November 26, 2010

Protesting against increased university fees

Our new insect overlords

I come from a time in the distant past before university fees. I was fortunate enough to attend one of the UK’s top universities without paying any fees myself. Now, in the harsh light of the year 2010, this seems like privilege beyond imagining. I certainly didn’t feel rich, I had £3,000 a year to live on (a gift form my parents since I didn’t qualify for grants) which paid for my accommodation (Class C rooms at class AA rates), my food (Tesco value range) and my books. But I left university with a degree and with no significant debt.

Right now, the average student graduating in July 2011 will find themselves with £21,198 of debt. Students graduating in 2014 may find that figure increases to £40,000 or more. And that’s based on an undergraduate degree only – not postgraduate or research work.

The rationale is that graduates will earn more and therefore will easily be able to pay of this monstrous burden of debt. Cue hollow laughter. Have you looked at the job market recently? Courses with a vocational aspect, professional accreditation or a clear path into a profession will stand students a better chance of graduating into a good job. But for most the future is bleak, especially in the arts. Unemployment is currently standing at 7.7%. For women the statistics are even worse. The number of unemployed women is at 1.02 million, the highest figure since 1988. And please note that this comes at a time when the government is introducing drastic spending cuts in the public sector, reducing Town and District Council spending by 40%. No public sector jobs for you hopefully graduates, and no civil services ones either with cuts affecting them almost as radically.

Our insect overlords seem almost surprised at the scale and scope of the student protests, as if they thought students wouldn’t notice or care about the increased fees. This morning David Willetts (the universities minister) said cheerfully patronised students: “”My real worry is that maybe young people are put off going to university because they think that somehow we are going to be charging them fees upfront. That’s not the plan… No young people or their parents are going to have to reach into their back pocket to pay to go to university. They will only pay after they have graduated. I don’t want any young person, therefore, to be worried about going to university, and some of these protests – they mustn’t put people off.”

Thanks for that, Mr Willetts, I thought it was the crippling burden of debt putting people off going to university. But now I understand those student are just confused and it’s the protests that are worrying people unnecessarily… Come off it!

And so much for widening participation. I actually found myself saying to a colleague “But doens’t the government want people form poor backgrounds without a family history of higher education to go to university… oh wait, it’s the Tories in right now.” Aimhigher, the national programme to get more working-class teenagers into English universities, will close in July 2011. David WIllets think’s it’s no longer needed and that “the universities [should] have the freedom and flexibility to decide how to spend their resources on promoting access.” Yeah, because with dwindling resources and no central support the widening participation programme will continue as vibrant as ever.

But let’s not blame the current cabinet of millionaires though. Born with a silver spoon protruding from every orifice, Cameron and co have no idea what it’s like for ‘ordinary people’ despite throwing that phrase around like a wrecking ball during the election. This is what the Conservative party is like.

I remember growing up as one of Margaret “there’s no such thing as society” Thatcher’s children. I remember the meanness, the hypocrisy and the sheer bloody-mindedness of Tory rule. And now they’re back, like the Evil Empire in act V of Star Wars, and it’s at least partly #NickClegg’sfault. (That’s the last time I ever vote Liberal.)

We should praise and support the students for marching and for protesting an unfairness that will have the worst effect on people not old enough to have voted in the last election. And, to the students, while you’re protesting don’t forget that there will be another election (however hard the Tories try to push it back into the distant mists of the future) and when there is you can march again down to your local poll station and vote them right back out where they belong.

September 27, 2010

Banned books week: speak loudly!

The Day They Came To Arrest the Book

The Day They Came To Arrest the Book

September 25 to October 2 is Banned Books Week. Here’s a list of the top ten most challenged books in the US (in 2009) and here’s another link to the top hundred most challenged books (2000-2009). What’s depressing about these lists for me is how old some of these books are. We’re talking about important YA fiction that I grew up with and yet these books are still being challenged for their honest and powerful engagement with important issues.

Speak was published in 1999
The Color Purple was published in 1982
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was published in 1976
The Chocolate War was published in 1974
Forever was published in 1975
To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960
Brave New World was published in 1932

Those are books dating from 78 years ago still being challenged.

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.  A banning is the removal of those materials.  Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.  Due to the commitment of librarians, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens, most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection. (ALA)

And one has to wonder, on what basis are these challenges being made? Dr Wesley Scroggins would like to ban Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. He cites it first in his article “Filthy books demeaning to Republic education“. Scroggins thinks this book is inappropriate and “should be classified as soft pornography”. The subject matter? A high school teenager’s struggle to speak out about having been raped by another student. I’ve read Speak several times and there is nothing in this book that could be counted as soft pornography. Perhaps Dr Scroggins equates rape with porn – in which case it’s his opinions that teenagers should be protected from.

I should also add that far from defending this book against the likes of Scroggins, Republic Superintendent Vern Minor commented: that:

“the curriculum is abstinence-based and that students can opt out of sex education classes. He also said “Slaughterhouse Five” has been removed, and that “Twenty Boy Summer” is being reviewed. Some of the issues raised by Scroggins were before the start of the school year and were complicated by the timing and renewal process of teachers’ contracts, Minor said.”

The ALA explains that challenges are often seemingly motivated by the desire to ‘protect’ children.

Often challenges are motivated by a desire to protect children from “inappropriate” sexual content or “offensive” language. The following were the top three reasons cited for challenging materials as reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom:

  1. the material was considered to be “sexually explicit”
  2. the material contained “offensive language”
  3. the materials was “unsuited to any age group”

But what sort of protection are we actually taking about? Not protection from the bulling rule of a powerful clique (events portrayed in the Chocolate War), not protection from sexual abuse (events portrayed in Speak), not protection from racism (events portrayed in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry). This so-called protection is from reading, discussing and thinking about the books which portray the issues and by-extension the issues themselves. In fact, information is being replaced by misinformation (rape = soft porn). And don’t even get me started on the value of abstinence-only sex education classes with an opt-out option – another example of misinformation or no information being considered somehow less offesnive or challenging than ACTUAL INFORMATION.

Anyway, Banned Books Week comes fast on the heels of a teenage literary festival disinviting guest of honour Ellen Hopkins after one librarian challenged the suitability of her work. When other speakers pulled out the festival was cancelled and some commenters blamned the banned author and her friends for this result. That’s right, because victims are always to blame for the acts of their oppressors.

I honestly think it’s getting harder and harder to publish important, brave and valuable books about issues that affects the lives of teenagers. Perhaps because Dr Scroggins believes all teenagers should or do live in a 1950s twilight zone world. Or perhaps because some modern publishers and critics think the issues are done and dusted: that racism, sexism, classism and other social ills are now in the past so let’s publish Disney Princesses and Glitter Fairies and forget about that difficult stuff.

Obviously there are some wonderful forward-thinking individuals in the publishing world, writers, editors, publishers and critics – not to forget the dedicated librarians who believe passionately in access to books. But I’ve been told by a prominent publisher to concentrate on the romance angle so a book of mine would be “too issuesy” and it’s common practice for every single epithet (from “fuck” to “bloody hell” to “arse”) to be stripped from my work before publication.

If it’s this difficult for parents, politicians and other ‘protectors’ of children to accept the books on the ALA list which are decades old, how less willing will they be to accept contemporary fiction with contemporary themes? There’s a bleak outlook for YA fiction if this trend continues.

But in the light of banned books week, let’s take some time to honour those authors of challenging fiction. To Judy Blume who taught my generation about the physical biology and the emotional implications of sex. To Robert Cormier who in books from The Chocolate War, After the First Death and We All Fall Down was never afraid to write about frightening difficult subjects. To Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak, who said in an interview: “But censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them.”

To all the authors who speak out about uncomfortable truths, I salute you. Keep writing and keep fighting for these important books.

March 12, 2010

Gender traditionalism leaves so little for girls

The other day I posted about Disney’s worries that fairytale princesses are unappealing to boys. Another reminder came today that they are also unappealing to girls.

Viv Groskop writes in the Guardian about trying to take her 3-year-old daughter on a feminist journey:
Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn’t exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, “Girls are boring. I want to do boys’ things.” I can see her point. Her brother’s life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. “I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy,” she told me recently. “My name is Peter.”

While I don’t think the idea of taking a toddler on a three hour walking tour of London’s East End focusing on areas important to feminism is the ideal solution (I’m an adult feminist and I think I would view the idea with trepidation), I think it is important to recognise the problem.

Toys are becoming more segregated, not less so. An acquaintance of mine reported a trip recently to a popular chain store where ‘boys costumes’ includes doctors outfits and ‘girls costumes’ included nurses outfits. This in 2010, not 1950. My recent purchase of a mini fridge for my office came with a large label declaring it to be a ‘man’s gift’. I’m sure a full sized fridge would be a woman’s gift – after all, who is it who spends all their time in the kitchen.

Marketing is often not ambitious, it doesn’t aim to challenge preconceptions, it plays to cliches and stereotypes. Is it any wonder the little girls flock to the pink fairy wings and the boys to the blue footballs when every message projected at children is that this is what they should like. I think it’s harder to avoid gender segregation in toys now than it was when I was a child in the 1980s.

I don’t know what we do about it. I don’t have a daughter to dress as a pirate and play light sabres with. But those of you who do, please go out and get a tricorne hat and a light up sword today.

March 2, 2010

Things I read on the internet

The Guardian asked writers for their ten rules for writing (part one and part two available here). I like lots of bit and pieces of advice and might take one rule from each author. But overall I liked this advice the best:

Ian Rankin

1 Read lots.
2 Write lots.
3 Learn to be self-critical.
4 Learn what criticism to accept.
5 Be persistent.
6 Have a story worth telling.
7 Don’t give up.
8 Know the market.
9 Get lucky.
10 Stay lucky.

Other things I read on the internet suggest a couple of addendums:

Additional rule a) If a reviewer critiques your book don’t take it personally. Especially don’t declare internet war on the reviewer, abuse them by email and in comments to forums and create sock puppets to praise your book and star rate it. That makes you look crazy – and desperate.

Additional rule b) Even if your dad is a rock star that doesn’t mean you can trace the art from other people’s manga and publish it under your own name without the entire fannish interwebs calling you out on it. And then CNN will notice. That makes you look stupid – and a plagiarist.

January 25, 2010

Birthday bookswap woes

I was asked what I thought of this story by US columnist Emily Bazelon about how she celebrates her sons’ birthday parties. The two boys, Eli and Simon, are 10 and 7 – and ever since the older boy’s third birthday they have celebrated a “bookswap” birthday party.

Twenty five children are invited to the party and each is asked to bring a (wrapped) book. At the end of the party each child takes away a different (still wrapped) book. The rationale for this is that the birthday bookswap celebrates the anti-consumerist values of the parents since the boys want for nothing and don’t need twenty five presents.

The problem is that the children hate it. After the first three years of the bookswap at nearly 6 Eli protested and the parents modified their austerity rules. Now twenty children bring wrapped books but five selected guests are expected to bring sizable consumer toys. Emily says: In the e-mail to the parents of the five present-givers, we told them to go nuts. They were happy to play along. “We’ll make it sure it’s BIG and made of PLASTIC,” one mom wrote.

That was four years ago. Eli has just had his tenth birthday and both children still hate the book swap. Emily describes their raction in her 22nd January column: Over the years, the kids have not exactly embraced the book swap. Nor do they tolerate it as a mildly irritating but harmless parental quirk. They hate it. Every year their protests grow louder. Meanwhile the parents don’t seem at all clear on what the bookswap is intended to achieve. They lavish their children with presents throughout the year, giving one a night throughout Hanukkah. They also allow family members (themselves, the uncles and aunts and the grandparents) and the five chosen children to give birthday presents. It’s not mentioned if the parents themselves celebrate their birthdays with bookswaps. So it appears that the only time this anti-consumerist sentiments are expressed are on the boys birthdays.

No argument against it works. The message from the children is clear.
“But I want 25 presents! I don’t care. I hate book swaps. I’m NOT having one. Nobody else has to. IT’S NOT FAIR! Why can’t I be like everyone else?
But the parents are immovable. The children don’t need 25 presents. They don’t think the idea of giving half the presents away to a charity is polite to the guests. They wants their kids to have some spine and not want to be like everyone else. They could donate the money from their own present for the boys to a soup kitchen – but they don’t want them to miss out on large parental presents like this year’s gift of a camera.

In the article Emily explains that in the end Eli gave up. Drama subsided into anticlimax. At the party, we did the book swap. Eli said not one more word about it, either of protest or acceptance.

It’s difficult to explain quite how depressing I find this whole sorry tale. The bookswap is pointless. 25 middle class children get presents, charity gets nothing and two children are cheated of the one day they can get to feel special. I think it’s particularly sad that the parents expect their children to debate them, to explain their reasons for not wanting the book swap, when the parents can’t explain their own reasons for having it in the first place. On top of that there’s the problem that books (and by extension literacy and language) are made a ‘teaching moment’ but the children themselves are not given any books and not expected to value books as gifts. Five guests are allowed to bring ‘real’ presents which are not books.

And I wonder if the five selected guests are being selected on the basis of their financial ability to produce really good real presents. Is this teaching anti-consumerism or tactical trading for the best return for the smallest investment?

There are so many better ways of doing this. Let the child receive the 25 presents of their guests but ask them to donate half the presents to charity. (I have no idea why Emily thinks this is not nice to the guests – it could be done after the guests have gone.) Or have the child donate some gently used toys of their choice to charity. Or ask that all 25 presents be books – I’d have loved this idea, although not all children would. Or ask that children don’t bring gifts, or only small gifts, or a small gift and a charity donation. Or forget the whole sorry exercise and on another date volunteer as a family to do charity work.

So, my opinion is that the birthday bookswap is misplaced idealism. What do readers think? Does your opinion change if you don’t belong to a culture that celebrates birthdays? How would you feel as either the child, or as the parents, in this situation?

November 26, 2009

Melissa in Wonderland, Romeo and Leanne

Filed under: adventures in the world of today,gadgets,living in the future — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 3:04 pm

I am disturbed by the concept of personalised classic books: found here on iwantoneofthose.

Have you always dreamed of starring in your very own novel alongside your friends? Well, here’s your chance. The Personalised Classic Books take 5 well known classics and lets you choose who you want to be the central characters. The plot remains the same, the only thing that changes is that it’s you hunting vampires in the darkest depths of Transylvania, or your friends setting out along the yellow brick road while you chase them on a broom stick.

It’s clearly an idea whose time has come but who actually would want one? The most obsessive Alice fan I know would run screaming from this concept. And in the 70 years until Twilight fans can have them will they still want one?

November 12, 2009

Living in the future

I’ve been thinking recently that I should make more blog posts about the things I talk about to my friends. I’ve not really got a purpose to this blog beyond telling people about me so one of the things you might be interested to know about me is that I like to live in the future.

Growing up with every kind of fiction and non-fiction easily accessible through my parents or my local library, science fiction was the genre I gravitated to. I fell in love aged about 13 and, although I’ve had good genre friendships and the odd fling, SF remains my one true love. Because I was born in 1977, my childhood happened last century. Isn’t that a weird concept? This can make me feel indescribably ancient but luckily anyone older than 9 was born last century too, and can share my experience. That’s one way in which I’m living in the future. Everything since 2000 is traditionally the territory of science fiction. We passed 1984 decades ago but now we’re about to pass 2010.

It can’t just me me who expected flying cars by now. And what about transporters, space ships, nutimats dispensing perfectly cooked food at the touch of a button… where are they? My science fiction beliefs were formed at the end of the 20th century and so more quantum wonders don’t play a part in my idealised SF future. It’s not about nanotech (although adult me is hoping elderly me might get to see it). My future is a Star Trek future of space ships, colonisation, Brave New Worlds and new civilisations. SETI is one of the first acronyms I learned. (More recently Adam Roberts has taught me not to dream of rockets but of spaceplanes; but again, I digress.)

Some things about living in the future have come true for me. I love laptops. I remember my mother’s first laptop: a chunky grey oblong which had enough processing power to run an early generation of word. That particular laptop continued to be handed on and around among family and friends for years, an old friend grown feeble. I had my first mobile phone as a student in 1996 and that was also a brick of a thing. Nowadays my laptop is a sleek silver ‘aluminum’ MacBook, although I still weep for my destroyed BlackBook. My phone is a shockingly out of date four years old because it’s one of the very last flippy phones: the Motorola KRZR, the ultra thin silver flip phone which I love for its Star Trek communicator vibe.

And Star Trek was created in the 60s: according to their paradigm, by 1995 Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban) had taken over one quarter of the world. That date, like other crucial dates in SF, I’ve watched passing with half-genuine surprise that the fiction events I know happened, failed to occur. We’re obviously down the wrong trousers of time.

My illusions haven’t been wholly shattered by the failure of neonazis, fascists, communists or greens to take over the earth. The Eden Project supplied me with huge biodomes; the Millennium Dome also jumped on the futuristic dome bandwagon (although it then branded itself as a dome of the Past). Architects are making promising strides towards houses with grass roofs, curved curners, wicker walls and reusing vernacular and historic building techniques (very Ursula Le Guin).

Netbooks are cool too – despite my tragic failure to buy one that will continue working for more than 3 weeks. (Hey, Apple, hurry up and build a product I can trust!) But I always wanted Penny’s book from Inspector Gadget and eBooks are no where near achieving the functionality of that shiny electronic computer book. I never understood the source of the contention between eTech and traditional booktech. I think book-shape is an ideal format for technology to take – in both form and function.

I like connectivity too. YouTube, Skype, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn… they suck me in with their cool ways of interacting with people. Social networking isn’t a black art – or if it is, everyone I know is practising it. My mother joined twitter and tripled the number of followers I had in three days. (That’s what you get for teaching your mother how to be a TechnoMom.) I meet fellow writers, academics, friends and fans on the internet and its endlessly cool to get messages from all of them.

And even when there’s no one else to interact online with I like my computer to be my friend. Yes , I am a Mac lover. All my personal computers have been macs. But I have a PC at work which I’ve befriended and we get along okay as long as we accept each other’s different lifestyle preferences. Should I even mention the Vista-running Acer laptop I got free from mymobile phone company which is offered tovisitors as the “guest” laptop? Already that’s taking me into console territory where I can tell you tales of pwning of a group of male classmates at MarioKart to their mutual astonishment, or gaining the interest of the non-reading kids at school visits with tales of my prowess at Grand Theft Auto (San Andreas).

I sync my mobile phone to my laptop, I use my laptop through my external monitor, I have two monitors at work where I also network to five digital signage screens, I have three different webcams (and yet I’m still a bit uncertain how to make video podcasts). I manage my calendar through Google and I use an iGoogle app for my Tweets.

I admit I’m almost never an early adopter (excepting ideas that never seem to come to anything) but I feel the pressure of the future endlessly pushing me forward into new technology. My nightmare is to become a person who can’t understand a video recorder – or whatever the current equivalent is. I want to live in the future. I have to live in the future – and so I try to push myself into the SF future wherever I find it.

Powered by WordPress