The University of Closed Minds: On Julian Stannard
Anthony Howell reviews Julian Stannard's The University of Bliss
The University of Bliss, by Julian Stannard
Sagging Meniscus Press, Montclair, New Jersey, 2024
ISBN 978-1-963846-07-2 (paperback) 978-1-963846-08-9 (ebook)
Review by Anthony Howell
It is 2035. Fee-paying students have turned seats of learning into seats of earning, and universities vie with each other for academic courses which will appeal to the uneducated consumer. It turns out that the consumer has very little interest in academic learning. So academics are being phased out—though they can usually find work stacking shelves in the university’s supermarket franchise or perhaps as refreshment trolley attendants on the morning commuter service. The University of Pettifogging bureaucracy, the University of Closed Minds, The University of Lies, the University of Pandering to the Market all do well in this climate; training up those eager to pettifog their way to the top of some illustrious organization, or those who wish to ensure that their minds remain firmly closed, or those intent upon becoming good liars or happily compromised while successfully pandering to the market; all these ambitions are amply provided for by the competing institutions, intent only on not sliding too far down the league table.
The University of Bliss ought to be more popular than it is, since it offers a commodity everyone should be keen on acquiring. It has already got rid of a fair number of its academics as it transitions into an innovatively cultist religious establishment, via its bishop and its vice-chancellor, and is about to receive that holy relic, the Weeping Aubergine, from the Light of Idaho. Subversive poets from the execrable Creative Writing department are organizing sabotage operations, but otherwise campus life continues as is traditionally supposed. Affairs between staff, gossip mongering, hideous rivalries—all these fester beneath the benign surface of Bliss. How will the university manage to climb back up the league table it has slid down? Fees have ushered in corporate fixers, accountants, branding experts…those who salivate before the market.
Julian Stannard’s novel combines SF and satire. But the story it tells happily wanders off into Rabelaisian humour, fireworks of vocabulary and exuberant nonsense. Here William Burroughs meets C.P. Snow. Stannard is a poet, and his novel is the sort of book the reader can open anywhere and enjoy the lighting switches from one sentence to the next, the elusive allusive phrases…
8.45 am Thursday morning, Dr Blink was walking through the Crimson Building. The train journey had been largely uneventful. He’d had a brief chat with Trolley Man Phillips. He’d ordered a bottle of Simone de Beauvoir’s Lightly Effervescent Water. Perhaps he was unlucky last time. The bottle fizzed a little when he opened it and he took a swig.
‘Doesn’t taste right,’ Harry said to himself.
The open plan air-conditioned admin offices were already clicking into bureaucratic buggery, churning out spittle, the English language filleted and made shallow by imperatives and meaningless communications. A couple of administrators were doing ‘Standing Desk Days’—their bottoms upright and doleful. This would earn them wellbeing voucher points and an upgraded lanyard.
‘Good morning Dr Blink’, said the nice admin girl, the one who liked ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. She wasn’t as nice as she used to be. If you’re going to walk down the corridor of the Crimson Building, walk in a more defeated way Dr Blink. ‘Think of slavery as educational’ Amiri Baraka had written.
The narrative is a clothesline hung with flimsy characters, often shat-upon by their robot hybrid pets, and it glories in its adjectival and acronymic subject clusters—breaking most of the rules about adjectives churned out so thoughtlessly by writing workshops. But the novel does not neglect drama. Take the attempted murder of the pro-vice chancellor/bishop’s Shih Tzu, who shits luminescent pooh and is the University’s mascot:
When she’d discovered Ethelred upside down in the wastepaper bin bleeping electronically in the colours of the rainbow she let out a theological whimper. She picked the dog up and held it to her heart. The little shitter wouldn’t have got in the wastepaper bin and disabled itself voluntarily. It suggested the Shih Tzu had been attacked, wounded and thrown aside. Not only had Ethelred cost fifteen thousand pounds, but the Bishop had also developed a spiritual bond with that winsome creature. In her grief Professor Wellbeloved couldn’t remember the details of the insurance policy regarding top of the range Tibetan Shih Tzus. Could Ethelred be sent to the Super Plus Repair Shop? Would she be able to get a replacement? If the university accountant wasn’t forthcoming she could always turn to the Light of Idaho who believed all creatures were blessed whether they were made of flesh or whether they were vegetal or hexapodal. The Church of the Aubergine had nothing against dogs. The Platonic Dog was an anagram of the Platonic God. Among its congregation there were hyenas and goats of an unorthodox persuasion and wailing yams and ladies’ fingers and dung beetles. These were Ignatius Loyola’s latest foot soldiers. Gladys rather liked that.
Well worth a read, Brave New World for academia, if you like. My only criticism is that the scene in the creative writing class suggests that the students have some intelligence and a sense of irony still intact—in the University of Bliss, I doubt that this would be the case, for all the subversive efforts of their tutor.
ANTHONY HOWELL, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice. Details about his collaborative project, Grey Suit Editions, are here. In 2019, his exploration of psychic chaos, Consciousness (with Multilation), was published by the Fortnightly’s imprint, Odd Volumes. His latest collection is From Inside (The High Window).
