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When More Means Less in Higher Ed

I read somewhere that most academic articles in the humanities never receive a single citation. It seemed sad and odd, so I thought to look it up. It’s actually 92% that go uncited!

And yet social media is full of people advertising their latest papers or calls for more papers. Why? Well, obviously they’re proud of their hard work and want to let people know about it. And they’d rather like their hard work to be among the 8% of papers which do get noticed.

But most people connect with more than just other academics in their field, so they know that such posts might come across as a bit spammy to those not in the field of Higher Education. Like family or friends.

So why do they continue to do so? Because they are required to as part of their job.

Publishers will demand to know how academics intend to promote their work. And universities measure academics against things that are actually impossible for them to guarantee – the shibboleths of ‘impact’ and ‘outreach’ primarily. And these are counted in purely numerical terms – the clicks, the tweets, the retweets and reposts, but most of all the citations.

So there’s a lot of work being produced and hence a lot of people trying to get their voice heard in the shouting gallery of social media, pleading with anyone who’s listening to read their work, or even just click on it.

But yet I rarely hear anyone say that they READ a great academic article recently.

Since academia became a publish-or-perish game, it has incentivised academics to churn out endless articles but it doesn’t actually incentivise them to read any, except perhaps as footnote fodder for their own outputs. No academic is set targets for how much they will read in the forthcoming semester or year.

Universities don’t just apply arbitrary (and sky-high) publishing targets to academics. They also demand things it simply isn’t in an academic’s control to offer, ie impact, outreach, virality and citations. It all adds up to a lot of pressure, and undoubtedly affects the quality of the papers being written.

The downstream affects of this ought to be obvious, especially in fields and disciplines which move quickly and require scholars to stay up-to-date with the latest discoveries or thinking.

Now I no longer have work targets for publication set by paper-shuffling administrators, I’ve really come to appreciate the ability to read and learn.

Universities should find ways to incentivise academics to read more and write less. Students and scholars and the sum of human knowledge would all benefit. But then, the bean counters wouldn’t have anything to count, and would no longer be able to bully or overwork staff with arbitrary and often punitive targets, or metrics they have no way of being able to guarantee.

In most areas of life, you can pursue quantity or quality. If universities really want their research to reach people, inspire them, change the game of a research field, or make a difference to society or the public, then they need to facilitate time and space for academics to read, and let them deliver work that really counts

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What if World War III broke out and no one noticed?

What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject?


We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help us at all? Are we like Europe in 1914, on the brink of a seemingly inevitable global conflagration? Or more like the great empires of the Bronze Age, which collapsed in darkness three millennia ago following their own tragic but elusive hyperobjective moment?

Perhaps AI might yet save us from ourselves, if only it too were not a hyperobject, or worse, the oscillating image of multiple potential hyperobjects, each one more alien and incomprehensible than the last.

So if we can’t rely on a digital messiah, we might be forced to resolve our current issues the old-fashioned way.

No, not war. The OTHER old-fashioned way.

I’ll be giving a talk on all this next month. More info shortly.

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The World Isn’t Yours

A lot of drugs come with what you might call rudimentary samizdat branding. Ecstasy pills regularly get imprinted with pop culture references for batch designation, for example.

But mostly, illicit drug names are a part of criminal anti-language, or at least they begin as such. If you don’t want the police or the normies knowing you’re doing a drug deal, you switch terms for things they won’t understand. Language becomes a club for members only and you need the passwords for entry. Cocaine becomes Charlie and so on. Even after the mask of anti-language slips and the terms become commonplace, they tend to stick around, because what’s criminal and taboo is also often cool.

In some refreshing instances, a kind of anti-branding occurs. Cannabinoids are dope because they make one stupid and sleepy, for example. Amphetamines are speed or whizz because they accelerate perception and energy levels, famously burning up tomorrow’s energy today.

The powerful drug scopolamine is known as Devil’s Breath, because once inhaled or ingested it renders the victim entirely suggestible. Usually, it is administered during a honey trap (often via lipstick) prior to robbery. I always liked the name Philip K Dick gave his fatally addictive substance in ‘A Scanner Darkly’ – Slow Death, the perfect combination of taboo sales pitch and truth in advertising.

But if ever I felt like viscerally objecting to drug nomenclature, it wasn’t when someone impressed cartoon figures like Donald Duck on a tab of E. Rather it was today, when I read about the drug WY which is wreaking havoc in India. WY stands for ‘The World is Yours’, a complete reversal of what drugs of abuse actually do, which is steal the world from those addicted.

This amphetamine/caffeine combo is disproportionately harming the already marginalised queer community in India, according to Vice magazine. A more insidious untruth I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered than this empty promise from drug dealers to fragile youth.

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The lost land of Greater Ireland

Early Irish writings, including the ‘Imramma’ poems, identify Irish monks sailing to North America. Later writings, including the Brendan Voyage do likewise.

Brendan's ship sailing by pillars of Ice - art by Jim Fitzpatrick and copyright to him.

The Norse annals, which were intended as historical records, do likewise, in the Landnámabók and the Annals of Greenland, which itself is written evidence supporting the now-accepted fact that the Vikings had reached North America in the 11th century.

A number of Norse sagas, including that of Erik the Red, also cite Irish sailing and colonising North America prior to the Norse arrivals.

Throughout these texts, this land is referred to as Írland hit mikla (Greater Ireland) or Hvítramannaland (White Man Land) due to the perception of those who were resident there.

Even in 12th century Sicily, the Arab historian Al-Idrisi wrote of the existence of Irlandah-al-Kabirah, or Greater Ireland, located to the west of Iceland.

And the Shawnee legends of the Amerindian peoples near Chesapeake Bay refer to the existence in their history of white men carrying poles and using iron instruments.

And artifacts have been found in locations including West Virginia which bear marks cognate with the Ogham script of ancient Ireland, though this is disputed.

This is all generally hand-waved away by contemporary historians as mere mythology, as they quite reasonably insist on incontrovertible archeological evidence.

Mind you, they used to do the same thing in relation to the Vikings until Anse-aux-Meadows was discovered. Even then, they still attempted to argue away the Helluland site on Baffin Island, even sacking the archeologist and her husband and sequestering her evidence.

I’m always intrigued by such historical disputation, and often wonder cui bono? Could a narrative which supported earlier European engagement with North America in anyway undermine Canadian claims to the wealth in and under the Arctic, for example? Such has been alleged in the past.

In any case, I hope they do find Greater Ireland one day, just as they appear to have already found Vinland and Helluland.

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The Waste Hill of the Ancient Roman Oil Boom

Monte Testaccio is a park in Rome, a 35 metres high hill that’s over a kilometre wide. It’s an artificial hill, created during the Imperial period by dumping all the used amphorae (clay jars) used to contain olive oil, which was used for food, cooking, heating and light in ancient Rome.

It’s estimated to hold the remnants of over 53 million such amphorae (which generally could only be used once due to the clay turning the oil rancid.) From this we can calculate the olive oil use of Rome at around 6 BILLION litres of oil throughout the late Republic and Imperial eras.

A city of over one million people for hundreds of years used so much oil that the used up containers are now a manmade hill a kilometre wide.

Today, by contrast, we use up 15 billion litres of crude oil. But where Rome used up their 6 billion litres during the entire classical period, our 15 billion litres of crude is EVERY DAY.
Just imagine, every single day, we use up 2.5 times as much oil as ancient Rome, the biggest city on Earth before the Middle Ages, did during its entire history. It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?

Furthermore, since the Roman oil was ‘grown’, it was also essentially carbon neutral, though obviously it led to localised pollution in the capital. Ancient Rome, in other words, would have smelt smoky, greasy and rancid. But it wasn’t enough pollution to affect the climate.

To achieve that, we’ve had to take the entire Roman oil use and waste multiples of the equivalent DAILY, for decades on end. It has to stop. We need renewable energy sources to become easy and ubiquitous as quickly as possible.

The world is still dealing with the trash and effects of ancient Rome’s oil use two millennia on. The problems we are creating now will still affect our descendants for unimaginable periods of time, assuming our species survives our own wastefulness and short-term thinking.

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He did it AI way

What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrisNqui9c

But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It’s superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is that it’s more persuasively Sinatra than almost all cover artists could aspire to be.

However, unlike almost any human singer, it’s soulless. There’s no attempt to convey or interpret the emotion of the original, because the emotion is the one singular component that the AI cannot aggregate or understand.

It makes a better fist of the Doors, perhaps because of much closer musical, chronological and cultural proximity. But generally, as more and more of these AI covers make their way into the cultural arena online, it’s becoming clear that, as Simon Pegg recently explained, AI is a mediocrity machine.

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Hands

A brief interlude in the (mis)translations project to offer something original, insofar that any poem may be original. This one is presumably self-explanatory.

Hands

There had to be earlier times that I don’t remember
now lost in the fog of memory, from confabulation
to capitulation, but the weekend that those poor kids
burned in Dublin, a few days before Bobby starved to death,
I went away for the first time with my da,
over to the football on the ferry, a bumpy crossing,
toilets heaving with puking men, ankle deep,
stinking of sour stout, black and yellow,
till we landed in Liverpool, like millions before us,
just after dawn, into grey skies, drizzle you wouldn’t
call rain, all the shops still shut but my stomach
complaining, and it was still Yosser’s town then,
red and angry, Torytortured, the darkened eyes
of the sleepless staring up suspiciously from shopfronts,
and we went looking for sausages and bacon, anything
really to stop my complaining, walked all the way
from the docks to Anfield, my hand in his. In his hand.

I think they even lost that day, those invincible reds,
and I don’t recall the match, just the crowd, a sea of scarves,
the roar of thousands, the fear and thrill of it, a man’s world,
and me manhandled into it, gripping my father’s fingers for fear
of losing him in the crush of the crowd, the swaying terrace
bouncing underfoot, and when, in the dayglo sun of Puglia
I grab my own kid’s tiny hand to arrest his limitless courage
in the face of the big world, the onrushing mopeds, the cars
and traffic he’s obsessed with, this is what I’m really holding onto,
the dead man’s hand, that lost grey world, all victories in defeat.

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Last Universal Common Ancestor

(With huge apologies to Suzanne Vega)

My name is Luca
I lived on the hot sea floor
I lived quite a while ago
About four billion years or more.

They say I came from a meteorite
during the Eoarchaean night
Just don’t ask me when that was
Just don’t ask me when that was
Just don’t ask me when that was

It might be because I’m mumsy
But you’re all descended from me
The lineage is rather hazy
But all life are my kids, you see.

From spirochaetes to amoebae,
cat, dog, whale or butterfly,
every living thing is mine
every living thing is mine
every living thing is mine.

For more info on your oldest ancestor, here’s a nice NYT article on the topic.

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Drink Like A Dictator Night!

Ten whiskeys. Five dictators. Three US Presidents. Two African Despots. Multiple Koreans called Kim.

It’s back, after almost a decade on the 2nd of May in Budapest! It’s the long-awaited return of Drink Like A Dictator Night!

For one night only, you too can learn how to drink like a dictator. Discover the Scotches that fuelled Saddam and the Bourbons that built democracy.

During this light-hearted, heavy-drinking evening of political satire and commentary, you’ll discover which whiskey is the choice of most totalitarian leaders, which dictator created his own whiskey to promote the idea that he was king of a far-off nation, who accompanied their dram with some hippo sushi, and what became of the single malt forgotten by Boris Yeltsin.

Advance booking required. See FB event page here: https://lnkd.in/eM-NcmRC

#budapest #whisky #whiskey #bourbon #dictatorship

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Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo Shakespeare

On this, his 459th birthday, I will dedicate a little time to re-reading some favourite sonnets – originally a Petrarchan form of poetry – by the Bard. I might even pass time with that overlooked early masterpiece Venus and Adonis, or else the now contentious Taming of the Shrew.

I might rewatch the excellent documentary series Shakespeare in Italy, from the BBC in 2012, featuring Francesco de Mosta, although it is alas not currently available on the iPlayer.

Or there’s always Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess’s tour-de-force novel of Shakespeare’s lovelife, which heavily features a Dark Lady who, for once, isn’t Italian. Burgess is somewhat of an outlier when it comes to Shakespeare. Despite having spent much of his own life in Italy, and married to an Italian, he tends to play down Shakespeare’s Italian connections.

Where most researchers and novelists have followed AL Rowse and identified the Dark Lady as Emilia Lanier, a woman descended from the Italian Bassano family, Burgess presents her as an unlikely Malayan in Elizabethan London.

This has always been my favourite of the covers.

Likewise, where many scholars accept that it is possible, though unlikely, that Shakespeare could have travelled abroad to Italy before his theatrical fame, Burgess elsewhere fictionalised a Shakespeare travelling to Spain to meet Cervantes at the height of both men’s fame. (He also wrote a short story where Shakespeare received literal inspiration for his plays from time travellers, so as a theorist of Shakespeare he was very much an outlier really!)

Despite Burgess, there is no doubt that Italy loomed large as a source of inspiration for Shakespeare. From the sonnets of Petrarch, to the sources of plays like Othello or Measure for Measure in works by Italian authors such as Ariosto, to the imagined Italy of his settings in Venice, Verona, Milan and elsewhere, to the Roman plays, Shakespeare’s work returns again and again to an Italy of the mind and soul.

I recently got the chance to revisit Stratford-on-Avon, and attend a performance of the recent RSC production of Julius Caesar, considered by many to be the best of Shakespeare’s Roman plays.

It was as magical and eclectic as one might expect from the RSC’s troupe. The lethal geopolitics of the late Republic and early Empire are distilled by the Bard into an almost claustrophobic clash of private loyalties and public interests.

I also went to visit Shakespeare’s schoolhouse, which is amazingly still in use as a school today, and was treated to a Latin lesson from his schoolmaster, an entertaining chap who may possibly have been an actor too. For it was of course in Warwickshire and not Tuscany that Shakespeare was first introduced to Italy and the literature of Latin and – by extension – Italian.

The more one reads Shakespeare, the more the influence of Italy, Romans and Italians becomes evident. I haven’t even mentioned his likely friendship with the English-born Italian John Florio, author of the first English-Italian dictionary, and a man who contributed almost as many words to English as Will himself.

Italy has no shortage of writers to be proud of, and no need to lay a claim to England’s finest. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Italy.

Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo.