingness to even attempt to enchant.
But, judging by the positive response everyone else seems to have had to it, maybe I’m just a grumpy old man.
8 – Design is Storytelling
This is fine as a kind of ‘whirlwind tour of design theory’, but I guess I was expecting a book about design and storytelling to really dig into storytelling and design. It doesn’t, except in some borderline insane ways. Really it’s a whistlestop journey through ‘back of the book’ blurbs of a whole range of things. Colour theory, experience design, visual perception theory, and yes – a little bit about storytelling too.
It’s clearly though a book written by someone who is already convinced, expecting the audience to be so charmed by the cleverness of the examples that they overlook all the questions that come to mind. It’s a book by a designer, for a designer… because it assumes far more of the reader than the content can bear.
It’s full of little asides like ‘Look at this pattern on this napkin, it was designed by \ and it keeps your attention focused on your interaction with the cloth, isn’t that neat!’
I guess it might be if I felt at all focused on the pattern. I’m willing to say – as someone who is absolutely not a visual thinker – that it’s a problem in the reader. But also, in order for me to accept that I need to see some evidence that the claims are grounded in evidence. At one point it claims that a condom wrapper is evocative of the subway signs in New York, because… I don’t know, people have sex on trains? But all it shows you is the word ‘Condom’ in a set of colours which – I assume, are colours reminiscent of those subway lines? If you have to explain an ‘obvious’ connection from the design to the conclusion you want people to have, it doesn’t say much for your design. I found that was true for about 80% of the examples – I’m told they are clever. I’m told they’re funny. I’m told they have some great active property that accomplishes whatever by drawing the eye or whatnot. In a book that should be all show and no tell, this is a book entirely about telling.
At one point the book tries to claim that cups getting heavier when they have liquid in them is design, telling the story of drinking. I appreciate the hustle, but come on. You have to go way out of your way to ‘design’ a cup that doesn’t get heavier when it’s full.
But that aside, this is quite a nice index to a whole range of things you could read about in better books. I added a few books and articles to my ‘to read’ list because the taster I got here did whet my appetite.
So that’s Design and Storytelling. Too ungrounded in evidence. Assumes too much of its own cleverness. Too appropriative of natural phenomenon as part of engineered design. Too credulous as to the merit of its own processes (I especially rolled my eyes at the treatment of personas). Too scattershot in its approach, and too loose in how it tries to cohere. Also very much not as funny as it thinks it is.
9 – The Queens of Animation
This is the first five star book I’ve read this year. It is absolutely awesome. I dithered a bit about whether it was genuinely as good as I felt it was, but the only criticism I can level at it is ‘I wish it was longer’. To be fair, that’s because the last few chapters pick up a chronological acceleration that could give the reader whiplash – the first half of the book saunters through a decade, the last few chapters encompass four. Honestly though, I could have easily stood to read a book twice its length.
I’ve loved Disney movies my whole life. There’s almost no Disney movie from the period from Snow White on to the Hunchback of Notre Dame that I haven’t seen, and for most of them I can still sing (well…) all the songs from memory. I haven’t kept up with the recent ones quite so much, but movies like Moana, Frozen, Brave and the like have gotten their fair-share of rewatchings. A lot of the names of the people associated with the early movies are well known to me. Frank Thomas. Marc Davis. Ward Kimball. Les Clark. I thought I knew who was responsible for the movies that were the backdrop of my childhood.
Turns out, not a bit of it. Behind the scenes, doing much of the genuinely important labour and creative work were a stream of women who were denied screen credit in a way that has completely obliterated their legacy. Not just in terms of the general public, but in terms of Disney’s own institutional memory.
The book takes a long, meandering tour through the contributions of a whole bunch of talented women I had never even known about. Given that this is a book that begins in the 1930s at a time when women were barely employable and often had to depend on their husbands for money, a lot of the lives outlined have tragic elements. Many of the women – Mary Blair, Grace Huntington, Retta Scott and others found refuge in the artistic contributions they were permitted to make. Make… but never given the recognition that would allow them to parlay it into the lives they wanted. Mary Blair in particular is a gut-wrenching story – a phenomenally talented artist (which I can say now that I can link her accredited accomplishments to the movies I have loved) who laboured under the perpetual jealous eye of an abusive husband. One who vastly exceeded her in material success but couldn’t bear to see the (internal) appreciation her work received from her peers, and from Walt Disney himself.
The Queens of Animation is a heart-breaking book in many ways, showing how easily women were cast aside by the Walt Disney company with scant regard for what was truly being lost in the process. Not just in terms of mere skill, but in terms of artistic flair and emotional empathy. The span of Disney’s least remarkable movies is well described by the mediocre men left in place after the creative women were laid off. Walt Disney comes across here as an imperfect champion for women, willing to give employment (at fractional wages of course) to women who wouldn’t be employable anywhere else in the industry. He’s surprisingly progressive in that sense. However, it’s still a company driven by blatant machismo (weird, for a company making cartoons about romantic princesses) and outright bullying. One of the more shocking passages of the book talks of Bianca Majolie, speaking up in one of the infamously combative story meetings. Faced with a frenzy of jeers and nasty remarks, she retreats to her office only for the story team to follow. She locks herself in, and they break down the door so as to continue the bullying.
Walt’s response? ‘That’s why we can’t use women. They can’t take a little criticism’
As I say, he comes across as an imperfect champion.
So much of this book feels like it’s the retelling of a cultural burglary. The battle for story credits isn’t entirely linked to sexual discrimination but it’s easy to see who was bearing the brunt of the unfairness. The book is an invaluable attempt to correct the historical record. It’s an outstanding, scholarly account of the topic and I absolutely recommend it to you. Its worst sin, as I say, is that I ended the book wanting more than it had given me.
10 – The Memory Police
Oh my, this is something quite special. It begins as a kind of pound-shop version of George Orwell, morphs into a sort of genteel Diary of Anne Frank, but eventually progresses into something uniquely odd and existential with a typically Eastern disregard for anything as conventional as plot. It’s an exploration of a very strange kind of dystopia, where the largest form of rebellion is the simple act of acceptance. It’s an apocalyptic novel, with an undercurrent of serenity. It’s horrifying, without being a horror. It’s beautifully evocative, without being conspicuously beautifully written. It’s about remembering through forgetting, and about what it means to lose meaning in incremental, unpredictable quantities. It’s really quite lovely.
But also, it’s really quite strange. It’s probably closer to a modern fairy tale than a typical novel. Its storytelling is almost all bound up in metaphor, and it asks a lot of the reader in terms of projecting their own sense of comprehension onto it. Especially when it comes to unfolding, in your mind, the odd dynamics that are outlined. It reminds me quite a lot of China Miéville’s ‘The City and the City’ in that a lot of its otherworldly tonality seems derived primarily not from anything supernatural but mostly as a kind of repressed psychological inaccessibility. The Memory Police doesn’t ever trouble itself with explanation, but only in exploring consequence. If you need answers from a book, this will be a frustrating text. If you can just immerse yourself in a beautiful, opaque mystery, it’s astonishingly good.
(For what it’s worth, I do find the lack of answers to be a little bit irritating, which is why it’s not quite five stars for me)
I won’t spoil anything, but here’s the basic premise. The main character lives in a world where things disappear. When they disappear, it’s like there’s a forced deletion of the contextual clues that we, as humans, build up around meaning. Perfume, for example, doesn’t literally disappear but it becomes impossible to understand. It becomes resistant to being processed on a sensory basis. It smells unremarkable. Its purpose is opaque. And articulating even the contours of its physical presence is like trying to write on oil with a greasy pencil. And in response, the people of the world – when a disappearance occurs – make an effort to destroy all of its instances. It makes living with absence easier when there are no traces of presence. And those that don’t engage with this act of intentional self-censorship find themselves under the vengeful gaze of the Memory Police – an organization that exists to police the disappearances.
Not everyone forgets, though… but not forgetting is a crime.
It’s all very allegorical, putting at its central core a question of what it means for things to be. Is a rose a physical thing that exists in our world, or a collection of properties and processes to which we have assigned a transient label? Do we live in the shadow of a Realm of Forms (as Plato once asserted), or is perception an ongoing process of moulding a collective understanding from imperfect contextual cues? What does it mean for, say, birds to disappear if we can still see them in the sky?
Perhaps one of the reasons I liked this book so much is that it’s an extended exploration of one of my favourite exchanges in the Discworld novels.
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T SAVED HIM?
“Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”
NO
“Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that. It’s an astronomical fact.”
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
…
“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.”
But The Memory Police goes further still. What if you could no longer even perceive ‘a mere ball of flaming gas’ as a coherent entity? And what happens if you lose the idea of ‘ball’, ‘flame’ or ‘gas’? What happens when everything has disappeared?
It’s a deeply sad, melancholy story and it’s wonderful and weird and moving and confusing. But most of all, it’s worth your attention.