Some watchers of this site may have noticed that I have taken advantage of the academic vacation to (metaphorically speaking) scrub the decks and coil the ropes of The Pequod, tidying up some aspects of the website. I last had a major play with the look back in 2007, so this was long overdue. Some of the key changes are:

• Redesigned banner area, with the title now linking to the home page (allowing me to delete the 'Welcome' tab. A Google+ button is now available, whilst I have deleted the the Print and Save buttons.
• More white space at the top of the page, making it easier to distinguish between navigation elements and the main content column.
• Removed some of the minor links to the Sitemap and Accessibility Information from the top of the page, and grouped these under a new About tab.
• Book reviews were originally placed within the Essays section. These have now been separated and given their own Reviews tab. I have also added book cover images and links to each review.

The other major change, which is indicated by the fact that my real name now appears at the top of the website, is that I have decided to drop the pseudonym Ishmael that I have published under since I started this website in 2004. I will give the reasons for this in a separate post.

The now-defunct News of the World used to have on its masthead the slogan "All human life was there." The slogan sounds fairly Biblical, which might be appropriate given that the tabloid's headlines often pronounced some righteous revelations of epic proportions. The quote actually comes, though, from Henry James' short story "The Madonna of the Future." In full, it reads "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats, all of human life is there."

The speaker of the quote is a Florentine artist who creates tasteless statuettes of animals (one imagines the chintzy sort of thing advertised at the back of the Radio Times); the narrator of the story does not approve:

They consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction.  They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women.  I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me.  I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar.  Their imitative felicity was revolting. 

Although the News of the World no longer used this masthead by its end, the source still seems appropriate. Murdoch's press came to view celebrities and crime victims, politicians and soldiers, as little more than performing monkeys for the "preposterously sentimental" delight of the masses; stories were written with a semblance of realism, all the while being cynical and vulgar. The News of the Worlds claims to have hacked blagged in the "public interest," but its pretensions to imitative truth were ultimately baseless, tasteless, and, yes, revolting.

There is a philosophical riddle which asks ""If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" At the end of the academic year, I wonder whether departing undergraduates (philosophy students or otherwise), ever pause to consider a variant of that question: when the students leave, does a university continue to exist? 

The answer is that it does, though in a somewhat reduced form. Although academics potter around, conferences are held, laboratories whirr into life with intense Summer research projects, a sense of vacancy pervades a university and its town. Pubs and libraries alike become emptier, lonelier places. Libraries and department offices close at five o'clock, instead of at ungodly hours into the evening. Mrs. Morris's flowerpots suddenly seem less prone to vacate her front garden and move to number 32 up the road. Traffic cones appear more rooted to their roadworks, rather than being alternatively employed as loudhailers.

Yet even as the last student crams his duvet into an overburdened car, or shuts the door of his halls of residence for the final time, even as a hush begins to descend, other noises and movements take the stage. As if they have been waiting in the wings for exams to finish, suddenly bright yellow diggers charge onto campus; traffic and pedestrian diversion signs redirect you from your accustomed routes to work; scaffolds scale the sides of buildings for painters and window cleaners to remove grime; the buzz of drills and the hum of electric generators takes over the air from the chatter of students.

Pinned to those tall, temporary builder's fences across campus, glossy boards appear with promising computer images of new lecture halls, extended libraries, bigger sports halls. These are, the vice-chancellor explains in his thrusting, visionary emails, all enhancements to that ephemeral but vital thing in the tuition-fee era, the "student experience."

But what of the experience of those of us left behind? Through thin walls in the library, strange bangings and clatterings can be heard, sounds which would never be allowed to disrupt the silence of revision time. Signs appear on the ends of book stacks, forcing one to decipher the cryptic rearrangements of shelfmarks that are suddenly taking place. Computers get taken away without warning, for upgrades and repairs. It would be tempting to grumble about academics being less important than the student body during this three-month summer programme of refurbishment, rebuilding, rearranging. On the other hand, it is one more reason to take advantage of one of the special privileges of academic life, and work from home (preferably in the garden, under a July sun).

But today I have to make a rare trip in. As I walk past a drab, concrete, 1960s lecture hall, a secretary wheels a trolley overburdened with files, which topples onto the pavement. Helping her collect the strewn papers, it appears that they are being removed because a ceiling has just collapsed in the Modern Languages Department. This is, I would like to imagine, a post-Browneian implosion, as the building reacts to the government's abrupt withdrawal of funding support for the arts and humanities from next year. More realistically, however, this concrete monolith has breathed a sigh of relief that during this three month hiatus it can reveal its true, mouldering age, safe in the knowledge that a lick of paint and fresh plasterboard will restore its respectability in time for the new cohort of students in October.

In his chapter about his early experiences as a homosexual, Alan Bennett in Untold Stories provides a sardonic and persuasive metaphor that puts paranoia about homosexuality in its proper place.

Throughout a chapter called "Written on the Body," Bennett recounts his awkward shyness as a young man, his slow adolescence, and his struggles to both articulate and act upon his sexual feelings. More than anything, he simply wanted to find companionship and to enjoy sex, without necessarily being voracious or public about it. He did not choose his sexual orientation; it is just something that seems to have happened to him at school, almost unnoticed.

At a party hosted by Ian McKellen in 1989, to support the abolition of Clause 28, Bennett relates the following anecdote about one of his readings at the event:

I introduced the extract, saying that to enquire (as McKellen had done) if I was homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.

Just as the man in the desert wants water, and its precise variety is irrelevant, so any individual wants (is even at times desperate for) love, sex and companionship. It is - or ought to be - irrelevant whether this need may be satisfied by attachments to those of the opposite sex, or of the same sex. This humanitarian observation is one that those religious conservatives who are petrified of homosexuality would do well to take note of. To be concerned about sexual preference is to miss the bigger picture of why sex and relationships matter in the first place, as necessary as water to the full and nurtured human life, and not something which anyone should be deprived of or chastised for.

I went to see a cracking production of Twelfth Night at the Ludlow Festival last night. Two very brief thoughts occur to me now (I was too busy laughing last night at a superbly fast-paced, comic production).

Firstly, is Sir Toby Belch not a kind of less critical iteration of Falstaff from Henry IV? They bear many similarities - both are larger than life (both physically and wittily), both are archetypes of the lazy squire, both are attached cloyingly and inappropriately to a court (Olivia's) or royalty (Henry).

The difference comes in the judgement made of them on stage. In Henry IV, Part 2, Hal - now King Henry V - repudiates his former comrade in drink, his "old lad of the castle":

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.

By contrast, in Twelfth Night, Belch's horrid manipulation of Malvalio, which leads to Malvolio's outcasting as an apparent lunatic, goes unpunished. Whilst the comedy of marriage and disguise is neatly concluded - Viola revealed as a woman so she can marry Orsino, Sebastian able to marry Olivia - the comedy of bawdy humour that takes place at Malvolio's expense does not get resolved.

Right at the end the clown continues to mock Malvolio - mimicking his famous lines about "greatness" even as he confesses to playing his part in his downfall.

Clown. Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one. 'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad.' But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? an you smile not, he's gagged:' and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

What is this whirligig of time that will bring in his revenge, morally chastising those, such as Belch, who have usurped and satirised the social order? In Henry IV we find out; later history tells us that Falstaff could not participate in Henry V's heroic and honest court to come, and so the play must make this judgement too. But in Twelfth Night Malvolio simply exits the stage muttering "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you"; the play ends on a song. As Twelfth Night was the Elizabethan festival involving the antics of a Lord of Misrule, it may seem appropriate not to have Belch punished on stage, just as there is no option but to judge Falstaff in the history play. Nevertheless, one still feels that in Twelfth Night, which is a set in the hyperbolically fictional world of Illyria which allows for much metatheatrical irony, it is the audience who are encouraged to recognise and reflect upon the limits of the comic genre for offering judgement on the world.

The second thing which occurs to me is just how deliciously lewd and bawdy Twelfth Night is. Next time you read a Daily Mail columnist muttering about the decline of moral values on television, or swearing, or sexuality, consider these lines from Twelfth Night, when Malvolio picks up a love letter he believes to be from Olivia:

By my life, this is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's.

It may look innocuous on the page, but when delivered by a good comic actor (and Malvolio last night was played by John Challis of Only Fools and Horses), the lines' audacious bodily humour can still draw a gasp from a middle-class audience in the twenty first century.