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.