Musing

I'm not adamantly opposed to the post-bleed, but nevertheless feel compelled to apologise for resuscitating the theme of the previous post, boring by definition as it was. Temporarily, of course; endlessness would be a bit too bureaucratic. I forgot to mention the avocados over here. The trouble is that they have a weird unity of skin and flesh. The outer and inner layers of the avocado, so scrapably separable in Australia (nor is there anything quite like running a blunt knife against the interior of an avo skin, getting every last bit of that green gold), are in England wedded substances. The skins are so weak that they just break off with the flesh. You inevitably spread bits of skin onto your toast, unsavoury shrapnel which must be picked out again in a large scale pre-ingestion forage. Avos genetically modified for annoyance, ensuring more time is consumed than avocado.

But most time is consumed complaining about it. Let's shelve that topic then, for now. Last weekend I made it out of Cambridge alive and decided to enjoy my good fortune by spending it on London, along with a crew of old chums from Australia. We painted the town red (or whatever colour semi-digested lasagna looks like after a night at Fabric) by two strategies: 1. Buying cake at Harrod's and 2. Museums. London, erst capital of an empire which chased the sun across the sky, is now of course a capital of museum tourism. Though (depressingly) the London eye - a giant ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames, monument to mankind's inner gimmick - far surpasses London's splendid museums in terms of visitor numbers, people still flock to the city for these climate-controlled time capsules. We followed suit, knocking off the Victoria and Albert, Tate Modern and British Museum within a few days.

I've been around the museum block in my short time. Any trip to Europe is standardly weighted towards the museum; at least if you're into that sort of thing. Four years ago, on a three month trip around Europe, I could safely reflect that half the time was spent in a form of museum. Europe could be considered one big museum. Certainly, the preservation of heritage round these parts dictates a good chunk of everyday life in urban spaces. So if it's all around you, why go to a museum? I'd never really questioned the museum's validity as a cultural institution, but for the first time, in London, I looked around the spacious rooms and saw strangeness, not treasure. I became paranoid that, as with all systems of canonisation, people were just coming to these places because they thought they 'should', seeking to increase their human points by seeing things with enshrined cultural value. Worse, I became paranoid that that was exactly what I was doing.

It took me back to my own experience of one of the world's greatest artistic anti-climaxes: the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. I didn't know at the time, and I still don't know...though I 'should' know...why the Mona Lisa was so important in art history. I just had a vague conception that it was important. So I hyped myself down the long halls of the Louvre, an idealistic young 19 yr old, skipping along the arrows which took me ever closer to my moment with the Best Painting Ever. But when I finally stood face to face with the lady, the waves of 'Is that it?' were impossible to suppress. That was it, just a painting, or just a Painting. And now a fat woman is jabbing her SLR into my ribs, now a young dad shoving past to get his toddler to the Loo(vre). The noise cycled round the decibels. Periodically an attendant would spit out a big universal 'shhh', and the conversation would drop to zero; but then slowly build until it was time for the next drop. You couldn't stay stationary for more than a second - and museum protocol teaches that the stationary state is the only way to yield maximum effect of cultural injection. It likewise teaches that silence is the rule: but silence here? Some irony insisted that the world's greatest artwork be placed in an environment least conducive to its reception.

Now, however, I'm not so sure that the din ruined it for me. Last weekend has made me press the particular mask of seeing I put on when I cross the threshold into museum/gallery spacetime. By this I mean I nestle into a particular mode when I enter these places, shifting what I look at, and how I look at it. Or at least I imagined the gear-shifting: 'Right, get ready to see some great stuff. Eyes peeled. On the ball. Art.' But I've realised that I don't partake in that much 'looking' at all. Rather, I look in the old fashioned left-to-right, top-to-bottom manner. I read. Not the pictures, but the accompanying blurbs. For some reason I've become so dependent on these that my eye gravitates to them even before the work itself. I want the text before the vision. This habit has become a bad one, to the point that I write off any museums which lack verbal contexts and explanations almost immediately. I'm probably way off the mark here, but it feels like the written word has become far my dominant medium for understanding the world. I read and write every day: these activities are like lounging in well-worn underpants. But when it comes to other media, I feel like I'm becoming downright amnesiac. I forget conversations, and I forget in conversations. I find it difficult to talk about things I might happily write or read about; I'm always taken aback with admiration for people who can deliver a precision discourse on a book or artwork which lasts more than a sentence. Images of visual art I forget easily too. As time passes, the read bit next to the work stays with me more staunchly than the work. Reader beware: read too much and you will be forever reading more.

So I've developed a bit of a habit with the written word. Nothing to worry about. I can stop at any time. Just watch me.

Well, maybe a few more hits. Along with my textual leanings, the weekend's museum sessions also made me think about what museums I've really loved, and why. Or, the related, shamelessly materialistic question: what are the best things I've 'gotten' out of museums? The short answer to that is 'inspiration'. Some works have really got my mind chugging - Guernica was one of them, though I can't quite reconstruct the points between which the chugging took place. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was big time titillating; Paris' Musee d'Orsay a pleasure. For exhaustive, masculine cross sections spanning the infinite times and spaces of empire, I look back on the Louvre, the Met in New York, the Brit Museum in London with much fondness. Then for the shock of the NEW: the MOMA in NY, the Tate in London, Pompidou in Paris. All of these have stuck in my mind as seen, and worth seeing.

The most tangible gift I've gained from these places is a vague sense of wonder, a fruitful bewilderment, which stays with me for days after the visit. I don't feel I've ever had enough time with the works to feel like I've clasped more than the most superficial hold around them (compared with, say, a Latin poem - into which I'd happily pour hours). But from a good museum I always emerge with a renewed zest for life. While the glow lasts, German Expressionism is important - which is to admit that it's not, always - and this is a good way to be. The museum is a rare space where looking and thinking are the norm, a suspension of the holy quest for functionality and productivity. People come out and feel satisfied that they've done something valuable, even if it's just been eying off pretty pictures. The eying is the doing.

In this way, the potent cultural pressure which drives the human to the museum is a good thing, if only to doorknock that internal creature who doesn't get much attention: the thing we've naturalised to 'Creativity', the thing the ancients anthropomorphised as the 'muse' (mousa>mouseion>museum). If only we looked with the same intensity every day as we performed our familiar tasks in the 'real' world, we might see more figures in more carpets. 'That guy's face looks like a splodge from Pollock.' Learning our lessons in the museum, the real amusement begins outside it.

Bureaucracy and the Brit

Living in England can often feel like reading Kafka in the dark, hungover, with a fat man sitting on your head. That sensation, to some extent, arises whenever and wherever on earth you have to deal with the unavoidable drag of bureaucracy. But in England, the dark is darker, the ale more regurgitable, the man fatter, and the Kafka Kafker. Get ready for some virtual bureau-tourism: travel writing that helps YOU decide never to bother.

So long are the talons of British bureaucracy that I first felt the pinch back when applying for Cambridge the first time, November '07. It was a wonderful spring, mild and clear; the children were frolicking outside with their hopskotches and skipping ropes, but I could not join in. No, I had to fill out an excessively long online application form, nor was that the end of it. Transcripts, research proposals, CV's, degree certificates all had to be sent in the flesh, by snail mail. To saving trees and fuel costs, Cambridge said no. Next came the icing: references. One of my referees happened to be overseas, which, one might think, wouldn't be too wacky a situation. I had to print off a form, fill out my part, send it to her in the U.K., then she would send it back to Australia, then I would send it back to the U.K., with the impression of Her Majesty's Mailroom still vivid in the little envelope's well-travelled memory. Efficiency with a capital Ef. Effing Cambridge.

English Bureaucracy is a voracious animal however, and its appetite for paper is never quite satisfied. At the moment I'm filling out exactly the same application, a funny piece of absurdist deja vu - or it would be, in play form. I didn't lie, I am actually studying here. But in order to progress from a Masters to a PhD degree, you have to pen the same thing over again, with the generous provision, this time, that you don't have to submit transcripts (because the forward thinkers at the Board of Graduate Studies kept them) and you only need two references instead of three. Onya, Mr BGS. Keep flicking those crumbs my way and I'll keep picking them up.

The constant paperwork has been a moderate stressfest, given that it calls for attention while other significant paperwork is tugging at your pants and complaining that you never buy it ice-cream anymore. I have had to divert time from my impending essay, but that doesn't really bother me. What pinches me more is the 'big picture' thinking that these tasks enforce, when all I have at the moment is a few very small, very granular pictures. I still don't really know why what I'm doing is important, assuming it is important - and I resent being made to think about it so early in the peace. I've managed to stay happy for 23 years without a big legitimising narrative, delusions of grandeur, or a raison d'etre. So why should I give any of these things to my research? It'll just skulk off disappointed when it realises it has fallen short of redefining scholarship. If I have to formulate delusions, at least give me more than two months to do it in.

But that is my own issue, and one of the few things in this life for which bureaucracy cannot be held accountable. Most dealings with bureaucracy provoke swearing, rather than existential crises. The other week I ordered a new camera online. The box came within a few days, and I was about to launch on the road to happysnapsville, when I realised my own staggering douchehood: I'd ordered the body without the lens. So I checked it could be sent back, obtained the green light, and posted it off. Now, since there was a difference in price between old and new goods ordered, I needed to pay the remaining quid on my cred card. But it didn't work. It took me several holds and transfers on the bank line to work out finally that my card had been frozen because I'd bungled the entry of a password a few days earlier. Secure, yet irritating. Anyway, with the payment processed, I thought it would be smooth seas ahoy. Two weeks went by, distinctly cam-less. In a rare act of consumer aggression, I decided it was high time to give the company a call. They told me the couriers had tried to deliver it three times, but I hadn't been home; so, they had sent it back to the store for holding. Now I'm no nine-to-fiver, but it has always been a fundamental assumption of mine that most adults are out on a weekday, usually working. Sensible deliverers in Australia left notes to combat this sticky problem. Not here, though: they just kept coming, knocking on the door, seeing if I was home to sign off my paid package, and taking it with them on their merry way if I wasn't. Which I wasn't. Apparently it happened about four times before I rang and asked the company why the fook they didn't just call me and arrange a time. Or, even better, leave the package with the custodian, who's employed to receive mail, among other things. The good people at Camera World answered my question with another question: 'Why don't you give the courier company a call?' They gave me the number, another hall of mirrors within an unnavigable labyrinth. The whole process of endless deferral and redirection was becoming too creepy and postmodern for my liking.

Despite my fears, the call to the courier was the money shot. We arranged a time and they came five hours too early; luckily (?) I was in bed, conveniently located at home. There have been more stories of despair just like this though. Applying for council tax exemption (everyone pays an exorbitant amount of tax here to subsidise inadequate recycling services etc.) involved inking out the longest form I've ever seen, and providing photocopies of almost every document with my name on it ever released. Again, like the question which always already seeds another question, and the door that leads to more doors, I was referred to a different department in order to complete the last stage of the application, which involved another application: this time for a National Insurance Number. Another arbitrary number was necessary to reduce the number on another form. I dreamt of terrible deaths by paper: a clerk sticking me in a giant photocopier which was really a high energy radiation machine, making me wait while my form trickled down an endlessly high skyscraper, signed by every level from clouds to ground, a form which approved melting my nipple hairs in a precise order pre-ordained by those invisibles at the top.

The bureaucratic principle of maximum difficulty seems to filter through to other spheres too. I was in a rush to get out the door of our flat the other day, hands fully flustered with laundry. But our door is so heavy that it is impossible to open with individual fingers. You need a total clasp of a strong, prehensile hand to pull it towards you with any success. So you drop everything and devote all being to the labour of the door. Once this obstacle has been conquered, it's just a short walk to the laundry through two more doors which must be opened by code, and then a third door which is even heavier than the first door. Thus are daily tasks made just that little bit more mundane and dreaded. It's no small surprise that this country is famous for limited social mobility when impenetrable barriers clog every passage. England may do many good things, but it doesn't open doors willingly.

Run, Forest

There was a time when I ran cross-country races like it was going out of fashion. Perhaps that's because I knew it was about to do just that: for after my twelfth birthday, there would be no more competitive running. Doing what could be done incidentally, whether playing on a football pitch, dashing for a train, or fleeing from malicious, stink-bug wielding colleagues - was no longer cool. Run when necessary, of course. But fun-run? The greatest rhyming oxymoron in the English language.

Last Saturday, I discovered that competitive running is still - not very cool. I signed up for the 'College Cuppers Day' (hooray!), a 10km course around an idyllic Cambridgeshire wood. Thinking it could be a useful exercise to measure just how fit I really was, not to mention an interesting theatre I had never been involved in, I enlisted without further question. I showed up at the number collection point, pinned on my unique paper number, looked around, and realised I knew not a soul. People were milling in college groups; but I hadn't even bothered to check that other people from my college were running. Two hours to race time. I slouched against a handy wall and became more aware of my hangover. More aware, also, of my failure to bring book or music entertainment. So I pretended to read a map of the London tube, while my ears ventured hungrily around the room, searching for juicy snippets.

As a sidenote, snippets at Cambridge are nuggeted gold. I walked through King's bar the other day and overheard two. Snippet 1: '...it's like the signifier and the signified...'. Snippet 2: '...as Kant would say...'. Those were gems; but the race day conversation was not so high-brow. Still, it was no less standard for that. Academic self-deprecation translates easily to a sporting context. There were things like 'Oh god, this is the last place I want to be...' and 'I'm not ready for this, I shouldn't have drunk so much last night...'. Now there's modesty, and then there's Ms. Undergraduate doing her best to appear all worn-out and dejected. Come on, Ms. Undergrad. We both know you were in bed by 9pm last night. I'd breathalyse you now, but for fear that it would be more awkward in a context outside my imagination.

Anyway, these snippets were making me a little edgy. When Cambridge students energetically downplay stuff like that, you know they're taking it seriously. As time elapsed, and the relative locations of Victoria and Piccadilly Circus burnt into memory, more and more jackets came off, revealing more and more singlets: 'Jesus College Running', 'Team Trinity' etc. Coloured and themed. Well then. Enjoy your singlets, ladies and gents. I for one choose to run my races in my girlfriend's black tights, loose-fitting boardshorts, ragged gloves and a jacket with a phone-shaped hole in the front pocket. Speed-singlets may look good, but what I lack in professionalism, I make up for in sheer aerodynamism. We'll see who has the last laugh.

Needless to say I got comprehensively beaten. I came somewhere in the middle...all I know is that the winner beat my by six minutes. That's considerable, in a forty minute race. While it would have been wonderful to pull off a dark horse victory, I'd discounted that from the moment we arrived at the course. So, visualise a paddock, cow-patted and all, with a small grove of trees in the middle. People put down their bags (containing spikes and packed lunches), and start warming up. Safely back home, I now realise that this was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Men and women in tracksuits getting warm in every conceivable way: sprints, jogs, legs-up, heels-up, stretches, push-ups, downhill, cross-hill. I walked the course (autumnal woodland - pleasant, if it were not about to be trampled) with some nice young lads, the conversation was flowing, until - 'Let's run this last bit then shall we?'. Running, running everywhere. I was alerted to how rare the run is in everyday life by its extreme concentration here. I had entered an asylum of running madpeople.

The race itself was even more bizarre. Comments made on the sporting field are fairly inane at the best of times. In football, there's necessary communication of course: 'pass it square', for example. But there's also the morale-boosting/general command shout, which probably constitutes a good proportion of the chatter on ground: 'Mark up!', 'First to the ball!', 'Save, keeps!' etc. Now, the range of possible expressions is reasonable in a game like football, where the competitors do different things and stuff actually happens. But in running? It would be make it sound more honourable than it actually is to say 'Wow, what a run he's having, he's putting one foot in front of the other and moving generally straight ahead so well today!'. As we circled the track, the spectators (all lady runners just finished their race) dug out two pearlers, which they mixed and matched in colourful combinations: 'Good running!' and 'Keep Going!'. Cheers...thank you, and I will.

I suppose the funniest element for me was just witnessing enthusiasm in action. At times I forget how many wonderful nerds there are out there, investing so much zeal in a very specific area. Yes, I know I do classics. Blind spot noted. But seeing people behaving so seriously towards something I was lazily indifferent about felt refreshing, and, well, 'fun'. Scarier is how quickly I found myself buying into the hot competition merely by absorbing a competitive environment. I set my target mid-race on this weedy little guy that was always just in front of me. I inched closer until I could hear him weezing. Then I strode past on the final lap. Another guy I passed said 'not you again'. The private battles and psychological conflicts, the highs, the lows. Running was the stuff of life. Good running, yes sir!

The adrenalin subsided, I almost vomited, downed some free biscuits, and went back home. Thinking, on the come-down, that competitive running affords a very quick route to uncoolness. Around forty minutes precisely; or thirty-four, if you're in a real hurry.

Age Shall Not Weary Them...

Permission to get sombre requested.

This post begins, again, with a seminar. We're not doubling up, I assure you: this time the seminar will serve purely as point of departure. So, we depart. I went to a seminar/lecture/talk hybrid this afternoon as part of the 'Classics Speaker Series', a brand of events designed to get the old and distinguished hands of classical scholarship back on the lecture circuit. These venerable, late-career sages are brought in to impart their years of wisdom to the younger generations, reflecting on their time in academic (and other) life, while providing statuesque examples for the bright-eyed kids to themselves aspire to. At least I think that's the ethos, having only been to one of them. At any rate, that was certainly the gist of the day.

The speaker was old-school as they come: he'd trained under some star dons whose flower of youth arrived late in the 19th century. His sheer scholarly lifespan meant that he'd brushed pencils with another age, with an altogether different cast of heroes. This was the card he (as he always inevitably would have) played in titling his talk 'Then and Now (and Some of the Bits Between)'. Then, and Now. The big contrast. In my day, we didn't have playful titles for lectures. Nor brackets in titles. And I absolutely refuse to insert cola and subtitles. So I went in anticipating the thread: a quaint anachronism of a man making a few modest observations on time and change.

I wasn't disappointed at the first visuals. Grey hair, spectacles struggling to contain licentious eyebrows, tweed jacket, vest and tie. The code for geriatric professor was still intact, I was relieved to discover. When he started speaking, things proceeded quite as expected: first, a diverting account of what it was like to learn Latin and Greek at school in the thirties. Then, some of the things he'd picked up from his esteemed teachers in his early days at Cambridge. So far, so standard. But then the opinions began to get a little controversial. The 'Now' bit morphed into the oft-told tale of change and decline. The life story paused as diatribe took the reins: no one learns Latin and Greek properly any more, literary theory is the devil's encroachment which divides men from their texts. Secondary literature piles on secondary literature to become tertiary literature. The good old texts lie abject and invisible at the bottom of the pile. For those who don't know the plot, this is a much-repeated argument at the heart of classics at the moment, in both educational and research forums. But the funny thing is that this kind of 'no one makes classics like they used to' sentiment is more often tied to the Oxford camp in the Oxford/Cambridge classical conflict (over-simplistic, but active nevertheless). This daring old gent was performing a bit of theory-bashing not just anywhere, but at one of the world centres for new theoretical approaches to the classics. The wind had changed since the glory days, when this guy was calling the professorial shots from his heavy chair; and he played to this change. Hats off, Gramps.

What depressed me was not the conservatism during the talk, but the interchange in 'question time' afterwards. The old Don had audaciously thrown his cards on the table, and he wanted to get a rise in return. In the customary silence that follows after the floor has been opened up to questions, as audience members tentatively think about their first move, he explicitly said: 'Come on, someone destroy me.' It was clear that this octogenarian still had a healthy appetite for debate, and he wanted a feed. But no one gave him anything. No one seized on his points with any of the ardour for contradiction and challenge I'd seen directed at middle-age scholars in the 'normal' seminar so far. No one engaged. There seemed general agreement in the room that he had passed beyond the point of force to be reckoned with. Go easy, spoke the silence: he's a relic from a forgotten time. Gloves on, this one's particularly delicate. People opted for safety over controversy: tell us about the time you went to Mt. Athos in 1951, tell us about your trip to post-war Yugoslavia, tell us about your school days. It smacked of policy of appeasement. A friend once pointed out to me that our generation always wants to ask their grandparents about the war. I too have unexceptionally asked my Grandpa about the war, but I remember the sad process of pity that went through my mind before I did it: I was asking not because I wanted to hear all that much, but because I thought he wanted to tell me. That's what it felt like today. Younguns and middle-agers condescendingly giving Grandpa the floor while they think about dinner.

Slightly more depressing, however, was what came out in response to these anodyne questions. Reading an essay, he had managed fine; but improvising, the old-man speak could no longer be concealed. The digressions ranged far and wide, all expanded into the most tedious detail. I can't remember the intricate sequence leading up to it, but he somehow arrived at the topic of the changes in the girls' uniform while he was at school. He quite literally delivered a five minute excursus on the subject. When talking of an ancient trip to Greece, he recalled the finer points of border diplomacy, such as the distinctive way the passport was stamped. I was reminded how long any story, even the shortest, can be. I was reminded of my Grandma's injunction to my Grandpa when he starts spontaneously launching into war talk: 'Make it short.' I was reminded, above all, of The Simpsons, when Grandpa Abe recounts a day in his younger life with infuriating specifity (paraphrase): 'On that morning, I got up, and made myself a piece of toast. I set the toaster to three: medium-brown. Then I put an onion on my belt. Everyone was wearing an onion on their belt back then, which was the style at the time.' Thus spirals our nightmare of murky, formless, endless geriatric discourse: a labyrinth of dystopic repetitions from where, we fear, we may never escape.

Is it inevitable? Do you cross the checkpoints of seventy and eighty pre-marked to harp on, more and more, about decline outside, while your body accelerates its own inside decline? Does the ability to tell stories of socially acceptable length and form fade to black? I struggle to tell socially acceptable stories at twenty-three (a bad test-case): but what about the seasoned raconteur? Will you fall into a digressive mush without the consolation of even knowing you're there? Will the right-minded adults around keep you in the bubble, never pricking you out with a candid 'You're being boring and irrelevant'? The archetypal patterns of old-age suggest gloom. We get the verb 'Nestorise' (at least I've heard it used...) from the first old man in literature: King Nestor in the Iliad. He's the first man on record to say 'In the olden days...'. I'm all for limiting comparisons to the ancient world. But in this case, it's safe to say that the genre of grumpiness has evolved little in three thousand years.

Ageing per se doesn't bother me: but predestination does. The idea of slowly, obliviously sinking into a type, like slipping gradually into a bath prepared at birth and kept warm until you're ready - that, if anything, makes my skin crawl. I console myself by silent oaths: I will remember Nestor, I will remember the professor of the bushy brow. But I won't. Memories will stop effacing age, and begin to create it. In Nestor's place will be remembered the sharp, context-less vision of an onion on a belt or a stamp on a passport. Soon after the fragments themselves will fade...

...nor the years condemn...

Weather: 'Tis nobler in the mind

My girlfriend just told me, with no slim justification, that I should shut up already about the weather. Ever-resembling the sulky school child, I have swallowed the rage, and will now blog about it. Having trouble keeping the younglings under control mum? Get them a blog!

I promise not to labour tedious comparisons or make banal observations, right after this one: the weather at present is shite. With the death of daylight saving, winter seems to have found its cue. The days now end at four, but rarely even begin: for the grey cabinet has no edges when you're stuck inside it. You search the sky's zones for a bit of strong sun, the kind that would, in Sydney, take 0.1 seconds to score a few letters on your retina: 'Sun waz 'ere, 08'. But all you get is drizzle; light, middling, freckly drizzle. Snoop-Dog, the sonic effects you pioneered with your 'drizzle''s are beyond reproach. But did the pathetic image of the sun-starved lad occur to you mid-composition? No, only the Californian climate could give rise to such happy-go-lucky word play. I'm loath to call you a faker, but you really don't know shit about the drizzle.

All this talk about weather has made me think about why there is...all this talk about weather. That is, why 'weather' ever became the paradigmatic 'lowest common denominator' topic. Surely there are better opening remarks available on the conversational market. Weather is immediate and universal, sure. But so are many things: buildings, cars, food, sex, clothes, the Simpsons. Or so I thought.

When I really racked my brain for alternatives, however, I couldn't come up with anything that even nearly approached current climatic patterns as a topic of absolute, blanket relevance. Four years ago now, almost to the day (sorry, temporal specificity is a price I'm having to pay more and more for writing an essay on (that is, concerning, but hopefully the other sense will apply as well) time), I was staying in Northern Italy with some family friends who couldn't speak a word of English. This was good for my Italian, which reached a novice level of competence during this period - but it was also incredibly frustrating. I can't stand cultural and linguistic barriers. They make me highly uneasy and embarrassed. It's one thing to travel independently in a country where you have little to none of the language, hopping along the tourist infrastructure (hostels, common tourist attractions etc). Commercial imperatives made this kind of thing easy a long time ago. But it's a whole different game to take part in a domestic environment. The potential for mix-up and miscommunication increases exponentially. Not only are you a burden on someone else's resources, but you're a burden on their mind: every communicative transaction is a strain. Politeness dictated that I really should have learned Italian.

Where has the weather gone? Well, it was with me then. The universality of weather-talk was institutionalised so deeply that it even filtered into the very early lessons of my thumbed pocket-book, 'Teach Yourself Italian'. A few pages in appeared the deceptively neutral phrase 'fa freddo' (it's cold), along with useful permutations ('fa molto freddo' - it's very cold). It was indeed cold at this time, coming swiftly up to high winter; so the phrase was at least accurate at base level. But it was so much more than this. For me and my equally Anglophone friend, it was the greatest linguistic blessing this side of Latin. I'd never realised before that week in just how many ways 'it's cold' could be deployed. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, conversation would gently pivot around the temperature. It was fun because you knew the domain: a familiar island within a vast, confusing sea. Iteration is always comforting, but no less in a foreign country, where the range of iterable things is severely reduced: 'Oh, we're doing the "it's cold" thing again are we? Brilliant, that I can do!' If adventurous, you could even stick a negative in there: 'it's not cold'. Woah, slow down there Jimmy.

One of the great things about the weather is that it's a never-ending story that can be tapped into at will: by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Constant changes beg for constantly updated comments. 'It's good, it's bad, it's hot, it's cold, it's dry, it's wet, it's typical, it's strange' - the pleasure we get from the behaviour of weather over time, repeatedly meeting and defeating our expectations, is almost analagous to the pleasure of narrative. Weather can do funny (the funniest) things, and the fact that it can still surprise us, after all these years of humanity, and more years of atmosphere, I find inexplicably marvellous. When all is said and done, when books written, films made, files created are finally erased from this fragile planet, the weather - nature's wonder-text - will still be there to entertain. And maybe, in some form, we'll still be there to talk about it.

Seminars

It just occurred to me that 'seminar' and 'semen' share the same etymology (Latin semen 'seed'). There you are. Classics: always activating a dirty connection, even when your mind feels safely out of the gutter and in the University.

But I begin with a digression. This town, housing the original apple that knocked Newton out and caused him to hallucinate a psychedelic theory of 'gravity', is obviously quite keen on the 'learning'. This is both a general condition as well as one specific to this year: as we speak, the Esteemed Institution is celebrating its 800th anniversary (tracing its roots to a blurry point in mythological time - but it works for me) by a series of events publicised as 'The Festival of Ideas.' I liked this title, coming from an Australia where 'Festival' usually prefixes 'of Music, Drugs, and Disproportionately Muscular Arms'. We're just now commencing festivities, and the luminary-presence-factor (LPF) is pretty astounding. Check some of the events at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/communications/community/ideasfestival/. I don't want to blow the horn (because that, young man, would be masturbation, and that, young man, would be wrong), but it's an exciting time to be in Cambridge.

Tonight I made my 'Ideas' debut with a panel discussion on climate change. The 'Idea' (aah, the word is inescapable...good publicity Cambridge) was that the five panelists, various men and women of distinction working in different interactive fields of climate change, would give their top five prescriptions on how to combat the warming of the globe on an individual level. Most of the suggestions weren't revolutionary. There was a significant amount of overlap between specialists; not to mention the preaching-to-the-converted environment which these kinds of event tend to foster. I will turn off my wireless router (the British pronounce it 'rooter' - the riches of English!) when I'm not using it, and I will enlist the aid of hot water bottles as a substitute for heating, for as long as this barren tundra permits. Even if the content wasn't earth-shattering/warming, however, it nevertheless felt great to be part of an audience (and performance) so engaged and responsive. People asked pertinent questions. One guy dared to prod the Achilles heel of hypocritical aviatory conduct: 'How many of you panelists have flown recently, and how did you justify it?' Bam. Right in the idea-maker.

The mood remained cordial and light-hearted, despite a bit of nettling provocation. So, by way of foil, let us cross Queens Rd to the architectural wonder that is the Classics Faculty. This building really puts the ass back in classical (the donkey, that is - but the Yank is welcome to read what she will). It's a horrible red brick monstrosity which elicits no awe for the Grand Traditions of Classical Scholarship whatsoever. And though that, in principle, is my cup of tea precisely, I just wish modesty didn't have to be so ugly. Anyway, within this building there unfolds on a weekly basis the Faculty literature seminar. These sessions have an international reputation for being a little ferocious; and the three that I've attended were reasonable witnesses to this fame indeed. The jousting can be quite exhilarating, but so far I've only seen one-way battles: i.e., the poor lad/lass down the front getting grilled by a sage down the other end of the long rectangular table. A speaker squirming for answers is not a pretty sight. The guy last week, whose research field fell under the aegis of 'reception studies' (valid and interesting pursuit of a classical text's continuing fate and influence after its initial 'publication'), came off particularly worse for wear. I'll never forget my supervisor's question at the end, framed with ever-so-slight disdain: 'So, I'd like to ask you a question about the only bit of Greek in your paper...' (the paper was mostly concerned with English texts). Whatever doesn't kill you...may paralyse your paper-giving muscles for life.

Then contrast the 'wine-dispensing' type seminar, such as the one I went to the night before, staged by the student-run classics society. Llewelyn Morgan, a sexy scholar straight outta Brasenose, Oxford, gave a largely extemporaneous (or naturally delivered, unlike the essay-reading which clanks in the foundry of the Lit Seminar) talk entitled 'The Short and Long of It: Sex, Death and Metrics'. The presentation was just that - a presentation. Clear, concise, and visually splendid, fully utilising the perks of the unfortunately corporate-ised Powerpoint. The lighting was set to 3: sultry scholarship. The ceiling was high, the roof was ornate, the acoustics were lovely (Benson Hall, Magdalen College). All this, and you could sip on your vin all the way through - and such was Dr. Morgan's skill that he managed to stay intelligible even as the glasses of his audience peristalled their way along the throat. Well, one has to wash the Sex and Death down with something.

By and large, I'm a self-confessed fan of the seminar. Thus are some of the variants of the genre encountered so far. I'm hoping that more will reveal themselves as time tramps on - preferably involving monkeys. For monkeys are the future of learning.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=XKgKZfhKrgU (thanks be to Tom Swann)

Ivory out.

On Newness

We all (of those who went) remember that first day of primary school. And most of us who remember this would also remember with sharpening clarity that first day of high school. For me, both were painful events of separation and loss. I filled my navy-blue flap hat full of miniature tears on the former occasion. The porous fabric was ill-equipped for first days, despite , and because of, its virginity. The second time, there were no tears, but rather the swaying organs of grounded vertigo, gravity flirting with the stomach. I knew not a soul apart from one boy I had scant eye-contacted at my previous school. Even that rope of familiarity had disappeared before I could swipe at it; he was in none of my classes. Standing next to the vice at the front desk of Metalwork, hearing laughter at the back which could never, ever at that moment have allowed me to participate: that was disempowerment. I was not a blip on the consciousness of any boy in that room. But they monopolised mine. Man, how it sucked to be new.

Six years were spent in that crucible, inadvertently forming friendships that no one could have celled in a spreadsheet. Some people manage to grate themselves against their high school after they leave it, draw blood, until everything they are, their life, their networks, is emphatically not their old school. That is a wonderful exercise in young-adult reformation, and university, or work, or unemployment, is the best place to start over. But I must be honest: I was born and made there, and I quite like the mould. I have, of course, expanded since those tender years. I've made friends whom I'll love permanently and without whom I couldn't...do (unless they attempt to murder me, which is my one and only, fairly generous I hope, out-clause) in the last five years. But I find it hard to construct my identity without leaning on those old, weathered props: that I became who I am in the grassless ghetto of a brilliant school, whose inhabitants I grew with and up and into, as they grew with, up and into me.

Thus it was a shock to remember what newness is: that old feeling which is always new, a taxing exercise in alienation. Severed from the place where I worked on a self and friendships continuously for 23 years (there was a brief period in nappies where I didn't give a fuck about anyone and shat indiscriminately; not my most popular), everything around me is self-evidently new. But I also am new. Departing from the subtle languages which are so well-established with every single one of my old friends is terrifying. It is, pardon the extension, ultimately like I'm speaking a limited, sparse form of Swahili which people must strain laboriously to understand.

At present, this language languishes below the poverty line. Newness is reciprocal, and the unique environment of Cambridge streamlines permissible conversations such that most run out of steam after the standard questions and answers. First, your name? Next, your discipline? Next, your accommodation? Lines may diverge from one or more of these categories, and the discourse may bloom into something better. But these last weeks have shown me how terrible I am at small-talk; but also why the name 'small-talk' works. It's not simply that the subject matter is trivial (things have a habit of getting very deep, very fast here), but painfully constricted by mutual lack of knowledge. I have no idea how big or how far I can push a particular conversation with a particular person. I'm uncertain about which quantities of 'identity' I should ration or release. Indeed, the very thing to be rationed is now unquantifiable: I've lost it, somewhere between my name and my subject. Newness has shown me, at least, that my personality is heavily implicated in what I can get away with.

This adds to more than just a ban on (ironically) racist jokes: I have to start over. Hardly a revelation, but the depth of this cross-world displacement never fully hit me until now, as I, and newness, arrived from opposite sides of the globe. Nothing like newness for a bit of old-fashioned introspection. Continuity within change, or change within continuity: I like to think I'm tacking another modulation onto Ovid's Metamorphoses. What is Toad in Cambridge? His liver looks different; but his bowels - praise the lord - look the same.

So what's come out the other end? What nugget of this wonderful place, digested, compacted and released, can I give you? This unplanned metaphor is already making any account I offer into poo, literally. But I suppose that adequately captures the difficulty of saying something that's been said so, so many times before. Nevertheless, let's start obliquely with the Autumn. The season is so beautiful here that it compensates for the dwindling days. Multicoloured leaves seem to highlight just how well they have nature down pat here. One of the first things that struck me about the town and surrounding villages is the idyllic perfection of urban-rural balance: trees are everywhere, yes, but scattered around town are 'greens', which aren't just equivalent to 'parks' - those strange compartment spaces whose openness almost feels like an aggressive command to exercise and be done with it - but rather manicured images of country-in-city. Tidy, but not too stylised, small paths meander through without a hint of disturbing the grass and mature, great-uncle trees. As you follow the river, every now and then you come across a swing gate - originally to keep cattle in place? - which you have to pull open and leave clang behind you. I don't know what's got me so enthralled with these gates. But they provide a kind of checkpoint value. They partition your journey into stages, and there's something so civilised about partition: even when you don't understand why it's there. But subtle demarcation is one aspect of the green's mildness. These spaces are at an age where they are perfectly comfortable with themselves.

These mini-pastoral spaces are, of course, as man-made as the buildings. But the buildings are something else entirely. Each college has its own architectural Geist; and though I'm far from expert, it's difficult not to see the character of each college projected onto its facade. The gate of Trinity is heavy, mediaeval, menacing, cherried on top with a dull but unmissable Latin inscription in gold, proclaiming the founder's importance. To the public: oh no, you're not bloody getting in here, and if you are, then you're damn well going to know who built the thing you're getting into. Ironic, I suppose, that no one reads Latin anymore: the dynamism of language will always crumble the monument. But will it? From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Latin inscriptions still carry their own aura of monumentality. In fact, it might even work better this way. 'What does that mean?' 'I dunno, but it sure looks important.' King Henry would have wanted it no other way.

Then, by contrast, King's. That sentence, or some variation thereof, can be overheard a lot within those hallowed sandstone walls. 'It's radical, it's different, GO KING'S!' And so the imaginary cheerleaders throng. But I like to believe. The architecture communicates this difference, and there is no greater foil than Trinity. Just up the road, The Trinity Gate occludes all eyes: you can grasp opportunistic glances into the quad when the door swings half open, but all you will catch will be a bit of grass and the odd window. Stroll past King's, however, and look! A thin sandstone screen mechanically marks the boundary. But you can see all within: the grand late addition of the Gibbs building straight ahead, Wilkins building on your left, world-famous chapel on your right. The membrane is permeable, an ornate invitation: come inside, the scholarship is fine. Or at least a poor Kingsman would like to think so.

Once again, I've sprawled past my bedtime. The blog is an art form I'm still grappling with; concision is another. But I promise to grapple more from here on in.

From the ivory town, goodbye for now.