#61: Academic supervision

An academic supervisor is probably the person who reads your writing more closely than anyone else, more closely than an editor, than friends and acquaintances, or even eventual readers of the finished product.

What does a supervisor do?

Good supervision is demanding. ‘Typically, the supervisor acts as a guide, mentor, source of information and facilitator to the student,’ says University College London’s advice to doctoral supervisors. Their list of things supervisors can help with is long and includes formulating the research question, evaluating the research results, making sure the work is good enough and presenting work. 

The guidance acknowledges that there are different ways of supervising: ‘Supervisory styles are often conceptualized on a spectrum from laissez-faire to more contractual or from managerial to supportive,’ it says. Hmmm… I would be a bit suspicious of that ‘laissez-faire’ — in my view good supervision is essential to the success or failure of a Masters or PhD, and a supervisor needs to take an active part in its conception and development.

PhD student Dirk Frans, looking back on successful completion, comments: ‘there must be a “click” between student and supervisor. I spent 10 years looking for a supervisor who would suit me. Not only did we “click” but he is a world expert, committed to the poor and still doing grassroots work. Only then did I apply for a place.’ Not everyone will spend 10 years looking for a supervisor, but I agree that “click” is important.

My experience of supervision 

I’ve just submitted a 35,000-word dissertation for my Masters by Research (MRes) in English Literature at Liverpool University. Rather than being taught through set modules, a Masters by Research consists mainly of a long dissertation, the research topic decided by the student. It is a little like one third of a PhD, although it is given a grade at the end rather than passed, failed or changes required (as happens with a PhD).

The supervision I had was excellent and I wanted to share three of the reasons here.

1. The supervisor read and engaged with my work seriously and in detail.

The high quality of the feedback comments, which were both encouraging and demanding, meant that I returned to them at later stages of research as well, beyond the particular piece of writing they referred to. These comments referred to different areas: content, organisation, expression, method, further reading, general progress and formatting. 

For example, feedback on content was: ‘I think it would be good to register the instantaneousness of the transformation which is underlined by seeing it, rather than hearing it.’ (Talking about transformation of the meaning of a word by repeating it within a line of a sonnet). A comment on expression was: ‘this opening was very difficult to make sense of and might require amendment’. A comment on method was: ‘this is good and interesting but do due diligence on analysis of the final lines first, before moving to this conceptual level’. (Meaning I had not devoted enough time to analysing the poem — I found the idea of ‘due diligence’ helpful as I continued).

2. The supervisor drew out and helped me refine and develop my own best ideas

She helped me develop my own strengths rather than expecting, either implicitly or explicitly, a particular understanding or even a set of ideas which I needed to reach, which would be more difficult and discouraging.

The above two points chime in with a reflection by Dan Long, who studied for his PhD while a secondary school teacher. According to his 'PhD diary', his supervisor Linda’s ‘enthusiasm as a reader’ was crucial. He said: 

‘As a teacher I was always sensitive to the knack of encouraging people through the right balance of praise and criticism. Linda has this knack but the most important thing about her approach to supervision is the way in which she will allow you to develop your own ideas without butting in or annexing them to her own take on a subject. With the comments on my writing she has pointed me in the right direction on certain writers or approaches without being prescriptive or didactic. Thus I find myself going back to her comments for pointers and find that I’ve taken the path suggested without really having realised it. This process is difficult to articulate and much of it hinges on the supervisor being a good or pleasant personality – it’s a mixture of being positive, supportive, questioning, sceptical, appreciative, empathic, judicious, kind etc.. Often I can see that some of my ideas might be a bit inane and Linda has the knack of hoeing these ideas over in a supervision and putting oxygen and nutriment in them.

3. The supervisor recommended not only sources to read, but how to approach my reading.

For example, she gave me guidance about how much attention it might be necessary, or not necessary, to pay to different things. She also helped me work in different ways sometimes — for example, there was a stage when I definitely needed to take a step back, let things disentangle and see which ideas ‘floated to the top’.

The supervision process meant that I’ve been able to explore the questions I had when I started the project (although it’s changed quite a bit since then). So to a large extent I’ve been able to build on the preparation I did before the course started, rather than having to put it to one side. It also means I’ve been able to progress with ideas I’m genuinely interested in. I won’t be asking for my money back.

A very useful bank of PhD students’ reflections on the supervision process can be found here (scroll down to ‘students being supervised’), with a more extensive bank here. These focus on the student-supervisor relationship, institutional attitudes and processes, and the many problems that can occur.

#60: Pet sitting

Mercer in Hythe, South Kent

Over the past five years I’ve been welcomed into the houses of people I’ve never met and trusted with some of the things dearest to them — their pets. I’ve also welcomed strangers to my flat to look after my cat mate Indi.

This is pet sitting — to find sits and sitters I use the website Trusted Housesitters, but others are Mindahome UK and MindMyHouse (there’s also HousesSitSearch, which aggregates different sites). Some sitters travel solo or in couples, some with families or even with their own pets. No money changes hands, but the sitter gets accommodation and the owner a pet-loving live-in carer, so there are no kennel or cattery fees and the pet stays in their home environment. Truly a win-win, I think.

Tiny Man in Andalucia — 'why, what else are plant pots for?'

Why petsit?

For me, one of the benefits of sitting is an opportunity to discover places I never would normally. I’m currently in Market Rasen, a pleasant Lincolnshire town, but hardly on the beaten tourist track. But if I hadn’t come here, I would never have visited the wonderful Lincoln Museum or seen the only statue I know incorporating an algebraic calculation (the statue is to George Boole, whose development of algebraic logic laid the foundations for modern computer design, and who grew up and taught in Lincoln. Photo at the end).

Cats are lovely companions and need less attention than dogs, but they can be characters — a rather hyper pair near Bath had to be kept apart, and one of them was not above running into the kitchen and nipping my ankle to remind me to feed her. But such forward behaviour is unusual.

Kipper, an aged Oxfordshire gent

Memorable pet sitting experiences 

Some other memorable moments and experiences I’ve had pet sitting are:

•           walking between the beautiful Oxfordshire villages of Adderbury and Deddington as abundant Red Admiral butterflies flew up around my feet

•           making firm friends with the first people I sat for in 2018, in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge

•           seeing a deer raise its head from the grass in the twilight on Farnham Park in Surrey (I never expected deer so close to the town)

•           sitting in a top floor flat above the bustling streets of Brixton reading Keeping their marbles: How the treasures of the past ended up in museums… and why they should stay there by Tiffany Jenkins — the most detailed case in favour of retaining ‘contested’ objects in museums I’ve read (raiding new bookshelves — with permission of course — is one of the pleasures of sitting)

Arnold in Sheffield changes the settings on my laptop

Are sitters or sits in more demand?

Supply and demand? Sits seem to be taken very fast in London, as do longer-term sits anywhere. Those in remoter places may take more time, but my impression from the Trusted Housesitters site is that sits and sitters are fairly evenly balanced. And like me, many people have both sitters in their home and sit for others. So if you are either looking for care for your furry one(s), or a chance to travel with free accommodation and four-legged companionship, it is well worth considering.

Tony the little lion in Suffolk

statue of George Boole with two students…

… and the equation

#59: Teapot

 

Teapots in life

Time to say goodbye to a beloved teapot, due to a broken lid and chipped spout. This morning saw me in a charity shop examining another, but I reluctantly decided the lack of draining holes to the spout meant it was impractical. Plus it didn’t have that friendly chubby shape.

I wonder what is so appealing about teapots? Two things I think – first, they are a sign of company – ‘tea for two’, even if you are making tea for one (a teapot for one which holds exactly two cups is ideal, to my mind). Secondly, using a teapot is more of an event, a longer break, than bunging a teabag into a cup.

Tea for one

Teapots in literature

What about teapots in literature? There’s Intelligence Service landlady Millie McCaig’s ‘ministrations with the teapot’ in le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the climactic night when the mole is unmasked. Then there is Fanny visiting Lady Polly in Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. Fanny discovers Polly ‘amid the usual five o’clock paraphernalia of silver kettle on flame, silver teapot, Crown Derby cups and plates and enough sugary food to stock a pastrycook’s shop’.

But my favourite is Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy losing patience with the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesiser which always produces ‘a plastic cup filled with a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea’. Arthur sits and tells the machine how to make a proper cup:

He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished.

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘that is what I want.’

‘You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?’

‘Er, yes. With milk.’

‘Squirted out of the cow?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose…’

‘I’m going to need some help with this one,’ said the machine tersely. All the cheerful burbling had dropped out of its voice and it now meant business.

The machine joins forces with the ship’s computer to try to solve this problem, with potentially disastrous results (although the tea they produce is wonderful).

Back to Earth. I would nominate the White Horse Inn in Westleton, Suffolk, for ‘the most generous teapot award’ for this year – tea for one turned out to have about 6 cups. There are much worse ways to spend a sunny afternoon then sipping it away in an East Anglian pub garden. Now, time for another cup.

Tea at the White Horse Inn, Westleton

#58: Prejudice warning

Love in a Cold Climate, published by Penguin Random House

I was dismayed to open a newly bought copy of one of my favourite novels, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, to find this on an introductory page:

In this book are some expressions and depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written. These prejudices were wrong then and are wrong today. We are printing the novel as it was originally published because to make changes would be the same as pretending these prejudices never existed.

 

My objections

These are my objections to this warning of prejudice:

1. It is preachy, lecturing the reader on how they should read and think.

2. It denigrates British society as a whole, by saying these prejudices were common.

3. It implies a central purpose of publishing is to moralise — it says the prejudices are only allowed to remain in order to show us they existed. It does not consider that they were part of a complex culture and way of thinking which forms the society portrayed in the book which, just like ours, was not uniformly bad or good.

4. It is inimical to the spirit of literature. Such ideologically-based statements tend to kill literature since their broadbrush, political, often fundamentalist approach does not sit well with individual experiences, the food of the novel. (I have explored this more deeply in another post on Jane Eyre.)

5. It is especially inimical to Nancy Mitford’s funny, wry, gently ironic tone.

What are we being warned of?

So what are the editors warning us about? The story of Boy Dougdale, the ‘lecherous lecturer’, molesting his young relatives and fascinating them with it? ‘And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing. Do admit, Fanny,’ says Jassy Radlett after one visit. Boy’s behaviour makes his beautiful niece Polly Hampton fall in love with him, and eventually they marry. Friend of the family Davey reports back on their wedded state when he returns from Sicily, where the couple have gone to live: ‘Well, all I can say is I know it is wrong, not right, to arouse the sexual instincts of little girls so that they fall madly in love with you, but the fact is, poor old Boy is taking a fearful punishment. You see, he has literally nothing to do from morning to night, except water his geraniums, and you know how bad it is for them to have too much water; of course, they are all leaf as a result.’ The last sentence is Davey’s wonderfully true-to-life gay humour and Mitford’s delicious comedy. Not exactly a prejudice, but a different take on sexual behaviour with minors.

Or perhaps we are being warned about this early description of the Hampton family’s aristocratic ancestry: ‘… in 1770, the Lord Hampton of the day brought back, from a visit to Versailles, a French bride, a Mademoiselle de Montdore. Their son had brown eyes, dark skin and presumably, for it is powdered in all the pictures of him, black hair. This practice did not persist in the family; he married a golden-haired heiress from Derbyshire and the Hamptons reverted to their blue and gold looks, for which they are famous to this day.’ Oh dear — implied negativity about a dark complexion. Well, since the book informs us this dark-featured man had ‘a great and life-long friendship with the Regent’ perhaps we should not take it as the plain evidence of British prejudice which the editors encourage us to.

Escaping the ideological filter

How boring it is to read literature in spot-the-prejudice mode. Mitford’s wry comedy is, like Boy’s geraniums, a sensitive growth, one which is spoiled by top-down moralising directives. But ideologies have overwhelming voices. Despite my determination to the contrary, to my dismay when I started to read the book alarm bells started ringing at examples of wrong thinking, to the detriment of the story. But I recovered in time to enjoy the story of this extended family: Polly and her exuberant young relatives Jassy and Victoria; Cedric the heir from the colonies (Canada) who, as Polly is cut off from our inheritance by her marriage, gains everything material that she might have had. Does he feel guilty about this? Not a bit. ‘No cruel looks at One,’ he says, referring to himself. ‘Fair’s fair, you know’. He changes the appearance, and the life, of Polly’s mother by giving her the full-time occupation of becoming beautiful with ‘creaming and splashing and putting on a mask and taking it off again and having her nails done and her feet and then all the exercises, as well as having her teeth completely rearranged and the hair zipped off her arms and legs’. And lastly, there is the counterfoil, Fanny the plain narrator with her unruly heather-like hair and unworldly academic husband.

So what motivates such prejudice warnings?

I assume such warnings are inserted because the publishers do not want to be seen as endorsing everything in the work they publish. But surely we don’t believe they do endorse everything — freedom of imagination, and the often conflicting views this produces, is one of the things which keeps literature alive, and publishers can’t agree with everything. And in that case we should have warnings on the Bible, Silence of the Lambs, On the Road, The Naked Lunch… and countless others. There is certainly a place for warning people about upsetting content, but Love in a Cold Climate is no candidate for that. Publishers, please trust the reader a little more to make their own judgements, and to realise that societies of past times had different values to ours.

#57: Rhetoric

'Rhetoric” by EpicTop10.com (CC BY 2.0)

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘rhetoric’? I asked a few friends and this is what they said:

I think of Cicero and rhetoric — a spoken essay or persuasive piece. Asking questions without opposition, or without having them answered.

It’s often political, in my opinion. Sounds like a long speech.

I can see it began with Cicero — this is how you persuaded people. But when you know the tropes it becomes mere rhetoric. As soon as the cat’s out of the bag it’s not magic any more.

The word now seems to have a negative feel, perhaps paired with the words ‘empty’ or, as the third speaker says, ‘mere’. It implies insincerity. Also, it is often associated with politics, as the second speaker says. For example, a Spectator article by Kevin Hague in June 2022 on the first instalment of the Scottish government’s independence prospectus says: ‘Instead of the robust analysis and sound logical reason we might expect from a paper produced by Scottish civil servants, we are instead offered pages upon pages of lazy rhetorical assertion.’

Yet rhetoric was a central part of a young gentleman’s education from Ancient Greece until the late nineteenth century, and is still taught today. Aristotle laid out the first systematic ground rules. It was a positive accomplishment, meaning the art of speaking and persuading. It included a wide range of speaking skills, such as ways of exaggerating or minimising your points; selecting words and phrases to surprise and delight your audience; down to well-known epithets like ‘brave soldier’ or ‘sturdy oak’.

So it was originally an oral form which moved to writing. Rhetorical devices were catalogued as an aid for writers by critics such as George Puttenham in the sixteenth century, and it was used in poetry, essays and other written genres. To give just one example, literary critic Walter Ong points out that Victorian prose writing drew on the rhetorical virtue of ‘copia’, speaking in abundance, and this to us can seem irritatingly verbose.

Rhetoric on a private level

So how might rhetoric perform not to an audience, but on an individual, private level? This is one of the questions I’ve been thinking about recently while reading sixteenth century poet Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’, a series of 108 sonnets and 11 songs about unrequited love for the lady Stella. In sonnet 34 Astrophil has a dialogue with an inner critic, who tells him ‘wise men’ will think his complaints about his misery stupid. Then those men shouldn’t tell anyone, Astrophil retorts, and no one will be disappointed. But the inner critic is not happy with this reply — it is stupid to speak without an audience:

What idler thing, then speak and not be heard?

Astrophil replies:

What harder thing than smart, and not to speak?

In other words, if you are hurting, you have to speak, no matter whether there is an audience or not.

These two lines from the sonnet are both rhetorical questions in our commonly understood sense, in that they do not require a real answer. Not only that, but the second question responds to the first by echoing its rhythms and retorting rather than engaging. The attempted answer is itself a rhetorical question, batting the ball back to the critic, so to speak.

Much of Astrophil and Stella lies between these two questions — written from pain out of necessity, but without a defined audience. It is not clear who the series is written for in fact, and is not writing without an audience pointless? But feeling without speaking is impossible, says Astrophil here. So the rhetoric has taken us to a place outside the declamatory structure of these two questions, to a place created by the tension between them. Astrophil has not persuaded himself but the sonnet form allows these two unanswered questions to stand, unresolved.

#56: The Light in Suburbia

The Light in Suburbia: a Year of Lockdown Paintings by Ian Archie Beck

A man I once knew used to enjoy strolling around neighbouring streets on Sunday mornings, looking at houses with their front gardens, front doors with stained glass inserts, hanging baskets, paths. Not in an intrusive way, but rather enjoying the homeliness and even beauty of them. I used to accompany him, slightly mystified at what could be so interesting.

These suburban streets are the world Ian Beck conjures in The Light in Suburbia: A Year of Lockdown Paintings, a book of watercolour and crayon pictures. The shadow of trees thrown on the white curved walls of a 1930s art deco style house; the corner of a garden shed with a trees flowing up next to its corrugated iron roof; a lemonade jug next to a window in spring, its static floral patterns providing an accompaniment to the glancing shadows of leaves behind it.

Observing light

The book is divided into the four seasons and works best for me leafed through chronologically, so the places and objects recur in different lights, just as the objects and buildings around us do through the year. So the lemonade jug in spring appears again in autumn, larger and with darker, more sharply defined patterns.

In the preface Beck describes how the pictures in the book arose from lockdown. Confined to his local area in Isleworth, he used to wander the streets early each morning and observe how the light struck objects. For example, on one trip he notices 'a group of mature trees planted at the corner of a junction of two crossing streets. The trees had been planted by the enlightened local authority at the same time that the houses were built, sometime in the 1920s. I was struck by the warm colour that the light gave to the trunks and branches. There was a haze effect made by the fresh leaf buds and there was an almost golden light beyond in the distance'.

Lockdown proved, says Beck, that he could take a break from illustrating books and 'might just paint for myself, something I had done very little of since the heady days of art college in the 1960s'. Not having to paint to a narrative, he said, proved refreshing.

Isleworth winter evening © Ian Archie Beck

A quieter lockdown story

This is part of the quieter lockdown story then, not the story of vaccines, restrictions and financial emergency but the smaller things that people discovered through reacquainting themselves with their localities. It is a world where many learned to appreciate their neighbourhoods anew, start different projects and even make new friends. Since pets were important for so many during lockdown, I was particularly pleased to learn that Beck was made to discover a new area by his greyhound Gracie, who one day pulled him in a different direction to his usual walk.

Perhaps pictures, rather than words, are the best medium for expressing this quiet break from the narrative of catastrophe in order to take pleasure in the shadows of trees on the backs of houses, or a buddleia bush bursting into an alleyway or marble busts in sunlight.

The Light in Suburbia is available from Unbound.

Alleyway beside Pitt Park © Ian Archie Beck

 

#55: Ancestors

 

Ancestors by Alice Roberts

Seven burials

Ancestors is subtitled ‘The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials’. In the book, Professor of the Public Engagement in Science at Birmingham University Alice Roberts uses burials, skeletons and their associated grave goods to talk about Britain and its populations, previous archaeologists’ practices, and current archaeological and cultural thought.

The Amesbury Archer, one of the skeletons Roberts chooses, was found with what looked like wrist guards and flint arrowheads around his body as well as pottery beakers which had been tipped onto their sides. There were also ‘decorated, delicate curls of gold’ which may have been earrings or hair wraps. The archer was 35-45 years old when he died and from the early Bronze Age — 2400-2100 BCE. This is the ‘richest Beaker burial’ in Europe, representing the man’s warrior status, and the grave goods are the earliest known pieces of metal in Britain. Roberts uses the Archer to discuss migration patterns, since he probably grew up in the Alps. 

Buried ponies

Another skeleton in the book is the Pocklington Chariot burial, from two or three centuries BCE. This has an intact chariot with the skeleton of the driver, ‘his body tucked into a crouched position to fit him in’. There are also upright ponies in the grave — headless, probably from a later ploughing of the earth. Roberts asks Iron Age expert Melanie Giles how the ponies got into the grave, upright. Giles replies:

‘Well, from what we can tell, they’re an old pair of ponies… So they’re a tried and trusted team. And maybe they trust their owners — enough to go down into the pit. I would guess they are encouraged to take that jump down into the grave pit, on their own, and then you get the chariot in, harness them up — and perhaps slit their throats as you back-fill rapidly around them.’

It is in parts like these that the book is best — careful recounting of detail together with a reasoned interpretation based on observation and analysis both of the site and of the skeletons. So we learn also that a sword and shield buried with an Iron Age skeleton in the Isles of Scilly were deliberately broken and that the grave contained a rare mirror. These objects, says Roberts: ‘could represent alliances; they could be gifts from mourners; they could be about old battles, won or lost; they could be about putting a version of the past to bed; they could be about imagining a future’. No escape from those ‘could bes’, just as Melanie Giles earlier had said ‘maybe’, ‘I would guess’ and ‘perhaps’. But this uncertainty opens a space for the imagination. A novelist could do a lot with such informed speculation about the ponies, the sword and the mirror.

The book also highlights the processes of archaeology — discovery, excavation, interpretation — and the activities of past archaeologists such as Henry Pitt Rivers, whose meticulous recording of the context of his discoveries were ahead of its time and who inferred population replacement movements from skull shapes, movements which Roberts hopes to confirm with DNA tests on the very skulls he collected.

The book starts and finishes with the Thousand Ancient Genomes Project, an attempt to use DNA sequencing of skeletons in archaeological remains to trace migration patterns to and from Britain, as well as ways in which diseases spread.

A bit scattered

The book is less successful in two main ways. Firstly, I would have liked a drawing together of the evidence from the disparate burials. A timeline and summary of what was found in each dig would be helpful, as would a map of the British Isles with each burial marked on it, and perhaps some kind of imaging of the islands’ main populations at each time. I could also imagine an infogram about how each burial confirmed or cast doubt on previous historical knowledge.

Archaeology and politics

Secondly, in my view Roberts is on shaky ground when she tries to hitch her archaeological wagon to current political preoccupations. For example, the bones of the charioteer mentioned above could not be identified as male or female and the grave contained both a sword and a mirror, traditionally associated with men and women respectively. ‘Perhaps’, says Roberts, such burials, and those of female charioteers, ‘could represent… a third gender. And then perhaps there was a fourth gender we haven’t even spotted; a fifth; a sixth’. 

I take Roberts’s point about not being too hasty with a binary judgement of sexes. However, it seems unlikely to me that Iron Age people were as preoccupied with gender fluidity as parts of twenty-first century society. During the book Roberts gives a great many warnings to the reader not to judge burials according to current views. But is this not what is happening here?

Opinions

The book is also punctuated by basic homilies on topics such as race and gender — some connected with archaeology, some not. She labels as ‘wrongheaded and futile’ the attempt to value a genetic connection to people from a particular place. She also says the idea of race ‘makes no sense biologically or historically’ and only racists believe in the idea. Well, my local council’s diversity unit sure believe that race exists, as do any number of media outlets and campaigning organisations. The book also contains a digression on the sexism of modern Roman Catholicism, which she describes as a ‘religious empire and system of political control’. I wondered if Roberts, vice-president of Humanists UK, was letting her opinions let rip in the way that cannot be done with a more cautious approach to physical evidence needed as an archaeologist.

Go see the Archer

But we can see the skeletons, and judge some of these issues for ourselves as far as possible. Roberts recommends a ‘pilgrimage’ to Salisbury Museum to see the Amesbury Archer. She describes him as ‘a metal-bending, bow-wielding, time-travelling magician’. This book would be, in parts, a good accompaniment to such a journey.