Quotulatiousness

May 8, 2018

Author dubious about students “analyzing” his novels

Filed under: Books, Education — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This is a most amusing little anecdote:

Ian McEwan, the award-winning author, has admitted feeling “a little dubious” about people being compelled to study his books, after helping his son with an essay about his own novel and receiving a C.

McEwan, author of works including Atonement, Amsterdam, and On Chesil Beach, said he remained unconvinced about the purpose of asking students to analyse his work.

“I always feel a little dubious about people being made to read my books,’ he told Event magazine, saying his son Greg was required to write an A-Level essay on Enduring Love several years ago.

“Compelled to read his dad’s book – imagine. Poor guy,” McEwan added.

“I confess I did give him a tutorial and told him what he should consider. I didn’t read his essay but it turned out his teacher disagreed fundamentally with what he said.

“I think he ended up with a C+.”

Asked for his thoughts on the literary landscape of 2018, McEwan suggested he was sceptical.

“Literary fiction is in a curious nosedive saleswise, down about 35 per cent over the past five years,” he said.

“Everyone’s got a theory: TV box sets, some sort of fatigue, who knows. Maybe it’s not just good enough.

“When people ask me who are the amazing writers under 30, I’m not in a position to judge. I start a lot of modern novels and don’t find myself compelled to continue.”

The Western Front Awakens – Peace In The East I THE GREAT WAR Summary Part 13

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 7 May 2018

The spring of 1918 brought huge shifts to the fronts of World War 1. The Eastern Front went quiet after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Western Front returned to a war of movement with the German Spring Offensive 1918.

Working at Rolling Stone in the early days

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

According to Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers, the magazine was everything a well-heeled sexual predator could possibly want in a workplace:

Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s superb new biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Hagan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff — male and female — was having sex with everyone else, under and on top of desks, on the boss’s sofa, wherever the mood struck them. Hagan quotes one writer claiming that Wenner told him that “he had slept with everyone who had worked for him.” Compared with Wenner and the early Rolling Stone crowd, Harvey Weinstein was a wanker.

Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of workplace harassment? They appeared to. In the company’s bathroom, women employees scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance — not, as they do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects and was rumored to have had threesomes with the Wenners.

Different as they seem, there’s a direct line between that revolutionary time and our own enraged, post-Weinstein moment. What started out as a clear-cut protest against workplace harassment has mutated into a far-reaching counterrevolution — a revolt against the combustible contradictions that the sexual revolution set in motion 60-odd years ago.

Charge of the Light Brigade | Animated History

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Armchair Historian
Published on 28 Dec 2017

The Charge of the Light Brigade, Animated History

QotD: Pay inequality

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It probably doesn’t come as news that airline companies pay pilots more than cabin crew — but according to the dogma of the gender wage gap, we’re supposed to find this fact troubling. The British government now requires companies to report their raw gender gap — that is, the difference in the median hourly wages earned by their male and female employees. Ignoring occupational differences, seniority, employment history, hours worked, or any of the countless other factors affecting salaries, these data are misleading at best. Nevertheless, when budget airline EasyJet reported a 51 percent pay gap between its male and female employees, the company knew that its reputation perched on the edge of a PR abyss.

And that’s the whole point of the exercise: simplify statistics to shock people at the seeming injustice done to women and shame companies into action; refuse to compare similar job functions; ignore the fact that, like every other airline, EasyJet’s pilots are disproportionately male, while their cabin crews skew female; forget that almost all carriers compete for the same 4 percent of the world’s female pilots; and whatever you do, don’t mention that the EasyJet CEO, who was in charge of this bigoted organization and also its highest-paid employee until retiring earlier this year, was a woman. The company should be branded with a scarlet “51 percent” until it … does what? Cuts pilots’ pay? Hikes the salaries of female cabin crew? Hires male attendants instead of female? Goes bankrupt?

Kay S. Hymowitz, “Equal Pay Myths: Activists for wage parity ignore stubborn truths”, City Journal, 2018-04-09.

Powered by WordPress