What, no Ivory Tower?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are writing an article about academics in the humanities communicating their research to the wider world. Imagine that you write for a newspaper which itself has a reputation for being somewhat academic and which usually engages in issues in an intelligent and thorough manner. And finally, imagine that you are, or so it seems, actually sympathetic to the subject of the article. Now: how would you introduce it?

There are many ways. You might discuss the crisis of funding currently facing higher education and the need for the humanities to justify their place in public discourse and public life more generally. You might allude to the historic dimension and highlight problems of comprehension between the academy and the wider world and also problems of comprehension amongst different academic fields. You could, as the Minister for Education did last week, point to the importance of the humanities in the context of the threat to the European project caused by the debt crisis, and underline the importance of issues of identity in maintaining European unity and international harmony.

However, if you write for the Irish Times, you could simply reach for the Big Book of Lazy Clichés and work from there.

THE SCHOOL of English at University College Cork this week attempted to reverse the public perception of their PhD students as pasty-faced bookworms who only ever surface from the bowels of the library’s archives to cash the occasional scholarship cheque.

I count five stereotypes here. Let’s take them in order.

1) PhD students are ‘pasty-faced.’ The claim is this: that PhD students spend so much time indoors, so much time away from natural light, so much time immersed in their studies, that they take on an unhealthy appearance. The inference is that academics choose not to engage with the outside world whatsoever and literally spend all of their time in ill-lit reading rooms where they eat pot noodles and perfect their defective posture. The problem is this: the majority of PhD students treat their studies as a job (if they are lucky enough to be funded). As such, they work regular hours during the day doing their research, writing, and teaching. Why are office workers, who spend all day indoors in much the same way, not held to the same standard? Can you be ‘pasty-faced’ if you work at the Irish Times?

2) PhD students are ‘bookworms.’ This is a more insidious claim. It is, unsurprisingly, true that academics spend a lot of time reading books. Revelatory! However, highlighting this fact in a pejorative manner is a much more disreputable act. The claim – that somehow reading is a negative, perhaps even dangerous thing – is a worrying one. It manages to, in a remarkably succinct manner, strike at the heart of the anti-intellectualism which informs much of the public discourse in Ireland. If you read a book, you’re probably a Fifth Columnist.

3+4) PhD students live in the ‘bowels of the library’s archives.’ There are two stereotypes at play here, but both have to be taken together to get the full impact of what our sage is saying. As discussed above, PhD students don’t like natural light. This is so much the case that their preferred study spaces are those which are as far removed as possible from the sun. Thus, they study as deep underground as is possible, in the ‘bowels’ of available study space. Little known fact: when the Chilean miner crisis was resolved last year, a group of eager final year PhD students from the University of Santiago moved into the empty shaft to complete their dissertations.

The second trope is this: PhD students are not only detached from the outside world, they are even detached from the world of the university itself. They reject the library. It’s not good enough. Too much natural light there. Nope, irrespective of their courses of study, PhD students make a beeline for the archives of the library. PhD students are obliged – under the terms of their scholarships – to study the history of the library in their given institution. Fortunately, the archives of university libraries are famously the deepest part of any university campus, being buried a number of miles underground, and, in some cases, perilously close to the earth’s very core.

5) PhD students will abandon the darkness for one thing only: ‘to cash the occasional scholarship cheque.’ Universities, centres of innovation and invention, are steadfastly sticking with the cheque. None of this electronic banking nonsense. And can you believe that PhD students get paid for all of this? And it’s probably out of your taxes. The author never makes it clear why, given that PhD students are apparently leaching off the state (or perhaps just their given institution, but it’s effectively the same thing), they don’t run amok with the free and easy cash. Why don’t they take some extravagant holidays in the south of France, or go to Mexico, or South Africa, or somewhere similarly far flung? Are they too busy buying books? No – they’re too immersed in the books (and presumably, too deep underground – returning to the earth’s surface can only be arranged every sixth week) to even bother cashing all of their scholarship cheques. They’re living the life of Reilly.

The final point is perhaps the most insulting. What of the legions of PhD students who are not on scholarships and who work multiple jobs for the privilege – and pleasure – of completing their studies? Should academic research be remunerated at all given that the recipients are so profligate?

I have written nine hundred words dissecting one sentence in a rather flippant manner. Yes, I realise that the author of the original article was being tongue-in-cheek too. The important point, however, is this, and it can also be found in the same ill-conceived sentence: to end the ‘public perception’ that PhD students are all of the things listed above, perhaps it would be wise not to perpetuate these lazy, insulting, and ill-informed stereotypes in the first place.

Still Unsure

A seemingly innocuous line from a box score on Sunday:

J. Lueke: 0.2IP, 2H, 4ER, 1BB, 2K.

This was, in pure sporting terms, an inconsequential appearance at an inconsequential point of what will be seen as an inconsequential game. It was only the third game of 162 that the Seattle Mariners will play this year.

It was hugely significant for other reasons. The pitcher concerned, Josh Lueke, was making his major league debut. He is 26, and was acquired along with three other players from the Texas Rangers in last year’s Cliff Lee trade. So far, so normal.

If you google Lueke’s name, you’ll quickly realise why his acquisition was, to say the least, problematic. In the summer of 2009 he faced charges of rape dating to an incident which took place in the May of 2008. Lueke spent 40 days in jail and agreed a plea bargain to the lesser charges of false imprisonment with violence.

Lueke missed the majority of the 2009 minor league season due to his legal troubles. His trade to the Mariners last summer caused a bit of a scandal in Seattle. The M’s have long prided themselves on being a moral and family orientated franchise. They run a ‘Refuse to Abuse’ campaign which sets itself squarely against domestic abuse. In the summer of 2007, they suspended and later traded pitcher Julio Mateo when he was arrested on domestic abuse charges. They are a whiter than white organization.

Lueke’s inclusion in the Lee trade was quickly seized on by journalists. It only took a basic google search to do so. The Mariners, apparently, had not performed this basic task before sanctioning the trade, or so they claimed. As media pressure grew, the Mariner’s top brass began to send out mixed signals, claiming both that they had not done their research, and that they were misinformed by the Rangers as to the severity of Lueke’s crime.

Ultimately, Carmen Fusco, the director of pro-scouting, was singled out as their sacrificial lamb. Fusco was fired in September of 2010, presumably for not having done his homework. It was widely assumed thereafter that Lueke would be moved on or released outright. There was no way that he would appear in the major leagues in a Mariners uniform.

Lueke, throughout it all, put together a very impressive minor league season in 2010, and, as spring training progressed this year, it quickly became apparent that, on baseball grounds alone, he would make the big league team. Lueke had remained silent since the trade, but in February, a number of carefully placed stories appeared in the local media to prepare the way for his emergence.

***

I offer the above as a quick and dirty introduction to the problem which presents itself. The problem, as it appears to me, goes right to the heart of fandom itself. Without getting into the details of the Lueke case, can I, as a fan of the Seattle Mariners, cheer for Josh Lueke when he’s on the field? I’m still conflicted.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that we know very little else about Josh Lueke. We know the following things. Josh Lueke is a very promising relief pitcher. He is from Kentucky. His surname is not pronounced the way you’d think it is. He maintains an active Twitter account where he quotes passages from the Bible as well as various motivational mantras without ever saying much of substance. Finally, we know about The Legal Issue.

Lueke is not the first sportsman to be implicated in a case involving allegations of sexual assault. The list is a long one. The Premiership, for example, throws up many similar cases every year. Allegations of rape have been leveled at players as diverse as Titus Bramble, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Robin van Persie. All were exonerated and the incidents forgotten. People laugh and joke when the latest story about ‘roastings’ emerge in the press. Sure, it’s not sexual assault, but there seems to be an attitude of ‘boys will be boys’ that almost tolerates such acts when we consider high profile footballers.

Although charges were never brought against Ben Roethlisberger, the allegations levelled against him were greatly damaging and resulted in him losing a number of high profile endorsements, as well as a six game suspension to begin the 2010 NFL season. Within twelve games, Big Ben was a hero again, based purely on his sporting achievements in helping the Steelers to the Superbowl. However, Roethlisberger never tried to initiate proceedings against Sports Illustrated, who published many of these damaging allegations against him. They don’t make for pretty reading.

The difference with Lueke, it seems to me, is that we know very little else about him. All of the aforementioned players had already established themselves as sportsmen of the highest calibre. We knew something of their skills and their personalities. They were sportsmen first and foremost.The went from heroes, to villains, to heroes again. That is the established narrative. It seems that we don’t like to let villains become heroes unless they have some experience of the latter condition already.

It seems that Josh Lueke is perceived as a someone with a legal history first and foremost, and an athlete second (where as, lets say, Roethlisberger was seen the other way around). The crime defines him. This is a function of the fact that he was an obscure minor league pitcher when the offence happened. Lueke had not risen, so there was no fall. Would the perception be different if he was an established major leaguer at the time? I don’t have an answer for this, nor do I seek to lessen or belittle the nature of Lueke’s case.

***

The Lueke situation raises more fundamental questions about the nature of fandom. Jerry Seinfeld was right when he claimed that when we support a team, we are essentially rooting for laundry. The guys wearing the uniforms or jerseys change frequently, moving from team to team, so what matters is the clothing, not the guy wearing it. To add to Seinfeld’s theory, lets also consider the following: that a great proportion of professional athletes are probably not people that we would choose to associate with, all things being equal. Surely, this is another factor which contributes to us rooting for laundry.

Whether they are Premiership footballers, Major League Baseball players, NFL stars, or even GAA players, we know the following: many of them will get into fights, cause criminal damage, drive while drunk, and hold questionable political views. Athletes reflect society more generally, and society is not perfect. In fact, athletes often tend to reflect a certain stratum of society that is underprivileged to begin with. This is an unfortunate fact of life.

Despite all of these foibles, we tend to forgive our sporting heroes. They are only human, as the saying goes, despite the drunken brawls, the racist outbursts, the dangerous driving, and so on. Everybody deserves a second chance and many receive multiple second chances.

So, we know that sportsmen are often not the nicest guys in the world, and we still cheer for them. Or, to be more accurate, we cheer for the shirt that they’re wearing. I think that everyone is entitled to a second chance. And surely that is the point of legal systems – to ensure that, when people transgress certain laws, they are punished accordingly. Thereafter, however, they are entitled to make good.

The nature of the allegations against Josh Lueke make this very difficult for me. This statement goes against all of my own political beliefs; namely, that everyone is entitled to a new start after they atone for their transgression. Lueke spent 40 days in jail and then took his plea bargain (for a different offence to the original charges). He has, as the cliché would have it, served his time. However, here we get into murky world of relativism. Does this alleged crime stand apart from other infractions which sportsmen can be guilty of? My gut says yes. My head tries to reason that the legal system punished him as it does for other offenders. I just don’t know where to stand.

The details of the case are out there, and they don’t read well.

For now, I think I’ll stick to rooting for laundry.

More Books than Sense

Zealous book enthusiasts compete for ownership of a rare tome

 

I am currently writing a history PhD thesis which pivots on the First World War. In the month leading up to Christmas, I was busy putting together a chapter on peacemaking during the conflict: both ideas pertaining to peace, and the actual negotiations in Paris in 1919. One book which I used in writing this chapter was published in the United States in 1915 by a group called the League to Enforce Peace. I used a version available at the Online Archive. Last weekend, I discovered that I own a copy of this very book. It has been lying unopened, on a shelf in my room, for at least a year.

Why? Blame the Trinity Booksale.

It turns out that I bought this book at the Trinity secondhand Booksale last year. Or the year before (to misquote Camus, I can’t remember). The Booksale has that effect on people.

The Booksale is held once a year in the University’s Exam Hall. It lasts from Thursday night until Saturday afternoon, and books are extremely cheap. The selection of books is also eclectic, with an abundance of academic and antiquarian tomes available. For those in the market for the latter, Thursday night is where it’s at. Crowds form outside the Exam Hall at least half an hour before the sale begins, then storm the building when the doors open, much like the television footage that one associates with the launch of the latest Apple product.

This is where the problem starts. The Booksale is incredibly competitive, mostly due to the fact that a good proportion of the buyers are there on behalf of second hand bookshops. Frequently, they will equip themselves with a cardboard box, and rather than risk losing out on a potential bargain, they simply fill the box with anything looking remotely interesting (or even not – it has been known for them to load stacks of books into their boxes without a second glance, Supermarket Sweep style).

The remainder of the mass of people – seventy percent or so – is a discerning academic crowd, who know what’s what. And the most popular section each year is the history/antiquarian table. Thus, to a history student who wants to make a purchase, there is quite a bit of pressure to make sure that you don’t let anything get away. If you do, it’ll be sold sooner rather than later.

For me, the Booksale is the land of the unnecessary impulse buy. Potential purchases are assessed by two criteria:

1) How many people are in the general proximity of the potential buyer. This is key. On the opening Thursday, casual browsing of the shelves becomes more akin to the primitive ancestors of football known as ‘mob football.’ If you’re surrounded by a number of hard headed buyers, all elbows and shoulders, you’re more likely to put a book into your ‘buying’ bag.

2) Price. Given that books are ludicrously cheap, a potential buyer is more likely to put their cash on the table and stump up for a volume on Medieval Fisheries in Southwest France than they might ordinarily do. Especially if they’re being rucked from one side and mauled from the other.

It is rare that I will ever emerge from the Trinity Booksale with something that I actually need. That is the joy of the event. You emerge with things which you either may need or intend on developing an interest in (such as my stack of Teach Yourself German books from the 1940s – current status: untouched). For buyers more at ease with themselves and the world, books may be purchased with the rationale that they will never actually read them at all: some volumes just look great on a shelf and give the veneer of being well read. What did Umberto Eco say about unread books in a personal library?

Having done this dance for four years now, I am not sure that any of the above explanations really apply in my case. I still have stacks of unread and untouched books lying in a wardrobe in my room, as the opening anecdote demonstrates. I have come to the conclusion that the Trinity Booksale people are, in fact, marketing geniuses: they sell these things on for very little, knowing the exact psychology of their target market. Then, they wait three or four years for the penny to drop and for the fools to realise that they’ll never do anything with these books. What happens then? The buyers give the books back to the Booksale, who sell them on again to more gullible idiots, pocketing the thinnest of profits.

I’ll list a few of my purchases over the years and try to explain how they came about, and what use they have been put to:

This is a book.

1) The Warren Report, €2. This was one of this year’s purchases. I really have no idea why I bothered with this. I have no intention of reading a 700 page report into the assassination of President Kennedy, especially one with so many, shall we say, question marks hanging about it. Even were I a scholar of the period, I’m not sure that I’d read the thing in full. So why buy it? Does it look good on a shelf? Possibly. But what sort of people would be impressed by such a thing?  This is the sort of existential second guessing which the Booksale provokes in me. It has me imagining scenarios where hypothetical acquaintances would regard a bookshelf, pick out the Warren Report, and declare themselves impressed with the owner. Do I really want to know these people?

2) The Road to Terror (eds J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov), €5. Another hulking doorstop of a book. Another volume that I am confident I will never open. I have no doubt that it is a very good book for people interested in a certain period of history (namely, the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s). However, right now I have no need for 600 pages of primary sources translated from Russian. Why the purchase? Peer pressure. A friend – who keeps across all the latest publications in European history – spotted it, asked if I owned a copy (seriously, why would I do such a thing?!), before heartily recommending that I buy it. His copy, purchased while doing a Masters, cost €35. That’s a saving of €30 for me. Sold. Expect to see it in a second hand bookshop within five years.

I own this. Well, not this actual copy, but still. Woo!

3) A History of Europe (H.A.L Fisher), €1. This is one that I’m proud of. In fact, it might be the only purchase that I have made at the Booksale which has been used more than once. The book, written by a leading liberal historian and sometime politician, was published in 1936, and treats the history of Europe from the beginning of time up to Hitler and Mussolini. While the work was also published in three volumes dealing with a different time period, this edition is a complete volume, numbering 1200 pages in total. That means that I paid .08c per page of history. That is, surely, a good thing. Just don’t ask me what happened after 1936.

4) League to Enforce Peace, Addresses, 1915, €1. The irony is that, of all the purchases that I’ve made over the years at the Trinity Booksale, I was oblivious to my ownership of the one which I actually needed, as discussed in the opening anecdote.

The last example demonstrates the peculiar psychology of the Booksale. You go in fully expecting to make a spur of the moment, impulsive, rash, and thoroughly unnecessary purchase which will be of no longer term use. You are so conditioned to the idea that any purchases will be of little long or short term use that when you do find a gem, it gathers dust on the shelf with the rest of the ill-thought out purchases.

Academia, meet Baseball

I love the places where academia and sport intersect. It’s a peculiar foible of mine. I am, for starters, obsessive about both the university world and sports, two spheres which, in the traditional reading, do not cross. Matters of the mind and those of the body are frequently presented as incompatible. Thus, when a genuine intersection presents itself, I get excited. Far too excited.

I recently learned – through the wonderful Baseball Prospectus Podcast – that the academic grading scale and the scale used by baseball scouts are part of the same family. Lets call them half-brothers. The former is apparently derived from the latter.

I’ve long been vexed by the grading scale utilized in the humanities. It goes like this. Students get a mark which is a percentage, but – and this is important – the mark never goes higher than 80. More significance is generally attributed to the classification of the mark rather than the numerical figure itself. These classifications – be they first, two-one, two-two, third, etc. – all correspond to ten percentage points. Thus, the marking scheme looks something like this.

70-80         First class.

60-69         Second class (upper)

50-59         Second class (lower)

40-49         Third class.

0-39           Fail.

This system is archaic, cumbersome, confusing, and doesn’t allow for a great deal of scope in differentiating between different forms of mediocrity (believe me, when you mark undergraduate essays, this means something). How to break out of this malaise?

Enter the Baseball Prospectus Podcast. On a recent episode, Jason Parks explained that the scale used by baseball scouts to rate prospects is appropriated from the academic grading scale. In addition, he explained the logic behind the latter: it takes 50 as the average, with every increment of ten in either direction representing a standard deviation from the mean. So, a grade of 80 means that you are three standard deviations above average, while 60 means that you are one above, etc. Method in the madness.

In baseball, if a prospect is deemed to have a score of 60 for a particular skill (say, power, or throwing arm), it is deemed good enough to make it to the major leagues and star in a good lineup. A skill with a rating of 70 is seen as exceptional, and the harbinger of an excellent major league career, whilst ratings of 80 are as rare in baseball as they are in academia. Jesús Montero, the New York Yankees catching prospect, is widely credited with 80 power. That sort of power might garner a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford.

This connection excited me. The academic scale makes some sense, and more to the point, the other field where it is used happens to be a great passion of mine. Academia has, however, bastardized the scale along the way. In my exposure to the scale, the three standard deviations under 50 simply aren’t possible, with the reason being that marks under 40 frequently are not given – it suffices to credit a student with a ‘fail’ (a practice that extends far beyond internet memes, and could perhaps be extended into the world of scouting). Thus, the scale has been skewed somewhat. While the numerical range has been retained, fifty is no longer the average – this is closer to sixty, in my experience. So, there’s a knock on effect, but this effect does not extend beyond seventy on the scale, ie, even though marks are squeezed upwards, this is capped in the upper sixty range. The result is a hell of a lot of uninspiring in the two-one and two-two range.

Essay marking is a chore. A good essay is a joy to behold, but comes along very rarely, like an all-star or hall of famer. In addition, students have a propensity to answer the same essay questions in the same way year after year. Correcting an inordinate number of essays on, say, the Dreyfus Affair, or the 1905 Russian Revolution leads to bad habits, and, when they repeatedly make the same arguments, it becomes harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or, to sort the organizational filler from the legitimate big league prospects.

You see where this is going.

Baseball borrowed from academia, so now it is time for academia to make a strategic appropriation in return. To break out of my marking malaise, I am borrowing from baseball scouting. Now, it seems to me that the two most important and frequently invoked ideas in baseball scouting are projectibility and upside. These are actually useful distinctions in academia (although perhaps more observable in a classroom context).  Projectibility relates to the ability of the player to develop their current skills over a period of time. A player doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be projectible. Upside is a different story. A player may not perform well in a quantitative sense (ie, their statistics may be poor) but still have great upside, ie, their raw skills suggest that there is a chance (if only a remote one) that they can become good, or very good, major league players. However, the probability of this is lessened – we’re talking best case scenarios.

Projectibility and upside are at the heart of student grading. Oftentimes, a middling piece of work can be ‘projected’; that is, one can see where it fits into a career (ie, four year degree) arc. In my experience of undergraduate essay grading, projectible essays tend to, for the most part, fall into the lower grading range. They might make the Big Leagues, but the chances are that they’ll be AAA unless there is an injury crisis. Upside, on the other hand, is much more exciting. A poor essay can demonstrate great upside. The combination of upside and projectibility leads to grades in the 65-70 range. That’s the elite range.

My new marking scheme will look something like this:

- 70-80: Bryce Harper/Stephen Strasburg: The best of the best. Blessed with both upside and projectibility, the only thing that can derail their academic career is freak injury – like being hit by a stack of falling books in the library – or drugs (see Hamilton, Josh).

- 65-70: Jesús Montero: Great upside, but question marks about their long term position (perhaps they are distracted by a joint moderatorship degree) and less projectable than other elite prospects.

-60-64: Dustin Ackley: Projectable and solidly put together, but really, how good is it? Not the most original of essays, but the bibliography is comprehensive, there are no typos, and the footnotes are impeccable.

- 55-59: Dee Gordon: Very good at one skill, but beyond that, what is there? Naively integrates a Socialist critique of the world into every piece of submitted work to the point where it becomes an annoyance. However, if this Socialist world-view were correctly harnessed, and he learned when it was appropriate to rail about the oppression of the workers, he might have a very nice career.

- 50-54: Blake Beavan: Nothing stands out about it in either a positive or negative sense. Could do with more items on bibliography.

- 40-49: Josh Lueke: Has quite a bit of potential. Also has quite a bit working against him.

- Under 40: Carlos Triunfel: Had great grades in school but no evidence in any assessed college work to suggest that this potential can be reclaimed.

Romance in Football

The recent closing of the transfer window in England has led to all sorts of recriminations. Once more, the media, supporters, players and managers are expressing outrage at the amount of money being spent on footballers. The transfers of Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll – which came to a combined £85 million – have people talking in almost apocalyptic terms. Listening to these critiques, one would believe that a new watershed has been reached.

Torres contributed to this narrative when he argued that the decision to move to Chelsea was, in a sense, not a difficult one. Countering allegations of betrayal, Torres claimed that, when it comes to football, the ‘romance is dead.’ Thus, he felt no qualms about moving from a club that at one point he claimed to be a supporter of to one of their main rivals.

Many journalists seem to be taking this utterance as being indicative of a very modern and new malaise. Indeed, over the past decade or so, it seems that this sense of millenarian anxiety has been expressed more and more. While Torres chose to articulate this change in terms of romance, the more usual formulation which is used goes something along the lines of “football has lost its soul.” A Google search for those exact terms yields 6,860 hits, mostly newspaper articles bemoaning the rise of transfer fees, wages, and other extravagances in the modern game.

This idea also forms the topic for discussions on television and radio, and seems to have infected popular culture more generally. See, for example, the outraged reaction to the Thierry Henry handball against Ireland in late 2009, which was the subject of special TV investigations which gathered together former players, journalists, and social scientists to explore the idea that a corruption of values was linked to sporting modernity. They always agreed.

I have written before that money has always been in football, and it has always been spent lavishly, sometimes outrageously. The transfer of Tommy Lawton – England’s star striker – in 1947, is the prime example. Lawton, a star at the peak of his powers playing for Chelsea, was the subject of a record £20,000 transfer. Where did he go? To Notts County, in the third division. Money has always been there, and players will always chase the money, loyalty and professional prospects bedamned. David Goldblatt, the author of a wonderful history called The Ball is Round, has argued something similar.

It appears somewhat obvious to state that money has been a major driving factor in football for over a century. There is more to the story. In my own research I have come across some interesting examples of the same anxieties about the morality of football being expressed by contemporaries for at least a century.

For example, during the First World War, footballers were the subject of criticism in the media – in both journalistic articles and letters to the editor – for not taking wage cuts in line with other workers. As they had not ‘done their bit’, they had deviated from the founding spirit of the game itself. The Edwardian spirit of ‘fair play’ and ‘playing the game’ had, through this lust for money, been lost.

In 1928, an interesting debate emerged in the letters pages of The Times. The Dean of Durham wrote (‘Transfers and Coupons’, The Times, September 28th, 1928, p.6) that escalating transfer fees had led to football losing touch with the moral values of a previous era. It had lost the public respect of sports like rugby or cricket, he argued. In response, the President of the F.A., Sir Charles Clegg, argued that this was not the case, as rising revenue in football allowed for a greater degree of cash to be reinvested in charitable works. Thus, football still brought with it the moral component which the Dean of Durham claimed was being lost. (‘Association Football’, The Times, October 3rd 1928, p.6)

There are many examples of similar rhetoric being used in media discussions about football, especially when it came to two key issues: cheating and the rise of money.

What I would like to suggest here is that the idea that one of the dominant narratives (if not the dominant one) which runs through (English) football for at least the last century is the idea that it had sacrificed its once lofty morals to a ‘modern’ fixation on money and winning at all costs. So, rather than the history of football being one of occasional great change or rupture, it seems that there is a great continuity in the perception of the game across the century. This anxiety could perhaps be linked to wider social issues at a given moment, such as during the war. However, while society was changing, the perception remained the same; namely, that football had lost its way and should try to reclaim the high moral values of a bygone age.

There is no romance in football, and people have been talking about it forever.

Taking Solace from History

Ireland is in crisis at the moment. An economic crisis which gathered pace over the past two years came to a head in December, and the current political mess is a direct consequence. It has proven virtually impossible to avoid the sense of impending doom in the media over the past few months and the idea that we are living in historic times. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

The media have also frequently repeated the idea that our leaders, be they in Ireland, Britain, Continental Europe, or America, need to ‘learn the lessons of history’, especially when it comes to economic issues. Superficially, this makes sense. Don’t do what Europe’s leaders did in the late 1920s (cut spending and retreat behind protectionist barriers) and avoid a similar cataclysmic depression. If only it were that simple.

I’m not an economist, and while I’ve tried my best to become fluent in the issues, I still have a basic (at best) grasp on the technicalities of what is happening in Ireland at the moment. However, I am a historian, and this constant invocation of the ‘lessons of history’, is, I feel, both something of a burden and a red herring.

When people try to invoke the lessons of history there seems to be an implication or assumption that these lessons are clear cut. It assumes that historical actors were always decisive figures, who followed clear paths to certain goals, and did so with conviction. It also assumes that a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ decision could have been made at any point in history.

I also find the idea that the ‘lessons of history’ can be clearly identified and applied to the present to be burdensome. Is there a clear lesson in everything that I read? If I can’t identify it, does that somehow undermine the quality of my own historical interpretations? I think (or rather hope) that the answer to these questions is no. There is far more contingency in history than in ascribing simple binary oppositions to the course of events.

Three recent pieces of unrelated recent reading have reassured me on these points.

Just before Christmas I became aware of the book by Adam Fergusson entitled When Money Dies. This book tells the story of the hyper-inflation which took place in Germany and Austria in 1922 and 1923. For a piece of economic history it is eminently readable: while it does go into quite a bit of detail on economic technicalities, it makes a strong argument about the social impact of these policies and relates the financial crisis to everyday life. The book ticks along at a good pace and is an entertaining read.

The book itself has had an interesting history. It was originally published in 1975 with Kimber, a small publishing house in London, and did not reach a mass audience. In 2010, it was picked up and championed by some on the conservative right and second hand copies began selling online for up to $1500. The irony of those traders who sought the answer to the bursting of one bubble by creating another seems to have been lost on many.

When Money Dies was presented as evidence in favour of mass spending cuts. The author is himself a Conservative MEP and has championed this view. The reality is much more complicated. Fergusson tells a story of vacillation, wavering, political instability, and often contradictory policies in different regions at different times. In short, there is no clear message to draw from the book other than that inflation of this nature can have an utterly paralytic impact upon entire societies.

I also recently read Frank Friedel’s biography of FDR. Roosevelt has also been presented in recent years as a decisive leader who’s vision and decisiveness during the Great Depression is an example to mimic. New Deal policies envisaged a new, interventionist place for the state and ultimately set America back to work. Those to the left of centre in current times would invoke Roosevelt as an example of why cuts and lower taxes do not work. State investment is the answer.

This is true, to an extent. However, I was again taken aback by the lack of decisiveness which Friedel presented in his biography. FDR was anything but the crusader who is often portrayed in the press. He was a pragmatist who had to work with a hostile Congress to get legislation passed. More to the point, his views on the economy and the state evolved and changed bore a streak of conservatism at many different stages in his career. He was not the single minded visionary whom we are often encouraged to invoke. He wavered and faltered, and, for all that, he was a Great President.

Finally, we come to someone who history has not remembered as a great leader, and that is André Tardieu, three times Prime Minister of France at the height of the Great Depression. I was recently in France looking at Tardieu’s papers from the First World War, but stumbled across some interesting material from the early 1930s. Specifically, I encountered a number of memoranda which he wrote (to no specific audience) about abstract concepts, such as confidence. What was confidence? How did people get confidence in their institutions, their representatives, their nation? How did the markets acquire confidence, and people confidence in the markets? Tardieu briefly pondered all of these questions, without coming to a firm conclusion about any of them. He was as perplexed and inquisitive as many observers of current events in Ireland.

The point is this:  the idea that there are clear and obvious lessons to be learned from history which can act as a panacea to all contemporary ills is an erroneous one, in all but a few cases. In ascribing ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ courses of action in a historical context, one loses sight of the most important and heartening element of history: contingency. It is historical contingency which should give us hope that current problems can be resolved in a satisfactory manner. Thankfully, the future is not preordained.

Kaiser Wilhelm

Kaiser Wilhelm

I love it when sport and history intersect in a somewhat meaningful way. It reassures me that, despite their many incompatibilities, the two dominant components to my personality just might be able to get along. It also provides sustenance for someone obsessed with the minutiae of certain sports and (necessarily) history that there might be a greater relevance in one or both of them.*

* You might at this juncture say something like ‘But history is always relevant.’ And I accept that. It’s just that when your life has, for four years, involved the production of a history thesis, the whole thing can seem a bit much. There is an existential crisis buried in every footnote.

Anyway, I was delighted today to discover that in the early twentieth century, there was a professional baseball player who went by the name of Kaiser Wilhelm. Fine, so his birth name was Irvin Key Wilhelm, but he was popularly known as Kaiser Wilhelm. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising to us now – there was a sizable ethnic German population in the United States which numbered about 14 million by 1914. And, needless to say, the real Kaiser -  Wilhelm II – was held in greater esteem in the United States before the First World War than after.

However, it turns out that the similarities run beyond mere monikers. Lets have a look.

1) Irvin Key Wilhelm both pitched and batted from the right side.

I think it’s fair to say that Wilhelm II’s politics were of the right. Also, his withered left arm meant that if by some quirk of fate he had played baseball, he would’ve been a righty.

Similarity.

2) According to Baseball Reference, Wilhelm’s best year (statistically) was 1908. That year he set career high marks in wins, ERA, Innings Pitched, and ERA+ (if you like the new fangled stats).

It’s a bit trickier to isolate a year when it comes to Wilhelm II, and lets just say that there has been ample historical scholarship on the matter. However, I’d say 1908 isn’t a bad bet. Yes, there was the embarrassing Daily Telegraph interview, but there was also the Bosnian Crisis, where German support for Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia was crucial. In the years leading up to the First World War, there weren’t many clear or even proxy victories for Germany, so this might be the best we can offer.

Similarity.

3) Irvin Wilhelm’s last full season was 1914. He pitched one inning in 1915 before retiring.

1914 was also the beginning of the end for Wilhelm II.

Similarity.

4) Wilhelm was out of baseball between 1910 and 1914.

While it’s a bit of a stretch, Wilhelm II’s Germany was not the primary player in any major international incident after the 1911 Moroccan Crisis until the outbreak of war in 1914. Coincidence? You bet your life it sort of kind of wasn’t!

Similarity. Sort of.

5) Kaiser Wilhelm threw one shutout in 1914.

Wilhelm II was shutout once in 1914 ( Battle of the Marne).

Similarity!

6) Kaiser Wilhelm (the baseball player) attempted a comeback in 1921. Wilhelm II did not. Oh well.

Terminal Illness

I flew out of Dublin’s new Terminal Two earlier in the week. I say that not as any sort of idle boast, but because the experience was a very odd one. The new terminal is, to all intents and purposes, a ghost terminal.

In fairness to Dublin Airport, there are two things that need mentioning straight away. First, the new terminal only opened just before Christmas, and so not all operations have moved to the new building. Fine. Second, and more relevant, is the fact that the terminal was planned when the Celtic Tiger still had claws, stripes and a pulse. It was conceived when Dublin was a major international destination that needed a state of the art airport. When we weren’t screwed, basically.

This post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of Celtic Tiger planning or the hubris of some Dublin developments of the past few years. Rather, it’s about the odd sensation of being in a virtually empty airport when it should be thronged. Let me explain.

Airports are interesting places. While in the modern age they have become (unfortunately) synonymous with either Ryanair induced queuing frenzies or mass hysteria occasioned by excessive security checks – or both – for me they are still fundamentally exciting places.

Alain de Botton put this best. He sees in the airport a place where we suspend our normal roles and functions in society. Our normal responsibilities – those things which define us in the realm of work, for example – go out the window. The airport is a place where ordinary life roles are suspended and exciting possibility takes their place. Each gate leads to an unknown or far flung (or sometimes more mundane) destination. They offer an escape, of sorts. Each gate allows us to suspend reality – fleetingly – and dream of a different life.

While stress has infected the modern experience of travel more than it perhaps should have, I still enjoy the entire performance. That’s why Terminal Two was so disappointing, in a sense. Take all the people out of the airport and you are left with a soulless husk. Remove the people and you remove the sense of possibility, the suspension of social roles, the excitement. The gates displayed no exciting and far flung destinations. It was like being in a warehouse (albeit one with an overpriced Thai lunch spot. Empty, of course).

At this juncture, the reader might justifiably say something along the lines of the following: “People in airports just get in the way and cause me further delay when I’m trying to get through security/check in/board.” And that’s a point that I take on board. My response? Get there earlier. Seriously. Try being punctual and embrace the airport experience. Observe around you. Suspend reality. Consider the possibilities.  And try not to get riled by the annoying business man speaking too loudly on his mobile.

Terminal Two is in its infancy, and I understand that. I hope that in months to come it will fill out as more airlines move their operations across to the shimmering new building. That may be wishful thinking (and a political and economic issue). However, for now, the experience of Terminal Two is disappointing and underwhelming. This is nothing to do with the facility itself, and has everything to do with paucity of people moving through it.

Will this be a terminal decline? Who knows.

Good Songs, Great Songs

In an interview on the fantastic Word Podcast last year, the Louisiana songwriter Mary Gauthier said that she doesn’t try to write good, or even very good songs; she simply isn’t interested. ‘Good is the enemy of the great. The world doesn’t need any more good songs.’

At the time, I wasn’t sure if she was being merely bombastic and I cynical, but I did not read much more into this. After all, good songs are, by their definition, better than bad ones, and infinitely better than bland ones. However, I did agree on one point: there are plenty of good songs in the world. It’s remarkable just how easily one can discover good music these days. Sites like Daytrotter, Hearya, KEXP, and many others present good new music in an accessible way. In 2010, I made great efforts to discover good new music, and did.

But it was the discovery of new music which brought me back to Gauthier’s quote. Yes, there is a lot of good music knocking about, and that’s fantastic, but after a while it can be a bit underwhelming. You become blasé about it. Good songs are, well, a good thing, but music should be engaging, compelling, and at its best, utterly transformative. And there is a difference between a merely good song and one that really makes you stop in your tracks. More than that, it starts you thinking – immediately – that you’ll have to find some way of hearing it again.

Mary Gauthier is right. Surely the ultimate is to write a song that makes the listener (or hearer – can’t assume anyone is actively listening) drop everything. This does not happen very often. In the past year (or so), I can recall it happening only once.

I was at a Steve Earle gig in Dublin in November 2009. Myself and my friend arrived later than we normally might, arriving as the hitherto unknown support act had three or four songs left. His name was Joe Pug. He was pretty good, he really was, but I must admit that I wasn’t paying the closest attention. I was waiting for Steve Earle.

Then he played his final song, called Hymn #101.

Immediately I knew that it was a fantastic, wonderful, great piece of songwriting. Hearing this song for the first time, I felt that there was nothing subjective about my reactions whatsoever: this was a demonstrably great song.

My thoughts went something like this:

- This is really frickin’ good.

- Must listen really closely so I can try and remember the melody and some of the words for post-gig humming.

- Must also try to disengage and just enjoy it.

- Shit, this is really good.

- What was the title? Will he repeat the title? I need to hear this again. What’s his name again?

It’s not so hard to track down songs now with Youtube. Once I had, I listened to Hymn #101 on a loop for days on end (there may have been a hangover involved). I devoured any available downloads within a few days. The song really held up. And as I have since learned through his album and a wonderful solo performance in Whelans in October 2010, Joe Pug is a fantastic artist.

Good songs are, well, good. And great songs are rare. When you hear one, you know it.

Worlds Colliding

I am in the third year of a Phd in history. That is not a boast, more of an important starting point. Whilst working as an undergraduate one thinks quite ‘academically’, this is really ratcheted up as a postgrad. Academia becomes all consuming; one constantly ponders the works of other academics, knows who is where, who does what, who wrote what, who is any good, and who is not. You know who is worth getting to know, who is best avoided, and who would rather not be known. Consuming academia on a regular basis, a number of questions came to mind again and again.

What is Dr. Feelgood‘s Phd in, and where was it obtained?

What institution gave Professor Longhair his title and how long did he lecture there for?

Does Master P really have a Masters?

The various obsessions in my life are continually colliding in such a way. What are the connections between baseball and the First World War? What links exist between my favourite writers and football (thank you Albert Camus)? Can we link the worlds of football or music to that of academia?

In the case of music, academic pop stars seem to be a little thinner on the ground than one might initially think. The university was the meeting place for many bands of course. In fact, it has become almost clichéd that bands, particularly of the Britpop era, would meet on campus (and swiftly drop out of their courses). This was the route for bands such as Suede and Blur. Similarly, in the mid-to-late 70s a number of punk bands got together through art college, such as The Clash. However, we can’t really speak of many of these bands as being particularly academically inclined or of their members achieving much as academics.

Brian May is one exception. His Phd in astrophysics at Imperial College was interrupted by the success of Queen and put on hold for thirty years. The singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson was a prestigious Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the early 1960s. His counterpart, Townes van Zandt, studied at the University of Colorado at the same time. His undergraduate essays were so brilliant that his lecturers held onto them permanently, according to John Kruth’s biography. Van Zandt never completed his degree on account of his manic depression. Robert Quine, lead guitarist with the Voidoids, was the nephew of Harvard philosopher W.V. Quine and himself held a degree in law before pursuing more serious matters in late 70s New York.

Vampire Weekend have emerged in the past two years as one of the most exciting and popular alternative groups around. Each of the bandmembers English Literature at Columbia University in New York and they make a virtue of this in their songs, writing about finer points of punctuation, amongst other things. Here is a properly academic band.

In a chance meeting with them in Austin, Texas, in 2007, I experienced this at first hand. Chatting with the lead singer, Ezra, I got to talking about my plans for my Phd. He sustained interest in the conversation longer than many of my academic colleagues, suggesting genuine empathy. A few weeks later I found myself talking to an old blues singer in a Memphis venue who goes by the name of Dr ‘Feelgood’ Potts. At no point  in our brief conversation did his academic past come up…