timhannigan.bsky.social
Writer: #TheGraniteKingdom, #TheTravelWritingTribe, Indonesia; academic stuff on travel writing. From Cornwall. Teaches Writing & Literature at ATU Sligo
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Right! This implies that prejudice, bigotry, hostility is the default, the neutral state, only overcome through "experience". It's an appealing narrative, embedded through familiar stories (the avowed racist who gains a Black neighbour and discovers we're all the same in the end etc etc).
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Well, that would certainly be an interesting collection!
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Don't take my word for it (well, take my word and that of a couple of other people too...)
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I mean, actually, yes, if you grew up in a moorland environment - big fires on the Penwith Moors, wandering in the blackened aftermath, watching the hill ablaze from the kitchen door, were definitely part of my 1980s Cornish childhood. But I definitely take your general point!
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You're also allowed to do it with authors of trade published books, by the way - just in case you were wondering...
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I remember about 5 years ago having all these meetings and workshops about "contract cheating" and how that was the incoming existential threat - such innocent times! I now find myself - *genuinely* - worrying a bit about the folks who used to work in essay mills. What are *they* going to do now???
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You're right, of course. But it's the sense of being officially ordered to do nothing, turn a blind eye - or, I dunno, go figure it out yourself - that adds to the terror.
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Add to that an all-staff stricture from on high warning that we must not under any circumstances ever run student work through AI-detectors, and it is very, very difficult to stay motivated. It's the sheer speed with which everything has been destroyed that is hardest to process.
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Same. I actually caught myself in a weird flush of grateful nostalgia the other day when I opened an essay in Turnitin and found the old familiar rainbow of uncited copy-and-paste: "Ah, back to the good old days, of, like, 2022 when everything was so simple..."
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Ha ha! I've had a couple of Virginia Wolfs too, which always makes me giggle...
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"It's Eliot with one L, and there's a space in Waste Land" - Convert to QuickMark..
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And FUTURE - future has to be in there somewhere. Also the exact same cohort of heavily airbrushed, healthy, wholesome, branded hoodie-wearing, laughing students.
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In my case my reading broadened substantially in later years - and not initially through any self-conscious strategy. Anyway, if there's a young man in your life you'd like to get going on reading - and perhaps writing - there's a table in Charlie Byrne's in Galway you might point him towards... /4
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We had a bit of a laugh at the obvious pattern - which we weren't aware of in the thick of it 20 years ago. We also wondered if we were maybe the last generation of men to have read like that, uncritically and unwittingly when young and bookish. But concluded that it
probably did us no harm. 3/
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Hemingway, Nabakov, Conrad, Greene, McCarthy, Wodehouse, Marquez, Kerouac, Heller etc. etc (plus A Room of One's Own, clearly positioned as a wry joke in the middle of it all). Anyway, we stood at the table for half an hour in a warm fug of readerly nostalgia (and Friend 1 bought The Crossing). 2/
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I was in the magnificent Charlie Byrne's Bookshop on Saturday with two friends, standing at at a particular table. It wasn't labelled, but it had clearly been curated with something in mind. "Jeez," said Friend 1, "this is my entire twenties right here..." And it was, for all three of us... 1/
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I was delighted - they actually listened, actually bought and read the book, actually found it relevant (yay! Maybe I *do* have some idea what I'm talking about after all!) and actually worked a reference to it elegantly into their own work.
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I have 3-hour modules (officially 1hr lecture/2hr seminar). What you might recognise as the "lecture content" *is* more heavily loaded in the first hour, but in practice it oscillates with other stuff throughout. (This is only easily practical with the same smallish group together throughout.)
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Again, I'd argue the idea that it's "different" is a binary simplification (more an escalation, perhaps). And the fundamentals of effective teaching are the same.
Crucially, I don't argue against what we might call "lecture content"; just the idea of giving over to it discrete blocks of contact time
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My point is that the binary conception *itself* is conservative (and out of whack with most other classroom learning). Sometimes conditions (200 students in a theatre) hamper efforts to break it down; but if not, why not just approach 3 hours of contact as a 2ndary teacher would for lesson planning?
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A thought experiment in return: is the majority of the 7 years post-primary education students go through before university "in effect self-directed"? And do the teachers there (who generally have a lot more formal training *as* teachers) have a binary lecture/seminar conception of contact time?
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Sure. But the same could be said of almost any lesson content, and none of that *has* to be delivered principally via a traditional lecture format. (It's a separate debate, but I do think there's a certain conservatism in teaching in HE - which is by no means entirely those teachers' own fault...)
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Yep, exactly! It's it's destabilising in a fascinating way...
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The best "lectures" are often the best because they mitigate the traditional format with elements that run counter to the very concept. (And I'd also suggest that a public lecture or YouTube video ought not be directly compared to a delivery within a formal education setting.)
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A counter-opinion: I trained to teach EFL before I ever taught in HE (though I taught EFl to students). Thus, the traditional "lecture" concept was pedagogically anathema. Why would HE teachers NOT by default emulate the theory-grounded practices of teachers in primary, secondary, FE, EFL etc.?
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It's part of what makes that area so compelling for me, and a little uncanny - the fact that the landscape has been so dynamic, so dramatically changed over the last few hundred years.
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Thank you! Delighted that you're enjoying it.
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Also being peculiarly very prescriptive about how their peers should behave "as an author"...
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Oh, just people going on endlessly about "gatekeepers", offering wild "industry insights", generally talking as though the publishing industry were a kind of public health service for would-be writers in which it's an indication that things are "broken" if not everyone gets to see a doctor...
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Absolutely!
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(My proposed solution is academic publication done in-house by universities and covered under general operating costs - but frankly, scraping for AI now makes me reconsider the principle of open access.)
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Yep. And I support the general idea of open access academic publishing where the labour of creation is typically provided at no cost to the publisher - though those who see piracy as an unproblematic solution there might remember there are editorial and production costs which need to be sustainable.
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A 70-year-old guidebook error might be some kind of record. I wonder how many editions it had travelled through.
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There are vast numbers of books that sell almost nothing as eBooks, but which are still published digitally by default - to be automatically (probably literally) pirated, and now, grotesquely, fed to AI. If a book sells 1000s in print and literally a few dozen digital, that's not easy to justify.
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I understand. But I'm NOT talking of an end to all eBooks. For big authors with decent digital sales, inevitable piracy is probably an acceptable pay-off. And sure, if the next Stephen King was print-only someone would scan and pirate it on Day 1. But no one's going to bother with that for my books.
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No, thanks. (I mean, it would be my publishers' business, not mine. But it's a hard no, personally speaking...)
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God, yes - guidebooks! The reflection has hit me hard that for many books, maybe whole genres, publishers have effectively been handing content direct to pirates with negligible legit sales as payoff. And now Zuckerberg and co. Have been able to pour it all straight into their vomit-generators.
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Thus, do publishers need to reconsider *automatic* digital publication, even when genre/market track record suggests there will be negligible eBook sales, given that it inevitably enables instant piracy?
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Sure thing; I don't disagree. But some folks seem to be discussing this as if LibGen itself isn't a problem - is maybe even a good thing(!) if only it weren't for Meta using it "unethically". But LibGen itself is utterly unethical mass IP theft!
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There's no good outcome, I guess; but if you're looking at print sales numbered solidly in thousands and ebook sales literally in dozens, it's hard to justify putting out a digital version when it absolutely guarantees piracy and a high likelihood of grossly unethical use for AI development!
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Absolutely fair point - but the same could definitely be said of audiobooks, and publishers *don't* automatically put out audio versions (for which the piracy risk is probably lower), only if they think there's a big enough market.
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But there are thousands and thousands of books (like mine!) that are pirated more or less automatically (probably actually automatically), which no one would ever bother scanning from print (and if they did then, hey! I'd get at least one print sale out of it!)
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Of course - and I remember the roughly photocopied pirate editions of The Beach and Southeast Asia on a Shoestring you used to see on the backpacker trail back in the day! And I've no doubt someone would scan and upload, like, the latest Stephen King on day one if it was print only.