Freckles & Doubt

There is an, on the whole, surprisingly small surge of posts on Tumblr about Neil Gaiman, who has been accused of less than savoury sexual activities with much younger women in positions of comparatively less power than he has. The initial article focused on one victim has brought half a dozen others out of the woodwork, so it's a pattern. There's what seems to be a fairly balanced reflection on the situation at https://politicsdancingxyz.substack.com/p/manufacturing-consent.

This has come completely out of left field: of all the potential items on my 2024 Bingo card "Neil Gaiman sex scandal" would absolutely never have been an option. I love his writing and his social media presence - Tumblr particularly, where he is sane, enlightened, snarky, and surprisingly in tune with Tumblr's propensity for idiosyncratic off-the-wall playfulness. He seemed, on all fronts, like one of the good ones, and a part of me was desperately hoping his accusers would be revealed as chancers, drama-seekers or severely disturbed, and the whole thing manufactured in bad faith. But his response has been to make noises that "it was consensual" in various articles, and then to disappear from sight since the whole thing blew up and hire marketing firms, so that's obviously wishful thinking on my part, and I am sternly suppressing it. It seems fairly clear that he was awful to women across the span of his life, and he clearly caused horrible pain and degredation to his victims, and they have my absolute sympathy, support and admiration for their strength in coming forward with this in the teeth of his reputation and status. But the fact that their pain is clearly the important thing here doesn't actually stop me - stop many of us - from feeling our own pain and loss at a destroyed relationship with a writer and creator who felt like one of our own.

I think, on the whole, the comparative silence on Tumblr is an echo of what I'm feeling myself - shock and grief, to an extent which makes it hard to process. He has been an icon in the sf/fantasy community for as long as I've been reading sf and fantasy. His work is warm and human and compelling, his treatment of female characters and queer identities and the like seemed to be enlightened and supportive, this simply doesn't fit. But I have to make it fit, and it's doing my head in - as it is, I think, for a large swathe of his readers.

It also stings paricularly because grief is partly anger, because what's been revealed about his personal proclivities for abusive sex with comparatively powerless women means that his public persona is a carefully crafted lie, designed to cover and enable his activities. I am angry because I feel stupid, as though I should have known. (I mean, I always hated his relationship with Amanda Palmer, who I intensely dislike for not particularly rational reasons beyond the age discrepancy and her brashness, but I blamed her for its dissonances, not him. He got me. Bastard.)

A lot of the discussions on social media from betrayed fans circle around the perennial problem of what the hell you do with your relationship with the art when the creator turns out to be a problematical dickhead. Sometimes this easy - I ditched Orson Scott Card and wossname, John C Wright (had to look him up) without a blink when I became aware of their respective frothing homophobias, their work never really mean that much to me. And the China Mieville jerking women around thing simply allowed me to admit how pretentiously intellectualised his work can be, despite its undoubted quality and originality. While I was fond of Harry Potter, I have always been aware of the books' flaws as literary works, and been frustrated by their conservative moral framework; JK's rampant TERFism was not a shock, and it has cost me absolutely nothing to boycott anything further from which she might profit, and retreat into HP fan fiction. Joss Wedon was a betrayal, but Buffy and Firefly were in the past, their loss is not as immediate. I have a harder time with Arcade Fire and Win Butler's sexual misconduct allegations, I love Arcade Fire, and I can't really listen to it any more without a sense of unease, so I listen to them a hell of a lot less than I used to. But I have bought and read, multiple times, pretty much everything Gaiman ever wrote, book-wise, and a fair chunk of his graphic novels. I have the giant Absolute Sandman tomes, for heaven's sake. I have Good Omens on DVD. I have written academic papers on him. Any way you slice it, that's a loss.

I don't know if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. I know it's far more likely, in our modern media age, that the relentless glare of the media spotlight will sooner or later discover horrible things about large numbers of our respected creators. No-one is perfect, and media - and humanity in general - love to dish the dirt, and the reality is that if the internet existed a hundred years ago we'd be cancelling cherished literary icons left, right and centre. And there may be an argument for trying to make that separation in order to still enjoy the work, but I can't. I cannot read or watch or listen without suspicion when I know the sordid details, and the suspicion, and consequent re-analysis of the work, spoils my enjoyment. TERFism is implicit in Harry Potter if you read it with the knowledge of JK's current frothings, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to find that Gaiman's female characters are rife with problems if I revisit them now, in the same way that Buffy is if you use the lens of Dickhead Joss. And that'll hurt.

So I have actually found Brandon Taylor's article about Alice Munroe to be strangely consoling, because he talks about precisely this betrayal in terms which mirror my own. And two of his comments really stay with me: one, "Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person." And two, "For myself, I will never read Alice Munro the same way again." This encapsulates it: three equal but competing truths. Brilliant writer. Dickhead. Tainted work.

My so far favourite response to this whole debacle, and the writer/cherished work relationship, is this tweet:



Part of me is also angry because this is such a waste. Gaiman had it all: respected body of work, iconic status among the fandom, a guaranteed market for Good Omens and Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, the high-budget cinematic adaptations which are in process at the moment, and which will unavoidably see less success than they could have because so many of us have a bad taste in our mouths. He was talking about working on a new book, which I will now not buy if he ever does publish it. He pissed all that away by being a dickhead and pretending he wasn't. He must have thought the structure of his achievements and his place in the fandom were unassailable. Now that it's all out in the open, they were - not precisely a lie, but an ill-built edifice threatening to totter, because we're looking at it harder, and bits of it are illusion over ugly gaps, and this is an ugly wind.

Fun features of Registration Hell Season: three different advisors using the wrong ID to assign student reg submissions to me on the database over a five-day period, so I didn't see them and found them only by accident, hitting me with a merry 30-strong pile to process when I thought I'd cleared my queue. Considering pinpoint retributive laser strikes from orbit.

Fun additions to Registration Hell Season: orientation. I have been working 10-12 hour days for several weeks and am very tired and scattered, so discovered only today that the orientation site, which I opened to students on Wednesday, had been released with the benefit of my extremely flawed and distracted fumbling of the degree groups. These were supposed to restrict students to seeing the curriculum material for their own programme only so they don't all sign up for the wrong degrees on the wrong forms, and I managed to screw it up so they don't see any curriculum info at all. Which, aargh. They really need that time to process it before they register. Sorted now, but aargh.

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation Hell Season: a mini exam committee in the middle of it, processing all the students who wrote deferred or summer term exams; small board schedule, only 100 or so, but I have to do it over this weekend. I am tired and scattered, see above, and checking them is like pulling teeth. I have sacrificed my last chocolate orange to the cause, and am permitting myself a segment if I check ten records.

(It's a slightly weird check, too, we assessed continuously rather than with exams last year, because remote, and it's inflated the marks so the distinctions and Dean's Merit List awards are off the charts. Remote learning and COVID have been very polarising, we have simultaneously the highest fail rate and highest distinction rate we have ever had, selecting, of course, against lower income students who don't have good work conditions or internet access. Yay transformation. And the Law faculty's merit-based access to the Law major has set its admission bar nearly 10% higher than usual because of the marks inflation, and unsuccessful students are exploding furiously all over my inbox. Sigh. It's usually fatal to cross a Law-inclined student, they all fancy themselves lawyers already, and present Arguments.)

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation/Exam Committee Hell Season: still no new glasses, and I can't bloody see with these ones, I have to slide them down to the end of my nose to read the tiny board schedule writing, and they keep falling off. Very distracting.

On the upside, the weather has remained below 30 so I don't have to make blood sacrifices to the rain gods, which is just as well, I'm too tired to leap naked around a pentagram. And my flame lily is green and leafy and flowering like a mad thing. It's not all bad.

Exam committee season, that is, not necessarily the jolly holly bit, which seems somewhat subdued this year, mercifully: the supermarket music selection has, for some reason, given me Walk Like An Egyptian two weekends running rather than syrupy Xmas carols, which is about a million times preferable and causes the traditional outbreaks of bopping in the aisles. No, 'tis the season of me and what my handy ruler informs me is a 7cm-thick pile of board schedules, which I have since Friday been spending merry 10-hour days checking. I have just finished annotating one and am taking a brief tea-and-bloggery break before assailing the next. With the usual acompaniment of cussing, whinging, exhortations to the heavens for patience in the face of unlikely student catastophes, and occasional wild cries of glee as random individuals manage, in the teeth of the COVID odds, to produce shining and admirable results.

It's been a very weird year for student marks. We expected a high level of fails and academic exclusions, given the extent to which students are not responding well to the remote format, and I think the exclusion rate is probably slightly up. Also, my non-finalist board schedule is about 200 students larger than usual, while the finalists are 200 smaller; all this COVID and larking about remotely is putting a serious crimp in our grad rate. But weirdly, the Dean's Merit List awards are popping up at about double the usual rate. Our faculty's courses all went continuous-assessment this year, since students weren't necessarily in CT for in-person exams; it's inflated the marks somewhat without the usual exam input. Conversely, students who crash, crash hard, and completely, clearly struggling with remote learning and, in many cases, illness and death and economic hardship and really difficult working conditions in their family environments. The marks are strangely polarised, either excellent or catastrophic, the middle stretches are extremely shrunken. Thus, apparently, is academic life under the thumb of the pandemic. In that the pandemic, like the bastard that it is, has its thumb on the scales.

I record for posterity the scene of annotatory endeavour:



From the left: packed of Côte d'Or pralines, with which I am motivating myself through this; board schedule, scribbled upon; curriculum note handout, produced by me in quantities in a desperate attempt to stop our complicated curriculum structures from eating advisors alive; glasses case, containing incredibly expensive new bifocals which appear to have the wrong prescription in that they do not allow me to actually focus on anything close, necessitating much swearing and me wearing the old ones because I can't afford the time to throw them back at the optician until at least Wednesday; cup of Earl Grey, one of endless succession which is powering this whole horrible process; practical essentials including pencils, erasers, handbooks, further curriculum notes, calculator; vase of St Joseph's lilies, which has the consolatory property of at least, if I have to sit here for hours on end, smelling nice. There's a cat in this picture, but she's under the table, on the chair next to me, snoring gently in her sleep.

I am making progress, there is an end in sight, but gods, I hate this time of year. And back to the salt mines I go.

oooh, yes, this blog thing, yes. *blows dust off it in the traditional fashion*. I knew I was forgetting something. Well, probably I'm forgetting lots of things, on account of how it's been a hellish couple of months and I am exhausted enough to have a small, limp, cheesy sort of thing in place of a functional memory. But it's more or less over bar the irritating mopping up. I survived, by dint of two months with 10-hour days and no weekends off, the translation of registration for 5000 students and orientation for 1400 into brand new remote processes designed by a giant, slow, inefficient bureaucracy and implemented by self with hindrance from same during conditions of global pandemic. I didn't even kill anyone, although the temptation was enormous at several points. I also tallied up my overtime hours this week. From the middle of January to the middle of March I worked 270 extra hours, counting extra-long days, evening stints and weekends. I am feeling, shall we say, somewhat entitled to my current state of exhaustion.

So, I had a lovely rant semi-written about last week's inbox full of sustained hissy-fit by a parent-of-student who is incensed because offspring doesn't make the cut for their programme of choice, and has been spamming the faculty hierarchy with increasingly self-important rants accusing all and sundry, but me by name repeatedly, of inefficiency, discrimination, racism, ignorance, despicable conduct, cruelty and what have you. Plus threats of legal action. And I was more than somewhat annoyed about all that, but then yesterday happened, and suddenly it all seems trivial and petty. I suppose the university catching fire would, in fact, deliver a nice hot cup of perspective.

I always vaguely expected my Cherished Institution to be burned down by angry students, not by rampaging bush fires, but that's nature for you. Table Mountain has significant fires every couple of years, we have stuffed the fynbos cycles royally by not allowing it to burn naturally at intervals, so when it does go up, there's all this deadwood and it's a ferocious blaze. There has been ash falling even out here, a suburb away, and the whole city is full of smoke, my eyes and breathing are feeling it.

But none of the previous fires on the mountain have actually affected campus - this time there were fairly serious winds, and the fire leaped onto campus in weird pinpoint strikes, and down over the freeway. Yesterday we lost three buildings (Jagger Library, the Botany building, and a middle campus smallish residence), and saw fire damage to others. The palm tree outside Fuller Hall went up like a torch, it was horrifying. We evacuated all the students from residences because of the smoke and ongoing threat, and there were awful pictures of little trains of them trekking through various suburbs with suitcases. The university apparently found beds for everyone in various hotels, and the community in general has been rallying magnificently with donations and food and what have you, but it's still a lot.

I have been part of this university for my entire adult life: here for undergrad and two grad degrees, and then working here both part time and full time thereafter. The Jagger library, with its special collections section, was where I spent a fair amount of time writing my PhD, it had a fantasy/sf critical collection which we started when I was chairing the Tolkien Society, and the lovely librarian used to order in good fairy-tale texts for me. It's all gone: the pics were horrible, the old building with all its windows full of flame. Some of the more fragile and valuable collections were in fireproof rooms under the library and are mostly OK, but we've lost a bunch from the African Studies library. The building is across the road from my office, which feels uncomfortably close, but it also feels as though a part of my own history has gone up in flames. Yesterday was awful, increasingly disbelieving doomscrolling through all the social media pics, and the weirdest sense of unreality - as if a year of COVID wasn't bad enough, now this? some kind of cosmic joke. The library going was a gutpunch, I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon in helpless tears.

This image of the sign to upper campus, which I've screenshotted from a media compilation on Youtube, really got me:



I suppose, now, we go on doing what we've been doing throughout the COVID crisis: what we can. Assess, replace, try to make it work in spite of everything. I hope the university has really good insurance.

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two-line answers in which he variously tells me all the inventively wrong things he has tried to do to make this mysterious thing happen and which haven't worked, and I cannot tell him what the right thing to do is because he WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT THE CHANGE IS! Given that I am sending increasingly annoyed emails with careful caps, underlining and bolds to try and make him focus on the question, I am being left floored and slightly breathless at the magnitude of the reading comprehension fail he is demonstrating. Honestly, he'll never survive a liberal arts degree if he can't read a simple question. And I'm very close to the point, given my current 12-hour days and 300-odd emails daily, of simply not answering any more. Because really.

Registration continues to melt down gently, we now have 70% of students having submitted, two days before the deadline, and have processed 65% of those. The proliferation of both reg submissions and queries to my inbox is being echoed, in more concrete terms, in my home environment, by various insectoid and other incursions, which likewise give the impression of scurrying masses imperfectly contained and erroneously misdirected. The cockroach outbreak has, merciful heavens be thanked, been more or less contained by the efforts of the landlord, who replaced the rotted sink backboard (thereby revealing millions of the little fuckers nesting madly in the rotting wood, as I had darkly suspected) and then made merry mayhem with cockroach insecticide all down the skirtings. I have a few desperate stragglers, but they are punch-drunk and staggering, and I dispatch them with extreme prejudice, and the kitchen no longer skitters when I switch on the light suddenly at 2am owing to sleepwalking, weird noises or the sudden need for the loo.

The more recent problem is the hitherto flourishing violet I had in a pot in the passage, which suddenly, a week ago, went all lacy-leaved on me instead of its previously happy and stalwart green, and I picked a couple of caterpillars off it, muttered strange gardening oaths, and though nothing more of it. Except the leaves continued to get lacier, and I rooted through them a bit to find more caterpillars, unearthed one or two, and eventually got the hell in and rustled the whole plant vigorously. Upon which there was a sort of squidgy, squirming shower, and about 20 browny-green caterpillars in assorted sizes, from mini to Economy, were left writhing disconsolately on the tiles. I have done that twice more on two subsequent days, to diminishing returns, and I think I may finally have eradicated them all, but really. Butterflies are pretty and all, but there are Limits.

Oh wait. 9-email student has just got back to me, via a futile and error-ridden detour through the Law faculty, with the final, grudging admission that he wants to move to Law, and a wild and exaggerately favourable reading of his eligibility for same in terms of school-leaving scores. I have disabused him of his various misconceptions, and am left reeling slightly at the though of the havoc his particular brand of wilful misreading could wreak on the innocent law profession. Lawks.

(My subject line is, of course, the Inchworm song, which I know through Danny Kaye on the Muppets, and re-watching the gentle sweetness of which has just soothed a lot of my irritation. On Youtube. My caterpillar infestation isn't nearly as cute.)

Not my favourite moment in completely not my favourite time of year in a completely ungodly horrible year in anyone's terms anyway.

We are
(a) running remote registration too slowly, because students don't follow instructions, so we have processed a third of our returning student cohort in three weeks and have only a week left to process the other two-thirds, which explains everything you need to know about my 12-hour days, and
(b) last night, after two weeks of wrangling in which the Law faculty tried to make me do the data crunching and I, fortunately backed by the full and pleasingly territorial might of our faculty manager, refused, I could finally release the list of students accepted for the Law major, about which said students have been bugging me with increasing fervour for three weeks, only to find that
(c) when I woke up this morning, it was to an inbox full of indignant students not selected for Law despite clearly meeting requirements, because the Law faculty, in a probably unconscious display of the if-I-do-it-really-badly-they-won't-make-me-do-it-again trope so beloved by domestic spats the world over, had completely screwed up the data, at which
(d) my internet promptly went out, which after half an hour on the helpline and crawling under the desk to diagnose the fibre box, and establishing that Octotel was suffering from either "problems" or "scheduled maintenance", was accompanied by
(e) the water going off, because the landlord spent two days this week rendering my hideous workload even more hideous by banging, scraping and SOMEONE IN MY SPACE KILL IT WITH FIRE, in order to install a prepaid water meter, for which
(f) he gave me absolutely no documentation, which means I've spent odd moments in the frantic week trying to work out how to prepay on insufficient info based purely on the brand name of the water meter packaging he left in my recycling, and working through the tiny prepaid amount he actually preloaded into it, culminating in
(g) this morning: no water, no internet, so no way of getting water, and no way to access the steadily increasing public relations disaster in my inaccessible inbox in addition to the massive pile of work I have to do this weekend.

Fortunately the internet came on again at lunchtime, and unlogjammed the logjam, so I am watered, internetted and have with consumate skill and dexterity placated the students by blaming Law entirely and being very sympathetic. (They're nice kids. I posted the list the instant it was finalised, which was at about 9pm last night, and three separate students emailed me a heartfelt "thaaaaannnk yooouuuuu!" with varying vowel extravagances in both the thanks and my name, they have all been incredibly anxious about this, hence the late night announcement). And I have to say, typing up the above Itemised List of Inexorable Doom made me giggle hysterically, because good grief.

But I am a very, very tired thing. My Monty Python subject line serves to describe both my life in general, and my voice in particular, which is evincing that gravelly octave-drop so characteristic of exhaustion. Come, oh, the end of March, when this is all over, I am going to assume the horizonal position and not move for several years.

Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line in a fine spirit of emulation and community. The version below of the current viral sensation "Soon may the Wellerman come" loses me a bit when it adds the canned beat and starts remixing, but it's the best quality edit of the first part I can find. (Also, the first bass addition, the cheerful blonde dude in the cap who basically started all this, has a completely phenomenal bass voice).



This is a bloody catchy piece of music, and I love what the communal treatment has done to it, but it's also fascinating and faintly horrible that it's become a viral meme at this point in time. I mean, yes, it's catchy and we're all bored, and it's also communal and we are all relying on each other very heavily through the internet to beguile us through this crisis. It is curiously akin, in its creative/collaborative spirit, to making bread. But it's even more interesting in purely thematic terms.

This is a whaling song. It arises from the nineteenth century whaling industry in New Zealand, major participants in which were the British Weller brothers, who built and lost a small empire in Otago in the 1830s, both running and supplying whaling ships. The Wellerman, with his "sugar and tea and rum", is bringing supplies to the whalers while they pursue their whale, and while they look forward to the day when the whale is caught and "the tonguin' is done" (tearing the blubber off the dead whale in strips, eeuw).

But there's a lot more going on here. The accounts I've been able to find are either "yay NZ industry" or "boo dead whales", and comparatively few mention the fact that the whalers were not salaried, they were paid in supplies, in fact, in the "sugar and tea and rum" carried by the Wellerman. Who was thus both boss and supplier, in a little closed and incestuous loop which gave all the power to the Wellers, who did indeed grow rather rich on whaling and supplying whaling ships, at least before the whale-oil bubble collapsed. The song is about entrapment, the ship hooking and endlessly being dragged by the whale, the whalers endlessly bound into the work/eat cycle of their moneyless employment, which ensured they couldn't actually easily leave it, because they could build up no savings on which to do so. "The Wellerman" is the whaling version of the coal-miner's "Sixteen Tons" - another day older and deeper in debt, I owe my soul to the company store. It speaks, under its jaunty tune, to pandemic and lockdown because of that claustrophobic sense that you can't get out.

It also implicitly speaks to our current late-stage capitalism, and its absolute disregard for the wellbeing and prosperity of the workers it exploits. The whalers under the sway of the Wellerman are desperately akin to the Amazon wage-slaves who are slipping into poverty while Jeff Bezos accumulates billions. While I love the song and its communal expression, it has also made me incredibly depressed, because it suggests that there is something fundamentally broken and intrinsically unlearning about humanity: nearly two hundred years ago we were not only slaughtering whales, we were exploiting the workers so a tiny elite could make money, and we're still doing it. Slavery, and indentured service, and exploitative and inhumane companies who care about money and don't care about people and deliberately locked them into service so they couldn't escape, are baked into our cultural DNA. I hate that. I hate that America is still fighting to implement a minimum wage which has been fought over for so long that it's no longer a liveable amount. I hate that the "New South Africa" notwithstanding, there are people digging in our bins every time we put them out, and the divisions between our poverty-ridden rural or township citizens and the wealthy commercial or political classes are huge and growing huger. We've always done this, how can we stop doing it?

It's giving me a micro-version of the grief and despair I felt when America elected Trump: that there is a segment of humanity - capitalists or Trump supporters - whose thought processes are so alienatingly inhumane to me that I can't feel any sense of connection to or kinship with them. And their inhumanity is dominating the directions our culture takes, precisely because it is exploitative and uncaring, and tramples the people who feel otherwise. And it's a lot of work for a sea shanty to be doing, but we're all trapped in this, working endlessly at awful, destructive jobs for which we are paid insultingly and from which we cannot escape, because the system has put us there and keeps us there deliberately. All we can do, apparently, is sing about it.

Aargh. And I'm tired and in the middle of exam committees and virtual registration, and losses and dissolutions are characterising my social circle, and I have a sinus headache, and it's hot, so probably I'm more pessimistic than I should be. But aargh.

In an unprecedented move blindsiding everyone except anyone with a brain who's been watching Trump in the last four years, MAGA goons today attempted to occupy the Capitol, in order to disrupt Senate ratification of the election results in favour of Biden. Two things about this.

One: cruising through my various social media feeds today, I am struck afresh by how much we seem to be living in a clichéd and not very well written science fiction dystopia.

Two: the attempt to disrupt congress and force an electoral decision in Trump's favour appears to have been half-baked at best, conceptualised by idiots as an idiot gesture, and fizzled without achieving anything except unnecessary death and destruction, and to unnecessarily underline the extreme and terrifying fragility of American democracy as a system, and the depth and ferocity of the country's social divides. Which, frankly, could happen to anyone, nationally, and has been exemplified all over the globe in the last hundred years or so, see badly written sf dystopia, above.

But the pointless gun-toting posturing of the invaders is in the event an irresistible parallel to the delightful video I actually wanted to post today, whose wantonly inept robots exemplify all of the above flailing futility with considerably more innocence and charm.

Work is currently giving me strong and recurrent desires to run in tight circles, screaming and tearing my hair out. The only saving grace of interminable, tedious Teams and Zoom meetings (I had eight last week. EIGHT!) is that I can, when the level of fuckwittery reaches critical, double-check that I'm on mute and rocket into the garden in order to soothe my soul a bit by petting kitties, talking to the spring-burgeoned plant life, or, in extreme cases, pacing up and down swearing creatively and shaking my fists. One of these days I'm going to forget the mute-check and whichever meeting it is will be electrified by various iterations of "fucking x and fucking y and why the fucking fuck they can't just fucking z" from my general direction, muffled in the distance amid the plaintive meepings of cats.

A university is not an efficient thing, god wot. It's a giant bureaucracy existing perpetually in the middle of an extremely turgid identity crisis, with its competing "selling a thing" and "testing the competence of a thing" goals being, at times, mutually exclusive. Students are, somewhat complicatedly, both a client and a product, which is why the default state of university administrators of any persuasion is "borderline insane". At the best of times the modern university lumbers around like an unamiable academic dinosaur, trampling its own student clutches and being shrewdly stung at intervals by managerial wasps: managerialism, and the increasingly sublime disconnect between upper leadership and the mere peons labouring at the actual student coalface, has done horrible things to our functioning. In the particular case of my Cherished Institution this manifests as recursive, self-replicating committees which bumble blindly about in something like a Dickensian Chancery fog, wherein actual measurable achievement is obscured almost completely by confused and conflicting management dictates, administrative intractability, membership bloat, and descent into the default tragic academic hubris, viz. addiction to the sound of one's own voice.

Add to that a giant world-threatening epidemic and the need to translate, at short notice, absolutely all of our firmly in-person processes to the virtual, and it becomes almost impossible. Balancing the competing needs of COVID safety, academic quality assurance, student sanity and university solvency is not a realistic goal in a reality with the normal number of dimensions. Everyone is stressed, tired and panicking; the institution has always worked in very distinct faculty silos, so the challenges of each faculty are different, and apparently all of the attempts to resolve wildly differing problems have to be debated at length, with appropriate woe.

The response to difficult problems appears to be to throw more people at them. This means that almost every meeting has new members, who will infallibly derail procedures by revisiting and rehashing issues we actually dealt with weeks ago. I swear six out of last week's eight meetings spent four-fifths of their time solemnly reinventing the wheel, arguing about its colour, entering caveats about how many we needed on any given vehicle, and eventually discovering, with innocent surprise, the same thing that we realised last week, and the week before, and the one before that: that the reason why we can't reach agreement is because Humanities has a unicycle and Law is a sixteen-wheeler, and you can't treat either of them the same way you do Commerce's sexy sports car with its regulation four. The whole is complicated by the occasional infusion of directives from the managerial godly bods up on wasp Olympus, who have vaguely heard of this "wheel" concept and have decided there should be five and a half of them and they need to be triangular. And purple.

My second, well-developed coping mechanism, after the "run in circles in the garden, screaming" one, is to remain very quiet in meetings, and to placidly continue to develop the orientation and registration programmes I think will probably work best, ignoring all dictates from on high, and occasionally nicking good ideas from more sane colleagues. At infrequent intervals I erupt into the meeting with barely-restrained ire, delivering a few pithy sentences to point out exactly how (a) this is irrelevant, and (b) it was also irrelevant last week, when we beat it to death. I am collecting those happy little yellow Teams upvote thumbs as a faintly reassuring reminder that I am not, in fact, alone in the frustration.

But I have never been so tired. Apart from the futility and exhaustion of these meetings, they're lengthy and time-consuming and cut into the limited time I have to actually do all this real work. Aargh, is all I can say. Aargh.

Well, it's definitely been a week. We opened second semester change of curriculum on Monday, which necessitated designing and building a complete process for dealing with probably rather more than the usual thousand or so submissions (students are dropping courses like buttered toast) remotely rather than in person. This means that for the week I have been managing multiple processes, including training and individual tech support for both students and advisors, on multiple platforms, viz:

• the submission by students on the student database of change of curriuclum forms;
  
• the activities on the student database of 13 different advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in checking and approving such forms (complicated and fiddly, because our database is Peoplesoft and doesn't do in one easy click what it can do in 12 obscure clicks and a sacrificial goat);
  
• since the database submission process doesn't allow for discussion with the student, the submissions by students on our web-based content delivery site of requests for individual curriculum advice;
  
• the submissions by students to the forum on our web-based content delivery site to ask quick/easy rules and process questions;
  
• the activities of 13 advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in offering curriculum advice via the web-based content delivery system, according to a strict timetable and at two separate contact points;
  
• the submission by students via email of curriculum change queries which cordially ignore, or didn't read properly, the instructions I sent out regarding seeking advice via the above rather than me;
  
• reproachful alerts to advisor solecisms in processing from administrators via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via the advisor WhatsApp group;
  
• occasional frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via phone call, because apparently WhatsApp isn't enough;
  
• occasional stop-gap Teams briefing sessions offering tech support via shared screens, to reinforce the training I gave them all last week, also by Teams, about which, hiss spit.

I am managing all of the above via the dubious assistance of a keyboard with a sticky letter T, which means that it only actually produces a T about half the time, and only if I hit it particularly hard. My level of stress is causing me to routinely misspell things, in particular my usual bugbear "curriculum", which I get wrong about half the time probably because of Freudian pressures (I have corrected it FOUR TIMES in this post alone). The lack of the T is adding a new dimension to this, most notably that my tendency to the classic internet "teh" instead of "the" is, sans T, causing me to sound unduly Canadian.

However! I am bloody but unbowed. The system is working, of a fashion, advisors are becoming rapidly more tech-savvy by processes of practice, hand-holding and main force and have been frankly lamb-like in keeping up with their duties, and my new keyboard arrives today. The gods willing and the creek don't rise (which it will, there's a major cold front in, for large tracts of yesterday it was raining horizontally), we may yet navigate this more or less unscathed. I cannot attest, however, to the probable state of my sanity or energy, I am exhausted. But, mostly, triumphant. I'll take it.