Sboyler alert: the result of Britain's Got Talent will be revealed in the course of this post. That is, now: Susan Boyle lost. Claimer: my anti-populist prejudices will be revealed in the course of this post. No time like the present. Susan Boyle's rise to global phenomenon gives me a sensation too strong for a shitty euphemism. It gives me fully-fledged splats of diarrhoea.
For those of you who aren't exiled in the Mother Country and haven't been touched by the swine-fluesque pandemic of 'I dreamed a dream' on Youtube, Susan Boyle is (now was) a contestant on the much-adored TV show Britain's Got Talent (like the various worldwide incarnations of Idol, but with less restrictive prescriptions for the type of performance). A frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman who openly confessed to having 'never been kissed', she was catapulted to mega-stardom upon her 'inspiring' performance of 'I Dreamed a Dream'; as the powerful voice emerged from the puffy face, it shattered preconceptions of what a frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman is capable of achieving. This is all so bile-boyling that I feel as if it should go into the safe, scorn-surrounded quarantine of quotation marks. Something about the whole affair pissed me off profoundly; quotes will only isolate the malaise, not explain it.
I don't take issue with Boyle's success per se. She obviously has a great voice, and all good luck to her in future endeavours that make use of this 'talent' she has generously showed us she's 'got'. Nor do I object to a performer's appeal being consciously stroked and enhanced by their biography: to put art in context and pinpoint where it comes from is to satisfy our nosiness and flatter our comprehension abilities. In many cases, an artist's captivating back-story eclipses interest in their actual output, or hauls them from mortal to myth. Boyle's story isn't so much a transcendence of adversity as it is of mediocrity; a trajectory which seems to sell much better in the current zest for 'reality'. Even so, if she doesn't exaggerate when she proclaims her lifelong lack of intimacy, I wonder if she wouldn't exchange her fleeting pop-deification for the enduring memory of a first kiss with Ted McCormick, sitting by the edge of the Loch, a tender young lass of wee more than fifteen. Her initial pin-up image of benign, smily old spinster has also been qualified after a few reported outbursts. Something tells me that Boyle would be a formidable presence to stumble upon in her local pub habitat.
Some would say that all of this is superficial shadow narrative: what we should really listen to is Boyle's stellar voice. That's all good and idealistic. But you can't stop an information-greedy populace licking up every last crumb it's fed. I used to argue passionately for a separation between the juries of artist and man when it came to the genius of Shane Warne. Whatever his shortcomings as hubby, he was a marvellous leg spinner. That line was also easy to toe because I find all expressions of public indignation at private (and minor) misdemeanours inherently funny. Still, I liked to think it was just plain fairness and tolerance. My protestations did nothing to redeem Warney at the nadir of his reputation however; my former boss would splutter coffee over the Sunday rags in pronouncing the verdict 'I hate that man.' Likewise in the Boyle case, people surely voted for a story as much as they did a performer/performance. Clever song choice ('I dreamed a dream' - did you then?) neatly tied the two together, such that one became a reminder of the other. The dream is one of the oldest feel-good metaphors in the book. Obama cashed in on the pos. cons too, slipping the word into the title of his autobiography, and thus the wider grammar of his election rhetoric: 'hope' and 'change' etc. I find it difficult to connect with this language, partly because I'm a cynical bastard, partly because most of my dreams feature failure, futile repetition, random numbers, badgers with dentures, Juvenal's third satire, and death. Some of which morph organically into others.
But the dripping sentiment is too easy a target, and predictability is also a recurring bad dream. What really galled me about the whole affair was that the judges, and presumably the public whose collective reaction they were trying to mirror, were unexpectedly blown away by a frumpish 48-yr-old with a good voice (it also galls me that I feel like I have to put in 'frumpish 48-yr-old' to illustrate). It was all so condescending: the frequent cuts to the judges' open mouths, the screaming fans, the proliferation of uses of the adjective 'incredible'. What's so bloody incredible about a good voice? Aah, so it wasn't the voice. It was the shock of witnessing the voice emerge not from a botox-high, orthodontically arranged mouth, but the hair-crowned lips of your ageless aunt Gladys. The subtext was precisely that: how could a woman who looks like that, sound like that? Which brings me to perhaps my most controversial slam: that wasn't that good anyway. It might be my ignorance of most things musical, but I for one felt nothing upon seeing that youtube vid; only a vague sense of resentment at being roped into the circus. If we shifted media, to, say, the good old wireless, would the Boyle reach the same dizzying heights, and cause everyone to swoon with ballooning belief in their own sky's-the-limitless potential? If a tear did appear in the corner of my eye as her hips began to 'rediscover' some dormant sensuality, planted in the first place by hours of staring at gyratin' bodies on the telly, it was shed for lost dignity, not long-denied success.
There's some consolation in the equally swift deceleration into obscurity that waits for Boyle with warm, open arms. The advantage of 'reality' fame in the youtube generation is its comical transience, an unreality that will look completely implausible when you're back on the outside, keeping pace with the ladies and gents who love a bit of implausibility, especially when it's not that implausible. The badgers may come once; but it's not likely they will come again.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Pitch
The giant slumbers in Cambridge for the exam period; until May week (sometime in June), the Nerd is unveiled in her conspicuous absence. Sorry, the Nerd is not necessarily female, but I've gotten into the bad habit of using a female pronoun for 'the reader' in essays. You know, undermining Patriarchy and all that. One pronoun at a time. Actually, I'm feeling so bloody subversive that I'm going to decapitalise: patriarchy. There. Anyway, the androgynous undergraduate animal confines itself to its study space for the next few weeks, pulling the curtains over the distracting sun and sky. And you would too, if you were battling for the same stake. Cambridge is completely different to the Australian university model of assessment, at least, in that the result for your WHOLE DEGREE rides on final exams at the end of three/four years. Suicide watch runs round the clock.
The downtime has an up-side in that it provides an environment in which knuckling down is perfectly legitimate. My dissertation is due in a meagre six weeks, so the knuckle-down is nothing if not necessary. But, even though I've probably never had more to write in less time, I'm inexplicably calm. Being in Cambridge seems to have had exactly the opposite effect on me than I initially thought it would. I worried that the pressure-cooker would dissolve me into nervous mash, but I'm feeling more relaxed than I was during my final undergraduate year back in Syd. The presence of much cleverer, more ambidextrous, more ambitious lads and lasses has given me a humble prod, steady energy - no more and no less.
A bit of old fashioned quietude gives me roomy opportunities to indulge in some pre-emptive nostalgia. A fair chunk of friends I've made in college and faculty are off to greener greens next year, soon-to-be Masters of their own degrees. A great crew of people on my course will be sorely missed; three out of nine (including myself, thesis permitting) are staying for a PhD, which isn't a bad strike-rate in the scheme of things. Anyway, sombre reflections on the brevity of youth have left me pondering what to do with my own (litephorical) summer. Reading loads of Latin love elegy doesn't help. If I get the 'life is short you're only young for the most piffling of spans you're a flower about to wilt you'll be old and past it soon shit shit you're already there' topos one more time, I think I'll spontaneously sprout some grey. A good way to get out of it is to remind yourself that it's usually just a love-poet trying to convince his mistress to give him some cheap action. Nevertheless, the thought is a pretty permanent fixture in my consciousness. Propertius, I hope it worked for you.
Which leads me to something I've been flirting with and tossing over for a while now. All puns - as always - forcefully intended. Switch off now if classical material bores you by definition; alternatively, give it a go...it might just get you going. Just over two thou years ago, Ovid wrote a poem that supposedly - so the inherited knowledge engraves - helped to get him exiled from Rome to what was then the darkest edge of the earth: the Black Sea on the Bulgarian coast. Arguably it remains that way, though the Tourist Authority of Bulgaria, and my Bulgarian friend who has been acting as a plain-clothes agent for them since birth, might say otherwise. Get your hands on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life if you want to see what happens when a killer modern author imagines Ovid in exile. Anyway, this poem - the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love - didn't quite gel with the moral models Augustus was trying to build for Rome at the time. It's a didactic (i.e. instructional, like DIY how-to guides) poem in three parts which sets about teaching the reader the fine art of picking-up: the first two sections address the men about the ladies, the third the ladies about the men. The general impression of lurve it creates is one of free-and-easy communion between well-to-do men and women of the demimonde; although debate is always raging over just what kind of girl Ovid was talking about/to. Augustus was a family man and a good pagan, becoming more so as his own grey hairs multiplied. Evidently, Ovid's 'irreverent' poetic peccadilloes were never going to fly for long.
It's an absolute jewel of a poem, particularly for the non-classicist (or classical dabbler...sorry, it's a constant fight to pull elitism out of the package) who is usually, and I generalise, delighted whenever she feels a bond with the ancient world. 'Aah, isn't that nice? They courted and mated just like us, those R/Wo-mans!' Hold your horses, we've come a long way. But I'm fascinated with that inbuilt impulse to identification, in and of itself. Why do we always want to be close to Rome, that piss-awful cosmopolis of slavery, death, disease, stench, conspicuous consumption, oppression of women, rampant inequality? The Art of Love really concentrates that issue of proximity/distance by seducing us into thinking up a Rome which is comfortingly modern and sophisticated. The only other Roman poet who can work that spell on us is, to my mind, Catullus: the passionate lover who can still banter with the boys.
Fast forward a bit: I'm also deeply intrigued by the structures of modern dating. This is partly because I feel the same complex of alienation from this institution as I do from the classical world; which is a shiny euphemism to paint over the fact that I've never really done it. An American friend of mine over here is a chronic dater; for him, the straight-up New Yorker, that's the basic building block of any sexual relationship. We always muse over the difference between American and British approaches to the dating game. Apparently the Brits' equivalent building block is not the date at all, but the drunken snog followed by subsequent drunken snogs followed by possibly spending more time with the person if the accumulated memories are good or at worst non-existent. A method with which I have some sympathy, to be sure. This seems a fairish call, though I'd hedge a few caveats around age and location: I'd guess that dating is probably more prominent in a big world-city like London, and among older (non-students) who aren't granted access to a pool of booze-infused sexual primers most nights of the week.
The novelty which I find really wacky is speed-dating. At least in the incarnation I've heard about, this is the procedure: several singles (equal numbers of both gender, in hetero version that is) sit down in a restaurant, get ten minutes to chat to the person in front of them, then musical chairs fly all over the place as one side of the table gets up and moves one seat further along. And repeat, until all combinations (and involved parties) have been exhausted. People then send their 'picks' of the night to a central organiser, the organiser informs the lucky likeable kinda gals/guys as to who likes them, then they can decide if they like the liker and want to follow up the 10 min introduction with a date of more generous proportions. Pull me up if there are holes in that explanation: but be aware that you betray a disturbing amount of familiarity with the process by doing so.
This kind of mechanised courtship is, needless to say, very different from the pick-up contexts of Ovid's poem. At times he makes it sound like there are eligible ladies crowding out the porticoes to overflow; all a man needs to do is make a visit to the right parts of town. But if it were really that easy, we wouldn't have three books of poetry about it. Three books which are choking on comic caviare, to boot. Just from (poor) memory, a few moments give me giggles. At one point Ovid advises the male reader on being attentive to the comfort of his not-yet-conquered prey: if she's cold, make sure you put her hands in your lap. Smooth and subtle, that's O's middle name. There's also the 'shameless euphemism' section: if she's fat, tell her she's well-proportioned, if she stinks, tell her she's fragrant. Etc.
So there's the wind-up; where's the pitch? Here it is, in anticlimactic form. With the well-mined humour already inherent to dating in mind, I thought some decent comedy could be wrung from the potential of the Art of Love to be taken literally. I've been thinking about a play/film (not sure which medium would work better yet) which applies the Art of Love to the modern dating sphere. Our hero - let's call him Norman for convenience, and because it has an anagram of Roman, but also No-man, contained within - is single, mid-30's, desperately looking for love in a big city. Hitherto luckless with the ladies, he is happy to try any new method, however bizarre. One of his problems is that he's incredibly literal minded and insensible to irony. Just when he feels life is rubbing his moustache in a trough full of urine, however, he comes across a copy of Ovid's Art of Love. He's always had a deep respect for classical wisdom, but this poem becomes, in his eyes, something else entirely. He reads it cover to cover, stunned the way through. No wonder he hasn't met any lookers; he's never carried out any of Ovid's sound advice! So he sets about methodically enacting everything Ovid tells him. At work, over the water-cooler perhaps, he sidles up to an attractive colleague: 'Bit cold today, eh?' says Norman. 'Yes, it is.' the colleague replies politely. Norman takes his cue: he grabs her hand and shoves it between his legs, all the while making seductive eyes. She removes her hand, picks up her water, and walks off silently. Norman writes 'Progress - physical contact near genitals' in his notebook. Or something like that.
Basically the laughs would stem from what happens when a humourless man reads the Art of Love literally and applies its principles in rigid order. The jars and jolts already involved in reading an ancient text two thousand years on would be amplified by his appalling sense of timing and context. Another scene might involve Norman in Rome, doing his research and gravitating to the very pick-up hotspots Ovid identifies. There are no longer hordes of women milling around the (ruined) portico, but pot-bellied council workers having a smoke. He asks them where the women who usually throng the area in readiness to have sex have gone; one of them points him to a brothel. He goes in and comes out a few seconds later. Out with the notebook: 'Progress - sexual congress, though at considerable monetary expense'.
The first two books of the poem are structured around trapping and caging: how to catch a girl in the first place, and how to maintain her interest once she's there. There could be massive scope for Norman misjudgement on precisely when to progress to the next stage; he could decide arbitrarily when to move on to phase 2, for example, after the awkward encounter at the water-cooler. This guy would, in many senses of the word, be a walking anachronism: a figure who doesn't belong in his own time, or any time for that matter, but also without a comic's clock (and with a comic's clock for that very reason), someone who does too much too soon, at the wrong time, and doesn't know when to say when.
Yeah, there would need to be a plot. And it would obviously be a very different work depending on medium of choice. Film would give more freedom for spatio-temporal movement, but a play might concentrate things better: for example, the play could be set at a speed-dating table, where Norman has to apply his doctrine in express form, and things would get progressively more outrageous as the pace accelerated. Thousands of blanks as there are, I essentially wrote this to steal much-valued input from You, most competent reader. Do you think there's anything in this, or is it just a bin-bound hallucination? If it is just a hallucination, is it of slightly better quality than my usual ones which involve monkeys wearing top-hats made of hemp underpants? Star ratings necessary. Just make them out of a meaningfully large number, like 400.
To end with an apology: sorry. I'm usually the first to whine about pretentious idea-workshopping. But you all know that my ticker runs on hypocrisy. So let's run with it!
The downtime has an up-side in that it provides an environment in which knuckling down is perfectly legitimate. My dissertation is due in a meagre six weeks, so the knuckle-down is nothing if not necessary. But, even though I've probably never had more to write in less time, I'm inexplicably calm. Being in Cambridge seems to have had exactly the opposite effect on me than I initially thought it would. I worried that the pressure-cooker would dissolve me into nervous mash, but I'm feeling more relaxed than I was during my final undergraduate year back in Syd. The presence of much cleverer, more ambidextrous, more ambitious lads and lasses has given me a humble prod, steady energy - no more and no less.
A bit of old fashioned quietude gives me roomy opportunities to indulge in some pre-emptive nostalgia. A fair chunk of friends I've made in college and faculty are off to greener greens next year, soon-to-be Masters of their own degrees. A great crew of people on my course will be sorely missed; three out of nine (including myself, thesis permitting) are staying for a PhD, which isn't a bad strike-rate in the scheme of things. Anyway, sombre reflections on the brevity of youth have left me pondering what to do with my own (litephorical) summer. Reading loads of Latin love elegy doesn't help. If I get the 'life is short you're only young for the most piffling of spans you're a flower about to wilt you'll be old and past it soon shit shit you're already there' topos one more time, I think I'll spontaneously sprout some grey. A good way to get out of it is to remind yourself that it's usually just a love-poet trying to convince his mistress to give him some cheap action. Nevertheless, the thought is a pretty permanent fixture in my consciousness. Propertius, I hope it worked for you.
Which leads me to something I've been flirting with and tossing over for a while now. All puns - as always - forcefully intended. Switch off now if classical material bores you by definition; alternatively, give it a go...it might just get you going. Just over two thou years ago, Ovid wrote a poem that supposedly - so the inherited knowledge engraves - helped to get him exiled from Rome to what was then the darkest edge of the earth: the Black Sea on the Bulgarian coast. Arguably it remains that way, though the Tourist Authority of Bulgaria, and my Bulgarian friend who has been acting as a plain-clothes agent for them since birth, might say otherwise. Get your hands on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life if you want to see what happens when a killer modern author imagines Ovid in exile. Anyway, this poem - the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love - didn't quite gel with the moral models Augustus was trying to build for Rome at the time. It's a didactic (i.e. instructional, like DIY how-to guides) poem in three parts which sets about teaching the reader the fine art of picking-up: the first two sections address the men about the ladies, the third the ladies about the men. The general impression of lurve it creates is one of free-and-easy communion between well-to-do men and women of the demimonde; although debate is always raging over just what kind of girl Ovid was talking about/to. Augustus was a family man and a good pagan, becoming more so as his own grey hairs multiplied. Evidently, Ovid's 'irreverent' poetic peccadilloes were never going to fly for long.
It's an absolute jewel of a poem, particularly for the non-classicist (or classical dabbler...sorry, it's a constant fight to pull elitism out of the package) who is usually, and I generalise, delighted whenever she feels a bond with the ancient world. 'Aah, isn't that nice? They courted and mated just like us, those R/Wo-mans!' Hold your horses, we've come a long way. But I'm fascinated with that inbuilt impulse to identification, in and of itself. Why do we always want to be close to Rome, that piss-awful cosmopolis of slavery, death, disease, stench, conspicuous consumption, oppression of women, rampant inequality? The Art of Love really concentrates that issue of proximity/distance by seducing us into thinking up a Rome which is comfortingly modern and sophisticated. The only other Roman poet who can work that spell on us is, to my mind, Catullus: the passionate lover who can still banter with the boys.
Fast forward a bit: I'm also deeply intrigued by the structures of modern dating. This is partly because I feel the same complex of alienation from this institution as I do from the classical world; which is a shiny euphemism to paint over the fact that I've never really done it. An American friend of mine over here is a chronic dater; for him, the straight-up New Yorker, that's the basic building block of any sexual relationship. We always muse over the difference between American and British approaches to the dating game. Apparently the Brits' equivalent building block is not the date at all, but the drunken snog followed by subsequent drunken snogs followed by possibly spending more time with the person if the accumulated memories are good or at worst non-existent. A method with which I have some sympathy, to be sure. This seems a fairish call, though I'd hedge a few caveats around age and location: I'd guess that dating is probably more prominent in a big world-city like London, and among older (non-students) who aren't granted access to a pool of booze-infused sexual primers most nights of the week.
The novelty which I find really wacky is speed-dating. At least in the incarnation I've heard about, this is the procedure: several singles (equal numbers of both gender, in hetero version that is) sit down in a restaurant, get ten minutes to chat to the person in front of them, then musical chairs fly all over the place as one side of the table gets up and moves one seat further along. And repeat, until all combinations (and involved parties) have been exhausted. People then send their 'picks' of the night to a central organiser, the organiser informs the lucky likeable kinda gals/guys as to who likes them, then they can decide if they like the liker and want to follow up the 10 min introduction with a date of more generous proportions. Pull me up if there are holes in that explanation: but be aware that you betray a disturbing amount of familiarity with the process by doing so.
This kind of mechanised courtship is, needless to say, very different from the pick-up contexts of Ovid's poem. At times he makes it sound like there are eligible ladies crowding out the porticoes to overflow; all a man needs to do is make a visit to the right parts of town. But if it were really that easy, we wouldn't have three books of poetry about it. Three books which are choking on comic caviare, to boot. Just from (poor) memory, a few moments give me giggles. At one point Ovid advises the male reader on being attentive to the comfort of his not-yet-conquered prey: if she's cold, make sure you put her hands in your lap. Smooth and subtle, that's O's middle name. There's also the 'shameless euphemism' section: if she's fat, tell her she's well-proportioned, if she stinks, tell her she's fragrant. Etc.
So there's the wind-up; where's the pitch? Here it is, in anticlimactic form. With the well-mined humour already inherent to dating in mind, I thought some decent comedy could be wrung from the potential of the Art of Love to be taken literally. I've been thinking about a play/film (not sure which medium would work better yet) which applies the Art of Love to the modern dating sphere. Our hero - let's call him Norman for convenience, and because it has an anagram of Roman, but also No-man, contained within - is single, mid-30's, desperately looking for love in a big city. Hitherto luckless with the ladies, he is happy to try any new method, however bizarre. One of his problems is that he's incredibly literal minded and insensible to irony. Just when he feels life is rubbing his moustache in a trough full of urine, however, he comes across a copy of Ovid's Art of Love. He's always had a deep respect for classical wisdom, but this poem becomes, in his eyes, something else entirely. He reads it cover to cover, stunned the way through. No wonder he hasn't met any lookers; he's never carried out any of Ovid's sound advice! So he sets about methodically enacting everything Ovid tells him. At work, over the water-cooler perhaps, he sidles up to an attractive colleague: 'Bit cold today, eh?' says Norman. 'Yes, it is.' the colleague replies politely. Norman takes his cue: he grabs her hand and shoves it between his legs, all the while making seductive eyes. She removes her hand, picks up her water, and walks off silently. Norman writes 'Progress - physical contact near genitals' in his notebook. Or something like that.
Basically the laughs would stem from what happens when a humourless man reads the Art of Love literally and applies its principles in rigid order. The jars and jolts already involved in reading an ancient text two thousand years on would be amplified by his appalling sense of timing and context. Another scene might involve Norman in Rome, doing his research and gravitating to the very pick-up hotspots Ovid identifies. There are no longer hordes of women milling around the (ruined) portico, but pot-bellied council workers having a smoke. He asks them where the women who usually throng the area in readiness to have sex have gone; one of them points him to a brothel. He goes in and comes out a few seconds later. Out with the notebook: 'Progress - sexual congress, though at considerable monetary expense'.
The first two books of the poem are structured around trapping and caging: how to catch a girl in the first place, and how to maintain her interest once she's there. There could be massive scope for Norman misjudgement on precisely when to progress to the next stage; he could decide arbitrarily when to move on to phase 2, for example, after the awkward encounter at the water-cooler. This guy would, in many senses of the word, be a walking anachronism: a figure who doesn't belong in his own time, or any time for that matter, but also without a comic's clock (and with a comic's clock for that very reason), someone who does too much too soon, at the wrong time, and doesn't know when to say when.
Yeah, there would need to be a plot. And it would obviously be a very different work depending on medium of choice. Film would give more freedom for spatio-temporal movement, but a play might concentrate things better: for example, the play could be set at a speed-dating table, where Norman has to apply his doctrine in express form, and things would get progressively more outrageous as the pace accelerated. Thousands of blanks as there are, I essentially wrote this to steal much-valued input from You, most competent reader. Do you think there's anything in this, or is it just a bin-bound hallucination? If it is just a hallucination, is it of slightly better quality than my usual ones which involve monkeys wearing top-hats made of hemp underpants? Star ratings necessary. Just make them out of a meaningfully large number, like 400.
To end with an apology: sorry. I'm usually the first to whine about pretentious idea-workshopping. But you all know that my ticker runs on hypocrisy. So let's run with it!
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Hymn: Spring
By popular demand, and by popular demand I mean one reader's suggestion (at least I have one reader - thank you Duncs, for a courageous self-naming and shaming), I'm sunning this blog to bud, greener than ever. I've been hard at the old essayism during the week, hard at the journey on the weekends: the last few have taken me to Istanbul, Glasgow and the New Forest. But now I'm back, ready for a final eight weeks of pain before the summer makes itself subtly present. I look forward to adapting the Australian summer pattern to an English context. That is, me making resolutions about extreme fun and productivity, and answering them with extreme online newspaper reading.
But for the time being, the bloom means automatic happiness. Over the last month, Cambridge has been transformed; and the changes have seemed all the more miraculous for my repeated departures and arrivals. First came the flowers. The path over the King's bridge, fast becoming my seasonal sundial, became thick with yellow; then brilliant whites and purples joined in the colour run. Times like these I wish I knew my quaint garden botany better. But I'll hit you with three known quantities: daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses quiver everywhere in the light breeze. Then the green began to arrive in truckloads, every day bringing an increase. Yesterday I punted up and down the Cam and the obstacles have really changed. The low-hanging willows now brush you with foliage rather than jab you with sticks. The river was crammed with peak time traffic of all sorts. You don't need a punting licence, so the conditions are expectedly unruly. A hot-shot tour guide veers elegantly around you, controlling two punts at once with effortless dips of the pole, sounding off about Byron and Wordsworth; while on the other side you're beset by novices entangled in messy knots with each other, the bank and the bridge. Much as students revile tourists, they're good for lightening the tone, and making you feel master of your own floating domain.
Up in Glasgow and down in the New Forest, I was given a prime chance to compare springs UK wide, north and south. The delightfully bleak, post-industrial, semi-dystopic landscapes of Glasgow didn't really show off much of mother nature's nude bits. I was here for one of the highlights on the classical calendar: the annual Classical Association conference. Not only were the buds and beds limited within the 4-star grandeur of the Crown Plaza Hotel, but they also had trouble finding space to live outside and around it. When Tam (my room companion) and I first alighted at the Exhibition Centre station, we were thrilled to look out over our expectations of Glasgow made flesh: a concrete plain of motorways, roadworks, shudder-inducing flashbacks to the future as it was in the 1980's. There was a windowed tunnel footbridge over the road, whose red semicircular beams seemed to point towards a badly designed infinity. The windows were no longer windows, but rather frosted and scratched chunks of plastic, worn down with repeated removals of stubborn graffiti. At the other end of the tunnel, a monstrous parody of the Sydney Opera House (the Exhibition Centre itself) loomed up: it looked like an armadillo, or a trilobyte, bending in on itself, arching its back to deflect the tomato assault that would come, inevitably, to protest its ugliness. Through some carpark and cut-up road, our hotel stood isolated on a block of land that could have easily gone the way of bitumen at birth. It was hemmed in by road, and I sensed that, when infrastructure progress comes a-calling, the Hotel Campanile might be the first sacrifice. It's one of those buildings whose absence might even bring significant aesthetic gains.
Despite the surroundings of the conference, we managed to escape into other, prettier bits of town. The university and its area are definitely happening; the CBD to a lesser extent. The centre felt clean and modern almost to the point of anonymity. It saddened me a little that you could probably walk through streets and streets of Glasgow without being able to identify it beyond 'miscellaneous U.K. city': dense oldish buildings now dominated, at least at street level, by those familiar reproducibles (Maccy D's, Pret-a-Manger, Pizza Express, Costa's Coffee; the unavoidable Wetherspoon's, Britain's answer to the question 'why shouldn't a pub be made into a chain?'). Amid all the superficial gloom of glomerating commerce, however, there were some real gems. The conference delegates were treated to a drinks reception at the city chambers, which housed one of the best staircases known to (this) man: walls, stairs and railings were all fashioned of smooth pink and white marble (or something like marble). We then downed our champas and picked at hors d'oeuvres in a gilded, high-ceilinged hall. We listened to more shameless flattery about the general greatness of classics, and the incomparable intellects of classicists. The latter may have been true once, because every educated person was a classicist (to some degree). Nowadays the platitudes make me cringe a bit; but they at least sound more sincere in the U.K. (proud home of elitism) than they do in Australia.
Not many natural gauges of spring in Glasgow then, apart from the marginally increased mating among classicists. When the blood of a scholar starts pumping, interpretation of that line of Apollonius has been known to wait for DAYS. Enough of that, lest I lose my ironic detachment from overheating. There was more scope for flower and shoot in the New Forest, despite rubbish weather. This patch of England, hinterland just near the coastal city of Southampton, is lovely indeed. Woodland tracks twist and turn through the trunks, each post of a tree given its own generous radius; nothing like the dense scrub of Australia. But there were weirder landscapes as well: hilly heath, which only supports rocks and brittle bushes. Then the wackiest innovation of all: a marsh on high ground. We walked up a fairly steep hill covered in overgrown grass thinking that it would be less muddy than below, but the water just seemed to swell out the top layer of earth into a squelching bog. I was wearing gumboots, and at one point I was stuck with both legs sunken up to the knees, my left hand in next to the legs, and my right hand clasping onto a skinny tree branch, trying to haul the rest of my defeated limbs out of trouble. For a time, I was the next bog man.
We're not out of the woods yet: April still threatens to go either way, beautiful one day, grim the next. But limb by limb, we escape the bog, and sing the hymn...
Spring!
But for the time being, the bloom means automatic happiness. Over the last month, Cambridge has been transformed; and the changes have seemed all the more miraculous for my repeated departures and arrivals. First came the flowers. The path over the King's bridge, fast becoming my seasonal sundial, became thick with yellow; then brilliant whites and purples joined in the colour run. Times like these I wish I knew my quaint garden botany better. But I'll hit you with three known quantities: daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses quiver everywhere in the light breeze. Then the green began to arrive in truckloads, every day bringing an increase. Yesterday I punted up and down the Cam and the obstacles have really changed. The low-hanging willows now brush you with foliage rather than jab you with sticks. The river was crammed with peak time traffic of all sorts. You don't need a punting licence, so the conditions are expectedly unruly. A hot-shot tour guide veers elegantly around you, controlling two punts at once with effortless dips of the pole, sounding off about Byron and Wordsworth; while on the other side you're beset by novices entangled in messy knots with each other, the bank and the bridge. Much as students revile tourists, they're good for lightening the tone, and making you feel master of your own floating domain.
Up in Glasgow and down in the New Forest, I was given a prime chance to compare springs UK wide, north and south. The delightfully bleak, post-industrial, semi-dystopic landscapes of Glasgow didn't really show off much of mother nature's nude bits. I was here for one of the highlights on the classical calendar: the annual Classical Association conference. Not only were the buds and beds limited within the 4-star grandeur of the Crown Plaza Hotel, but they also had trouble finding space to live outside and around it. When Tam (my room companion) and I first alighted at the Exhibition Centre station, we were thrilled to look out over our expectations of Glasgow made flesh: a concrete plain of motorways, roadworks, shudder-inducing flashbacks to the future as it was in the 1980's. There was a windowed tunnel footbridge over the road, whose red semicircular beams seemed to point towards a badly designed infinity. The windows were no longer windows, but rather frosted and scratched chunks of plastic, worn down with repeated removals of stubborn graffiti. At the other end of the tunnel, a monstrous parody of the Sydney Opera House (the Exhibition Centre itself) loomed up: it looked like an armadillo, or a trilobyte, bending in on itself, arching its back to deflect the tomato assault that would come, inevitably, to protest its ugliness. Through some carpark and cut-up road, our hotel stood isolated on a block of land that could have easily gone the way of bitumen at birth. It was hemmed in by road, and I sensed that, when infrastructure progress comes a-calling, the Hotel Campanile might be the first sacrifice. It's one of those buildings whose absence might even bring significant aesthetic gains.
Despite the surroundings of the conference, we managed to escape into other, prettier bits of town. The university and its area are definitely happening; the CBD to a lesser extent. The centre felt clean and modern almost to the point of anonymity. It saddened me a little that you could probably walk through streets and streets of Glasgow without being able to identify it beyond 'miscellaneous U.K. city': dense oldish buildings now dominated, at least at street level, by those familiar reproducibles (Maccy D's, Pret-a-Manger, Pizza Express, Costa's Coffee; the unavoidable Wetherspoon's, Britain's answer to the question 'why shouldn't a pub be made into a chain?'). Amid all the superficial gloom of glomerating commerce, however, there were some real gems. The conference delegates were treated to a drinks reception at the city chambers, which housed one of the best staircases known to (this) man: walls, stairs and railings were all fashioned of smooth pink and white marble (or something like marble). We then downed our champas and picked at hors d'oeuvres in a gilded, high-ceilinged hall. We listened to more shameless flattery about the general greatness of classics, and the incomparable intellects of classicists. The latter may have been true once, because every educated person was a classicist (to some degree). Nowadays the platitudes make me cringe a bit; but they at least sound more sincere in the U.K. (proud home of elitism) than they do in Australia.
Not many natural gauges of spring in Glasgow then, apart from the marginally increased mating among classicists. When the blood of a scholar starts pumping, interpretation of that line of Apollonius has been known to wait for DAYS. Enough of that, lest I lose my ironic detachment from overheating. There was more scope for flower and shoot in the New Forest, despite rubbish weather. This patch of England, hinterland just near the coastal city of Southampton, is lovely indeed. Woodland tracks twist and turn through the trunks, each post of a tree given its own generous radius; nothing like the dense scrub of Australia. But there were weirder landscapes as well: hilly heath, which only supports rocks and brittle bushes. Then the wackiest innovation of all: a marsh on high ground. We walked up a fairly steep hill covered in overgrown grass thinking that it would be less muddy than below, but the water just seemed to swell out the top layer of earth into a squelching bog. I was wearing gumboots, and at one point I was stuck with both legs sunken up to the knees, my left hand in next to the legs, and my right hand clasping onto a skinny tree branch, trying to haul the rest of my defeated limbs out of trouble. For a time, I was the next bog man.
We're not out of the woods yet: April still threatens to go either way, beautiful one day, grim the next. But limb by limb, we escape the bog, and sing the hymn...
Spring!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The Twin in the Basement
Those familiar with my pre-exilic clowning will know that destination UK was decided about a year ago, after the dons failed to run a background check and graciously let me in to their towers; I just didn't know whether it would be Oxford or Cambridge until August came around. I was teetering on the precipice of heading for the older, bigger place, when some intuitive beam snapped. I called my prospective supervisor here and asked him if there was any spare cash lying around to make up the difference between the full funding I had at Oxford and the partial amount I had at Cambridge. The man's magic translated from Greek to finance seamlessly. Upshot: you're reading a blog about life in Cambridge, and not the place at the other end of the wormhole.
And yet, however happy I am in a place, my imagination has an insuppressible appetite for greener grass. In the darker moments of the Cambridge winter, I couldn't help meditating over the question of 'what would life have been like...over there?' Everyone gets the desire to be somewhere else, of course: we filthy rich westerners are ever buying up images of island paradises to escape to. But the long history of the Oxford/Cambridge dichotomy made the decision into a caricature of a pivotal moment, a bifurcation so clear cut that you could write a film about it. You'd call it Sliding Doors. A younger Gwyneth Paltrow would play me. Anyway, the evil twin, though confined to the basement, would raise a cry from time to time and demand its scraps and crumbs; I couldn't quite let it die.
The way to kill it was through overfeeding. I went to Oxford for the second time a few weekends ago. The first time didn't really count: I arrived in the morning, had some grub, went for a bit of a walk, saw a play purely in Greek, then went home. Another day at the office. This second time was both more extended and more representative of what I would have lived through had I taken the Oxford option. Three Cambridge diggers and myself had booked in for a one day colloquium on 'Latin Poetic Commentaries' (at Corpus Christi, my would-be Oxford college), featuring various home- and international-grown stars of the commentary scene. In non-techy terms, a commentary is usually an edition of a classical text (such as Virgil's Aeneid, etc.) which includes explanatory notes ranging over anything the commentator feels will help interpretation: grammatical, literary, historical, cultural notes are all fair game. Because Latin and Greek, being dead languages, have become utterly unfamiliar, the commentary has gained central importance. Whenever you're mulling over a text, a commentary is the first port of call; more often than not it straightens out basic linguistic problems you have, and forms a convenient synthesis of modern criticism which has been written on the text. So the commentary, next to the text itself, is the thing that is most read in classical circles, and generally the most respected. You really have to know your stuff to write one; and the time investment required is often astronomical. One commentary I use a lot took thirty years to percolate. That's a marriage right there, working up to the satisfying divorce of publication.
This colloquium was set to consume all Saturday. It didn't begin well. The friendly antipathy between Oxford and Cambridge is singularly well-serviced by the vom-generator also known as the x5: it's a bus that miraculously manages to transform a 1.5-2 hr sprint into a windy 3.5 hr marathon. The mid-point, right where the accelerations thrash your stomach against your intestines at peak intensity is, by a cruel twist of fate, scenic Milton Keynes. This is the UK's answer to Canberra, but much, much uglier. Sitting down to design from scratch, you could just imagine the round table of architects eagerly discussing their utopian vision; too little did they anticipate that it would one day turn into the dystopic city of bus sickness, a place at which people don't even have to alight to feel repulsed.
Glad for some air, we made the walk to Corpus Christi under the expert guidance of a knowing defector (she was an undergraduate at Corpus before she made the conversion for her masters). We smashed a pre-conference tea and biscuit in the bite-size Corpus Christi hall as we paid our monies and registered. The miniature dimensions of the college became a bit of a running theme...well, gag...for the day: the quadrangle was microlithic, and the lunch was proportional. We settled into a crammed space (the day was already 'sold out' before the saint of an organiser let me squeeze in) for the first paper. This was probably the highlight for me, given that it was still morning, I was all tea-d up, and I hadn't heard the sleeping pill of a word 'lemmatistic' yet. The presenter was a young PhD student at Corpus, smattered over the UK media of late because of her phenomenal success on University Challenge (a quiz show for Uni students; taken uber-seriously). She was quick, clever, and knew how to speak; she's writing a commentary on part of Catullus' poem 64 for her thesis, one of my favourite poems ever. So I was already sympathetic to the material. My attention began to fade during the next presentation on Propertius; I dipped in and out of Statius and Ovid after lunch, and by Horace, namely post-Afternoon Tea, I was almost out. The fault lay largely with the nature of the field: commentary-writing is about as nitty-gritty an activity as you can get in classics, and the method of microcosmic analysis that it encourages tends to shift attention away from the bigger picture to questions like 'How many times does that word occur in Horace? 32?! My, that is interesting!' Even when the Ovid woman tried to lay her cards on the table and get controversial, declaring from the whistle 'this commentary is a political commentary...so let's get political' - no one got political. That was depressing; but even more depressing was my own inability to engage or comment. I'm chronically tongue-tied at these events as it is. I get ultra-nervy and can't control my voice properly, so my usual practice is to try to ask inoffensive questions of short duration, standardly relating to puns. But barely anything came into my head on this occasion. The rest of the Cambridge contingent picked up my slack, god bless 'em.
The Catullus girl kept raising an apt point about the boredom often involved in reading a commentary. She touched repeatedly on the importance of 'waking the reader up' with the odd lightning-bolt turn of phrase. Those were probably the only moments where my head filled with 'hell-yeah's. If there's one thing I'm genuinely invested in, it's the war on dreary academic writing. That's not to completely marginalise all big-man principles of science, objectivity, structure etc. (always contestable); just to say that rigour doesn't have to equal boredom. If we're spending days reading books and articles, we might as well be having fun.
Anyway, not much taken from the Saturday which we hadn't already discussed in our MPhil seminar in first term. Sunday was different though. We had a pancake-fuelled day in town, walking beneath a gleaming sun that threatened spring. Oxford is a very pretty place; I'd even go so far as to say it trumps the Bridge. That might just be my controversial bent on the slant (likewise I praise Melbourne over Sydney to anyone I meet-haven't decided whether it's a rhetorical exercise or an opinion yet). But it feels like a more homogeneous attempt at a university: the architecture of colleges and uni buildings works well together. There're also prime meadows and punting territory within walking distance (and full view) of the magnificent Christ Church College. We glided downstream over some cake and gin, periodically visiting the bank and ducking beneath spindly tree branches as we went. But no one fell in. I think my chances of drowning would be slightly higher writing a commentary than travelling in a punt. I certainly know which of the two I'd rather be doing.
So the twin below no longer knocks. The flowering Cambridge daffodils nod assent.
And yet, however happy I am in a place, my imagination has an insuppressible appetite for greener grass. In the darker moments of the Cambridge winter, I couldn't help meditating over the question of 'what would life have been like...over there?' Everyone gets the desire to be somewhere else, of course: we filthy rich westerners are ever buying up images of island paradises to escape to. But the long history of the Oxford/Cambridge dichotomy made the decision into a caricature of a pivotal moment, a bifurcation so clear cut that you could write a film about it. You'd call it Sliding Doors. A younger Gwyneth Paltrow would play me. Anyway, the evil twin, though confined to the basement, would raise a cry from time to time and demand its scraps and crumbs; I couldn't quite let it die.
The way to kill it was through overfeeding. I went to Oxford for the second time a few weekends ago. The first time didn't really count: I arrived in the morning, had some grub, went for a bit of a walk, saw a play purely in Greek, then went home. Another day at the office. This second time was both more extended and more representative of what I would have lived through had I taken the Oxford option. Three Cambridge diggers and myself had booked in for a one day colloquium on 'Latin Poetic Commentaries' (at Corpus Christi, my would-be Oxford college), featuring various home- and international-grown stars of the commentary scene. In non-techy terms, a commentary is usually an edition of a classical text (such as Virgil's Aeneid, etc.) which includes explanatory notes ranging over anything the commentator feels will help interpretation: grammatical, literary, historical, cultural notes are all fair game. Because Latin and Greek, being dead languages, have become utterly unfamiliar, the commentary has gained central importance. Whenever you're mulling over a text, a commentary is the first port of call; more often than not it straightens out basic linguistic problems you have, and forms a convenient synthesis of modern criticism which has been written on the text. So the commentary, next to the text itself, is the thing that is most read in classical circles, and generally the most respected. You really have to know your stuff to write one; and the time investment required is often astronomical. One commentary I use a lot took thirty years to percolate. That's a marriage right there, working up to the satisfying divorce of publication.
This colloquium was set to consume all Saturday. It didn't begin well. The friendly antipathy between Oxford and Cambridge is singularly well-serviced by the vom-generator also known as the x5: it's a bus that miraculously manages to transform a 1.5-2 hr sprint into a windy 3.5 hr marathon. The mid-point, right where the accelerations thrash your stomach against your intestines at peak intensity is, by a cruel twist of fate, scenic Milton Keynes. This is the UK's answer to Canberra, but much, much uglier. Sitting down to design from scratch, you could just imagine the round table of architects eagerly discussing their utopian vision; too little did they anticipate that it would one day turn into the dystopic city of bus sickness, a place at which people don't even have to alight to feel repulsed.
Glad for some air, we made the walk to Corpus Christi under the expert guidance of a knowing defector (she was an undergraduate at Corpus before she made the conversion for her masters). We smashed a pre-conference tea and biscuit in the bite-size Corpus Christi hall as we paid our monies and registered. The miniature dimensions of the college became a bit of a running theme...well, gag...for the day: the quadrangle was microlithic, and the lunch was proportional. We settled into a crammed space (the day was already 'sold out' before the saint of an organiser let me squeeze in) for the first paper. This was probably the highlight for me, given that it was still morning, I was all tea-d up, and I hadn't heard the sleeping pill of a word 'lemmatistic' yet. The presenter was a young PhD student at Corpus, smattered over the UK media of late because of her phenomenal success on University Challenge (a quiz show for Uni students; taken uber-seriously). She was quick, clever, and knew how to speak; she's writing a commentary on part of Catullus' poem 64 for her thesis, one of my favourite poems ever. So I was already sympathetic to the material. My attention began to fade during the next presentation on Propertius; I dipped in and out of Statius and Ovid after lunch, and by Horace, namely post-Afternoon Tea, I was almost out. The fault lay largely with the nature of the field: commentary-writing is about as nitty-gritty an activity as you can get in classics, and the method of microcosmic analysis that it encourages tends to shift attention away from the bigger picture to questions like 'How many times does that word occur in Horace? 32?! My, that is interesting!' Even when the Ovid woman tried to lay her cards on the table and get controversial, declaring from the whistle 'this commentary is a political commentary...so let's get political' - no one got political. That was depressing; but even more depressing was my own inability to engage or comment. I'm chronically tongue-tied at these events as it is. I get ultra-nervy and can't control my voice properly, so my usual practice is to try to ask inoffensive questions of short duration, standardly relating to puns. But barely anything came into my head on this occasion. The rest of the Cambridge contingent picked up my slack, god bless 'em.
The Catullus girl kept raising an apt point about the boredom often involved in reading a commentary. She touched repeatedly on the importance of 'waking the reader up' with the odd lightning-bolt turn of phrase. Those were probably the only moments where my head filled with 'hell-yeah's. If there's one thing I'm genuinely invested in, it's the war on dreary academic writing. That's not to completely marginalise all big-man principles of science, objectivity, structure etc. (always contestable); just to say that rigour doesn't have to equal boredom. If we're spending days reading books and articles, we might as well be having fun.
Anyway, not much taken from the Saturday which we hadn't already discussed in our MPhil seminar in first term. Sunday was different though. We had a pancake-fuelled day in town, walking beneath a gleaming sun that threatened spring. Oxford is a very pretty place; I'd even go so far as to say it trumps the Bridge. That might just be my controversial bent on the slant (likewise I praise Melbourne over Sydney to anyone I meet-haven't decided whether it's a rhetorical exercise or an opinion yet). But it feels like a more homogeneous attempt at a university: the architecture of colleges and uni buildings works well together. There're also prime meadows and punting territory within walking distance (and full view) of the magnificent Christ Church College. We glided downstream over some cake and gin, periodically visiting the bank and ducking beneath spindly tree branches as we went. But no one fell in. I think my chances of drowning would be slightly higher writing a commentary than travelling in a punt. I certainly know which of the two I'd rather be doing.
So the twin below no longer knocks. The flowering Cambridge daffodils nod assent.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Reviewzzz
I know this is cheating, but a couple of peeps have asked about my reviews which appeared in The Cambridge Student (one of the student rags) earlier in the term. Since I'm concerned about you wasting your lives, I've deliberately made them short. One's on Nabokov, the other on Pop Science (a few of my favourite things). The Nabokov was for a 'Cambridge Classics' column, a weekly review of pieces set in Cambridge; hence the focus on setting.
Here's something I prepared earlier:
Vladimir Nabokov – Glory
It was a sad moment when the man in the UL pasted a virgin date slip on the inner cover of Glory. I calculated that the book had sat there unborrowed for twenty-seven years; a harsh service of solitude for any book, but particularly for an all-time favourite, and for one which images 1920’s Cambridge so beautifully.
Sadness, however, quickly transmuted into gush, as I remembered how much I loved this novel. Glory is a charming Bildungsroman-type story, which tells the life adventures of Martin Edelweiss, a Russian born boy/man whose father dies early, and mother dotes dearly. Just as Martin hits the romantic stride of adolescence, he and his mother must flee revolutionary Russia. Via a formative dalliance with an older woman in Greece, and a brief refuge with his Uncle in Switzerland, it’s decided that Martin should attend Cambridge. Here he falls in love with an unattainable family friend, forms an awkward threesome with Darwin, who is equally smitten with first friend, dines with the pederastic professor of Russian literature, wins the college championship over St John’s as goalkeeper for Trinity, floats down the Cam in the languid suspension of an early summer, post-exam, pre-result day, fights Darwin in the meadow, then tenderly washes Darwin’s wounds in the river.
If those vignettes narrow too much, it may be because Glory’s program encourages delight in the small details, pointless joy in the ordinary everyday. Martin is a wholly sympathetic creation, a naïve, imaginative youth who relishes adventure for adventure’s sake. The happy portrait of Cambridge is one more reason to read a novel that doesn’t require them. All it asks is to feel that mysterious something upon arrival at an ending which is not-much-of-an-ending: ‘just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day’.
Review of S. J. Gould Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
Stephen Jay Gould was the original golden-haired jock in the now crowded cafeteria that is the genre of ‘popular science’. So popular was this populariser that he even made it into the elite pop-culture club of animation as himself in The Simpsons. But don’t let your anti-vulgar reflex deprive you of reading Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: for there was certainly substance to the hype.
This book is superficially about geology. But it is also a fascinating application of literary criticism to a discipline that doesn’t tend to indulge this kind of close reading. Treating non-fiction genres (especially history, science) as art is still a small business. Gould’s strength is just this: the recognition that scientific discourse is as much about the wrapping as the precious idea-nugget inside.
Gould frames himself as a man on a mission: the revolutionary re-reading of three ‘canonical’ works in the history of geology. These are Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1680-89), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. All three feature prominently in the ‘textbook’ (Gould’s term) narrative of geology’s history, from armchair dilettantism to real (masculine?) empirical observation. Gould brings in the straw men only to set them alight; he deconstructs the myth with a dexterity that would impress any self-respecting revisionist. His strategy is to unlock these texts by showing that all three scientists were contemplating the same dichotomy: namely time’s arrow (a view of time as one-directional progress) versus time’s cycle (time as eternal repetition). The debate is old as time itself, but it puts our (sometimes) unquestioned 21st century view of time-as-progress into long-term perspective.
In Gould (1941-2002) we had an historian of science who was not only receptive to the literary art of his scientific predecessors, but a wonderful practitioner of it himself. His language is rich in metaphor and vivid with pithy phrases like ‘Science self-selects for poor writing.’ Yes it does: and Gould made the evolutionary cut. I would heartily recommend this book to posterity, which, according to Lyell’s cyclical time, might well be another race of ichthyosaurs.
Here's something I prepared earlier:
Vladimir Nabokov – Glory
It was a sad moment when the man in the UL pasted a virgin date slip on the inner cover of Glory. I calculated that the book had sat there unborrowed for twenty-seven years; a harsh service of solitude for any book, but particularly for an all-time favourite, and for one which images 1920’s Cambridge so beautifully.
Sadness, however, quickly transmuted into gush, as I remembered how much I loved this novel. Glory is a charming Bildungsroman-type story, which tells the life adventures of Martin Edelweiss, a Russian born boy/man whose father dies early, and mother dotes dearly. Just as Martin hits the romantic stride of adolescence, he and his mother must flee revolutionary Russia. Via a formative dalliance with an older woman in Greece, and a brief refuge with his Uncle in Switzerland, it’s decided that Martin should attend Cambridge. Here he falls in love with an unattainable family friend, forms an awkward threesome with Darwin, who is equally smitten with first friend, dines with the pederastic professor of Russian literature, wins the college championship over St John’s as goalkeeper for Trinity, floats down the Cam in the languid suspension of an early summer, post-exam, pre-result day, fights Darwin in the meadow, then tenderly washes Darwin’s wounds in the river.
If those vignettes narrow too much, it may be because Glory’s program encourages delight in the small details, pointless joy in the ordinary everyday. Martin is a wholly sympathetic creation, a naïve, imaginative youth who relishes adventure for adventure’s sake. The happy portrait of Cambridge is one more reason to read a novel that doesn’t require them. All it asks is to feel that mysterious something upon arrival at an ending which is not-much-of-an-ending: ‘just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day’.
Review of S. J. Gould Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
Stephen Jay Gould was the original golden-haired jock in the now crowded cafeteria that is the genre of ‘popular science’. So popular was this populariser that he even made it into the elite pop-culture club of animation as himself in The Simpsons. But don’t let your anti-vulgar reflex deprive you of reading Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: for there was certainly substance to the hype.
This book is superficially about geology. But it is also a fascinating application of literary criticism to a discipline that doesn’t tend to indulge this kind of close reading. Treating non-fiction genres (especially history, science) as art is still a small business. Gould’s strength is just this: the recognition that scientific discourse is as much about the wrapping as the precious idea-nugget inside.
Gould frames himself as a man on a mission: the revolutionary re-reading of three ‘canonical’ works in the history of geology. These are Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1680-89), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. All three feature prominently in the ‘textbook’ (Gould’s term) narrative of geology’s history, from armchair dilettantism to real (masculine?) empirical observation. Gould brings in the straw men only to set them alight; he deconstructs the myth with a dexterity that would impress any self-respecting revisionist. His strategy is to unlock these texts by showing that all three scientists were contemplating the same dichotomy: namely time’s arrow (a view of time as one-directional progress) versus time’s cycle (time as eternal repetition). The debate is old as time itself, but it puts our (sometimes) unquestioned 21st century view of time-as-progress into long-term perspective.
In Gould (1941-2002) we had an historian of science who was not only receptive to the literary art of his scientific predecessors, but a wonderful practitioner of it himself. His language is rich in metaphor and vivid with pithy phrases like ‘Science self-selects for poor writing.’ Yes it does: and Gould made the evolutionary cut. I would heartily recommend this book to posterity, which, according to Lyell’s cyclical time, might well be another race of ichthyosaurs.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Sandstones of Time
It's well established that most Australians love old bricks. The wide brown land ticks several utopian boxes: weather, food, great barrier reef. But on the venerable building front, the marks are much lower. There would have been a time (twenty years ago?) of great confidence in the enshrined value of Australia as a place to see, when our lack of flashy European monuments was more than outrun by our wonderfully varied landscape. That's as nationalistic as I'll get, and besides, pride in landscape is the worst form of a rubbish phenomenon: love of country, if it has to happen, would better take its justification from the human institutions we can take responsibility for, not the rocks that were strewn there by a scatterbrain deity well before humans were around to invent universal health care. There's another rant in that. Anyway, I was on the point of the point: how sobering a thought that these natural beauties, once believed to be stored in the securest treasury of unchanging nature, may not outlast Trinity College. You can restore a chapel, but not a rise in sea temperature. The scales of permanence have tipped.
Apocalypse later. For now, back to the Australian love of sandstone. When I first arrived here, I was stunned at the ancientness of it all. But it was a kind of ancientness that was different from the cordoned palaces and grand cathedrals of Europe; these felt like monuments in the most sterile sense of the word, intact ruins advertising a lost age when there were royals without tabloids, and god had a capital G. I'm not bulldozing ruins here. Ruins are my business; day by day I wade through the fragments and remnants of 'dead' languages, half-lost literature, and wrangle with the tourist infrastructure that has built up around them. So I'm devoutly pro-ruin (not the same as pro-destruction). But it did seem that most of the architectural wonders of Europe were built in devotion to power structures which are no longer very important (sorry to all kings, queens and Catholics reading this). Well, modify that: no longer very important to me, a run of the mill secular Aussie. From centres of government and worship to pockets for collecting tourist coin; when a space is used for seeing and not for doing, in my eyes it's got the ruin bug.
I think that's what set the old buildings of Cambridge apart. The colleges are indeed dumping grounds for tourist money and 'I waz 'ere, 2009' photography, but they are also, as every self-respecting college sign will tell you, places where people 'live and work'. The sandstone is inhabited. The cobbles are smoothed and cracked from long use. The walls are scuffed and uneven at handlebar height after years of cycles leaning on them for support. It's nice to think that the heavy stones are not just inert spectacles, or, worse than that, still propping up campaigns against abortion and contraception: they are frames for work always in progress, and good work, for the most part. This is one of he homes of the progress myth, which, though humbled every day, sticks around tenaciously. You'd hope that, however long humanoids last, they could use a Cambridge to reflect on how far they've come, and then to help them go further.
Anyway, as always with the humdrum rhythm of routine (which is more of a lullaby to me than most people), I sometimes fall asleep on my bike and forget where I am. Not literally of course. Don't drink and ride. But however far down my head is kept at times, I've been trying to take more stock recently of where I am: what I'm seeing and what I'm doing. I realised that a weekday in my life here involves a pretty good level of contact with beautiful things.
I lumber into the world at about 8am. I eat some sweet cereal which my lovely girlfriend has concocted from a mixture of nuts, fruit, inferior and superior grade muesli, much more than the sum of its parts. Beautiful thing number one. I have a cup of tea, which tasted good in Australia, but in England, where it's zero celsius and falling, it tastes more like free cocaine to a retrenched executive. Beautiful thing number two.
This is quickly deteriorating into a day-in-the-life-of; if it's too banal, have my blessing to leave. Right, now that the ADHD's are out of the way, back to it. Feasted and dressed, I check the BBC 24-hour weatherwatch. The greatest-hits selection of weather in any given day, snow, rain, sleet, sun, drizzle, and the most exciting of all, clouds, inevitably results in me getting dressed for a second time. Then it's off to the dream factory, the place where cola and fullstops fondle each other, footnotes get made and laid: the library. I bike off along the path from my apartment (west of the city centre): first I pass a huge field, spanning to the horizon, full of hibernating haystacks in black plastic wraps, which I once thought were sculptures lamenting the modern substitution of plastic for hay. On the left, along the whole path, a tiny stream with its dependent greenery runs parallel. The brush is thick, almost hedge like; several times I've walked along it only to have some cocky birds burst out of it right above my head, making me jump when I'm trying my best to do a composed Cambridge gait. Round a bend I come to a picturesque little lake on the right, part of a grove that forms the northern tip of the University Athletics ground. It invariably reminds me of how I'll never do another 10km running race. On the left is the Cambridge Lawn Tennis Club. If I have anything to do with it, this dormant little volcano will go off in the spring. The lava will look like a mixture of Pimms, sweat and vomit.
Then it's onto the 'real road'; every day I reenact the terror of unscrewing the training wheels. This quiet street (Adams Rd) is one of the ritzier bits of town: big houses with hedges in the front and mini-orchards in the back. I warm up to the daily college perve with a view of the most boring first. Robinson College's red brick, direct from the 80's to you, neither offends nor impresses. The Grange Rd intersection then presents me with my first decision of the day, an oh-so-literal fork in the road. Should I cut through the chaff and head straight on to the beauty spot, staking a claim on a desk in King's library? Or should I hang a right and move towards the Fac, the f-word abbreviation for the Classics Faculty Library?
It really is choose your own adventure made live in Cambridge, where you never quite know which library you'll end up in. I have to admit I'm more prone to the second option; literary material is more plentiful and accessible in the Fac. So, a right heading south down Grange Rd takes me past the University Library on the left. This storehouse is a legal deposit library, meaning it automatically gets a copy of every book published in the U.K. You'd think it would wear a smile on its face for all that free packaged knowledge. On the contrary, it's very gloomy about it on the outside (it looks like a ziggurat prison, something a Victorian mind may have drawn up for max-incarceration with max-efficiency). On the inside, it's even worse: books spill over from the shelves and invade your precious desk space. I often think that if I died reading in there, my body wouldn't decompose, but would grow books the next day. Merrily I bypass the UL, then. A bit further on the right, there appears the University Rugby Union stadium, which invariably reminds me of how shit a sport is Rugby Union. That cheers me up. Selwyn College comes up quickly on the left (more red-brick, but of the tasteful 19th century sort) and I round the bend into Sidgwick Ave, past the lesser bit of Newnham College (Women Only; this is actually one of my favourite colleges, not for the women part, but for the gardens, pretty even in winter). Down the tree-canopied Sidgwick Ave, and BAM! - the Fac hits you in the face with more, worse, red-brick mediocrity. It's housed on the aptly termed 'Sidgwick Site', along with some siblings: Law, English, Criminology, Modern and Medieval Languages. The Law Fac, as always seems the case with this aristocratic subject, got the brand spanking new architecture. Hence its recent occupation by students in protest over Gaza. They were going to take Classics, but their energy dissolved beneath the Kryptonite of red-brick. Not to mention the olfactory shelling from the graduate common room fridge.
A lot of people despise the Fac library, but I find something charming and utilitarian about it. Shelves run along the innards of the room, grouped in order of general awesomeness: Latin and Greek literature is closest to the entrance, while yawn-inducing art/architecture is relegated to the very back (jokes...but behind every joke...is a shelf of seriousness). Along the windows on both sides of the room are rows and rows of desks. I choose one where my nose-picking will be most conspicuous or least conspicuous, depending on the state of my sinuses. Then I set up shop and hoe down with Virgil, Horace or Ovid - whoever is the flavour of the moment. When I've read too much about how super Augustus is, and how the fields spontaneously produce spaghetti bolognaise under his reign, I answer my growling stomach with a walk. Sometimes, if organised, I head thirty metres to the common room and eat the leftover glory of last night's banquet (usually a roasted lamb with pig legs and cow bum - carnivorousness is the new vegetarianism), but other times, if lazy, I set off for King's hall. Here the beauty really kicks in. The famed postcard image of Cambridge, King's chapel with Clare College court to its left, is the view as I cross Queen's Rd. Once through the back gate of the college, I always jump a little bit. A tributary of the Cam follows by my right side as I make the gentle incline up the stone path towards the bridge over the river. Trees line the path, and of late, little yellow flowers (crocuses?) that seem to tease you with promises of far-off spring. When it snowed heavily a couple of weeks ago, this scene was transformed into monochrome heaven.
At the apex of the bridge, I always make sure I look right and left. The Cam was the line along which the colleges were first drawn, and it would be a waste not to get an ocular fill of the gentle river going down towards Trinity, and up towards Queen's. If God is feeling the weather for that day, punts are scattered in both directions: these are small, flat boats, more boring versions of the Venetian gondola. Their precious cargo is half Italian, half Japanese. Not only do they look picturesque, but also have functional value in keeping delinquent tourists off the streets. I have a brief stare at the Mathematical Bridge Newton apparently designed: it looks gravity-defying, so must have been built before his accident with the apple.
I tear myself away from the hypnotic rhythms of the river and stroll up the path, Bodley's on the right, back lawn on the left. In a few metres, the library appears, deceptively swallowed into the sandstone: but on the inside, one of the best rooms to discharge daily grinding ever. I'll be getting intimate with her later. Then, since all this gazing gets me groaning (tum-wise), I'm through the tall wooden doors and into the cafeteria in one deft movement (actually several steps...but this post is getting out of control). I take my pick of the meat or veg on offer, make sure the plate is seasoned with chips - which dish King's is especially adept at producing, sometimes curly, sometimes straight, ever savoured - and proceed to the Hall. Here I sit with comrades and talk poetry and truth; both categories are usually covered by comments on the quality of the chips. The chips are poetry, and that's the truth.
Long have I rambled, and rambling is no hangover remedy. Anyway, that's a taster response to the question 'So...what do you DO every day?' I've gone out on a limb and assumed interest, feel free not to indulge. But come this far, you're probably well over-indulged by now. So those are the bricks out of which my days are built. Scuffed they may be; but they continue to look wonderful.
Apocalypse later. For now, back to the Australian love of sandstone. When I first arrived here, I was stunned at the ancientness of it all. But it was a kind of ancientness that was different from the cordoned palaces and grand cathedrals of Europe; these felt like monuments in the most sterile sense of the word, intact ruins advertising a lost age when there were royals without tabloids, and god had a capital G. I'm not bulldozing ruins here. Ruins are my business; day by day I wade through the fragments and remnants of 'dead' languages, half-lost literature, and wrangle with the tourist infrastructure that has built up around them. So I'm devoutly pro-ruin (not the same as pro-destruction). But it did seem that most of the architectural wonders of Europe were built in devotion to power structures which are no longer very important (sorry to all kings, queens and Catholics reading this). Well, modify that: no longer very important to me, a run of the mill secular Aussie. From centres of government and worship to pockets for collecting tourist coin; when a space is used for seeing and not for doing, in my eyes it's got the ruin bug.
I think that's what set the old buildings of Cambridge apart. The colleges are indeed dumping grounds for tourist money and 'I waz 'ere, 2009' photography, but they are also, as every self-respecting college sign will tell you, places where people 'live and work'. The sandstone is inhabited. The cobbles are smoothed and cracked from long use. The walls are scuffed and uneven at handlebar height after years of cycles leaning on them for support. It's nice to think that the heavy stones are not just inert spectacles, or, worse than that, still propping up campaigns against abortion and contraception: they are frames for work always in progress, and good work, for the most part. This is one of he homes of the progress myth, which, though humbled every day, sticks around tenaciously. You'd hope that, however long humanoids last, they could use a Cambridge to reflect on how far they've come, and then to help them go further.
Anyway, as always with the humdrum rhythm of routine (which is more of a lullaby to me than most people), I sometimes fall asleep on my bike and forget where I am. Not literally of course. Don't drink and ride. But however far down my head is kept at times, I've been trying to take more stock recently of where I am: what I'm seeing and what I'm doing. I realised that a weekday in my life here involves a pretty good level of contact with beautiful things.
I lumber into the world at about 8am. I eat some sweet cereal which my lovely girlfriend has concocted from a mixture of nuts, fruit, inferior and superior grade muesli, much more than the sum of its parts. Beautiful thing number one. I have a cup of tea, which tasted good in Australia, but in England, where it's zero celsius and falling, it tastes more like free cocaine to a retrenched executive. Beautiful thing number two.
This is quickly deteriorating into a day-in-the-life-of; if it's too banal, have my blessing to leave. Right, now that the ADHD's are out of the way, back to it. Feasted and dressed, I check the BBC 24-hour weatherwatch. The greatest-hits selection of weather in any given day, snow, rain, sleet, sun, drizzle, and the most exciting of all, clouds, inevitably results in me getting dressed for a second time. Then it's off to the dream factory, the place where cola and fullstops fondle each other, footnotes get made and laid: the library. I bike off along the path from my apartment (west of the city centre): first I pass a huge field, spanning to the horizon, full of hibernating haystacks in black plastic wraps, which I once thought were sculptures lamenting the modern substitution of plastic for hay. On the left, along the whole path, a tiny stream with its dependent greenery runs parallel. The brush is thick, almost hedge like; several times I've walked along it only to have some cocky birds burst out of it right above my head, making me jump when I'm trying my best to do a composed Cambridge gait. Round a bend I come to a picturesque little lake on the right, part of a grove that forms the northern tip of the University Athletics ground. It invariably reminds me of how I'll never do another 10km running race. On the left is the Cambridge Lawn Tennis Club. If I have anything to do with it, this dormant little volcano will go off in the spring. The lava will look like a mixture of Pimms, sweat and vomit.
Then it's onto the 'real road'; every day I reenact the terror of unscrewing the training wheels. This quiet street (Adams Rd) is one of the ritzier bits of town: big houses with hedges in the front and mini-orchards in the back. I warm up to the daily college perve with a view of the most boring first. Robinson College's red brick, direct from the 80's to you, neither offends nor impresses. The Grange Rd intersection then presents me with my first decision of the day, an oh-so-literal fork in the road. Should I cut through the chaff and head straight on to the beauty spot, staking a claim on a desk in King's library? Or should I hang a right and move towards the Fac, the f-word abbreviation for the Classics Faculty Library?
It really is choose your own adventure made live in Cambridge, where you never quite know which library you'll end up in. I have to admit I'm more prone to the second option; literary material is more plentiful and accessible in the Fac. So, a right heading south down Grange Rd takes me past the University Library on the left. This storehouse is a legal deposit library, meaning it automatically gets a copy of every book published in the U.K. You'd think it would wear a smile on its face for all that free packaged knowledge. On the contrary, it's very gloomy about it on the outside (it looks like a ziggurat prison, something a Victorian mind may have drawn up for max-incarceration with max-efficiency). On the inside, it's even worse: books spill over from the shelves and invade your precious desk space. I often think that if I died reading in there, my body wouldn't decompose, but would grow books the next day. Merrily I bypass the UL, then. A bit further on the right, there appears the University Rugby Union stadium, which invariably reminds me of how shit a sport is Rugby Union. That cheers me up. Selwyn College comes up quickly on the left (more red-brick, but of the tasteful 19th century sort) and I round the bend into Sidgwick Ave, past the lesser bit of Newnham College (Women Only; this is actually one of my favourite colleges, not for the women part, but for the gardens, pretty even in winter). Down the tree-canopied Sidgwick Ave, and BAM! - the Fac hits you in the face with more, worse, red-brick mediocrity. It's housed on the aptly termed 'Sidgwick Site', along with some siblings: Law, English, Criminology, Modern and Medieval Languages. The Law Fac, as always seems the case with this aristocratic subject, got the brand spanking new architecture. Hence its recent occupation by students in protest over Gaza. They were going to take Classics, but their energy dissolved beneath the Kryptonite of red-brick. Not to mention the olfactory shelling from the graduate common room fridge.
A lot of people despise the Fac library, but I find something charming and utilitarian about it. Shelves run along the innards of the room, grouped in order of general awesomeness: Latin and Greek literature is closest to the entrance, while yawn-inducing art/architecture is relegated to the very back (jokes...but behind every joke...is a shelf of seriousness). Along the windows on both sides of the room are rows and rows of desks. I choose one where my nose-picking will be most conspicuous or least conspicuous, depending on the state of my sinuses. Then I set up shop and hoe down with Virgil, Horace or Ovid - whoever is the flavour of the moment. When I've read too much about how super Augustus is, and how the fields spontaneously produce spaghetti bolognaise under his reign, I answer my growling stomach with a walk. Sometimes, if organised, I head thirty metres to the common room and eat the leftover glory of last night's banquet (usually a roasted lamb with pig legs and cow bum - carnivorousness is the new vegetarianism), but other times, if lazy, I set off for King's hall. Here the beauty really kicks in. The famed postcard image of Cambridge, King's chapel with Clare College court to its left, is the view as I cross Queen's Rd. Once through the back gate of the college, I always jump a little bit. A tributary of the Cam follows by my right side as I make the gentle incline up the stone path towards the bridge over the river. Trees line the path, and of late, little yellow flowers (crocuses?) that seem to tease you with promises of far-off spring. When it snowed heavily a couple of weeks ago, this scene was transformed into monochrome heaven.
At the apex of the bridge, I always make sure I look right and left. The Cam was the line along which the colleges were first drawn, and it would be a waste not to get an ocular fill of the gentle river going down towards Trinity, and up towards Queen's. If God is feeling the weather for that day, punts are scattered in both directions: these are small, flat boats, more boring versions of the Venetian gondola. Their precious cargo is half Italian, half Japanese. Not only do they look picturesque, but also have functional value in keeping delinquent tourists off the streets. I have a brief stare at the Mathematical Bridge Newton apparently designed: it looks gravity-defying, so must have been built before his accident with the apple.
I tear myself away from the hypnotic rhythms of the river and stroll up the path, Bodley's on the right, back lawn on the left. In a few metres, the library appears, deceptively swallowed into the sandstone: but on the inside, one of the best rooms to discharge daily grinding ever. I'll be getting intimate with her later. Then, since all this gazing gets me groaning (tum-wise), I'm through the tall wooden doors and into the cafeteria in one deft movement (actually several steps...but this post is getting out of control). I take my pick of the meat or veg on offer, make sure the plate is seasoned with chips - which dish King's is especially adept at producing, sometimes curly, sometimes straight, ever savoured - and proceed to the Hall. Here I sit with comrades and talk poetry and truth; both categories are usually covered by comments on the quality of the chips. The chips are poetry, and that's the truth.
Long have I rambled, and rambling is no hangover remedy. Anyway, that's a taster response to the question 'So...what do you DO every day?' I've gone out on a limb and assumed interest, feel free not to indulge. But come this far, you're probably well over-indulged by now. So those are the bricks out of which my days are built. Scuffed they may be; but they continue to look wonderful.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Supervisions
We did seminars; now it's time to get a little more intimate. The other primary outlet for human contact in the life of a classics graduate is the ominously titled 'supervision'. Scrub the word of its management speak surface rust and imagine a tall professor pacing back and forth in a book-crammed room, stoking fire, wielding cane, occasionally stopping to loom over the bedraggled student who scribbles away in the corner. Congratulations: you haven't imagined a supervision.
Or at least not one of mine. The supervision is, education wise, probably one of the best things about Cambridge. It is a rare event, happening only once every two or three weeks, but all the more special for the infrequency. Something wonderful indeed is it to pant up a narrow medieval staircase, boards creaking and hearts aflutter, knock on the door of your all-time academic hero, hear the first muted tones of that voice on the other side of the heavy timber, that honeyed voice which will be yours alone for the next blissful half hour. On paper, all a supervision involves is talking over your work, one on one, with your supervisor. But in practice, it's a whole lot more.
I scored a supervisor this term who may just be the best teacher I've/ll ever had/ve. Let him be known as Prof H. His method might be described as inspiration through bafflement. I sat down on his generous couch for the first time last Thursday, and, after venturing a bit o' the old tiny talk, started making lame enquiries about what he thought of the draft I had handed him the day before. An hour and a half later, I had no answer. Here is a sample of the notes I took:
No public broadcasting - lack of microphones.
No populace to be addressed by prophetic voice nowadays. We don't have a crier. Invented idea of upping and leaving.
Anchored.
Agrippa out there changing landscape.
What is the city? Something that could get into a boat?
The gubernator - ship of state. Those guys are reshaping the world...
Certain way of attending to reality.
...
Love is madness - access to philosophy. Erotic love to be the same thing as reading Plato.
Hating love, loving hate. Rough, real talk - perfect iambic woman a match for him? Just dreamt up woman. Giving elegy to iambist - the hatred a turn-on. Is this like difference between 7 and 16?
...
Everyone knows what Virgil is about to say.
...
Plutarch anecdote - two crows trained, one to say 'Ave Caesar', the other 'Ave Antoni'. Flexibility of civil war.
If that doesn't look nonsensical to you, then you are a genius. And that's not a quarter of my frantic scribblings transcribed. Basically the whole thing was one fantastic flight over the rooftops of Greece and Rome. Prof H hopped back and forth, digressing, alluding, eluding; I caught what I could in my flimsy ink and paper net, but fear I lost the catch of the day. An added problem was that the thoughts seemed to wilt as soon as they flowered, never lingering longer than the brief apex that the life-cycle demanded. Like those time delay shots of nature budding and dying in the space of a few seconds, it all appeared and vanished in a blink or breath. And then, just as you're kicking yourself for letting the delicate kernel fall through your fingers, he destroys everything by chucking a retrospective cloak of doubt over it all, topping off a five minute spiel with a 'or something like that, anyway' or the sonic silence of a verbal 'dot dot dot'. So do you really think like that, or were you donning the mask? Is that Prof H, or his inner devil's advocate? Will the real Prof H please stand up? Tangled in strands of irony, never until now did I really mean 'really makes you think'. Really. No irony. Dot dot dot...
To the untrained eye that may all look frustrating and pointless. And when I left the room, I did walk a rather perplexed walk up to hall for lunch. But a couple of hours later - the stupor snapped and dispersed - I revisited my notes, and they began to form a very fuzzy logic. I repeated a few days later, clarity factor rising; intervals of time seemed to make them speak, louder at a distance. Like the man's execrable handwriting, the squiggles started to reveal their secret forms.
After whining a few weeks back that the written word has become my only meaningful medium of communication, I now have to reassess. If I came across the story of the two crows - man in Rome brings out his talking crow after Octavian's (Caesar) victory, trained to say 'Hail Caesar!', then reveals that he had another one at home all along, trained to say 'Hail Antony!' in the event that the battle of Actium had gone the other way (or something like that...) - in Plutarch, I would have forgotten it straight away. But now the two crows peck at me for life.
Eight Hundred Years of Cambridge is a long time to get things right. This educational megalith has accrued untold wealth, eighty something Nobel prizes, buckets of Lord Byron's vomit (no matter how poetic). But eclipsing them all is that modest model of transmission, where Knowing Little meets and talks with Knowing Lots, baffled collides with baffler - and gets supervised to smithereens.
Or at least not one of mine. The supervision is, education wise, probably one of the best things about Cambridge. It is a rare event, happening only once every two or three weeks, but all the more special for the infrequency. Something wonderful indeed is it to pant up a narrow medieval staircase, boards creaking and hearts aflutter, knock on the door of your all-time academic hero, hear the first muted tones of that voice on the other side of the heavy timber, that honeyed voice which will be yours alone for the next blissful half hour. On paper, all a supervision involves is talking over your work, one on one, with your supervisor. But in practice, it's a whole lot more.
I scored a supervisor this term who may just be the best teacher I've/ll ever had/ve. Let him be known as Prof H. His method might be described as inspiration through bafflement. I sat down on his generous couch for the first time last Thursday, and, after venturing a bit o' the old tiny talk, started making lame enquiries about what he thought of the draft I had handed him the day before. An hour and a half later, I had no answer. Here is a sample of the notes I took:
No public broadcasting - lack of microphones.
No populace to be addressed by prophetic voice nowadays. We don't have a crier. Invented idea of upping and leaving.
Anchored.
Agrippa out there changing landscape.
What is the city? Something that could get into a boat?
The gubernator - ship of state. Those guys are reshaping the world...
Certain way of attending to reality.
...
Love is madness - access to philosophy. Erotic love to be the same thing as reading Plato.
Hating love, loving hate. Rough, real talk - perfect iambic woman a match for him? Just dreamt up woman. Giving elegy to iambist - the hatred a turn-on. Is this like difference between 7 and 16?
...
Everyone knows what Virgil is about to say.
...
Plutarch anecdote - two crows trained, one to say 'Ave Caesar', the other 'Ave Antoni'. Flexibility of civil war.
If that doesn't look nonsensical to you, then you are a genius. And that's not a quarter of my frantic scribblings transcribed. Basically the whole thing was one fantastic flight over the rooftops of Greece and Rome. Prof H hopped back and forth, digressing, alluding, eluding; I caught what I could in my flimsy ink and paper net, but fear I lost the catch of the day. An added problem was that the thoughts seemed to wilt as soon as they flowered, never lingering longer than the brief apex that the life-cycle demanded. Like those time delay shots of nature budding and dying in the space of a few seconds, it all appeared and vanished in a blink or breath. And then, just as you're kicking yourself for letting the delicate kernel fall through your fingers, he destroys everything by chucking a retrospective cloak of doubt over it all, topping off a five minute spiel with a 'or something like that, anyway' or the sonic silence of a verbal 'dot dot dot'. So do you really think like that, or were you donning the mask? Is that Prof H, or his inner devil's advocate? Will the real Prof H please stand up? Tangled in strands of irony, never until now did I really mean 'really makes you think'. Really. No irony. Dot dot dot...
To the untrained eye that may all look frustrating and pointless. And when I left the room, I did walk a rather perplexed walk up to hall for lunch. But a couple of hours later - the stupor snapped and dispersed - I revisited my notes, and they began to form a very fuzzy logic. I repeated a few days later, clarity factor rising; intervals of time seemed to make them speak, louder at a distance. Like the man's execrable handwriting, the squiggles started to reveal their secret forms.
After whining a few weeks back that the written word has become my only meaningful medium of communication, I now have to reassess. If I came across the story of the two crows - man in Rome brings out his talking crow after Octavian's (Caesar) victory, trained to say 'Hail Caesar!', then reveals that he had another one at home all along, trained to say 'Hail Antony!' in the event that the battle of Actium had gone the other way (or something like that...) - in Plutarch, I would have forgotten it straight away. But now the two crows peck at me for life.
Eight Hundred Years of Cambridge is a long time to get things right. This educational megalith has accrued untold wealth, eighty something Nobel prizes, buckets of Lord Byron's vomit (no matter how poetic). But eclipsing them all is that modest model of transmission, where Knowing Little meets and talks with Knowing Lots, baffled collides with baffler - and gets supervised to smithereens.
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