Wednesday 30th July 2025
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Review: Spoon River Anthology

Elena Trowsdale
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Review: Spoon River Anthology

As I’m sure as all you live theatre fanatics out there know, online theatre just doesn’t really compare to the experience of in-person theatrical events. It lacks the buzz and the anticipation of being sat in your seat. However, Spoon River Anthology proved to me that this didn’t necessarily have to be the case.

Sat in my darkened room, curtains drawn, fluffy blanket on and a glass of wine in hand, my excitement grew as I clicked the link on Paper Moon Productions’ email taking me to the Spoon River website. As I eagerly waited for the countdown clock to reach zero, it dawned on me that this felt like a really special experience. An experience just like live theatre but in the comfort of my own bedroom.

For starters, the date of the performance was specially picked to be the date of the new moon (something I learnt on the lovely pre-show website). I wasn’t just watching a YouTube video – I felt like I was participating in something collective.

In addition to the special date and countdown clock, this performance comes with its own physical anthology to leaf through as you listen to the performance audio. Spoon River Anthology is a ‘multi-media performance of music, drama, and art’, as described by Amberley Odysseas (the web designer) on the production’s website. Each monologue or scene of audio comes with its own art piece, all of which are contained within the journal you can look through during the show. It’s great to feel something like a playbill whilst you listen to the actors’ voices and the artworks in the journal are all exquisite.

Spoon River Anthology is a compilation of the individual stories of the inhabitants of the town of spoon river. These tales are all originally poems by Edgar Lee Masters, lovingly transposed for theatrical use by Georgina Dettmer. The listener is walked through these sometimes rather moving tales by Minerva Jones (Eugenie Nevin), who functions as a kind of narrator, and by the music of Michael Freeman. I have to say, the music was the real stand-out hit of this performance. I was consistently blown away by Freeman’s writing and performance which very nicely set the tone of the whole piece. His audio quality was immaculate- this really improved the immersive quality of the performance. The same cannot be said for Nevin’s audio which was a bit too crackly to maintain Freeman’s high standard. However, this was definitely a Covid-19 imposed problem, and I am willing to forgive because of Freeman’s beautiful voice and the acting talent on display in the production.

The main quality I enjoyed about this performance was how immersive it was. To enhance this sense of immersion, I strongly recommend following the advice from the production team and listening to the audio through headphones. As each different scene (and journal page) is a monologue from a different character, the audio forms a kind of ASMR vocal journey between many unique voices- a journey strongly improved by headphone use.

Delving deeper into the individual scenes: my personal favourite characters were Trainor the Druggist (Cora Bullivant), Indignation Jones (Jamie Murphy) and Dora Williams (Gracie Oddie-James). All three were performed excellently with an acute awareness of the topics they were discussing and the overall feel of the piece. In terms of sound effects, Julia (Elsie Busset)’s scene which was partially muffled, ostensibly behind a door, was incredibly inventive.

The pages of the journal also had a profound effect on how I viewed each character in the narrative. When I turned the page to the spread which signified Benjamin Pantier and his wife I was genuinely shocked by the turn the artwork took and how well this matched the change of speaker. In parts, the images told the story of individuality and interiority really effectively; while in other parts, the images were a bit off-kilter (but beautifully so). Sometimes the links from vocals to art were a little heavy-handed, such as the shell drawings accompanying the words ‘shell of a woman’. However, this clarity was useful in terms of helping the audience to decode other images and relating them to the accompanying vocals. Overall, each artwork felt sensitively collated and intimately connected with the whole performance-experience like threads woven into a tapestry. The journal turned this digital performance into a physical moment, a multi-sensory experience.

In summary, while some audio could’ve been better, I was impressed by the all-encompassing experience that Spoon River Anthology became. In a year with little to no available theatrical resources, the production team of Spoon River managed to create a magical experience of many intersecting forms of artistic talent telling important stories. From the editing of the audio file to the curation of the journal, the performance flowed seamlessly from sense to sense. I am so grateful I got to be part of the audience, and that I got to help, as the ending song says, ‘keep those words alive’.

Image Credit: Chloe Dootson-Graube (original artwork)

Hanging in the (im)balance: the state-private school disparity in Oxford

Fionn McFadden
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Hanging in the (im)balance: the state-private school disparity in Oxford

If any place is familiar with the trials and tribulations of maintaining a complex reputation, it’s the University of Oxford. As an instantly recognisable academic, political and cultural landmark of the UK, its image is the subject of media and cultural hypersensitivity. In spite of countless assertions to the contrary, Oxford’s depiction as a strange world of bizarre customs and dusty books, neatly dressed in ball-gown hedonism, is still alive and kicking today.

This is certainly the case in my hometown of Harrogate: a sleepy little spa town tucked away at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales, where a handful of students from its schools grace the City of Dreaming Spires with our northern-tinged presence. The number of times I’ve been jokingly asked if I’ve put a certain body part in a pig’s mouth is higher than the number of Tories with actual Bullingdon Club membership. Such a unique reputation finds its roots in the institution’s practices and culture. The word Oxbridge is most often used with implications of superior social status and elitism. The term was, in fact, described by journalist Carole Cadwalladr in 2008 as shorthand for an elite that “continues to dominate Britain’s political and cultural establishment.”

The eagled-eyed amongst you will have already noticed that these characteristics of Oxford bear a striking resemblance with those of another of Britain’s most infamous educational institutions. That’s right, the much-dreaded E word. I’m talking about Eton. More specifically, not just this one institution, yet in sense of the word as encompassing all of the private schools that this nation covertly, yet proudly, boasts. You only need to flick through history to see that this University has acted, and continues to act, as a halfway house between many politicians’ humble beginnings in the Berkshire countryside, and their end goal of Westminster domination. 20 UK Prime Ministers have received an Eton education, with a total of 28 having also attended Oxford.

Look no further than the incumbent leader of our glorious Union: an Etonian, turned Balliolite, who is now responsible for making the most crucial decisions in our country. Boris Johnson, like many of his predecessors, is living evidence that Oxford has an affinity to educate the not-so-greats, in the Greats, so long as the price tag is right. This is reflected in the extent to which Oxford swings open the doors of every one of its colleges to welcome students from private schools with open arms.

A Sutton Trust study done in 2018 revealed that eight schools, six of whom were independent and the other two state sixth-form colleges in Cambridge and Hampshire, filled 1,310 Oxbridge places over three years; this is compared with 1,220 from 2,900 other schools, a practice that Oxford (as well as Cambridge) continues to maintain. This statistic is mind-blowing. It demonstrates the minuscule geographical pool from which Oxford admits students, made only narrower by its socio-economic hegemony. Such a stark statistic becomes even more terrifying when the bigger picture is considered. It is estimated that anywhere between as little as 6%-7% of the UK school population attend private schools. I implore you to pause for a second and visualise the magnitude of the discrepancy between 93% and 7%. One doesn’t need to be a mathematician to work out that such an imbalance means that a frighteningly small number of students, the majority of whom have already become accustomed to small class sizes, easy access to resources and state of the art facilities, are being given disproportionate access to one of the world’s leading academic, political and cultural institutions.

I am not calling for a ban on private school students attending Oxford, which would be a ludicrous suggestion. Education is a human right that is recognised by the majority of, if not all, international organisations. Access to education should be equal, regardless of sex, gender identity, race, sexuality, religious belief, or wealth. Yet, the existence of private schools fundamentally contradicts this principle. One of their major problems is that they restrict the choices that the majority of parents have over their children’s education. Of course, any parent with their children’s best interests at heart would choose to send them to a school with the most exciting prospects for future education and employment. Yet, the private school system restricts that choice to the few who are lucky enough to afford it.

“But what about scholarships?”, you might ask. Yet again, it comes down to the numbers. Only a shocking 1% of students at private schools pay no fees as part of scholarship programmes, whilst only 4% of private school turnover is in fact devoted to bursaries. Scholarships act as a façade– creating an illusion that private schools are committed to widening access to lower-income families and disadvantaged children. The numbers say otherwise, confirming instead that scholarships are little more than a PR stunt, merely masking a brewing pot of entrenched privileged that has leaked into Britain’s institutions for centuries.

And by maintaining such a huge disparity, Oxford has not only actively allowed for its propagation, it has become a key cog in the maintenance of educational inequality. Ashamedly, my own college, Balliol, offers the Vaughan Memorial Travelling Scholarship, a travel grant worth up to £4,000, available to Old-Etonians only. It must be noted however that some colleges make a concerted effort to stand out and stand up for state school students: Wadham, Hertford and Mansfield come to mind.

The latter is indeed a rare example, a college that builds its appeal almost entirely around its high proportion of state-educated students. The first thing one sees on Mansfield’s web page the blaring assertion that the college is ‘open, friendly and welcoming’, boasting that ‘Mansfield has the highest state sector intake of Oxford colleges’. This is indeed true, and their efforts have certainly been commendable. Mansfield appears to be the only Oxford college to have ever passed the 93% threshold, with their 2019 intake being comprised of 94% state school students.Despite this, their intake fell back across the threshold to 91% in 2020. Even with that, Mansfield by-far outshines all other colleges.

In 2019, Balliol just scraped past 60% state, whilst Christ Church barely clung onto a balance, with 49.8% of its students admitted coming from private schools. Such imbalance brings a host of dire effects, yet the most upsetting is the isolation, stress and even guilt felt by some state school students during the so-called best time of their lives. For a truly moving and personal account of such an experience, I urge you to read Balliol medic Leoni Loughlin’s article on the Oxford Student entitled “Feeding them to the Lions: Access burnout and guilt”. Her account proves that for a significant proportion of state school students, access programs do little to tackle the problems that Oxford’s affinity to private schools creates.

Access programs are not working precisely because they do not go far enough in addressing the problems of the state/private disparity at its root. Like scholarships, they appear to act as a solution to temporarily plaster over cracks that the University has allowed to grow, century after century. This is why, despite their best efforts, the marketing of colleges like Mansfield and Wadham as a watertight safe space for state school students is misleading, turning a blind eye to the problems of state school students that permeate every Oxford college.

The imbalance and its plethora of disastrous consequences is a blaring problem that the University has ignored for far too long. Urgent and meaningful action is needed. As a centre of education first and foremost, providing a bridge between students’ secondary school careers and their entry into the world of adulthood and employment, it is only right that Oxford’s intake reflects that of the school population of the UK as a whole.

The quality of the social and academic education received at Oxford will only be enriched by admitting a pool of students as representative of the wider population as possible.  Perhaps, such action to ensure this may come in the form of a ‘93% charter’- a binding promise from all colleges to increase their state school admissions to meet the 93% threshold (or its representative equivalent) by a date in the near future. Such a charter must include a guarantee to admit from a wider range of state schools, not just those in leafy suburbs and small towns like Harrogate. These promises could, in fact, be entrenched into the University Statutes as a resounding commitment to take on a role as a key figure in promoting educational equality. Such proposals sound drastic, but I am calling on, pleading and imploring the heads of both the colleges and the central administration to consider it as a necessary measure to resolve a drastic problem.

Yet I am a realist, and in the great Oxonian tradition of taking time to respond to the calls of social progress, perhaps other action needs to be taken in the meantime. At this moment I am reminded of one of my mum’s favourite maxims: “If you want to change something, change it from the inside”. It is now time for private school students, committed to building a better future for all young people, to use their privilege and voice to pressure these institutions to allow waves of committed, engaged and deserving state school students to make a significant step towards institutional inequality. Such an effort must be an almost unanimous one, which may involve uncomfortable, but necessary, self-reflection and discussion. Dire problems will require dire solutions.

I want to end this article with some reflections. I sometimes feel that, despite my passion to see the end of educational inequality, it is not my place to argue – a cisgender, white male who comes from a privileged, middle-class background, who attended a highly ranked state school where opportunities for and aid in applying to Oxbridge were presented every step of the way, as well as having two loving, supportive and academic parents who have always been around to help foster my interests and soothe my worries. In the short time I’ve been at Oxford, I’ve felt so lucky to have met the most wonderful group of interesting, kind and like-minded people whilst studying a subject I love. Yet, personally, this is exactly the reason why I am writing this article and support such urgent action to be taken on this issue.

Despite what the Conservatives may tell you, privilege and status come with responsibilities, namely that of ameliorating the circumstances of those less fortunate than yourself. Students at Oxford who have come from backgrounds of privilege must become leading voices in pressuring the institution to shake off its bias, both hidden and overt, against state schools and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Above all, the institution of the University of Oxford itself must finally recognise that its standing as a leader in academic and research progress requires it to step up too as a leader in the fight for social progress and justice. As an educative institution at its core, nowhere is it more suited to join than the wider campaigns in the UK to finally bring an end to educational inequality, such as Abolish Eton, a Labour Party grassroots campaign calling to ‘end the class segregation of our schools’. Increasing state school intake will not solve all of Oxford’s problems, yet it’s certainly a start.

Oxford is and has always been an elitist institution. Yet this must not deter people from fighting against these problems or giving into them. Such change seems impossible: Oxford’s comfort with private school students is so deeply entrenched in its culture and practices, thus change to combat this inequality must go beyond the surface level of access schemes and outreach events. It is long overdue, but it is finally time that Oxford faces up to the numbers, and does the right thing, to prove that it is really the world leader it claims to be, not desperately clinging on to its damaging past.

Image credit: Fonie Mitsopoulou

01/04/2021, 12:30: This article was amended to clarify the result of the 2018 Sutton Study.

Meet one of the students speaking out against sexual violence in private schools

Ben Jureidini
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Meet one of the students speaking out against sexual violence in private schools

CW: Sexual violence and harassment 

I’m supposed to be talking to Ava Vakil at 3pm. It’s currently 2:58 and I’m in my pyjamas. I drop her a message, feeling a bit sheepish that I’m so unprepared to interview a woman who has, in the past week, been in the Telegraph and The Times, spoken to Vanessa Feltz, and been given her own IMDb page. “Exactly what I like to hear”, she replies, “I may or may not be in the middle of my skincare regime hahaha.”

It is only then that I ask myself why I’m nervous: Ava and I have shared countless conversations about Taylor Swift, Alijaz off Strictly, and Mean Girls: the musical; we’ve split drinks at the Turf Tavern, and I’ve sent her countless messages complaining about my love life. The difference now is that Ava, following her publication of an open letter to the headmaster of King’s College School, Wimbledon, has become a figurehead for the outpouring of frustration felt by women and girls in the face of a “culture of misogyny” not just at KCS, but at schools across the country. I asked her what it’s like to spend her vac not revising for collections, but being interviewed on BBC News: “It feels like I don’t really know what’s happening”, she admits, “but then again, in term time I don’t really know what’s happening so the feeling is kind of the same.” 

Whilst this may say more about the termly workloads than suddenly having Google searches autocomplete your name, the pressure of powering through a Trinity Term reading list is altogether different to the pressure of the media circus, especially as a young woman. Telling me about the shock she felt upon opening the Daily Telegraph to a photo from her Instagram – used without prior consent – and finding that the image of her face was “about three times bigger than the story”, she gives a wry smile as she acknowledges how “it’s indicative of that desire to go ‘Oh look at this woman’, and then as a subheading ‘Here’s the story.’” Unsurprisingly, there is a vast difference in the ways different publications have chosen to report on Ava’s letter: Glamour’s headline calls her an “inspirational female student”, foregrounding her intention to “give a platform to these stories”; the Daily Mail describes how “a female student has accused a prestigious £20,000-a-year school”, quoting the “hotbed of sexual violence” line. 

In a story supposedly about Dulwich College, it is Ava’s picture that appears alongside Lily Cole’s, an alumnus of another school detailed in the article. “I was seeing myself represented on platforms which I wouldn’t usually interact with myself”, she admits, and in terms of the first time she saw herself in the news, “it was, of course, the Daily Mail, and it was a picture taken from my Instagram, which I had no idea about.” I asked her what she made of her letter being taken out of her hands so quickly, her face and words being one day confined to her Instagram and the next on broadsheet newspapers, but the meteoric rise of her story speaks to the ubiquitous nature of its subject matter: “It doesn’t spread so quickly because it’s some kind of sensational story. It’s not. It’s an everyday story. And that’s what makes it even scarier – this is the everyday reality for a lot of young women. … This is the daily reality of 13- and 14-year-old girls. It’s horrifying.” Throughout our conversation, and throughout all the conversations she has been having with journalists during the last few hectic weeks of her life, Ava always directs attention, sometimes against the will of the interviewer themselves, not to the undeniably unique nature of her own experience, but to the stories with which she has been trusted, and to the horrors that girls and young women deal with on a daily basis. 

And it is from this place of horror that Ava penned her letter, with real, institutional change in mind. Five days after International Women’s Day, the police forcibly arrested women at the vigil for Sarah Everard, a woman murdered as she walked home in the middle of the evening. “I all just felt like, how can you … tell everyone that it’s great, because it’s International Women’s Day, and therefore we should celebrate women, when there’s violence being perpetrated everywhere else?” Ava, of course, did not have viral fame in mind when she collected these stories of male violence occurring up the road from her – quite the opposite. She recalls messaging her friends on their group chat, feeling helpless in the face of a tragedy at once so overwhelming, but so horrifically commonplace: “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. The problem just feels so huge.” 

In the face of such a systemic problem, Ava asked herself “where does this problem affect me and affect the people around me? And what power do I have to change that?” For the answer, we need turn only to her letter, a collection of testimonies from young women and men, describing the abuse and violence they suffered at the hands of KCS students. Throughout her experience in the news cycle, Ava constantly keeps in mind that “ultimately the purpose of everything I’m doing right now is to represent the stories and the people who have got in contact with me. … What mattered to me was the voices of the people who had sent me the stories. And it mattered that they were represented properly.” 

And what of this representation? Throughout our conversation, the matter of intersectionality constantly arose, not just in terms of the “nexus of oppression” that Ava used to describe the interactions of race, class, and gender in the culture of violence the letter reveals, but in Ava’s own ability to represent the stories of her peers in such a public forum. “I think the fact that I’m white really plays into this, particularly in the picture elements in the newspapers,” Ava tells me when I ask her if she believes that she has benefited from the very structures of race and class that compound the misogyny her letter describes. “I think the fact that I went to a private school has played into people’s reception of the story: even on the radio I was told that you could tell from the way I speak that I’m really articulated and educated. So, whilst that’s meant in a really lovely way, ultimately, what is behind that is ‘oh, you have a certain accent, which means what you say is worth more’, which is completely wrong. I have no doubt that the media would have been a lot harsher to me if I didn’t represent all those categories.” 

Ava’s letter is incredibly written (although, she admits, laughing off the laudation of her eloquence, she spelt the headmaster’s name wrong), but she is all too aware that, were she a woman of colour, or if Wimbledon High weren’t a private school, the picture of her painted by the media may not have been so glowing. There is the very real understanding that this story may not have been picked up on had Ava not benefited from these kinds of privileges: “I feel like, therefore I have a responsibility to make sure those stories aren’t just heard from my point of view.” To be complimented on her accent, on the way she speaks, is for a listener to detract from the content of the message itself, and, when one person is ‘permitted’ by the media to represent the stories of others, “the focus always has to be on the stories, not necessarily on the way they are told, although that’s incredibly important.” And the stories told are tellingly, and worryingly, diverse: “obviously, the focus of the letter was about misogyny, but a lot of what I received was to do with racism and homophobia. I think we can’t underestimate the racial aspect of this misogyny, too.” 

To shrug off these stories as “boys being boys”, therefore, is not only to forgive and perpetuate a very real culture of very real violence, but also to ignore the systems of privilege that permeate our society, extending from educational to governmental institutions. It would be amiss, ignorant even, not to acknowledge that KCS is a feeder school to Oxford – 25% of their sixth form students, according to the website, go on to attend Oxbridge – and that these universities are themselves feeders to, as four out of the last five Prime Ministers demonstrate, the highest levels of government: “These people end up having decision-making power over a great proportion of the population. If those decisions are informed by misogyny, or racism, or homophobia, of course that’s really going to impact inequality.” 

“The response cannot purely be that of well-meaning talks and videos in PSHE”, Ava’s letter reads, and she is adamant that these attitudes “must be stamped out” at their source, and this requires a response both on a local level, within the governance of schools like KCS, but also in the ethics of media representation: “If young, wealthy, majority white boys grow up seeing that people like them, and people who look like them in the media aren’t held accountable … then of course it’s going to facilitate this culture of thinking that you can do whatever you want. … I think it fosters this sense of being more than or being better than and thinking it’s your right to treat people in this way.” When an educational institution, as the Daily Mail article points out so aggressively, benefits from and instils such privilege, any response must recognise that “it’s the privilege that allows them to hold these attitudes, it’s the privilege that allows them to take them forward into positions of power. And it’s the privilege that means they’re not held accountable for it.” 

“We have to clock that it’s not just the people in suits who should be telling the stories,” Ava implores, “And that’s when that disruption happens, when we use social media, and when we tap into those more democratic forms of storytelling that don’t have as much top-down power – that’s when people start getting scared, because suddenly you’re hearing from people who you’re not used to hearing from.” The stories contained in her letter tell of abuses permitted within a culture of privilege, and perhaps to be unaware of this in our reporting – and who the media allows to do this reporting – is merely perpetuating the problem. “I think that’s what we need to focus on here: the wider the conversation, the better.” It is at this point her boyfriend’s phone begins to ring, cutting her off as she dismantles self-perpetuating systems of oppression from the other end of a Facetime call. 

Once we’re back on track, I ask her a question which can often sound rather twee, but it is one that speaks to the kind of local activism Ava instigated, rather than the national response it has received: where does she see this going? She answers quickly – I’ve asked standard journalistic fodder: “it would lead to a place in which people feel as though they have the power to make change themselves. And that putting something on your Instagram story … something in your own words, can have a really big impact.” What follows, however, is far more specific, and a further reminder that I’m speaking to a friend, who hasn’t had to deal with standard journalistic fodder until the past week: “It’s really daunting, and it’s really scary.” 

After a brief pause, she recounts “feeling like I was in trouble for speaking out about this, which I know is from being indoctrinated to think that I shouldn’t raise these issues, and that, if I do, I’ll be doing something wrong, and I’ll be causing too much of a stir.” I ask her if she felt somehow guilty, and she responds so quickly that my speech-to-text app muddles up the order of our conversation, “I felt so guilty! … I think sometimes we need to be a little less afraid of being criticised for what we say.” As I finish typing up this article, the News at 10 is playing a story about a group of students from Highgate School, who have staged a walkout following allegations of sexual assault, and I am reminded that – even if Ava rightly insists reporters focus on the stories she has published, rather than her personal experiences – she, like all of these students, is dealing with a confluence of their public and private lives, are being asked to juggle BBC interviews with revising Shakespearean history plays. “It’s very strange” she says as we bring the call to a close. Strange, yes, but also far too close to home for far too many. 

Alan Rusbridger steps down from Irish media commission

Jill Cushen
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Alan Rusbridger steps down from Irish media commission

CW: Sexual Abuse

Alan Rusbridger, principal of Lady Margaret Hall and former editor of The Guardian, has resigned from the Future of Media Commission due to editorial concerns over an article by Roy Greenslade. 

Greenslade, a former Guardian columnist, recently admitted that he had been a supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). After a BBC Spotlight program in 2014, Greenslade wrote an article critical of Máiría Cahill, an Irish politician who said she was sexually abused as a teenager by alleged IRA member Martin Morris. In the article, he wrote that Spotlight “were too willing to accept Cahill’s story and did not point to countervailing evidence”. 

A review by the Guardian’s readers’ editor found that Greenslade should have been open about his position. Greenslade said he regrets that he did not make his support for the IRA’s use of violence during the Troubles known and offered his “sincere apology for failing to disclose [his] own interests”.

The Guardian and Alan Rusbridger also issued an apology to Cahill. In an opinion article, Rusbridger said that while he was aware that Greenslade was a Sinn Féin supporter,  he did not know that he supported the IRA’s campaign. Speaking to the Irish Times, he said: “I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have published it now and I’m sorry.”   

Cahill called for the Irish government to remove Rusbridger due to the article’s lack of editorial insight. In the Irish Independent, Cahill wrote that as editor, Rusbridger was “ultimately responsible for it appearing on The Guardian platform”.

In a statement issued through the Irish Government press office, Rusbridger announced his resignation: “I was pleased to be invited by the Taoiseach to be part of the Future of the Media Commission […] The Commission is considering critical issues for Ireland and I don’t want my involvement to be a distraction from its work.” The Future of Media Commission was set up by the Irish Government in September 2020 to make recommendations on the future of media in Ireland and is due to publish its report later this year. 

In response to Rusbridger’s opinion piece, Máiría Cahill told Cherwell: “the Guardian article attempted to conflate the paper’s support for the peace process with their negligence on allowing the malicious Greenslade blog to be printed in 2014. This was not the issue at hand and I felt it was an attempt at deflection and minimisation. It was never about whether the paper was for or against peace – it was about the politically motivated maligning of a child abuse victim by an IRA supporting journalist for 6 years on the Guardian‘s website.”

Alan Rusbridger declined to comment further.

Image Credit: Michele Agostinis / CC BY-SA-4.0

 

 

In Conversation with Raven Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness

William Foxton
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In Conversation with Raven Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness

CW: Mentions of suicide, r*pe threats, and cyberbullying.

‘After years and years of silence and secrecy, I’m here to tell the truth,’ begins Sarah in her ‘coming-out’ video released earlier this year. ‘The videos were fake.’

It’s been over a decade since Sarah graced our screens as Raven Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness, her alter-ego that went viral in 2008, exposing her to the best and worst the Internet had to offer. Now, after years of hiding, she’s back with the answers to a mystery twelve years in the making.

It’s 2008, and Sarah has just released her first video. It begins with a sullen Raven announcing to her audience that her friend Azer won’t be joining her. Earlier that day, she recounts, she was in Hot Topic ‘being really goth and stuff’ when she saw Azer in a nearby Hollister, the ultimate betrayal of their goth identity. But Raven refuses to let Azer’s actions get her down.  Joined by fellow My Chemical Romance enthusiast Tara, played by her real-life sister, the pair lip sync for their lives to MCR’s ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, a metaphorical middle finger to Azer, Hollister, and all non-believers.

It’s a lot. But it set the tone for what viewers were to experience on Sarah’s channel: dodgy make-up and die-hard goth. The subsequent videos vary in popularity and quality, though they’re linked by a recurring theme: an undying love for all things undead. The videos are the perfect time capsule, offering up a rare insight into a lost subculture.

However, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Assuming the identity of Raven, Sarah managed to pull off one of the greatest feats of trolling seen on the Internet in recent years.

Taking inspiration from sites like 4Chan and Reddit, fertile grounds for your typical Internet troll, Sarah decided to practice the dark art of trolling. Her aim was to create a character so earnest, and yet so misguided in her allegiance to goth, that real goths everywhere would be incensed. Arming herself with some aggressively stylised eyeliner and the belief that nobody truly understood her, she decided to impersonate the most heinous of subcultures: the mall goth (or ‘baby goth’ as she calls them), an off-shoot of the fully-fledged goth movement that emerged in the late 90s. If the goth didn’t care, the mall goth cared too much, mainly about Good Charlotte, Hot Topic, and Edward Cullen.

‘I asked myself – what could I do that would really piss off little baby goth Sarah?’, she tells me.

And thus, Raven Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness was born.

And she was a success. The videos were an instant hit, and Sarah began to experience an archetypal virality. She soon learned, however, that entering the cultural conscious comes at a price.

‘The reception that Tara, Azer and I received on YouTube when we originally posted the videos was not good,’ she begins wearily. Some applauded her ingenuity, recognising Raven as a comedic creation, but most thought the videos were real. ‘And because the internet was a much different place back then,’ she continues, ‘we attracted a lot of comments from people who basically bullied us.’

She reads me a selection from the thousands of comments left by anonymous users. They’re difficult to listen to.

‘ “Ugly fast-ass fake bitches you’re not gothic you stupid fat fucking bitches the only reason you hate life is because the girl sitting right next to you is prettier than you you fat dumb-ass bitch and the girl next to you is a stupid poser both of you are ugly as fuck why don’t you go fuck each other that’s the only way you will ever get laid you ugly fat ass bitch why don’t you both go cut yourselves because you’re a waste of fucking space you fat fucking bitch ☺”,’ Sarah reads from her phone. ‘That was one run-on sentence by the way.’

Most involve some sort of critique of her appearance. Many include incitements to suicide or rape threats.

‘Oh here’s a good one,’ she says, ‘Hands down the best example of satire I have ever seen. Super talented kids, for sure.’ A momentary relief, but it’s quickly buried among countless threats and insults left by the anonymous mass.

‘As a very sensitive person, the comments really got to me after a while,’ she tells me, ‘there’s a difference between reading “haha go kill yourself” from an Internet stranger once a year, or once a week, but if it’s every day, year after year after year…that’s a lot. And it weighs on you.’

Things got worse after an interview with journalist Ethan Chiel was published. Chiel had spoken to the girls in order to address the false rumours circulating that Tara and Raven were the co-authors of My Immortal, an infamous work of Harry Potter fanfiction released at a similar time that likewise parodied the goth genre. The hate took on a new power, as trolls began to link Chiel’s interview to the videos, blurring the line between Sarah and Raven. ‘People were bringing my real self into the harassment,’ she tells me, ‘crossing that boundary.’

This is what led her to go incognito, ceasing to upload videos and denying all links to Raven. It’s also the reason she was reluctant to reclaim the identity all these years later. ‘We were worried that if we came forward it would be 2008 YouTube all over again and we would just be bombarded with people telling us that we were fat and ugly and should kill ourselves,’ she tells me, ‘we stopped paying attention because we assumed that it was going to be the same negative bullshit we’d been inundated with pretty much every single day since we started posting.’

During the years that Sarah was in hiding, the mystery of Tara and Raven became a self-sustaining mythology, with Internet users adding new strands to the narrative. There’s the video of a teen performing Little Talk’s Of Monsters and Men under the name Tara Rowe, dedicated to an unknown Raven. It’s a deliberately ambiguous video, with the comment section turned off, posted on an otherwise empty channel. An attempt to further engage with the mystery? Perhaps. Then there’s the conspiracy videos, with YouTubers speculating over the girls’ fate and, of course, the My Immortal saga. There’s a theatricality to the whole thing, the mystery becoming something much bigger than Sarah could ever have imagined.

Her desire to keep the secret was also due to her concerns for ‘Tara’, whose real identity remains anonymous to this day. Recalling the vitriolic comments referring to their weight they received back in 2008, it’s something she wishes to protect 2021 Tara from:

‘[Tara] recently had a kid and her pregnancy was rather complicated and, as a result, her body changed a lot. She doesn’t look the same way that she used to and she’s really self-conscious about it. As her older sister, I really hate that, because she gave birth to a human baby and I think that’s pretty impressive. But she’s not ready to come out yet because she doesn’t look the same and she knows that if she does come out she would be met with all these comments. She can’t deal with that right now.’

Sarah’s decision to finally re-emerge earlier this year is not one she took lightly. ‘I came out because I felt like I had to,’ she tells me, a result of the ‘internet manhunt’ that arose in the quest to discover Raven’s true identity. Sarah now works as a dominatrix under the pseudonym Petra Hunter. Things became difficult for her when her followers began to speculate that Petra was an older version of Raven. Having shared her real identity in Chiel’s interview, she was worried people would in turn make the link between Petra and Sarah.

‘Because I’m a sex worker that means I’m already an easy target for harassment,’ she tells me, ‘I’ve been in the adult industry for a little over 10 years now and while the public perception surrounding sex work is definitely changing a lot, it’s still really hard to shake the fear of someone finding out my true identity.’

Sarah had managed to successfully deny allegations that Petra was Raven for years, but her followers became more aggressive in their assertions after a TikTok video went viral linking her two alter-egos. Her Petra account gained hundreds of followers in a single day; she was tagged in comment threads full of Internet theorists. Her followers became obsessed with finding the truth, at whatever cost.

‘It was kind of scary,’ she tells me, though she recognises that their desire to ‘out’ her wasn’t necessarily malicious.

‘I think it comes from the fact that younger generations, the ones leading the manhunt, haven’t really grown up without the internet,’ she tells me, ‘A lot of people find it really hard to believe that not everyone has an online presence or that not everyone wants to be found. People are so used to being able to search for someone and find them and when you can’t find someone, instead of giving up, you just double down even harder. For a culture that is very online, we made it very, very hard to be found.’

Sarah was worried about what might be exposed in their pursuit of the truth: her name, her address, her family. ‘I felt like coming out was the only way that I could regain control of the situation,’ she tells me, ‘I can’t be doxxed if I dox myself. So it was basically a fucking power grab.’

Hearing this, I question whether the virtual pat on the back these Internet theorists so desperately crave is worth the consequences this detective work can have on the lives of people like Sarah. I can’t help but wonder if we have a responsibility to leave some mysteries unsolved.

‘There’s always going to be an allure to a mystery,’ Sarah tells me, ‘and Tara and I loved keeping the mystery alive. We loved watching people try to find us, but it was actually really scary when they did.’

‘It’s so tricky,’ she continues, ‘because even if you think you’re being safe about what you’re revealing about your suspect, you’re never really going to know whether or not the information you’re posting is safe. You’re never really going to know if it’s fine or not until…,’ she pauses, considering this for a moment, ‘until the person speaks for themselves.’

A section of her website reads: ‘Tara and I don’t have personal social media, as we both prefer to keep our private lives as offline as possible. Please don’t overstep those boundaries.’ Coming out as Raven has allowed Sarah to set these boundaries, but does she think people will respect them?

‘I hope so,’ she says, ‘more for Tara than for me. I’m really protective of Tara and she’s made it pretty clear that she’s not ready to come out.’

The reaction Sarah received in 2021 is worlds away from what she was expecting: ‘99% of the reception I’ve gotten has been people saying “you’re hilarious, you were such an important part of my childhood, your videos are so funny…” etc. It’s been a real mindfuck for me because I have lived so much of my life convinced that the opposite was true.’ With a dramatic increase in followers and a long-overdue outpouring of love for Raven and Tara, is part of her thankful to those who ‘outed’ her, give the success it has led to?

‘It’s complicated,’ she concedes, ‘I’m really glad that I came out as Raven now. It’s been great. There’s part of me that wants to say thanks. But I don’t want to set a precedent at all…I don’t know. It’s a really weird position for me to be in.’

And what about the next person? The next TikTok or Tumblr user who finds a clue that leads them down an Internet rabbit hole in search of an answer to a mystery that might expose someone who wishes to remain hidden, what advice would she give them?

‘Pursue it,’ she says, ‘but be careful with what you find.’

Image provided by Sarah.

Thoughts on Literary Awards

Elena Buccisano
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Thoughts on Literary Awards

Literary awards and prizes have been around for centuries, with the first British Award for Literature established in 1919 (The James Tait Black Memorial Prize). However, the concept of awarding prizes for art and literature dates back to the Ancient Greeks who competed for prizes offered for the best plays. Interestingly, the endurance of literary awards shows no signs of lessening; arguably, they are only gaining in momentum as more and more publicity and prestige is being placed on the winners. Publishing and commercial decisions are increasingly being made on the outcome of these awards, as are the decisions of consumers, who look to these awards for their next read. In light of this rise, a series of questions surface: should awards and prizes have such a stronghold in the world of literature? Do they do more harm than good? Can writing be accurately measured in a contest?

Indisputably, literary awards are crucial in today’s publishing world. Booksellers and publishers have been quick to capitalise on the publicity generated by awards such as the Costa Book Awards and the Booker Prize. So why were these awards launched, and have they become simply a publicity opportunity? The Booker Prize, now one of the most prestigious literary awards, was set up in 1968 as a result of discussion between Booker and the Publishers Association about the need for a significant literary prize in Britain. Its aim was to “stimulate public interest and controversy, reward merit and increase the sales of books”. But how far have literary awards digressed from their aims? There is no surprise that the rise in the prestige of these awards has led, in turn, to an increase in publicity and prize money. The Booker Prize’s lucrative monetary sum of £50,000 blurs the line between culture and commerce; the literary value of a text therefore becomes more and more intertwined with its commercial value. However, this does not necessarily have to be viewed in a negative light. By industry standards the £50,000 prize is a substantial reward and indeed, rare in the literary world. This highlights that few authors today can afford to write solely for art’s sake; they must make a living in some way.

Although these awards often proclaim their intention to ‘reward merit’, the criteria for excellence in literature are entirely subjective which poses a major issue as to the validity of the awards. It may be argued that because the verdicts of a prize board are potentially liable to error, these prizes remind us uncomfortably closely of what the works being judged are about: the human condition. In this way, whether literature can ever be accurately valued is something certainly up for debate. The dual 2019 Booker prize win for Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo reminds us that distinguishing between the value of literary works is more difficult than it might seem. The judges’ decision to break the rules and jointly award the prize tells us that determining the merit of literary works can sometimes be a bit like comparing apples and oranges; every work can have a perceived value in its own and individual way. Although it can be said that, despite differences in taste, it is still possible to determine whether a work is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, distinguishing between ‘good’ works is arguably, not entirely possible. The issue of social value set against artistic and commercial value prevents the formation of a comprehensive measure of worth. 

Literary awards not only impact the commercial success of authors and publishing houses, but also inform the canon of contemporary literature. Many Booker Prize-winning novels, like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, have ended up as set texts in schools or on university courses. Others, like The English Patient or Life of Pi, have been made into blockbuster films. Most significantly, however, writers who are longlisted or shortlisted for prestigious literary awards can expect an immediate boost in sales. Central to all of this is how literary prizes have embraced controversy by exploiting publicity to further its economic success. This reflects the philosophy that lies at the heart of such prizes, which have indeed stimulated ‘huge public interest, controversy and sales’. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been hit by a series of scandals in the last ten years, including the sexual assault scandal of 2018. The Swedish Academy, which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it in 2018 after numerous allegations against Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of Academy member Katarina Frostenson. This incident also raises issues concerning the makeup of academies and awards committees. Arguably, those who decide these awards wield the most power in the sphere of literary awards; their qualifications, bias and background all play an implicit role in the committee’s decisions.

In light of the sexual assault scandal, the 2018 prize was instead awarded in 2019: Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 prize and Austria’s Peter Handke was awarded the 2019 prize. However, these decisions spun into their own scandal. Peter Handke, the playwright, novelist and poet, was recognised for ‘an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience’. However, his support of the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav Wars and his speech at the 2006 funeral of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic (who was charged with violating the UN Genocide Convention) was quickly brought to light. These events raised an important question within the sphere of literary awards: should a writer’s political views and actions outside of their work be considered as part of the deliberations for the award itself? And what role do literary awards have in dictating morality within the literary community? Effectively, the actions of this powerful literary institution gave a voice to an individual whose moral compass can be questioned; the lack of foresight and sensitivity exemplifies the potential for literary awards to harm literature and its associated communities.

As much as literary awards have run into issues over the past years, they are undoubtedly here to stay. Recent technological innovations have allowed us to discover new ways of assigning literary awards. The winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards are decided by the public through an online vote. In 2020, more than 5.6 million votes were cast; this method of allowing readers rather than literary judges to assign the awards may be the future of literary prizes. At the heart of this model is the theory that the combined judgement of millions of readers is best placed to determine a book’s value. Even though the Goodreads Choice Awards is not a longstanding award, it is a reflection of the preferences of readers and the way in which new technology can contribute to the spreading of literature. Nonetheless, critics of this model have voiced their opinions. They have cited the fact that some texts were condemned by their contemporary readership at the time of publication, but rehabilitated later on once social contexts had changed. Even so, the most obvious criticism of vote-based awards like Goodreads becomes clear upon consulting any bestseller list which acts as a similar, popularity-centric metric. These lists are based purely on sales and therefore, are arguably not good judges of literary merit. The increasingly intertwined relationship between literary awards and technology has also indicated a potential evolution in the profession of the author. The social media obsessed era we are currently living in has meant that authors are turning to the internet to promote and discuss their books. Online reviews by readers themselves have become even more important in the reception of a new book. Marketing knowledge is now becoming a crucial skill for a successful author.

The criteria for the awarding of literary prizes have also evolved and are set to evolve further. Arguably, one of the first indications of this change was Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel win for his lyrics, becoming the first songwriter to win the award. The Academy awarded him the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” After the announcement, Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said, ‘we’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet – that’s the reason we awarded him the prize.’ The debate on whether his work merited this award or should have even been considered for this award was a lively one. Yet, the decision of the judges to award a songwriter and musical artist the most prestigious literary award shows their willingness to open up the term ‘Literature’ to various art forms. Indeed, as Salman Rushdie said, ‘the frontiers of literature keep widening, and it’s exciting that the Nobel prize recognises that.’

One thing is indisputable: so many cultures, over many centuries, have felt it vital to award prizes to works of literature— which is to say, literature and art in general is prized. Although their stronghold and increasing influence in the world of literature may cause anxiety for some, ultimately the concern that fuels our complaints about the Nobel, Pulitzer and Booker prizes is one about the ambiguities of value and merit, about who deserves it and how it operates. The nature of literature’s subjectivity means the choices of these juries should be taken with a pinch of salt, but what they do achieve is the spotlighting of works that us, as readers, might draw our own value from. Finally, in light of the ever-changing nature of the literary landscape and the possibility for new ways of determining literary value in the future, these prizes might just have to do for now.

Balliol College apologises for 300 years of taking money linked to the slave trade

Anvee Bhutani
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Balliol College apologises for 300 years of taking money linked to the slave trade

The Master of Balliol College, Oxford has apologised for the historical acceptance of donations linked to the slave trade over the past 300 years. Dame Helen Ghosh, Master of Balliol College, said the college’s research showed that it had accepted the equivalent of £2 million in today’s money from benefactors with links to the slave trade. This accounts for around 10% of donations between 1600 and 1919.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Ghosh said: “Of course, looking back on this now we are sorry that we took those donations — whatever might have been in the minds of people who took them at the time.”

Some of the donations came from the owners of slave plantations and those who owned ships that transported slaves. Ghosh described this connection as “highly regret[table] whatever the level of donation”. The research, which will be published later this year, also revealed that Balliol’s most notable benefactor is William Beckford, whose family owned a slave plantation and bought the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire.

The college’s endowment is worth around £123 million. In recent years, the college has seen a wave of progressivism including starting a scholarship fund for black and ethnic minority students named after Sir Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana and a former Balliol student. It has also taken measures including divesting from fossil fuels and increasing accessibility within the college. Ghosh is the former director-general of the National Trust where she established a research program to investigate how Britain’s great country homes were linked to the slave trade. 

Balliol’s decision is part of a series of steps taken by various colleges to help retrospectively rectify their relations with colonialism. All Souls College, recently paid a £100,000 grant to a college in Barbados in recognition of its funding from Christopher Codrington, a wealthy slave owner who left £10,000 to build a library. The building was also renamed in January in an effort to make amends over Oxford’s contentious history, though they have kept the statue of Codrington. A decision on whether Oriel College might remove their statue of Cecil Rhodes is also expected soon.

Balliol College has been contacted for comment.

Image Credit: Betty Longbottom/CC BY-SA 2.0

University sport captains and presidents urged to commit to taking action against sexual violence and discrimination

Maurício Alencar
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University sport captains and presidents urged to commit to taking action against sexual violence and discrimination

CW: mention of sexual violence and discrimination

Atalanta’s, Oxford University’s society which promotes and supports women in sports, has released an open letter standing “in solidarity with those who have been affected by acts of sexual violence perpetrated by men, or discrimination based on their gender, sexuality or race”. The letter outlines various pledges of action against sexual violence and discrimination. The letter also invites Oxford sports captains and presidents to sign it in order to show that Oxford’s sports clubs “share these commitments” that hope to eradicate these behaviours from Oxford’s sporting societies. 

Founded in 1992, Atalanta’s aims to “recognise and foster the impressive achievements of sportswomen across the University”. The society is not exclusive to female members and the website states the society has members from over 24 sports clubs. Atalanta’s letter follows the death of Sarah Everard, as well as other recent discussions over forms of discrimination that occur every day. 

The letter wishes to take strong action against forms of sexual violence and discrimination and outlines its pledges to “facilitate a discussion on sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination among our community”. The letter also outlines its pledge in “supporting our members in holding our perpetrators accountable”, and to “put in place institutional changes within our society” so that forms of sexual assault and discrimination can be eradicated. 

The operationalisation of these pledges is also outlined in the letter. The society wishes to hold a “society wide discussion group” and create an “anonymous form” in order for experiences of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination can be registered and so that wrong behaviour does not occur again. The society also hopes to introduce a welfare secretary into its committee to “act as a go-to point for members”. 

As harassment and discrimination is an intersectional issue and some individuals may feel the effects even more commonly or acutely, the society hopes to introduce “leads” in its committee “so that the voices of BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled members are always being considered”. 

The letter also addresses the Sports Federation, and requests for it to implement “a clearer and more sign-posted system for reporting harassment within the sporting environment”. The reporting system would be “open to all members of Oxford University” and “all teams should be made aware of this”. 

Sofia Baldelli, president of Atalanta’s Society, told Cherwell: “Following recent events, Atalanta’s recognised the need for change in the Oxford sport community in order for victims of sexual violence, harassment or discrimination to be supported sufficiently.

“Along with the changes we are implementing to our society and what we are asking of the Sports Federation, we are asking captains and presidents of Oxford University sports teams to sign this letter and pledge to bring about changes within their clubs so that everyone can feel safe and supported within Oxford sport.”


If you are a captain or president of a sports team, you can contact [email protected] or click on the link in Atalanta’s Instagram bio to sign the letter.

Image courtesy of Atalanta’s Society.

The Mechanicanon: AI and Literary Value

Edward McLaren
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The Mechanicanon: AI and Literary Value

It has been said before that ‘the Canon’ is a fitting description for collected quality texts of literature, music, or art because of the fiery, and often explosive, debates that the constituent parts and powders end up releasing. Unlike many a preserved military device of the same name, no functional literary or artistic canon is a museum piece leftover from the Napoleonic Wars, even if a great proportion of their elements derive from such a period. Canons are loaded, ignited and fired into one another, not from opposing gunships (most of the time), but across the imaginary battlefields between Traditionalist and Activist intellectuals. As neither is at hazard of being genuinely blown up, their volleys continue.

These canonical debates have, since the dissimulation of many a national ideal or faith, consisted of a small number of a priori judgements based either in the heritage-value of writing about known authors or the justice-value of writing about unknown ones. It follows that these rows are as changeable as politics and as unempirical as religion. Yet, who is to say disorder is inevitable if we learn, over the coming years, to make our judgements of quality in art and literature as stern and knowable as those found in certain mathematical proofs? It is my fearful opinion that by exploiting the overlaps between literary study, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence we will eventually arrive at ‘The Mechanicanon’, a finite number of objective masterpieces, and fulfil this prophecy, even if doing so would consequently annihilate the very schools of analysis which have kept artwork human.

My argument presupposes that when the intelligent aspect of AI comes to surpass that of the human, in terms of accurately simulating reality, it will answer the question of why certain artworks bring many people a sense of absolution, communicated meaning, or quality. These AI selected texts shall form the Mechanicanon, which is so called because it at once describes a hyper-intellectual machine canon (Mechanicanon) and a device for measurement that exiles one consciousness in order to make severe judgements of the sense of absolution across many (Mechanicanon).

This sense of absolution is not the only emotional standard AI could find for enjoyment by simulating a generalised model of the human brain, but it is the only measurement for purpose and quality that seems to allow texts to be appreciated one generation after another, across cultures. This sense of absolution and its connection to the endurance of texts is similar to what a friend of Freud called the oceanic feeling in ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’:

“. . . a feeling which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, – as it were ‘oceanic’. This feeling . . . is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of religious energy which is seized upon by various Churches and religious systems . . . and doubtless exhausted by them.” (p. 24, Norton Standard Edition).

This is not to suggest that Freud’s (or my) explanation could ever calculate the sense of absolution in the same way that AI would measure it across the simulated brains of humanity. Instead, the inclusion of this paragraph is mainly meant to show that long before our species became aware of the mere potential for a Mechanicanon, we already knew of a common sense of intuited meaning that could be realised through an experience of religion or art.

Of course, it is also important to my argument that the friend in question becomes aware in this passage of the fact that the sense of absolution is at once utterly individual and common to all. According to them, the sense of absolution fulfils the private urges of the self and the implied urges of the collective, as if they were one and the same. It is a sense of universal shared meaning that can be channelled in ‘millions’ through their exposure to certain texts, and therefore implies a hierarchy distinguishing the texts that can generate this feeling from those that cannot.

As someone who experiences something like a sense of absolution just from reading the extract of Freud I have presented, I find it surprising that we have only recently found out this hierarchy of texts has a neurological basis common to many people. For instance, the still-developing field of music therapy identifies certain well-organised, harmonious and calming pieces as effectively reducing the symptoms of dementia in broad groups of patients provided they listen for approximately thirty minutes at a time. Patricia A. Tabloski was responsible for finding that the first movement of Mozart’s ‘Sonata for Two Pianos’ generated the ‘Mozart Effect’, an intelligence enhancement in patients perhaps to do with the organisation of the cortical firing pattern for spatial-temporal processes. The other piece that produced a similar response was Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’, which appeared, in the same experiment, to produce a calming effect on the emotions of numerous patients and on the limbic system and parasympathetic nerve system. Both these successful pieces are pieces with a history of criticism describing a responsive sense of absolution in the listener.

What is perhaps more interesting is the fact the subsequent study ‘Adjunct effect of music therapy on cognition in Alzheimer’s disease in Taiwan’ found the same music tended to produce the same effect on listeners despite their being of a different cultural background. As the study went, it found there was not much evidence at all that Pop Music, Dubstep or Rap create a comparable effect, even in the case of those few examples which are supposedly calming in nature. This rejects the argument that the sense of meaning or absolution we get from music or art is culturally determined. Instead, it indicates that certain ‘high’ artworks are not only more powerful in terms of the effects which they produce within us, but better for us; ameliorating our pain.

Nevertheless, I do not mean to equivocate the effect of music on the human brain with the effect of literature. There are already papers which suggest that a history of reading and writing can reduce the brain’s vulnerability to dementia, but as reading is a longer and more time-consuming task than listening to music, we are less certain that human studies would separate ‘high’ works from ‘low’ as simply as in the case of what is read as opposed to what is listened to. It should also be mentioned that the positive effects of ‘high’ music on the brain do not directly imply a sense of absolution in the listener. It could be that the participants experienced a sense of heightened intelligence without the awareness of eternity that Freud or myself describe. Such a standard of true quality, for all its rhetorical sense, could be indebted more to culture than biology. But even if this unlikelihood is true, it does not undermine my argument that an AI simulation of all humanity’s potential brains could find certain pieces of artwork that would always produce such positive effects as Tabloski describes as well as the sense of absolution which we describe.

As soon as AI develops to the stage where it can accurately simulate a person’s cognitive responses, it shall be able to effectively measure which texts, literary, musical or artistic, produce the sense of absolution according, not to our definition, but that of its own supreme intelligence. If it averages its study across all potential human brains of all cultures using all known texts, it shall either calculate a number that are pleasing to all or pleasing to each culturally divergent group of human being. In this sense, the Mechanicanon will either be one whole (provided that culture does not have a large effect on the neurology of what is the experienced sense of the absolute) or divided into several parts (provided that it does).

This second option of a Mechanicanon divided between cultures will not be ideal, but it will still be very useful as it shall inform critics that certain cultural modes of textual experience are incompatible. We should say that the aforementioned studies and the long history of cultural exchange between peoples do not imply this will be the case, yet, even if it were, the divided Mechanicanon produced would still calculate an absolute standard of value for an individual within his respective culture.

We must also remember that once AI reaches the stage in its development where it will be capable of these beyond-human measurements, it may well choose a different category for quality measurement than I generalise as the sense of absolution. I firmly believe that from my experiences it is this term that best describes what separates a ‘high’ or canonical text from a ‘low’ or non-canonical one. Still, this judgement has been inevitably skewed by my possession of a single human mind that cannot evaluate itself effectively.

An advanced future AI that can interrogate the mechanisms of many human minds while at once remaining an accurate and detached mathematical unconscious will find a better word, a higher standard, and perhaps a stronger sentiment that it will use to qualify the texts of which the Mechanicanon should be made-up. For example, it might be a memory and the sense of a common memory between people that produces the awe of reverence rather than the obscure and placeless sense that I have identified. Potentially, an AI’s advanced study of overlapping human memories and the sentiments of memory would spawn a Mechanicanon before an investigation into my ‘sense of absolution’ would.

But, whether my term comes close or far from describing the AI’s standard, the influence of its evaluations shall be as creative to any study of artwork as they shall be destructive. After a brief period of resistance, I believe the critic will become either a person of science or a disgruntled hobbyist. When an AI can learn to measure the values of texts quicker and better than they ever could, it is logical for them to take on the role of its translator to the general public or give up their office. The first, I must add, will only be possible if the AI in question does not become its own most effective translator and completely subordinate those intellectuals. I hold it highly unlikely that any field of literary or artistic scholarship shall survive beyond the professor’s book-club or the public theatre.

It is the unsolvable debates about the Canon which have kept the related schools of literature, art, and music in a state of ambivalence for as long as the sciences have created measurable progress. The Mechanicanon, in other words, shall be a school in itself that requires no human to listen to it. Or, to return one last time to the metaphor of the military cannon, this new one shall – by learning to load and fire itself – exile us from even counting as its projectile or target.

Artwork by the author

Oxford ACS responds to racial harassment incident at Christ Church

Jill Cushen
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Oxford ACS responds to racial harassment incident at Christ Church

CW: Racism

The Oxford African and Caribbean Society has released a statement on a racial harassment incident at Christ Church, Oxford. The society has been monitoring a racial incident that involved two first-year students at the college who harassed Grace Oddie-James with the N-word on 28 November 2020. They stated that subsequent events have been “extremely distressing” and impacted the victim’s welfare. 

Oddie-James’ request to know the punishment of the perpetrators was denied by the college. The society described the denial of her request as “deeply concerning” for reasons of “transparency and justice”. 

The statement raises concerns over Christ Church’s commitment to rooting out anti-blackness and their protection of racial perpetrators. Oxford ACS stated: “We believe that justice cannot be sufficiently served if the college is willing to sacrifice the duty of care they have to Gracie both as a member of Christ Church and as a victim of racism, for the benefit of shielding her perpetrators from accountability.” They also made two “simple and clear” demands of the college: “that a) Christ Church let Gracie know how the perpetrators will be disciplined and b) reform their disciplinary process so in the future it sustains such transparency for victims.” 

In the statement, the society also said that throughout the last academic year, the college has shown “it can be a hostile and uncomfortable environment for undergraduates with black heritage” and so far concluded that “Christ Church have a disturbingly unclear disciplinary process”. 

An email, seen by Cherwell, was sent to all Christ Church students on Thursday, reminding them that within hours of hearing indirect reports of the incident, the college appealed to students to come forward with any relevant information or concerns. In the email, the Censors’ Office informed students: “A thorough internal investigation has since taken place, resulting in a disciplinary process which is ongoing.” They also said: “We are all committed to making Christ Church a place that is inclusive, diverse and welcoming for all students and all staff.” 

Christ Church also released a statement to Cherwell, stating that the college “will not tolerate racism in any form and has robust procedures in place to deal with such allegations”. 

Speaking of the racial harassment against Oddie-James, the college’s spokesperson said: “It became apparent that the incident involved a student who had been rapping along with a Notorious B.I.G. song, which included the n-word. A thorough internal investigation took place, resulting in a disciplinary process which is ongoing. Christ Church has received independent legal advice through​out, informed by best practice guidance for the higher education sector from the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, with due regard to all students’ rights to fair and confidential processes. Welfare support was also offered from the outset.”

“Christ Church is wholly committed to confronting racial bias, harassment and discrimination in any form. We treat reports of such matters extremely seriously. The whole of Christ Church continues to work together to ensure that the College is an inclusive, diverse and welcoming community for all students and all staff.”

Gracie Oddie-James told Cherwell: “Something that could have been dealt with in a matter of weeks has come to, in part, define my first year of university. I want to make it very clear that from the outset I strived to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with college. And yet constantly, their words failed to be harmonious with their actions. There is no trust to be had.”

She added: “That being said, the JCR have been brilliant and I especially want to thank Giulia Da Cruz (president) and Viren Shetty (ERM rep). Finally, I have seen some people pushing to reinstate the CHCH boycott. I want to remind students that this negatively impacts the few black students in the college – I think I speak for all when I say the JCR is more than willing to work through this alongside every college. Certainly, this will garner better results.” 

Image Credit: Andrew Abbott / CC BY-SA 2.0

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