Hmmmm.

So this (understandably) 'minor' academic's account of Britain's supposed ills (the 'scourges...of modern Tory demonology', according to a disappointingly passive John Harris) are based around three points. These are:

1 - The 'postwar expansion of the state'.

During the 1930s, two camps existed within the UK. One - incorporating a sizable proportion on the left, prior to some of the British Communist Party mucking up severely in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and quite a few Conservatives as well - wanted to intervene in the incipient European crisis before it, and I'm sorry if this sounds an understatement, got too late. The other - incorporating quite a lot of Conservatives, aristos, and the editorship of the Daily Mail - wanted to chum up to Hitler. We won't go into the question of intervention in Spain here, although it might have saved a few headaches somewhere down the line (rubbish song, but the Manic Street Preachers knew the deal here.) The non-interventionists won the day. Britain consequently fought a paralysing pan-global war which decimated half of its major cities and lefy it in crippling debt. Angered by the arrogance of a Conservative Party who acted as if election was their divine right, and still mindful of the facetious 'return to normal' enacted by the governing classes in the aftermath of World War I, the British public voted in Clement Attlee's government of democratic socialists, who instituted a programme of reforms designed to make sure the people of the nation could, you know, eat every day and go to a hospital when they needed to and stuff like that. Millions benefit: in spite of the fact that Britain was absolutely bereft of cash, its people were - in general - better looked after than ever before. Within twenty years, people who would, ten years previously, have associated the word 'university' with the man they saw to pick up a prescription are enjoying their graduation ceremonies. Notwithstanding the fact that the 'expansion of state' began as a bloody neccessary measure during WWII, under a non-more-Conservative PM, this is disingenuous Thatcherism at its worst.

2 - 'Next came the left's embrace of what was supposedly all the rage in the 1960s - hedonism, moral relativism, 'the politics of desire' - which Blond thinks trickled down to the most vulnerable layers of society and spread chaos.'

There's a lot of unpicking to be done there, isn't there? This is the old 'John Lennon wrote "Revolution" while voting Conservative as a protest against excessive taxation' argument, in a strange kind of way. If the left embraced the hedonism of the Sixties - and this is a rather worn cliché, I think - then the right were no less guilty. Where some of 'the left' might have dumbly taken Laingian and Reichian 'theory' as an invitation to screw everything that moved whilst imbibing anything chemical they could lay their hands on, the right were embracing radical individualism no less wholeheartedly. The fundamental difference is that the left's 'politics of desire' were tempered by an ethics which demanded a critique of this individualism, which found its popular manifestation in punk (I don't believe its key slogans need repeating here) at more or less the same time as the mainstream right was abandoning the last vestiges of paternalism to participate in a Damascene conversion to Thatcherism. There are three kinds of Conservative: 'disappointed of Tunbridge Wells', who believes in all forms of legality until he's caught speeding, the typically more sociable libertarian Tory with whom you can have a pint and an argument until he's carted off for attempting to punch a police officer, and the one who wants to have it both ways. Lest we forget, the last Conservative government was brought down in part by a preponderance of the latter, who seemed unable to keep their own cocks in their pants while telling the rest of us to behave as if we were extras from The Vicar of Dibley. A Cameron government will mix all three, resulting in unmitigated disaster for everyone who isn't George Osborne.

3 - 'Finally, Thatcherism unleashed the free market...'

Well, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

'A dirty, hoggish people'

How one, admittedly crazy-sounding, Latvian politician saw the British after witnessing planeload after planeload of stag parties puking, pissing, and shagging their way around Riga, behaviour which has prompted the city's mayor to issue a public warning asking all-male groups from the UK to up their game a bit.

I have rather mixed feelings about this. Stag parties are not my thing, and the only one I ever went on involved a bunch of us playing pool in a cottage in Blakeney, having a kick-around, rescuing two small children from the salt marshes (long story), eating some lasagne, then heading back to Norwich full of bracing sea air. I could, I think, manage the 'rugged outdoor activities followed by one big night out in a UK city'-type affair, but the decidedly 2000s practice of decamping en masse to Central Europe, drinking Dreher or Krusovice until it comes out of one's eyeballs, then visiting extremely expensive strip & clip joints leaves me cold. Spending ten months in Budapest's District Seven, effectively the hub of the city's nightlife, has allowed me to witness a lot of these parties at first hand, and they're pretty grim. On our street there's a well-patronised, well-regarded romkert (typically, a squat-like bar set up in a disused building, decorated with furniture collected in the biannual district chuck-out) called Szimplákert. Now, Szimplákert has become, to a degree, a victim of it's own success, and even makes it onto the pages of the typically unadventurous Lonely Planet bar listings, with the result that big groups of Brits - or those smart enough to realise that they're being massively overcharged in the shiny, Square Mile-type bars on Liszt Tér - wind up there. Cue parades of middle managers in polo shirts decorated with 'hilarious', often borderline homophobic slogans ('Budapest 2009 - Gay-vin's Stag Do!' was a recent favourite), yelling at the barmaids in English, and competing with the local winos to see who can leave the biggest patch of vomit on my doorstep for me to step in come Saturday morning.

The thing is, though, that I can't help but feel that the British are scapegoated somewhat. I've seen plenty of Germans, Scandinavians, and Russians behaving identically in District Seven, the difference being that the British only seem to act up when under the influence. When sober, most English people at least demonstrate a degree of embarrassment about their unwillingness to take the plunge with Hungarian, whereas I frequently see Germans snap at shop or café workers (in English or German) then descend into fits of mirth at their addressee's inability to respond. What price a guy from Szeged or Miskolc walking into a bar in Hamburg, rattling off an order in Hungarian, and expressing complete incredulity at his failure to be understood?

I've often asked my students, and people I meet around and about, what their stereotype of an English (or Scottish - they don't often differentiate) person is. Sample answers: 'a snob'; 'an alcoholic'; 'a football hooligan'. The latter I find intriguing - I would have gone along to see Újpest or Fradi by now were their stadiums not more or less given over to Drehered-up ultra groups (witness the behaviour of Újpest's 'boys' as they host cross-border rivals Steaua Bucharest in the Europa League a few weeks back): by way of comparison, I've very rarely felt intimidated either within or en route to any English ground. I do feel that the British, and in particular the English, are frequently asked to take the rap for forms of behaviour which are endemic throughout the whole of Europe. I admit that I feel safer walking around downtown Budapest at three in the morning than I do walking through Norwich's leafy suburbs anytime after eight, but I hardly think antisocial behaviour is a problem exclusive to the UK.

'Far stronger than the British would ever have tolerated'

Neil Ascherson in today's Observer, bucking the trend of 'twenty years later' style articles to act as if post-Soviet democracy is a uniformly good thing:

What most ordinary people wanted, at the end of 1989, seemed to be something like social democracy. In other words, freedom, a regulated market economy, and a strong welfare state - the "European" model. Not unreasonably, the public thought that they could combine the freedom and prosperity of capitalism with the social benefits they had learned to expect under communism.

They were wrong. The countries in transition imported an undiluted version of Thatcherism, far stronger than the British would ever have tolerated. Price controls were abolished, subsidies cancelled, currencies left to find their own level. Many state industries and services were privatised, often bought over by western multinationals. Huge gaps appeared between rich and poor: a new, predatory super-rich class on one hand, near-destitution for pensioners and the redundant on the other. Social services withered or vanished, like the elaborate network of free day nurseries for working mothers in East Germany.

Transition soon carried away the revolutionaries themselves. In Germany, Bärbel Bohley and Jens Reich of Neues Forum went back to teaching and painting. In Poland, a new tribe of "professional" politicians, including reformed communists, had replaced the Solidarity veterans by 1993. Even Lech Walesa, the first freely elected president, was out of office by 1995, replaced by an ex-communist. In Czechoslovakia, which broke into two states in 1993, most of the Charter 77 heroes were out of government by the time of the split. Isolated, Vaclav Havel stayed on as Czech president until 2003.

The shape of politics had changed. The poor - the losers in the shift to capitalism - were now championed by right-wing nationalists, not socialists. Against them stood the new urban middle class and the sanitised post-communists, committed to neoliberal economics and European integration. The old revolutionaries now retreated into academia, journalism or seats in the European Parliament.

This is not the world they hoped for, back then when they stood exhausted among vast crowds who kissed them and cheered them and waved national flags. Adam Szostkiewicz, who had been jailed in 1982 as a Solidarity organiser, remembers how his hopeful fellow prisoners were disillusioned by the new Poland. "They expected a revised version of an open, free people's democracy, which was not to be. The new Polish democracy was too liberal and not 'social' enough ... for me, with my middle-class background, it was all right, livable, promising. It may sound rather minimalistic. But in the light of the historical experience of our parents' generation and our own, we may be forgiven, I suppose."

A Czech friend, who didn't want to be quoted by name, was much harsher. "Nothing remains of our old spirit. The Czechs have become a nation of little white mice, jostling for money and biting each other. Nobody sane could want to go back to the communist days. Yet what freedom have we really gained? Back then, the Russians made our foreign policy; now the Americans do. Back then, we lived in a culture of communist lies and false promises. But isn't the capitalist media and entertainment culture just as false and manipulative?"

Miklos Haraszti, the best-known figure in the Hungarian opposition 20 years ago, now lives in Vienna as representative on freedom of the media for OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe). He insists that he and his generation never had "perfect society" illusions. "I wrote a sober forecast then, saying we knew our democracy would be noisy, dirty, corrupted." His main regret is that Hungarian politics after 1989 became so partisan. "Our round table led to an idea of perfect liberal-democrat constitutionalism -almost too advanced. Reality pushed that over. We didn't want majoritarian, British-style politics, but something based on consensus, on a common denominator of our democracy. But populist instincts pushed towards a majoritarian style. This lack of the common denominator, the partisanship especially in the media, is creating something like the Weimar Republic. And that inevitably leads to totalitarianism unless we can find a substitute.

Until a few weeks ago, I went, every Wednesday morning, to the MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) building, a little beyond Vörösmarty utca metro station on Andrássy ut, to teach a man who deals with the logistical headaches of driver allocation across the network's six regions. When he left school, he worked as a locomotive driver on a Pannonian branch line in the years imminently preceding 'System Change'. Simultaneously, he studied for a degree in HR (or whatever János Kádár's laissez-faire communists chose to term this none-more-Blairish field), and this allowed him to enter into the post-Habsburgian labyrinth of MÁV's managerial pyramid. Recently, he completed a second degree, for which he submitted a thesis advocating a rethinking of the organisation's command structure: occasionally, he makes wistful references to Britain's 1990s rail privatisation, which he seems to me to have conflated with some mythical age of rain and steam. Given that senior MÁV employees receive a pan-EU fare waiver valid for roughly one week of every year, and an additional discount for family, he perhaps failed to notice the various atrocious consequences of privatisation in the UK when he visited.

As in many Hungarian businesses, and state institutions, there's a certain valorisation (or fetishisation) of the Thatcher-Blair 'achievement' which follows on from the 'undiluted' transfer of Thatcherism into Central and Eastern Europe that Ascherson discusses. MÁV's running of what would seem, to the average Briton, to be a relatively cheap, punctual, and well-used service, albeit one which is run at a net loss to the heavily indebted state, is regarded with something oddly resembling guilt rather than with the pride that success in the face of the severe limitations brought about by Hungary's first dust-up with the Invisible Hand should legitimate. It's almost as if the linguistic and material veneers of success and competence that impinge upon every bloody second of every bloody day in Britain (as a wag on a message board I read noted recently, it's virtually impossible to drive past any business HQ in the north-east now without seeing the words 'passionate about [insert name of product - crisps; hair gel; worming tablets - here]' emblazoned on a thirty foot long laminated banner on the outside) represent something to aspire to; something which would constitute a final act of supplication in the direction of Brussels and Washington. Boosted with seemingly unlimited finance from 'rich Central Europe' in the late 90s, there was a flash of the fur of a Magyar Tiger at the start of this decade: now, it seems that they're being asked to buy into the whole package precisely when it's the last thing they can afford to do in practical terms. Whether or not one accepts the notion that the subsidisation of public services is one of the main things that taxes exist for, it is hard not be struck by the uneasiness in the 'new democracies' as regards the absence of the superficial signifiers of prosperity - Pret a Manger, say, or a new set of sub-Fosterian offices for PWC - and the manifestation of this anxiety in a form of insistent, maddeningly limp corporatese flaunted throughout the glitzed-up bits of downtown Pest. Their own language honed in subtlety of expression (there are more than eight ways to express the basic information 'Eva likes flowers', each of which shifts the emphasis slightly to gesture towards something beautifully unvoiced), Hungarians labour awkwardly within the no-man's-land of Business English, where the quicksilver idioms and turns of phrase which characterise the parent tongue ossify as inflexible, de-ironised dictums, encumbered with grotesquely insincere conviviality. (Business English: a language invented, in an act of revenge, by the kids whose stories always came back covered in red ink: 'not a proper sentence, Richard.')

MÁV has now moved from its base of more than 100 years in the Terézváros to a purpose-built, sub-Fosterian HQ at Népliget, the vast park on the frontier between the Eight and Ninth Districts which is also the home of the similarly under-reinvention Ferencváros TC's Albertstadion. Andrássy ut, with its frighteningly steampunk paternoster and tatty, endless, dimly-lit corridors, is to be sold: one imagines that it will become a scmaltzily 'authentic' hotel or an apartment block for the well-heeled.

The top of the page shows a projected vision of the 'Corvin Strand', an act of regeneration that has so far consisted of packing the (largely Roma) inhabitants of this impoverished section of District Eight off to the distant suburbs and putting up a bunch of office blocks and flats that are, due to the economic crisis, too expensive to complete.

FINALLY!!!

My PhD thesis, bound.

'If you crash a helicopter, you probably die'

Or so claims a good friend of mine, who took time out from his own documentary film to go and see Terminator Salvation last week, returning with the above assessment of the film's mimetic shortcomings. But I'm feeling all conspiratorial about this, and I'm really not sure that the prevailing hostility towards the fourth film in the Terminator sequence is at all justified.

First things first, TS falls some way short of T1 and T2, and it would be unfair not to point this out. However, judging the new movie solely on such grounds seems to be an act grounded in an urge to be proved right, a not-so-latent wish on the part of the 'mainstream arthouse' devotees who staff broadsheet culture sections to strike a blow against an extremely abstract notion of 'Hollywood'. I'm not in the business of backing up my intuitions with any kind of factitious data, but I'm willing to guess that the reviewers in the 25-40 bracket who came down like a ton of London (Farringdon?) Bricks on TS, and did their best to murder The Dark Knight, and have almost certainly already written their reviews for the Robocop remake, would happily sit through repeat viewings of piss-poor whimsical bollocks like Juno, Broken Flowers, The Virgin Suicides, Before Sunset or any one of the ceaselessly proliferating Amerindie flicks that deal with bugger all in a style which signifies Incredible Meaningfulness. (By the way, that's two digs in three days at Richard Linklater, which isn't entirely fair because he made Dazed and Confused, a beautiful movie, and A Scanner Darkly, which, while not quite Blade Runner, did a passable job of making me feel as interestingly discombobulated as the work of Phillip K. Dick, from which it was adapted.)

Of course, it sounds like what I'm doing here is making a populist swipe against 'pretentious' films, but I think I'm actually pursuing the opposite. Perhaps the fact is that TS wasn't really very good at all, but my frustration at the perseverance of the 'oh, aren't we all so relaxed and unconcerned and emotionally literate' media to thrust the empty vessel of the abstractly 'arty' movie - not to be confused with the abstract art movie - in our direction led me to enjoy it more than it deserved. But, if I'm being perfectly honest, ninety minutes of Christian Bale and Sam Worthington machine gunning robots and crashing helicopters just has, to any sane person, be preferable to two hours of Bill Murray knocking on doors and wearing a tracksuit. McG's taking on of the Connor v. Skynet mythos might lean towards a rather reductive, underexamined philosophy - apparently, humans will always have the advantage of a vaguely defined 'humanity', AKA soul, which Skynet's otherwise unimpeachable AI cannot cow or acquire for itself - but at least it makes a less myopic engagement with a Big Question than any of the wan feasts of self-congratulation that I've listed above.

Maybe the question isn't so much 'is TS any good' - I enjoyed the cinema experience regardless of the film's eventual quality - but 'whither the arthouse film'. Two points here. One: since around 2001/2002 'artiness' has been the dominant ingredient of the perfume that marks one out as 'not in favour of illegal wars'. From the rather desperate attempts to conceive of an American 'lit rock' musical scene last year, which seemed to be engendered by little more than the fact that one of Vampire Weekend had read some Thomas Pynchon, to the pleasing on the ear but nonetheless essentially cosmetic rants of Charlie Brooker (one of the good guys, but effectively trapped within his own overly imitable sentential rhythms...), to weirdly Lacanian blog posts like this one, an unwillingness to tow the 'scent of art' line has you marked down as, oh, I don't know what, Toby Keith or Littlejohn or someone, and when you've just spent four years going half-mad trying to produce serious arguments about art and culture it's rather frustrating. Two: is there room for a revitalisation of the auteur? Common consensus seems to treat Jim Jarmusch and Linklater and even Sophia sodding Coppola as if they're the natural heirs to Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Godard, Rivette et al but they just aren't. Because you're all attentive readers you'll have read the article by David Thomson I linked to a week back in which he (rather painstakingly, for a comparatively short article) demonstrates how Hitchcock's films are held together by force of style rather than by any Aristotelian commitments. In the case of Jarmusch in particular, I'd argue that the modern pseudo-auteur film retains aesthetic unity through the force of the image of the force of style, by a laboured framing of the directorial tic and a carefully-planned strategy of homage to one or two of the masters. Of course, America has had its own genuine auteurs, but too many overlook the seventies directors - and hell, why not James Cameron and Ridley Scott as well - because of a poor gold-shit ratio. But there is surely much more to be gained by watching King of Comedy, or The Conversation, or Blade Runner, than by wasting one's time with a dressed-up undergraduate fantasy like Linklater's Before... films.

You know, I really want to stop writing gnarly stuff and tell some stories about Hungary, but this comes so much more naturally to me....

'They complained of "high maintenance" students who sought constant advice'

Although I'm surprised that anybody needed to be paid to produce a report bearing such strikingly obvious conclusions, I'm pleased that the disastrous consequences of rote-learning at A-Level have been properly recognised. The point about needy students sticks out, though: the demand for spoonfed information that arises shortly ahead of essay deadlines and exam periods is - if your experiential point of comparison is as recent as the beginning of this decade - really quite shocking. Whenever I prep undergraduates for an exam (usually the unweighted Year 1 test, which is effectively the HE equivalent of a SAT), I tell them how I went about making the step to sophomore. That process entailed sitting in the library for a few hours a day, reading and making notes on books which weren't on the course reading lists, but sounded interesting and relevant. Unsurprisingly, by dint of their not being on the lists, the books were always available, so I saved myself the three or four hours a day the usual panicking undergraduate expends running around the Short Loan room and the recent returns area looking for, I don't know, John Lukacs' Hitler and Stalin or Jane Eyre or Elementary Plant Biology 101. Of course, the approach worked because reading the new books with reference to the soon-to-be-completed course provoked a reactivation of my previous reading, so I could sit with my lecture notes on the desk, constantly reframing them according to my latest theoretical whim (I was discovering Propp, Shklovsky, and Jakobson at the time). I suppose this method is closer to the one applied by students who don't attend universities which use the (Scottish, if you like) modular system, in which case I might be seen to have been going several extra miles, but it more than paid off.

Anyway, I always explain to students how and why this attitude is better, and emphasise that it's completely pointless to sit there combing lecture notes if there is no critical subjectivity motivating what has been copied out over the course of a term. Generally, the response is a muted 'suppose so' mixed with a few people who come out and say more or less honestly that they'd been hoping that I would tell them how to pass the exam. It doesn't take a genius to see which system has been responsible for incubating such infantilism; it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to see that A-Levels have been subjected to the general and overwhelming pressure of Blairite glibocracy. The cultural logic of late, late capitalism - as manifested in, say, The Guardian's culture section or even by a platform as critically well-meaning and superficially corruscating as Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe/ Newswipe series (having finally seen them, I'll tentatively add the first two parts of the Red Riding adaptations in here) - has it that intellectual labour bears no reward, and that the ultimate object of a participation in any strand of cultural thought is a patina of 'artiness' which brings with it a lifelong obligation to attend the opening of (for example) each new film by Richard Linklater or Michael Winterbottom. One studies an arts subject at university because it's a passport to 'alternative', rather than due to any intrinsic interest in what being 'alternative' might possibly mean.

This is where the A-Level approach to EngLit both arises and is instrumentalised. According to a number of the theoreticians of literature's pedagogic value, 16-18 year olds must be taught the subject as a kind of hormonal complement. Anyone who has been, or known, a sixth former, will be aware of the absolutely paramount role of a loosely-defined individualism within their schema of ideas, hence the world of acoustic guitars, lifts to gigs, and self-consciously tasteless humour that they nearly all inhabit. For a text to have an impact, therefore, it needs to mirror the indignation of the teen, which is to perform the act of interpellating the 'rebellious' individual. There is no medium, only a Holden Caulfield-like message, and the message is - give or take a few lightly grazed political 'issues' - 'your individualism is sacrosanct'. The entire Western corpus becomes a drawn-out bildungsroman leading, with apparent inevitability, to the sanctioning of one individual in their easily-maintained, and thus unimaginable, historical moment. If 'high maintenance' and 'neediness' are terms drawn from the lexicon of romantic insecurity, their application to a pedagogic situation in which the student is reliant upon pseudo-plausible and easily digestible responses to the egotistical questions 'how did this text bequeath me' and 'how does this text sustain me' is entirely apt. There is far too little intellectual uncertainty in the experience of the arts undergraduate, and the suggestion that they be asked to cope with a little more is a welcome one.

Right, I'm planning to pull my finger out over the next few weeks and put a few things up here. As a precursor, a few links:

An absolutely magnificent article by David Thomson on Hitchcock - you could remove the specifically cinematic vocabulary and use it to make a case for abstraction in any medium. I love the stuff about the marriage of order and disorder in Hitch's frames: I've always meant to accommodate the 'plane scene' in NbNW into my 'terror and flat landscapes' paper for precisely this reason.

Bradford is the first UNESCO city of film!

And something previously unknown to me: Paul McCartney's 'Temporary Secretary'. It might induce queasiness.