Reviews and Comments

In 1940s (?) Rhodesia, a white woman is killed my her houseboy. Is is not a murder mystery, but an exploration of how how things got to that point. How the woman came to be who she is, marry her husband, live in that house, have that servant. How the black man came to kill her. How the neighbours and police came to not investigate the matter, came not to be surprised or sorry. How the whites came to dehumanise the blacks in Rhodesia.

Mary, the main character, her husband and their relation are portrayed with nuance and sensitivity. I think we're meant to hate Mary, but really I felt like she had not really chance in the world she grew up. By comparison, the character of Moses (the houseboy), strikes me as a caricature of himself, and of all the most trite stereotypes. Probably the book also came across very differently when it was written and Rhodesia was under Apartheid. Not a 'pleasant' read, but one worth your time.

I realise I'm late to the party, but Lucia Berlin is such a great writer. Why did no one tell me? There's sadness in her stories, humor, compassion, curiosity for humanity. Many don't have much of a plot, but they are pieces in the narrative threads that run through the book, and that are largely autobiographic. Some of these threads are the writer's alcoholism a broader tendency towards self-destruction and powerful love affairs. I generally have little patience for this: yes, you are a broody American genius who does not fit in (hello Kerouac, hello Bukowski, hello Faulkner, hello Miller, hello Burroughs, why it's getting crowded in here...), cool, we get it, what else? Not only did I not found it annoying in this case, but I thought it was INTERESTING. I wondered why that's the case, and perhaps it's because Berlin does not wear her 'vices' as badges of honour - though neither does she fall into moralism. Instead, she's capable of exploring how her choices affected other people, too, how they shaped her relations: the good, the tragic, the ugly, the heartwarming. What can I say, I loved this book.

I rarely enjoy hate-reading, but in this case I did. In the process, I formulated a theory: there are two ways to engage with this book. Some women will relate to Heti's anxiety and nagging doubt, recognising her fear and frustration as their own. It is something powerful when a book can give voice to your experience and by critiquing the book I don't mean to say that there is anything wrong with that experience. But, since I didn't relate in that way, I have processed her writing on a more analytical level. And, for the most part, I found it outraging. So much so that I started a note on my phone titled: Grudges against Sheila. Here we go:

It is true that motherhood has become more of a choice, and that when this choice is taken away from women, their freedom suffers. BUT, I object to the sentiment that everything that demands our time and attention is a threat to our freedom. Caring for others - whether children, parents or friends - does not make us less free. We should demand a more balanced distribution of the caring load - a theme Heiti almost entirely avoids - not to be granted to responsibility not to care.

I dislike the parallelism between art and children that she threads through the book. First, if being an artist is incompatible with being a mother is not, or at least not mainly, because art requires more of your soul than other jobs. It is because it's a precarious occupation, where you're paid by your output and have no benefits. There are more and more jobs like that, which are similarly hard to combine with motherhood. It's called a neoliberal job market and we should all try to point that out, and insist on alternatives, please. More importantly, I find it very problematic that she sees (her) works of art as equivalent to having a child in that they both are something that gives meaning to life and adds worth to the world. Leaving aside that it doesn't bode well for her as a perspective mother, it implies that women need to have 'a good reason' not to have a child - as if artists were more entitled to make that choice than plumbers.

Both Heiti and her partner are very blind to their privilege as a straight white couple with a lawyer income, with Miles winning the insensitivity award 2018 for envying older gay couples for not having been judged for not having children.

Miles overall comes out pretty badly from the book. Unintentionally, I believe. He avoids having a frank conversation about what seems like a key decision to be taken together, preferring instead to use some dubious tactics (you'll never be a great writer if you become a mother) to dissuade Heiti. Also, he invariably gets angry when she cries - which brings me neatly to the next point.

There is a hint to the fact that Miles may be sweeter and more supportive than the narrative suggests, but that Heiti is blinded by her own depression, which, following her menstrual cycle, grows, lessens and grows again. This depression may also explain why she seems incapable of action (the two instances in which she DOES something - goes on a walk and to the beach - are high points in her life, by her own account), stuck in her mind, prone to feeling like the world is against her. To me, this is an interesting theme, which intersects with the biological urge to mother that women tend to experience in their 30s. How much are our body dictate how we feel? But, Heiti is not THAT interested in it: towards the end, she goes on medication and quickly resolves that that's the way to go: screw those initial reflections on how pain is part of life, give me antidepressants! (for the records, I don't object to antidepressant).

Finally, there is motherhood - not only her complex feelings towards mothering children, but also her relation to her mother, which emerges as the fundamental reason why she is 'not destined' to be a mother. Again, this was an interesting point, but one that I wish was more elaborated. Her mother's character comes across as a distant figure about whom we know very little, aside from her Jewish background. Probably, that's because she was a distant mother who remains a mystery even to her own daughter. We come to know very intimate details about Miles, his thoughts and sexual acts - but very little about her mother. There seems to be something missing here, since motherhood is THE key theme.<

Clearly, for all its faults, it has been for me, as a woman in her 30s, a thought-provoking book.

A collection of speeches and essays around the higher education reforms in Britain in the years 2010 - 2013. I arrived in London in 2011, just a few months after the mass student protests had subsided. I eventually also studied at a British university and then in Hong Kong, a system that inherited some features from the British model and also followed (or proceeded?) Britain in the move towards neoliberal competitiveness. The book delves into many technical aspects of the reform, such as the changes to the funding system, the conditions of student loans and the plan to introduce a teaching assessment framework. But, to focus on the more general arguments...

The first great merit of the book is to make an argument against the reform that goes beyond protesting high fees. Now, I believe British students have all the right to protest university fees, which are arguably the highest in Europe, have nearly tripled in a ridiculously short amount of time and disturbingly raise the social and economic barrier in a country where class already plays such a big role. But, to 'only' complain about raising fees has allowed to present the issue as a sectional interest matter: there you go, over-privileged millennials feeling entitled, university is not a right, it is only fair that you would have to pay for it at some point, anyways they are wasting not only tax payer money but also their own time, etc. Collini takes issue with how the reform push us to consider university education as a service that students access for their own exclusive benefits as consumers. Research and higher education benefit society as a whole - they should not cater to the interests of the government, businesses, nor students.

The other major theme running through the book is an attack to the neoliberal pseudo-economic newspeak that has come to dominate so many aspects of our lives, university included. As someone who was asked in an interview how my research 'speaks to excellence' I couldn't help feeling validated. The choice of words, as Collini points out, matters a great deal, because it pushes scholars to justify their relevance in terms that aren't their own: if they have to prove - often in quantitative terms - how their work 'makes an impact' or 'contributes to growth' they are not only bound to fail on the task, but also to undersell (oooops, wrong word) what they ACTUALLY do.

I also appreciated that Collini resisted the temptation to lament a lost golden era, when university where actual universities. Instead, he recognises that, like most institutions, they change in their ethos and purpose. Nevertheless, he suggests, we should hold on to the idea of universities as a place dedicated to open inquiry, insulated in as much as possible from external pressures and demands.

Which brings me to my last point. I think Collini is persuasive when it comes to counter-arguing the right-wing, neoliberal attacks to the university system. But then again, I'm not an hard audience to persuade. He is less interested in addressing what we could call left-wing arguments against the elitism of universities, not only as places but as ideas. This may be a rhetorical strategy: he is making a case of the unique value of university, has to fend off accusations that professors are lazy and only focused on their narrow work, convince his readers that money spent on humanities research is well spent and so on. Yet, in some parts of the book this insistence on the value of universities and professors weakens the argument. For example, in insisting on the uniqueness of universities, he misses the chance to recognize that other professions and other learning institutions need similar freedom from economic and government pressures (he vaguely acknowledges art institutions may be in a similar position. I think schools could be added to the list - sure they are not pushing the limits of knowledge, but they should be encouraging critical thinking?). Or, in his defense of professors, he glosses over the fact that - whether out of entitlement, exaggerate pressure to publish, or something else entirely - there are in my experience MANY professors who do not take teaching seriously and even bully students. I agree that increasing bureaucratic demands and making funding more precarious is unlikely to help, but one should not minimize the problem. By contrast, I think Collini could have a bit more confidence in students capacity to contribute to discussions about the value of education, and what are things that should or should not change. Not as entitled consumers, but as parties involved.

I bookmarked this book as 'to read' during the first months of my PhD, because it was quoted by Brian Harley. I finally brought myself to reading it last December, a few weeks after handing in my thesis. I'm very glad I did: not only it has nothing to do with maps (a definite plus at this point in my life), but it is a fascinating memoir, by a kick-ass woman who could handle not only horses and planes, but also words.

I have never been particularly affected by the mythology of pioneer pilots, but the book captures the magic of governing a plane, understanding how it works and how to make it fly, knowing the skies and the earth below, the dangers and the poetry of it:

'After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone - each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and coppers discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak - it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it'

I couldn't help but compare Makham's attitude towards Africa, natives and colonialists to those of Doris Lessing (I haven't read Karen Blixen, but that would be an even apter comparison). I'm not sure how to put it in a nuanced way, so I will just put it as it comes: Makham has very little white guilt. She is not crushed by her privilege - in the same way as she hardly pays notice to the sexism that she encounters as a woman pilot, which she seems to write off as misguided gallantry. Yet, she is not blind to how race and class shape her relations, particularly the one with her childhood friend Nandi. 'What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together'.

Perhaps this mix of confidence, insight and matter-of-factness comes with knowing, befriending and loving actual indigenous persons, rather than thinking of indigenous people as a group or a political identity. Kibii is a real child: funny, clever, sometimes arrogant, sometimes brave, sometimes pity. He is not a symbol for African children. Makham is not exactly indignant that racial relations mean they can no longer walk together in adulthood, though a certain sadness and disappointment transpires. Somehow, for me the result is a portrait of colonial relation that is more lively and nuanced, but not necessarily less revealing, than Lessing's denounce.

Makham's prose is rather poetic, and it was a long time since I had to look up so many words in a dictionary. Yet, as she makes beautifully underscores, she values clarity: 'I had nearly a thousand flying hours to my credit at he time and, if my eyesight had failed me during my preparations for the examinations, it would have been due to the additional hundred o two hours I spent studying navigation out of books whose authors must have been struck dumb in the presence of a one-syllabe word. Everything those authors said was sound and sane and reasonable, but they went on the theory that truth is rare than radium and that if it became easily available, the market for it would be glutted, holders of stock in it would become destitute, and gems of eternal verity would be given away as premiums'.