At approximately 18:15 on the 10th of June, I overheard the following conversation between two microscopic pests. They were sitting by the fourth hairpin bend in my small intestines, historically a lucrative spot for roadside begging:
Max: Alright Rob? How's life in the fast lane?
Rob: (chuckles, resulting in a rumble) Pretty slow at the moment. Haven't seen much action since the bellum intestinum of Africa 2006/7. Made great inroads there. But it was a short-lived victory - bloody homeostatic forces came back and slaughtered the lot of us. Never trust the armies of an embattled body. I only survived by putting on a yellowy white dress and posing as a Yakult bacterium. That got me a bit of work actually - everyone loves Yakult. But however hard you try, you can never get rid of the stigma of foreignness. Nothing much changes in this part of the world. You get trodden on just for being different. But you're young. You need to work all this out for yourself.
Max: C'mon Rob, it's not all that bad. We get a sniff of an upset from time to time. And Johnno was just saying that Cliff told him that there are some big winnings just around the corner. Lots of parties coming up, immune system low, you know. And the machine's getting older. We'll get something soon. I can feel it.
Rob: I'll believe it when I see it.
Two weeks later, lying in bed between my half-hourly trips to the toilet, I felt Rob give Max a big hug. The optimism of youth had trumped father Jaded in a touching success for the little guy, an unlikely win for the underdog over the imperial power of normative bodily functions. It was a beautiful moment, and I had diarrhoea.
It was by no means a unique capitulation. Several of my friends here, keyed into the same Cambridge rhythms that prescribe periods of sickness and health, were attacked simultaneously by flus, colds, infections. Where did our wellbeing go? The south of France? See you in October?
The answer lies in the Cambridge anomaly I briefly sketched out at this time last year: May Week. My cursory remarks were to be found right at the bottom of that post, so many of you wouldn't have made it (I barely make it, and I write the thing). In which case, let's refresh or insert the memory. May Week is the semi-confusingly titled (it is a week, it's not in May) period of concentrated licence at the end of every academic year. After the Undergrads work their hinds off for two months in preparation for the final exams, which in turn follow a good six months of working far harder than any self-respecting undergraduate at most other self-respecting universities, they are rewarded with an expensive and intensive one week course in fun studies. No classes and marks here though: it's pass-fail, the only strict criterion being one non-examinable regurgitation. The relative social quietude of Cambridge in the months leading up to exams really makes this one of the best week-long raves in the world. I can't be a card-carrying misanthrope just yet, for the spectacle of two young lovers passed out on the grass after a sunrise dip in the river, bowties skewed and dress straps akimbo, near-empty bottles of champagne in one hand, each other in the other, still brings an indy tear to my eye. Smart people rarely permit themselves human overindulgence; when they do, what to do but warmly indulge them?
The end of June last year saw the first fruits of a shrivelled income: I simply couldn't afford to buy into May Week in any substantial way, so I did what I always do, made a virtue of necessity, and wrote sulkily 'I didn't want to participate anyway.' I claimed that the King's Affair, one of the cheaper events of the week, was inherently superior. 'Don't bother with Trinity or John's balls' I said, 'they're overpriced wankfests tailor-made for black-tied champagne-swilling Tories. King's, on the other hand, provides left-wing booze at the radical price of sixty pounds. I know which one I'm going for.'
This year I bought a dinner suit and promptly attended both Trinity and St John's may balls on consecutive nights. My party ideologies are easily neutralised with a bit of spare cash. Unfortunately, I didn't start the week in the right zone to play the long game and survive: Monday's Trinity ball chased right at the heels of a bicycle jaunt to Brittany which featured various forces for fatigue, such as long-distance cycling, drinking, lack of sleep, and a nine hour drive on the return. As I sat in the euro chunnel covered in baguette debris, performing my hungover ritual of reading the most difficult unintelligible book conceivable (Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition', which I like to re-title (but not) 'Repetition and Difference', because I didn't understand a word, and so the only satisfying thing I can do with it is make jokes about the title), I trembled at the monstrous levels of fun to be had in the week ahead. I feared I would not make it. And ten pages of Deleuze did not offer anything, not even a footnote, on the dread of excessive bourgeois recreation.
There was nothing to be done but slip into some evening wear and think of mum. Despite my longer term anxieties, Trinity, the first bender, was confidently set in motion. Much as it pains me to hand it to them, it does merit a bit of a purple patch. Luckily I was ticketed on the back of a musician playing at the ball, which meant jumping the lengthy queue and heading in the side entrance. Yep, ordinarily you have to brave an hour long queue for an event that costs 140 pounds. Welcome to the good life. Anyway, I circumvented it with some agile ducking and weaving under the wing of my musical partner. I got in not long after the official start, dived straight in for a G+T, then let my more seasoned colleague drive me straight to the oysters. Apparently these guys - though they arrive in tons - go very quickly. I suggested that this was because people like him eat thirty in quick succession, buckling under paranoid greed. He didn't hear me though; he was too busy breaking his consumption record. I captured the feat on memory card and sucked a few down myself. In the frantic initial rush to eat and drink, slamming Pimms and pigging out on Hog burgers, it took me a while to absorb the surroundings, which were, cynicism aside, beyond special. The usual manicured and empty grounds of Trinity were transformed into something that could be described as a third way between Glastonbury and Outdoor Cocktail Party. Er, much further toward the latter of course. But what struck me as bizarre was the unique mix of sweaty makeshift and haute couture: portable toilets and food tents, fairy floss stands and dodgem cars, doughnuts and strength-testers formed the backdrop to thousands of youths immaculate in their formal dress. Of course there were higher class entertainments on offer as well: string-group dancing in hall that would have seemed equally delightful a hundred years ago, sophisticated toffy comedians, and in the realm of ingestibles, premium quality champagne and a dedicated port and cheese room all night long. But I found the unconvincing veneer of 'classiness' the most charming part of the evening: the space was symbolically arranged so that as you moved from the old buildings to the open air on the other side of the river, the old-fashioned elegance of the entertainment declined: from formal dancing and Moet, past the cheese, over to the jazz tent, past the chocolate fountain and electronica tent, through to the unashamedly carnival world of rides and ice creams. I ended my own night in this region, as I think did most people; it was a lovely, progressive stripping away of affectation as people boozed further and further into animalistic oblivion. It was a synchronised kebab trip after a stuffy dinner of lobster mornay with your posh in-laws. Eventually the common denominator of youth glared garishly through: drinking and driving (small electric cars) in a controlled environment.
The next night was more legitimately punk, but only if the night before it was disavowed. I'm happy with the contradiction if you are. Every year the anti-ball crew flexes their collective middle fingers and decides not to endorse these events by paying for them, but rather to play the latter day Robin Hood and break in for free. The security is tight, particularly at the biguns like John's; at the same time, the 'security' is always a crack team of intimidating Cambridge students. This means that you're likely to know someone, anyone, on the inside. And if you know them well, it doesn't even smell like the stench of corruption - merely the collaboration of prisoner and guard against the man. John's ball this year happened to be saturated with King's men and women working security, so my friend and I thought we'd have a go. The only barrier was the castle-like fortification: we still had to get over the piranha-infested moat and scale the guarded walls before having a remote chance of even whispering to our insiders. But the crash stars were smiling. After some interviews with experienced crashers, we ascertained that the best way to breach was via disguise rather than flashy action-man techniques: posing as garbage collectors was the tested method. So we threw on some understated black, picked up some black bags from the dumpster, and walked straight in the back entrance while the guard had his hands tied with someone else. Unintentionally, the timing was perfect: we made the breach during the fireworks, when all eyes temporarily left their duties to gawk at vast amounts of money exploding into pretty, perishable colours. I realised that this was the chief reason, too, for the superabundance of love on NYE: everyone is staring at the sky and not at each other.
So we made it past the first hurdle; but a crash is a series of them. As soon as we reached the light of the back court, we began to pick up rubbish - not so zealously as to be conspicuous, but trying to keep up a pace comparable to the other cleaners around us. Half an hour in and we were running out of ideas/bin space; the approach had to be modified. Move or die. The problem was that we weren't dressed in evening wear, so couldn't just blend into the crowd of legitimate guests. The smart road would have been to put our suits in the bin bags and change immediately upon entrance; but our success had taken us by surprise, and we hadn't planned this far ahead. Now was the time to call in backup. A King's friend (bless her) came to the rescue, convincing us to dump our bags and follow her - of course, in the presence of another worker, we just looked like run-of-the-mill workers ourselves, having our two hourly break and a much-needed chat. The final major snag was movement between courts: each passageway had several wristband checkers stationed to catch out any undesirables. My friend created a distraction, we fudged our way through, and we were properly into a world of unlimited free booze. Unfortunately we were jammed in the court which specialised in alco-pops. Fortunately the same court specialised in drum and bass. A loss, a win, but we were still up in the lifetime accounts.
At this point, the story becomes a guaranteed favourite of ancient authors who love a bit of vicissitude with their breakfast cereal. Beware good fortune: it will inevitably turn bad. Giddy with success and premixed vodka concoctions, we became a little cocky. We felt the niggling urge to explore the next main court, so we scoped the passageway situation, observed that it was temporarily unguarded - and went for it. We made it through. Anti-climax? No, just a prelude to the real thing. We sipped a few cocktails. I even saw another Kingsperson working at the bar, she knew the situation, she asked me in front of the others how long I had been on my break for, we were building the charade, we were meshing, we were riffing, it all felt so good. And then we decided to return to the godforsaken vodka womb whence we came. Largely - and my friend admits this - the calamity to come was his fault: he spied some cleaners whom he suspected were also involved in the crashing game, and with liquored impetuosity thought it a good idea to confront them and pretend we were security. He leapt up and bounded towards the passageway before I could reason with him. The wristband-checker asked him where his wristband was. 'I lost it', he replied dishonestly, but not quite dishonestly enough. I was trailing behind him, so I had a split second to think. Shit. Shit. What to say? The checker turned to me and asked 'do you have a wristband?' Shit.
'Um, yeah I do.'
My Australian friends will be pleased to know I still merit the nickname 'Toady'. And a moment of stunning betrayal it was. For some reason, the checker believed me without checking. But my friend, he was escorted to the back entrance to prove he was a cleaner, and if not...flick. Yep, he was flicked. My conscience pounced, I tried every security staff member I knew; but no one could help. I mourned for my friend and my own understanding of the concept of friendship. But, as after all funerals, I had a drink. And then another. And then, slowly, predictably, the guilt passed through the bladder. I plundered the security friend's wrist and hung a tattered band precariously under my sleeve. She managed with her security ID alone. The rest, as they say, was history without memory. The proof is in the survivor's photo (in which the naked guy, unfortunately, is not me).
The remainder of May week dribbled away in various lobotomising pursuits; never have I been so tired of fun. I ended the days with a trip to Oxford for an exchange formal with our sister college. After falling asleep on the couch in their graduate common room, still dressed to impress, I woke up at 6am to a friend covering me with my dinner jacket. I had been shivering, but not with cold; my body was anticipating the immensely painful withdrawal from fun. Did I deserve this fun? No, not in the way an undergraduate deserves their fun. Graduate existence feels like this a lot of the time: no medicated courses of work and play, no alignment of cycles with peers, no banked up tension and prepaid release. The intense good times must be parasitic. The fun must be hijacked.
Resignedly, I faced the firing squat. It was worth it.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Sunday, May 23, 2010
The Pursuit of Mappiness
If we spin the globe back about 550.5 revolutions, right to left, rest our finger on a point a few millimetres up the east coast of Australia (our sphere is scaled for maximum microcosmic force), and compare our suspended image of a past world with that of the present, we might notice one fundamental, equilibrium shifting difference: it was about then that I threw my weight - 1% water, 99% classical dictionary - on a plane and leapfrogged from Sydney to here, this here low-lying corner of England. You felt the earth move, right? Even if I grudgingly acknowledge different levels of impact on different observers, the move was made, and here I am, which allows me to say with all sincerity and zero affectation that strangely beautiful phrase: there I was. Yep, I'm lost as well.
So there I was - which is to say here I am - at my desk rehearsing cliches about the vast dimensions of this small world and the telescopic outreaches to those gigantic stars and how not even an instrument of infinite magnification could ever give us an image of what we really want - the whole universe in our field of vision - but nor could it ever limit our ability to imagine the parallel universes we'll never see until we wrestle free of our own. These mental journeys are not particularly sophisticated; I'm probably just replaying a jumble of semi-recollected scenes from various Star Wars films. But whenever I grapple with these unfathomables my head floats, my heart beats and I almost feel moist in those organs of vision - threatening to cry for their own loss, no doubt, because they know what they'll never see. This feeling always takes me by surprise, particularly for being replicable at will. Emotions - strong, unmistakeable quakes - are a very rare thing in my daily life. Thus they arrive ever unexpected. But where does this pleasant turbulence spring from? Is this 'awe' akin to what a devout Catholic feels when she nods up to the ceiling of St Peter's? Have I sold out and started worshipping at the altar of the 'universe' because I'm too lazy to look for real answers?
These sensations rarely last more than a paragraph before they come crashing back to earth. This shuttle has landed back in Sydney. At some stage - whether it was in high school or slightly later - I developed a reputation among friends for having a good sense of direction. This talent, to make street-level orienteering sound jazzier than it is, can be a blessing and a curse in equal measure. On the one hand, having a traveller who 'knows where they're going' can reduce the gnawing stress unavoidably tied to being in a new place. On the other, the mind mapper gets blamed at the merest hint of becoming lost, and friends with equal senses of direction but less confidence are always waiting in the wings to catch you out. Anyway, for reasons shrouded in the mysteries of group dynamics, I became the guy with the directions. I always found this task a bit uncomfortable, mostly because I hate leadership and am very happily married to my passivity, thank you. And yet, social phenomena aside, I can't deny that this role probably arose from a shameful geekery towards maps. If I drop artistic pretensions for this sentence, I freely admit that I would have the Louvre bombed and the Mona Lisa weeping sooty tears in exchange for a comprehensive collection of the history of cartography. I could stare at a mid-scale map of central Adelaide for much longer than I could/did stare at Guernica. If exiled to a desert island, I would take a map. It would save me having to walk around the island for an eyeball. And, well, I could find my way back home too.
The map is the most simultaneously useful and beautiful concept imaginable - dir, anyone could see that - but whence my particular love? In my official biography, I read that the seeds were sown in childhood (dir again). I wouldn't call my pop a keen traveller, but he was definitely a keen daytripper: we would go for long drives into the hinterland of New South Wales, try the city car on dirt roads, move along squiggly lines with no avowed purpose other than to see a few trees. Many of the hours I spent in the passenger seat of these trips - and other, shorter trips, since we were always driving somewhere, for food, for computer showrooms, for power tools at bargain prices - were spent with one of the only two books in the car. I wasn't interested enough in automotive mechanics to read the manual, so one option remained for me: the street directory. In truth, there was more than one; whether out of a mild form of OCD prohibiting him from ever throwing a printed product in the bin, or a high-minded appreciation for the cartographical art (for the record dad, if you're reading this, I'll always believe in the latter), father would always keep to hand a good selection of the major highlights in the previous thirty years of Sydney street directories. I would pick the one that lay closest, even if the suburb we were travelling through wasn't invented in the time of publication. And I would 'read'. Turning to a page at random (unless I had a backlog of interesting places to look up), I'd get to know the major roads, waterways and points of interest: parks, cemeteries, golf courses, public, private, catholic schools, community centres. Everything represented by richly coloured symbols. I traversed the main routes, the big black snakes, and the back roads, the little white ones - occasionally wandering onto secondary arteries coloured in yellow. Even the smallest red circle, filled (traffic light) or outlined (roundabout), was worthy of remark. I could brazenly flout convention and head the wrong way down a one-way street, turn right at a no-right-turn; it was just me and a post-apocalyptically empty metropolis. So this was what the people meant when they urged you to reclaim the streets.
I suppose I could see this as preliminary to that very Australian rite of passage: the day of the driver's license. But I'm not certain I had a genuine desire to realise these marks on a map; and if I did, they were inevitably less interesting in the flesh. There was one stalwart location I kept flicking back to (I may even have had it dog-eared): the Port Hacking estuary at the extreme southern border of greater Sydney. This harbour always tickled me. The mapmaker had decided to represent the sandbanks beneath the water by drawing vast stretches of golden sand peninsulas prodding far into the blue. What a fantastic place that must be - I thought - where one could stroll along sandy highways and be surrounded on both sides by crystalline water. A pacific paradise on the drab frontier of suburban Sydney. Ten years later, I visited the place for real. The sand banks were quite big. But they were mainly submerged. If I'd wanted very shallow water, I would have treated myself to a kiddie pool. It's only weird if you take a camera.
Through the underrated paedagogical medium of mediocre sandbanks, I learned a very important, very late lesson: the street directory could often give you what actual experience couldn't. One memorable session I devoted to the Cook's river, a lesser known tributary in southern Sydney: I traced it through many maps, as far as I could, through backyards and disused mattress factories. I remember the joy of pinning the point where it turns from natural bank to concrete drain. Man, it was sweet. How much more lovely was the pure blue of represented water than the murky brown sludge of an industry-lined river barely worthy of the name. In the street directory, civilisation worked perfectly. Everyone could get everywhere anytime through a seamlessly linked supernetwork of roads and Presbyterian churches. The streets of drug-ridden Cabramatta looked the same as the streets of moneyed Vaucluse. There was no symbol for knife crime. The street directory looked at society from so far above that an ideal egalitarian space was created. To this day I continue to labour under the misapprehension that squinting can play a part in social justice.
So a childhood largely taken with consultation of street directories must have something to do with it. There was also the possession of the huge illustrated Atlas, replete with pretty pictures and 'world's biggest' facts - but that story more properly belongs to an aetiology of my current fascination with the biggest things in the world. In any case, as I grow old and jaded, the map is the source of more and more happiness. When in London, I'm that guy who stands right in front of the tube map for minutes and bars you from quickly checking you're on the appropriate line. I'm the only human in the map section at Border's. I'm the brave soldier who takes his life in his hands every time he crosses the road in an unfamiliar place - for he would rather look where he's going in a two dimensional format. And, perhaps most embarrassingly of all, I'm the man who reads a map for non-utilitarian reasons. I went to bed with a nice miniature A-Z of London the other night. It was the most direct route to sweet dreams.
The urge to map is definitely implicated in games of knowledge and power - a place mapped is a place known, and a place conquered - but I refuse to think that the pleasure of the map is just about pushing my megalomaniac buttons. At least in surveying the dense webs of a big city, there is something satisfying about the chaos of it all; much as we plan for it, it's nigh impossible for the human population to grow in simple geometric patterns. But there is also a stout beauty to a good grid. I look at a large map and maybe I see a large metaphor: sometimes we people get it straight, sometimes hopelessly crooked, sometimes the landscape bends us to its will. We detour and diffract. But we get there eventually. A way can always be found; each place always every other place, merged via colourful lines of unmappable potential.
That wasn't about Cambridge, but I'm sure you can find your way back.
So there I was - which is to say here I am - at my desk rehearsing cliches about the vast dimensions of this small world and the telescopic outreaches to those gigantic stars and how not even an instrument of infinite magnification could ever give us an image of what we really want - the whole universe in our field of vision - but nor could it ever limit our ability to imagine the parallel universes we'll never see until we wrestle free of our own. These mental journeys are not particularly sophisticated; I'm probably just replaying a jumble of semi-recollected scenes from various Star Wars films. But whenever I grapple with these unfathomables my head floats, my heart beats and I almost feel moist in those organs of vision - threatening to cry for their own loss, no doubt, because they know what they'll never see. This feeling always takes me by surprise, particularly for being replicable at will. Emotions - strong, unmistakeable quakes - are a very rare thing in my daily life. Thus they arrive ever unexpected. But where does this pleasant turbulence spring from? Is this 'awe' akin to what a devout Catholic feels when she nods up to the ceiling of St Peter's? Have I sold out and started worshipping at the altar of the 'universe' because I'm too lazy to look for real answers?
These sensations rarely last more than a paragraph before they come crashing back to earth. This shuttle has landed back in Sydney. At some stage - whether it was in high school or slightly later - I developed a reputation among friends for having a good sense of direction. This talent, to make street-level orienteering sound jazzier than it is, can be a blessing and a curse in equal measure. On the one hand, having a traveller who 'knows where they're going' can reduce the gnawing stress unavoidably tied to being in a new place. On the other, the mind mapper gets blamed at the merest hint of becoming lost, and friends with equal senses of direction but less confidence are always waiting in the wings to catch you out. Anyway, for reasons shrouded in the mysteries of group dynamics, I became the guy with the directions. I always found this task a bit uncomfortable, mostly because I hate leadership and am very happily married to my passivity, thank you. And yet, social phenomena aside, I can't deny that this role probably arose from a shameful geekery towards maps. If I drop artistic pretensions for this sentence, I freely admit that I would have the Louvre bombed and the Mona Lisa weeping sooty tears in exchange for a comprehensive collection of the history of cartography. I could stare at a mid-scale map of central Adelaide for much longer than I could/did stare at Guernica. If exiled to a desert island, I would take a map. It would save me having to walk around the island for an eyeball. And, well, I could find my way back home too.
The map is the most simultaneously useful and beautiful concept imaginable - dir, anyone could see that - but whence my particular love? In my official biography, I read that the seeds were sown in childhood (dir again). I wouldn't call my pop a keen traveller, but he was definitely a keen daytripper: we would go for long drives into the hinterland of New South Wales, try the city car on dirt roads, move along squiggly lines with no avowed purpose other than to see a few trees. Many of the hours I spent in the passenger seat of these trips - and other, shorter trips, since we were always driving somewhere, for food, for computer showrooms, for power tools at bargain prices - were spent with one of the only two books in the car. I wasn't interested enough in automotive mechanics to read the manual, so one option remained for me: the street directory. In truth, there was more than one; whether out of a mild form of OCD prohibiting him from ever throwing a printed product in the bin, or a high-minded appreciation for the cartographical art (for the record dad, if you're reading this, I'll always believe in the latter), father would always keep to hand a good selection of the major highlights in the previous thirty years of Sydney street directories. I would pick the one that lay closest, even if the suburb we were travelling through wasn't invented in the time of publication. And I would 'read'. Turning to a page at random (unless I had a backlog of interesting places to look up), I'd get to know the major roads, waterways and points of interest: parks, cemeteries, golf courses, public, private, catholic schools, community centres. Everything represented by richly coloured symbols. I traversed the main routes, the big black snakes, and the back roads, the little white ones - occasionally wandering onto secondary arteries coloured in yellow. Even the smallest red circle, filled (traffic light) or outlined (roundabout), was worthy of remark. I could brazenly flout convention and head the wrong way down a one-way street, turn right at a no-right-turn; it was just me and a post-apocalyptically empty metropolis. So this was what the people meant when they urged you to reclaim the streets.
I suppose I could see this as preliminary to that very Australian rite of passage: the day of the driver's license. But I'm not certain I had a genuine desire to realise these marks on a map; and if I did, they were inevitably less interesting in the flesh. There was one stalwart location I kept flicking back to (I may even have had it dog-eared): the Port Hacking estuary at the extreme southern border of greater Sydney. This harbour always tickled me. The mapmaker had decided to represent the sandbanks beneath the water by drawing vast stretches of golden sand peninsulas prodding far into the blue. What a fantastic place that must be - I thought - where one could stroll along sandy highways and be surrounded on both sides by crystalline water. A pacific paradise on the drab frontier of suburban Sydney. Ten years later, I visited the place for real. The sand banks were quite big. But they were mainly submerged. If I'd wanted very shallow water, I would have treated myself to a kiddie pool. It's only weird if you take a camera.
Through the underrated paedagogical medium of mediocre sandbanks, I learned a very important, very late lesson: the street directory could often give you what actual experience couldn't. One memorable session I devoted to the Cook's river, a lesser known tributary in southern Sydney: I traced it through many maps, as far as I could, through backyards and disused mattress factories. I remember the joy of pinning the point where it turns from natural bank to concrete drain. Man, it was sweet. How much more lovely was the pure blue of represented water than the murky brown sludge of an industry-lined river barely worthy of the name. In the street directory, civilisation worked perfectly. Everyone could get everywhere anytime through a seamlessly linked supernetwork of roads and Presbyterian churches. The streets of drug-ridden Cabramatta looked the same as the streets of moneyed Vaucluse. There was no symbol for knife crime. The street directory looked at society from so far above that an ideal egalitarian space was created. To this day I continue to labour under the misapprehension that squinting can play a part in social justice.
So a childhood largely taken with consultation of street directories must have something to do with it. There was also the possession of the huge illustrated Atlas, replete with pretty pictures and 'world's biggest' facts - but that story more properly belongs to an aetiology of my current fascination with the biggest things in the world. In any case, as I grow old and jaded, the map is the source of more and more happiness. When in London, I'm that guy who stands right in front of the tube map for minutes and bars you from quickly checking you're on the appropriate line. I'm the only human in the map section at Border's. I'm the brave soldier who takes his life in his hands every time he crosses the road in an unfamiliar place - for he would rather look where he's going in a two dimensional format. And, perhaps most embarrassingly of all, I'm the man who reads a map for non-utilitarian reasons. I went to bed with a nice miniature A-Z of London the other night. It was the most direct route to sweet dreams.
The urge to map is definitely implicated in games of knowledge and power - a place mapped is a place known, and a place conquered - but I refuse to think that the pleasure of the map is just about pushing my megalomaniac buttons. At least in surveying the dense webs of a big city, there is something satisfying about the chaos of it all; much as we plan for it, it's nigh impossible for the human population to grow in simple geometric patterns. But there is also a stout beauty to a good grid. I look at a large map and maybe I see a large metaphor: sometimes we people get it straight, sometimes hopelessly crooked, sometimes the landscape bends us to its will. We detour and diffract. But we get there eventually. A way can always be found; each place always every other place, merged via colourful lines of unmappable potential.
That wasn't about Cambridge, but I'm sure you can find your way back.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Eat n Crete
Let's begin with a swerve from the title, misdirection being the secret of good blogging. Accretion will take time.
Doing a PhD is a bit like working for the man, with one or two fundamental differences: there is no man, and not much work is done. The closest one gets to a pale imitation of the man, at the same time a shabby excuse for work, is through optional participation in the library. The Cambridge Faculty of Classics Library may well be the snapshot of an organisational psychologist's brain at the moment of orgasm. Desks stretch out in perfect monomorphic geometry, as far as the eye can see: and what this eye sees is other eyes seeing it. At your seat, laptop unfolded, a microsoft word document stares into your soul; it's your first love, and there is something mystical in the meeting of face and interface. But sometimes - every half hour? every quarter? - your fingers slip down the trackpad and renew flirtation with the dock. A row of colourful icons springs into life. Which to choose? There can be no choice. Firefox burns brightest in the southern osx sky. One well-aimed click and the benign baby blue and white of standard gmail format pops up. A moment of raised pulse as the number fades into focus: it hasn't changed. Better check again in fifteen minutes. What's happening on the Guardian though? No change. But there's a reputable News service on Facebook right? Click scroll refresh scroll. 'John Smith is enjoying the sun in Mauritius.' 'John Smith has uploaded new photos.' 'John Smith has skin cancer.' Wait. This isn't news. This isn't even information. It's just people spurting their immediate situation all over your mind, leaving it there to fizz and sizzle and quench the spark that wants to burn through the cord connecting you, tangled itself. Your fingers can't unplug themselves from the trackpad. Why am I reading this? Scroll. These are seconds, minutes. Scroll. Refresh. Scroll. Ooh, hang on, that looks interesting.
'Tom Geue wrote another rubbish note that takes ages to get going and then never really gets there in going.'
Sign me up. But not so fast. There's a new set of eyes in the library. I can feel them burrowing straight through the top of my spine and out my adam's apple. The blue square with white 'f' passes straight through my eye-gouged neck. I turn around.
It's my supervisor. For she too works in the library. We all work in the library. It's a big panoptic prison that jolts you awake every time you fall asleep in cyberspace. And who will supervise the supervisors? Other supervisors. The chain goes all the way up to the big supervisor in the sky - s/he has five hundred publications and counting. But even s/he is not immune from supervision, via subvision. I look out and up at the soft white puffs in the blue vault and - rarely, yet every so often - the slow sky browser refreshes to form a giant f. A copy of Plato's Republic lies open in a prominent quarter of the heavens. But I'm not fooled. I've caught God checking facebook.
'John Smith is dying in a horrible natural disaster. God, where are you?'
'Fuck. Better get back to work.'
And we'd better get back to Greece; well, fly in for the first time, through a sky notably devoid of f's. A genuine feature rendering PhD life distinct from the grind is that, provided you're not teaching or seminaring, you can take holidays whenever you want. Not too far, and not for too long; the most vigilant supervisor is actually the one that has a permanent post in your own head...and you can't escape that one. A friend and I were sitting in the pub one night, on a brief but standard form of Cambridge holiday, and we decided we needed a) sun and b) nature. A few more sleeps and we'd booked flights for a week's jaunt to Crete, a place where (so we'd heard) sun and nature cohabited in neighbourly good cheer. It also happened to be the cradle of western civilisation - Zeus was sort of born there, fact - so naturally recommended itself to me as classicist. More to the point, it recommended itself to me as student in the low income sense of the word. Because Crete's a classical land, I was eligible to claim funding from the faculty to go there. If there was an emoticon for 'cash register sound', I'd be threatening to use it right now.
It was the subsidised Romance of a lifetime. Now it would be a stretch to call myself a Hellenist, let alone a Philhellene: the small amount of Ancient Greek I once knew has shrunk to the size of handy supplement to English translation. Plus I think the Romans are way funnier and much more interesting. So I didn't go in with the goosebumps people imagine must form, implied by the poke of outrage: 'You're a CLASSICIST and you haven't been to GREECE?' By no means a die-hard, but not completely lay either, I suppose I was in a good zone to be impressed. And I was - but ruins were only a fragmentary part of it. In six days, my German mountaineer and I covered a good chunk of the island. If it hovered on the reflux line labelled 'more than we could chew' at the time, I can at least digest it for you now.
This was, in half, a walking trip. So we wanted to warm up. I'd learned on my in-flight last-minute research that one of the distinguishing features of the Cretan landscape is the abundance of plateaus. Among the more famous is the Lasithi Plateau, a little south-east of the capital. Ok, bam, that's the destination. But there was an obstacle, which is where this qualifies as a boring plot: no buses were running to the plateau that day. Give up? No way. Not when you're unfurling a plot. So we jumped on a bus to a junction 40 km from our town. Then - nervily, like two migratory birds in the wrong place in the wrong season - we did it: we made a sign. I carved out 'Psihro' in scratchy Greek letters. It would be the first of many signs in our passage from hitching childhood to adolescence. We shyly brandished the sign for forty five minutes, waving it, aiding it with the extension of thumbs, near stepping in front of traffic; all just to get noticed. It was like Hollywood, where the signs are people. The drivers had signs of their own. Sometimes it was the eyes-ahead ignore. Sometimes it was the apologetic look and the mumbling of Greek; I lip-read and deciphered 'I'm making a mockery of you' mostly. Sometimes it was the frenetic pointing at the dashboard, meaning one of the following: 'I'm running out of petrol.' 'I'm not going far from here.' 'I have a dashboard.' All had dashboards, and many had the nerve to point this out. But we couldn't tell for certain. It was a new script. I felt like an impotent archaeologist; I couldn't crack the code. But the end was all too intelligible. No one stopped.
I'll spare the story of how we came to know it (suffice it to say that waiting was the medium), but I'll give you the message: never put an obscure town of tiny population on your sign. For it's more than likely that no one will be going there. (Aside: I'm thinking about a series called something along the lines 'When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations' - this would be the type of thing that would make the cut.) A few changed signs and two lifts later, we sat in the back of a farmer's truck and let the machine climb the hairpin bends for us. We had the wind in our hair, spanners and other miscellaneous lumps of metal jabbing at our coxics, sesame snacks - and we were learning.
I just need to take a moment to dwell on the idea of the plateau, which I didn't really think about before or after reading that 'distinguishing features of Cretan landscape' sentence. The plateau is a land within a land, a microcosm indistinguishable from the macrocosm but for reference to its frame: a ring of high mountains. Flat ground at high altitude; for some reason I find this combination sexy, perhaps because it appeals to the remnants of a childlike treehouse fetish, the longing for a self-contained space up above. And this plateau was hidden among the clouds. You pass into a thick fog on the way up, the turn from ascent to descent your only positioning guide. A few metres down the tortuous track and everything opens up: a vista of verdant green criss-crossed by penstrokes and rectangles. It was like the first entry into a land before time, except this land had windmills and agriculture, and time. We walked the 8 km diameter of the plateau and made it to our town just before sunset, climbing the foothills at the edge to survey the plain in golden light and watch the shadows creep across it further and faster. Our vantage point was the cave of Zeus, supposedly the place where Rhea hid her son (not yet the best god on Olympus) to protect him from his hungry father. The gate was closed. I jumped the fence and knocked on the door, but nobody was home. God is dead, indeed.
From the relative cold and moisture of the mountains we hitched back down to coastal sun, wedged between sacks of animal feed. The locals kindly dropped us on the main road back to the capital, on which we assumed we could jump on a bus within the hour. Wrong, but for good reasons. We had forgotten it was a national holiday (independence day, celebrating the end of Ottoman rule in Greece). This meant: parade, and lots of it. Triumphant trumpets blared over crackly loudspeakers as the youth, the future of Greece, took to the streets and marched in ascending order of age. The litluns were criminally cute: they all took their duty to march in formation very seriously, stomping emphatically and swinging their arms higher than the wide angles of an overexcited pendulum. As we and they moved up the age divisions, the seriousness turned to expert looks of distinterest, ironic smiles and flashed glances. My favourite part was watching the parade disperse, and every participant walking back from where they had come, but broken out of formation and clumped into cliques: sixteen yr old girls linking arms and laughing about how hot Costas looked in his traditional dress. Yep, that's definitely what they were talking about. Damn, Costas.
Back in the capital later than expected, the day was lost; so we decided to try our best to get to another small town on the south coast by nightfall, another victim of the one bus a day rule, one bus which we had missed, or which had never left, never arrived. Again we thought we'd push our luck and bus it to the nearest junction (50 km from the town), then hitch; if we got stuck in the mountains, we'd just have to tent down on an uncomfortable slope. We used our last bit of paper (EasyJet booking reference) to make another sign, walked up to the appropriate road, dumped our bags and settled in for the waiting game while velvet dusk worked its way down. A lift came along pretty quickly, but it only got us a third of the way. We waited an hour or so outside the taverna of the mountain village; five cars passed, and passed us by. Eventually some kind taverna gents came out to help us; the one that could speak a bit of English was from Palestine and had a brother in Melbourne. While his original nationality made him a non-typical example, I encountered the same story again and again over the course of the week: I've got a relative in Melbourne. Never have I felt it more of an advantage to be Australian; though it never secured us special treatment, it always greased the transactions with good smiles. This instance was no exception: within five minutes we were in one of the taverna manager's friends' car, twenty euro lighter, but on our way to where we wanted to go. Which was slightly further away than our mental cartography had admitted.
We were on schedule, always important when travelling with a German. In town by 9, we had a room by 9:30. We strayed off the footpath into someone's backyard, and my friend shouted what we thought was Greek for 'sorry', then asked if they had a room. They had a room. What a room! After a swordfish stop and a pina colada down the docks, I woke in the morning to hints of gleaming sun; just to confirm, I threw the bright blue french doors open and stepped out on the balcony to be smacked in the face by broad beams of heat. It was 8am. It was hot. Apparently Australian troops fighting in Crete in WWII had thought of it as Australia floated north of the equator. I could see why. Sun in the face is, for an Australian, quite possibly the most evocative memory jogger out there. Whole acres of past life bloom from dormancy.
We breakfasted on the pier, stocked up on camping gas and pissweak mediterranean sunscreen ('for pre-tanned skin' - premature of us?), and began our three-day hike. We never thought this would be a walk in Hyde Park; but I don't think either of us quite comprehended the magnitude of the ups and downs, the difficulty of terrain, the rocks and thorns that would bruise scratch and cut into us over and over. But, even for the flesh wounds, this was the most glorious trek I've ever stepped along. After my walkabout in Italy, down a patch of the crowded Ligurian coast, I had decided that the whole perimeter of European seaside was at maximum capacity. But in three days of hiking, we ran into four people. The cliffs, the crags, the gorges and the beaches were ours on exclusive loan.
Initially, we budgeted for a few stops in civilisation: Loutro, a blue and white village accessible solely by foot and boat, would provide the last proper nutrition for a few days. One of the fascinating things about passing through this town and the next was the living construction site that a seasonal tourist culture creates right at this transitional time. A week before official season began, nothing much was open for business; but everything was open for refurbishment. Saws and paintbrushes hustled the day away, while we lingered over lunch. Loutro was especially striking for its visible skeleton of tourist infrastructure. The invasion was nigh - and so you had to look your very bluest and whitest.
We bedded down for a night on the beach with some bread, olive paste and rough red wine. Our last town for two days would come in the morning; and we had staked a lot on its furnishing us with provisions. But we were out of season, and they were out of stock. We managed a big loaf of bread, twelve packets of marmalade and a whole lot of water. Well, what we thought was a whole lot of water. Turns out you need to consume a bit more than 1.5L per day when you're heaving a heavy pack up an 85 degree slope...in the sun.
When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations: They Almost Die.
No, I exaggerate; we did run out of water the day after, with a good hour till the destination town. But running out at that point was a deliberate, rationed manoeuvre. It meant skimping on consumption for thirty six hours. And man, was I thirsty. Drinking small amounts of water while thirsty is tantamount to being Tantalus: the dude doomed to perpetual hunger and thirst in the underworld. Except worse, because he had zero satisfaction, whereas we had measured sips of hints of tints of satisfaction with the countdown to full emptiness hanging over us every time we guzzled slightly more than we should have. When we made it to Sougia, I recruited every liquid I could think of: water, coke, orange juice, pear juice, I could have even swallowed litres of my own bodily fluids, if I'd had any to donate to an iced glass. Sweet damp moisture. I'll never be embarrassed about sweating or wetting my bed again. All wetness, produced or consumed, is a hydrated blessing from above.
We took one final hitch to another intermediate mountain village, where a bus would take us back to the cities of dense plenitude, cities, wonderful conglomerations of availability and waste. There is more to tell, but it wouldn't be the same. We came to these cities and all we wanted was to eat, drink, meet - to relieve the backlog caused by deprivation. We thanked Zeus for refilling every slackened branch of vein. We poured libations of raki directly into our mouths. We talked, we traded dollops of conversation. We couldn't get enough.
But you, dear reader, are bloated. Slender emetics and slippery laxatives from here on in. We all have to overcompensate when we've eaten Crete.
Doing a PhD is a bit like working for the man, with one or two fundamental differences: there is no man, and not much work is done. The closest one gets to a pale imitation of the man, at the same time a shabby excuse for work, is through optional participation in the library. The Cambridge Faculty of Classics Library may well be the snapshot of an organisational psychologist's brain at the moment of orgasm. Desks stretch out in perfect monomorphic geometry, as far as the eye can see: and what this eye sees is other eyes seeing it. At your seat, laptop unfolded, a microsoft word document stares into your soul; it's your first love, and there is something mystical in the meeting of face and interface. But sometimes - every half hour? every quarter? - your fingers slip down the trackpad and renew flirtation with the dock. A row of colourful icons springs into life. Which to choose? There can be no choice. Firefox burns brightest in the southern osx sky. One well-aimed click and the benign baby blue and white of standard gmail format pops up. A moment of raised pulse as the number fades into focus: it hasn't changed. Better check again in fifteen minutes. What's happening on the Guardian though? No change. But there's a reputable News service on Facebook right? Click scroll refresh scroll. 'John Smith is enjoying the sun in Mauritius.' 'John Smith has uploaded new photos.' 'John Smith has skin cancer.' Wait. This isn't news. This isn't even information. It's just people spurting their immediate situation all over your mind, leaving it there to fizz and sizzle and quench the spark that wants to burn through the cord connecting you, tangled itself. Your fingers can't unplug themselves from the trackpad. Why am I reading this? Scroll. These are seconds, minutes. Scroll. Refresh. Scroll. Ooh, hang on, that looks interesting.
'Tom Geue wrote another rubbish note that takes ages to get going and then never really gets there in going.'
Sign me up. But not so fast. There's a new set of eyes in the library. I can feel them burrowing straight through the top of my spine and out my adam's apple. The blue square with white 'f' passes straight through my eye-gouged neck. I turn around.
It's my supervisor. For she too works in the library. We all work in the library. It's a big panoptic prison that jolts you awake every time you fall asleep in cyberspace. And who will supervise the supervisors? Other supervisors. The chain goes all the way up to the big supervisor in the sky - s/he has five hundred publications and counting. But even s/he is not immune from supervision, via subvision. I look out and up at the soft white puffs in the blue vault and - rarely, yet every so often - the slow sky browser refreshes to form a giant f. A copy of Plato's Republic lies open in a prominent quarter of the heavens. But I'm not fooled. I've caught God checking facebook.
'John Smith is dying in a horrible natural disaster. God, where are you?'
'Fuck. Better get back to work.'
And we'd better get back to Greece; well, fly in for the first time, through a sky notably devoid of f's. A genuine feature rendering PhD life distinct from the grind is that, provided you're not teaching or seminaring, you can take holidays whenever you want. Not too far, and not for too long; the most vigilant supervisor is actually the one that has a permanent post in your own head...and you can't escape that one. A friend and I were sitting in the pub one night, on a brief but standard form of Cambridge holiday, and we decided we needed a) sun and b) nature. A few more sleeps and we'd booked flights for a week's jaunt to Crete, a place where (so we'd heard) sun and nature cohabited in neighbourly good cheer. It also happened to be the cradle of western civilisation - Zeus was sort of born there, fact - so naturally recommended itself to me as classicist. More to the point, it recommended itself to me as student in the low income sense of the word. Because Crete's a classical land, I was eligible to claim funding from the faculty to go there. If there was an emoticon for 'cash register sound', I'd be threatening to use it right now.
It was the subsidised Romance of a lifetime. Now it would be a stretch to call myself a Hellenist, let alone a Philhellene: the small amount of Ancient Greek I once knew has shrunk to the size of handy supplement to English translation. Plus I think the Romans are way funnier and much more interesting. So I didn't go in with the goosebumps people imagine must form, implied by the poke of outrage: 'You're a CLASSICIST and you haven't been to GREECE?' By no means a die-hard, but not completely lay either, I suppose I was in a good zone to be impressed. And I was - but ruins were only a fragmentary part of it. In six days, my German mountaineer and I covered a good chunk of the island. If it hovered on the reflux line labelled 'more than we could chew' at the time, I can at least digest it for you now.
This was, in half, a walking trip. So we wanted to warm up. I'd learned on my in-flight last-minute research that one of the distinguishing features of the Cretan landscape is the abundance of plateaus. Among the more famous is the Lasithi Plateau, a little south-east of the capital. Ok, bam, that's the destination. But there was an obstacle, which is where this qualifies as a boring plot: no buses were running to the plateau that day. Give up? No way. Not when you're unfurling a plot. So we jumped on a bus to a junction 40 km from our town. Then - nervily, like two migratory birds in the wrong place in the wrong season - we did it: we made a sign. I carved out 'Psihro' in scratchy Greek letters. It would be the first of many signs in our passage from hitching childhood to adolescence. We shyly brandished the sign for forty five minutes, waving it, aiding it with the extension of thumbs, near stepping in front of traffic; all just to get noticed. It was like Hollywood, where the signs are people. The drivers had signs of their own. Sometimes it was the eyes-ahead ignore. Sometimes it was the apologetic look and the mumbling of Greek; I lip-read and deciphered 'I'm making a mockery of you' mostly. Sometimes it was the frenetic pointing at the dashboard, meaning one of the following: 'I'm running out of petrol.' 'I'm not going far from here.' 'I have a dashboard.' All had dashboards, and many had the nerve to point this out. But we couldn't tell for certain. It was a new script. I felt like an impotent archaeologist; I couldn't crack the code. But the end was all too intelligible. No one stopped.
I'll spare the story of how we came to know it (suffice it to say that waiting was the medium), but I'll give you the message: never put an obscure town of tiny population on your sign. For it's more than likely that no one will be going there. (Aside: I'm thinking about a series called something along the lines 'When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations' - this would be the type of thing that would make the cut.) A few changed signs and two lifts later, we sat in the back of a farmer's truck and let the machine climb the hairpin bends for us. We had the wind in our hair, spanners and other miscellaneous lumps of metal jabbing at our coxics, sesame snacks - and we were learning.
I just need to take a moment to dwell on the idea of the plateau, which I didn't really think about before or after reading that 'distinguishing features of Cretan landscape' sentence. The plateau is a land within a land, a microcosm indistinguishable from the macrocosm but for reference to its frame: a ring of high mountains. Flat ground at high altitude; for some reason I find this combination sexy, perhaps because it appeals to the remnants of a childlike treehouse fetish, the longing for a self-contained space up above. And this plateau was hidden among the clouds. You pass into a thick fog on the way up, the turn from ascent to descent your only positioning guide. A few metres down the tortuous track and everything opens up: a vista of verdant green criss-crossed by penstrokes and rectangles. It was like the first entry into a land before time, except this land had windmills and agriculture, and time. We walked the 8 km diameter of the plateau and made it to our town just before sunset, climbing the foothills at the edge to survey the plain in golden light and watch the shadows creep across it further and faster. Our vantage point was the cave of Zeus, supposedly the place where Rhea hid her son (not yet the best god on Olympus) to protect him from his hungry father. The gate was closed. I jumped the fence and knocked on the door, but nobody was home. God is dead, indeed.
From the relative cold and moisture of the mountains we hitched back down to coastal sun, wedged between sacks of animal feed. The locals kindly dropped us on the main road back to the capital, on which we assumed we could jump on a bus within the hour. Wrong, but for good reasons. We had forgotten it was a national holiday (independence day, celebrating the end of Ottoman rule in Greece). This meant: parade, and lots of it. Triumphant trumpets blared over crackly loudspeakers as the youth, the future of Greece, took to the streets and marched in ascending order of age. The litluns were criminally cute: they all took their duty to march in formation very seriously, stomping emphatically and swinging their arms higher than the wide angles of an overexcited pendulum. As we and they moved up the age divisions, the seriousness turned to expert looks of distinterest, ironic smiles and flashed glances. My favourite part was watching the parade disperse, and every participant walking back from where they had come, but broken out of formation and clumped into cliques: sixteen yr old girls linking arms and laughing about how hot Costas looked in his traditional dress. Yep, that's definitely what they were talking about. Damn, Costas.
Back in the capital later than expected, the day was lost; so we decided to try our best to get to another small town on the south coast by nightfall, another victim of the one bus a day rule, one bus which we had missed, or which had never left, never arrived. Again we thought we'd push our luck and bus it to the nearest junction (50 km from the town), then hitch; if we got stuck in the mountains, we'd just have to tent down on an uncomfortable slope. We used our last bit of paper (EasyJet booking reference) to make another sign, walked up to the appropriate road, dumped our bags and settled in for the waiting game while velvet dusk worked its way down. A lift came along pretty quickly, but it only got us a third of the way. We waited an hour or so outside the taverna of the mountain village; five cars passed, and passed us by. Eventually some kind taverna gents came out to help us; the one that could speak a bit of English was from Palestine and had a brother in Melbourne. While his original nationality made him a non-typical example, I encountered the same story again and again over the course of the week: I've got a relative in Melbourne. Never have I felt it more of an advantage to be Australian; though it never secured us special treatment, it always greased the transactions with good smiles. This instance was no exception: within five minutes we were in one of the taverna manager's friends' car, twenty euro lighter, but on our way to where we wanted to go. Which was slightly further away than our mental cartography had admitted.
We were on schedule, always important when travelling with a German. In town by 9, we had a room by 9:30. We strayed off the footpath into someone's backyard, and my friend shouted what we thought was Greek for 'sorry', then asked if they had a room. They had a room. What a room! After a swordfish stop and a pina colada down the docks, I woke in the morning to hints of gleaming sun; just to confirm, I threw the bright blue french doors open and stepped out on the balcony to be smacked in the face by broad beams of heat. It was 8am. It was hot. Apparently Australian troops fighting in Crete in WWII had thought of it as Australia floated north of the equator. I could see why. Sun in the face is, for an Australian, quite possibly the most evocative memory jogger out there. Whole acres of past life bloom from dormancy.
We breakfasted on the pier, stocked up on camping gas and pissweak mediterranean sunscreen ('for pre-tanned skin' - premature of us?), and began our three-day hike. We never thought this would be a walk in Hyde Park; but I don't think either of us quite comprehended the magnitude of the ups and downs, the difficulty of terrain, the rocks and thorns that would bruise scratch and cut into us over and over. But, even for the flesh wounds, this was the most glorious trek I've ever stepped along. After my walkabout in Italy, down a patch of the crowded Ligurian coast, I had decided that the whole perimeter of European seaside was at maximum capacity. But in three days of hiking, we ran into four people. The cliffs, the crags, the gorges and the beaches were ours on exclusive loan.
Initially, we budgeted for a few stops in civilisation: Loutro, a blue and white village accessible solely by foot and boat, would provide the last proper nutrition for a few days. One of the fascinating things about passing through this town and the next was the living construction site that a seasonal tourist culture creates right at this transitional time. A week before official season began, nothing much was open for business; but everything was open for refurbishment. Saws and paintbrushes hustled the day away, while we lingered over lunch. Loutro was especially striking for its visible skeleton of tourist infrastructure. The invasion was nigh - and so you had to look your very bluest and whitest.
We bedded down for a night on the beach with some bread, olive paste and rough red wine. Our last town for two days would come in the morning; and we had staked a lot on its furnishing us with provisions. But we were out of season, and they were out of stock. We managed a big loaf of bread, twelve packets of marmalade and a whole lot of water. Well, what we thought was a whole lot of water. Turns out you need to consume a bit more than 1.5L per day when you're heaving a heavy pack up an 85 degree slope...in the sun.
When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations: They Almost Die.
No, I exaggerate; we did run out of water the day after, with a good hour till the destination town. But running out at that point was a deliberate, rationed manoeuvre. It meant skimping on consumption for thirty six hours. And man, was I thirsty. Drinking small amounts of water while thirsty is tantamount to being Tantalus: the dude doomed to perpetual hunger and thirst in the underworld. Except worse, because he had zero satisfaction, whereas we had measured sips of hints of tints of satisfaction with the countdown to full emptiness hanging over us every time we guzzled slightly more than we should have. When we made it to Sougia, I recruited every liquid I could think of: water, coke, orange juice, pear juice, I could have even swallowed litres of my own bodily fluids, if I'd had any to donate to an iced glass. Sweet damp moisture. I'll never be embarrassed about sweating or wetting my bed again. All wetness, produced or consumed, is a hydrated blessing from above.
We took one final hitch to another intermediate mountain village, where a bus would take us back to the cities of dense plenitude, cities, wonderful conglomerations of availability and waste. There is more to tell, but it wouldn't be the same. We came to these cities and all we wanted was to eat, drink, meet - to relieve the backlog caused by deprivation. We thanked Zeus for refilling every slackened branch of vein. We poured libations of raki directly into our mouths. We talked, we traded dollops of conversation. We couldn't get enough.
But you, dear reader, are bloated. Slender emetics and slippery laxatives from here on in. We all have to overcompensate when we've eaten Crete.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Sicklical Chuckling
Twice upon a time, King's College Cambridge was a free radical. It slept with all the former enemies in quick succession and, in return for the pleasure, it offered access to its bookshelf. Women, state-school flotsam, and - last but not least - communists. Commies stretched as far as the eye could see, columns of revolution that not only did not keep off the grass: they swathed it in red. The sandstone's blush was visible from the moon.
The roseate tinge still seeps into the glasses current King's students look through to connect with their chronically mutinous predecessors. And let it be known from the start: I am one of those students. For the postmodern child, the child of the children of 1968, it's hard to resist the sense of belatedness that hits at the point just after smashing your ipod in frustration at its poor performance and visualising Steve Jobs buried alive in a tomb of malfunctioning tablets. Calm returns, and you hollow out the middle class question: is this it? Did we sell the revolution for cul-de-sac advancements in personal audio?
My cosy position of ironic detachment was threatened a few weeks ago when a revolutionary measure was proposed. On the wall of the King's college bar - in the same shot as the pool table, from whichever angle it's composed - is a sacred item: a painting of the once Soviet flag, yellow hammer and sickle on red background. Prostrate yourselves, faithful. But apparently not everyone is a believer. For a humble suggestion was made: take the thing down. The apocrypha go that a student was leading his/her Russian friend through the bar for the first time, proudly showing off their share of the Cambridge thesaurus. Friend, on catching sight of the painting, immediately broke down in tears; such was the enduring keenness of the wound inflicted by the regime, a painted reproduction of the flag of which adorned the wall of our drinking den. This is where a better person/more deceptive writer would advertise their initial response of sympathy. This is where I don't do that. My knee-jerk (my only knee-jerk?) was to fend it off with ridicule. As a kid, I was traumatised by a Spartan dentist who drilled my teeth and gums into a ground powder of enamel and flesh. But I don't go spluttering every time I see a portrait of a dentist. Indeed, I welcome any attempt to artistically represent this most neglected of subjects. Personal grievances must be suppressed for the art. All for the art. Especially when the genre is barely teething.
It's of course in the nature of a middle-class beneficiary without significant experience of loss or suffering to be dismissive, if not downright flippant, about that of others. Some of the best (or my favourite - what does that say?) comedy emerges from this padded room of middle-class insulation. The problem is that the flippancy never seems to matter because we comfortably classed kids travel in packs. We watch the two-minute guardian wrap on the day's tragedy, donate if they're lucky - and we're done. We make appropriate condemnations for the appropriate time (prescription of mourning periods has always been a funny feature of civilisation), and then we make jokes. None of your friends will pull you up on that slightly-too-soon Haiti crack, and if they do, well, retreat: it was just a joke. With the advent of internet anonymity, it's astounding how small the gap between disaster and japery has become. So narrow that we could go down in history as the generation in which laughter and slaughter became contemporaneous.
The reason I emphasise the shelter of 'just a joke' is that I was surprised - not because it was particularly surprising, but because I'm particularly easily surprised - to find that very tack taken by many of the 'reasonable' students in the college. When the discussion got going on the issue of whether to remove the flag altogether, replace/supplement it with something else, or keep it as is and was (discussion that flared for days, on and off line), I think it would be fair to say that the majority of people in favour of retaining the flag were not rabid reds. They were people that saw a kind of postmodern, self-conscious irony in the exhibition of a gilt-framed communist flag in a space whose very stones were consecrated to unequal distribution of wealth. Not to mention the fact that a symbol of honest manual labour looked out upon a scene of leisure at best, luxuriant over-indulgence at worst. So most 'keepers' saw the joke, or a joke. And I realised what awesome power the definite article has, what an immense social force a joke can be, and what irony in an ironic age can do to really get things done (or prevent them from being done). In-groups are constituted through - among other things - getting the joke. The childhood paranoia about exclusion due to not getting it, getting it too late, or getting it only to realise you don't have it, but it's on you instead - the anxiety round the joke is available for funerals and nightmares. Now I'm just parodying Freud. Even though I haven't read Freud. Geez, don't you get it?
The power became noticeable because I felt it acting on me. Before this issue arose, I'd never thought of the painting as more than a quirky feature whose presence made us feel better about apathy. Perhaps I intuited that there was something fishily ironic going on here - but I didn't feel further brain investment necessary. When the ironic campaigners set off, however, I immediately jumped on board. Pfft. Yeah. Of course it's ironic. Isn't it obvious? Whether you're for or against, if you don't find this whole situation funny, you're not reading it properly. Lighten up, square. No one likes a square. Round up and fit in our nice ironic hole, why don't ya?
Don't get me wrong. We're living in the ironic age - that's post-iron age if you're talking archaeologically - and I'm an ironic child. But the guilty problem I grapple with every day, in life and work (Juvenal is just joking when he's all misogynistic, right?), is that irony is impossible to argue with. The ironists have won. A jokey interpretation will always trump a serious interpretation because it ranks higher on the 'get it' meter: to see irony is a distinguishing marker of sophistication and intelligence. It's the knowing glance between artist and 'responder', the contract that wins the critical points. It connects people that get it. And call me elitist - thanks, I've heard you, now you can stop - but I can't help wanting to be part of the it-crowd. I shuffle over to the wry smiles almost spontaneously. I want to be close to the distance of the laugh. I can't bring myself to risk sincerity.
The votes were counted and the flag remains. My devout socialist friend was delivered the results through an i-Phone. He sprang up and began to hug members of his own it-crowd: 'We won! We won!' I didn't have the heart to tell him it was an ironist victory. That would have been far too serious indeed.
The roseate tinge still seeps into the glasses current King's students look through to connect with their chronically mutinous predecessors. And let it be known from the start: I am one of those students. For the postmodern child, the child of the children of 1968, it's hard to resist the sense of belatedness that hits at the point just after smashing your ipod in frustration at its poor performance and visualising Steve Jobs buried alive in a tomb of malfunctioning tablets. Calm returns, and you hollow out the middle class question: is this it? Did we sell the revolution for cul-de-sac advancements in personal audio?
My cosy position of ironic detachment was threatened a few weeks ago when a revolutionary measure was proposed. On the wall of the King's college bar - in the same shot as the pool table, from whichever angle it's composed - is a sacred item: a painting of the once Soviet flag, yellow hammer and sickle on red background. Prostrate yourselves, faithful. But apparently not everyone is a believer. For a humble suggestion was made: take the thing down. The apocrypha go that a student was leading his/her Russian friend through the bar for the first time, proudly showing off their share of the Cambridge thesaurus. Friend, on catching sight of the painting, immediately broke down in tears; such was the enduring keenness of the wound inflicted by the regime, a painted reproduction of the flag of which adorned the wall of our drinking den. This is where a better person/more deceptive writer would advertise their initial response of sympathy. This is where I don't do that. My knee-jerk (my only knee-jerk?) was to fend it off with ridicule. As a kid, I was traumatised by a Spartan dentist who drilled my teeth and gums into a ground powder of enamel and flesh. But I don't go spluttering every time I see a portrait of a dentist. Indeed, I welcome any attempt to artistically represent this most neglected of subjects. Personal grievances must be suppressed for the art. All for the art. Especially when the genre is barely teething.
It's of course in the nature of a middle-class beneficiary without significant experience of loss or suffering to be dismissive, if not downright flippant, about that of others. Some of the best (or my favourite - what does that say?) comedy emerges from this padded room of middle-class insulation. The problem is that the flippancy never seems to matter because we comfortably classed kids travel in packs. We watch the two-minute guardian wrap on the day's tragedy, donate if they're lucky - and we're done. We make appropriate condemnations for the appropriate time (prescription of mourning periods has always been a funny feature of civilisation), and then we make jokes. None of your friends will pull you up on that slightly-too-soon Haiti crack, and if they do, well, retreat: it was just a joke. With the advent of internet anonymity, it's astounding how small the gap between disaster and japery has become. So narrow that we could go down in history as the generation in which laughter and slaughter became contemporaneous.
The reason I emphasise the shelter of 'just a joke' is that I was surprised - not because it was particularly surprising, but because I'm particularly easily surprised - to find that very tack taken by many of the 'reasonable' students in the college. When the discussion got going on the issue of whether to remove the flag altogether, replace/supplement it with something else, or keep it as is and was (discussion that flared for days, on and off line), I think it would be fair to say that the majority of people in favour of retaining the flag were not rabid reds. They were people that saw a kind of postmodern, self-conscious irony in the exhibition of a gilt-framed communist flag in a space whose very stones were consecrated to unequal distribution of wealth. Not to mention the fact that a symbol of honest manual labour looked out upon a scene of leisure at best, luxuriant over-indulgence at worst. So most 'keepers' saw the joke, or a joke. And I realised what awesome power the definite article has, what an immense social force a joke can be, and what irony in an ironic age can do to really get things done (or prevent them from being done). In-groups are constituted through - among other things - getting the joke. The childhood paranoia about exclusion due to not getting it, getting it too late, or getting it only to realise you don't have it, but it's on you instead - the anxiety round the joke is available for funerals and nightmares. Now I'm just parodying Freud. Even though I haven't read Freud. Geez, don't you get it?
The power became noticeable because I felt it acting on me. Before this issue arose, I'd never thought of the painting as more than a quirky feature whose presence made us feel better about apathy. Perhaps I intuited that there was something fishily ironic going on here - but I didn't feel further brain investment necessary. When the ironic campaigners set off, however, I immediately jumped on board. Pfft. Yeah. Of course it's ironic. Isn't it obvious? Whether you're for or against, if you don't find this whole situation funny, you're not reading it properly. Lighten up, square. No one likes a square. Round up and fit in our nice ironic hole, why don't ya?
Don't get me wrong. We're living in the ironic age - that's post-iron age if you're talking archaeologically - and I'm an ironic child. But the guilty problem I grapple with every day, in life and work (Juvenal is just joking when he's all misogynistic, right?), is that irony is impossible to argue with. The ironists have won. A jokey interpretation will always trump a serious interpretation because it ranks higher on the 'get it' meter: to see irony is a distinguishing marker of sophistication and intelligence. It's the knowing glance between artist and 'responder', the contract that wins the critical points. It connects people that get it. And call me elitist - thanks, I've heard you, now you can stop - but I can't help wanting to be part of the it-crowd. I shuffle over to the wry smiles almost spontaneously. I want to be close to the distance of the laugh. I can't bring myself to risk sincerity.
The votes were counted and the flag remains. My devout socialist friend was delivered the results through an i-Phone. He sprang up and began to hug members of his own it-crowd: 'We won! We won!' I didn't have the heart to tell him it was an ironist victory. That would have been far too serious indeed.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Elephant Skeletons in the Closet Room
The right moment for the monthly post has long passed, but here I am, left with a curious dilemma: the referent of my 'here' has switched hemispheres. The danger of cultivating a routine is that, should the routine break down, or be written off entirely, you're singularly unprepared for dealing with it...because you've become very good at maintenance, woeful at innovation. When my menstrual body clock is angling for some verbal flow, ordinarily I find something mundane and Cambridgey to talk about. But what to do now that I'm back in...Australia? Surely separation throws a spanner in my authority to talk of towers and acceptable autism. Writing about Cambridge now would be tantamount to writing about the Romans: a remote subject without the redeeming aid of autopsy. A futile pursuit. Combine this with the fact of my ailing imagination. Sometimes I sit in front of my computer trying to create objects from scratch - you know, weird animals and stuff - and all I get is a mouse with the head of a computer (even the range of animals is narrowed by the semantic greed of technology), a man with a pillow for a bum, a giraffe crossed with a desk. I think I'm heading for the imaginative ground zero whereat the only thoughts you can have are dictated by your immediate environment, and all they are, are names: 'curtain', 'fan', 'floor'. Right now I could probably manage a thought of modest epigram dimensions, but the containers are shrinking every day. And the last Russian Doll is hollow anyway!
We've quite obviously changed topic. So let's move cities.
To Sydney, Christmas Day, 2009: drizzle does a convincing visual impression of England, and it might have carried it off, if not for the short and shirt signposts of humidity, the enemy of those trying to keep up the dramatic illusion of green Buckinghamshire in the semi-tropical colonies since 1788. Like a flashy rolex in a period film, sweat gives the game away every time. It was a blast from the past for me: salads as far as the eye could see, my aunt's famous bean dish, one terabite of meat, red, white and pink. Two plates later, on went the fly guards and out came the tiramisu and mango ice-cream, coffee so strong it dissolved your food for you and burnt the image into the walls of your lower stomach (a hint of grappa to give some real kick), and finally, some port for dad, who definitely wasn't driving. Mutatis mutandis, it was much as I remembered it: a sustained exercise in forced consumption. The indigestion is self-feeding: as stomach fills and lethargy grows, you're even less equipped to defy the command from above to eat again. For Aunt and Uncle, bless 'em, seconds are never questions. They are vehement, military statements. Speech acts that whack you on the widening arse and wobble you towards the serving spoons of never-ending more.
Weaned off the dripping udders, I had to chase away the withdrawal either by siesta or bustling activity. I jumped on the latter, for my mind had been pressed for weeks by mother's gentle suggestions that I clean the junk out of my old room - all of which had been flung into the wardrobe over the years in a desperate strategy confusing problem solution with solution deferral. In addition to the longer term accumulations, there was also the rubble of an impressive last minute effort at storage before I left for Cambridge: clothes I had put in the 'probably never wear this again but just in case because I wore it once and for this reason has sentimental value' category brushed shoulders with past HSC Latin exams...which also received mercy from 'in a rush, can't trust judgement, don't be hasty, might need them' thought processes. There were precious bank statements and phone bills dog-eared into my abortion of an expandable file. Complete with envelopes. Keeping bank statements - ok, perhaps still excusable, but definitely approaching the anal end of the sphincter spectrum in this online age. But keeping the envelopes? The worst thing was that my collecting mania wasn't even ob-compulsively comprehensive. Phone bills from June and December were there. Envelopes from June, Augustus and December were there. My hoarding was only superficially effective. Everything was crammed into the reusable green supermarket bags which were all the rage at the time. No order was discernible; the only governing principle was opportunistic utilisation of space. If it was empty, I filled it.
And that was only the top stratum in the unique geology of my wardrobe - time-capsuled, the thing would have baffled scientists of 2500. It would have baffled scientists of 2010. The upper compartment was packed with every bit of paper I had ever collected during my later school and early university life. So very many trees, felled so that I could: churn out practice papers for extension maths in the shade of uneven parabolas, gain very vadose understanding of physics but follow a syllabus to the dot-pointed letter, write sophistic aphorisms in the back of my first year English lecture book which were designed to distil the TRUTH I had learnt that very term: 'The uncertainty of existence exists as a certainty.' No joke. That was scrawled across the back of my book, given pride of place in the structurally important cardboard section. The embarassment isn't even remedied by placement amid more obviously spontaneous squiggles and vandalistic wisdom, of the kind that appeared on my Yr 10 pencil case: 'Nazis are Gay.' I'm sure I recognised the self-confuting humour in that at the time. Anyway, you can have that little gem of an insight - and hold onto it, because it took about 24 lectures, lots of French Revolution reading, a bit of Victorian poetry, and Heart of Darkness to craft it - for your kids if you like. I'll throw in 'Nazis are Gay' at no extra cost. Just be sure to quote your source (there's no such thing as free wisdom): the Sydney-based philosopher Tom Geue. You know he wrote them at 18 and 15 respectively? Precocious insight!
While the fact that you could find exact replicas of these nuggets cloned across numerous exercise books and pencil cases throughout the adolescent world doesn't breed nostalgia in itself, the feeling that engendered the nuggets does. The misapprehension I laboured beneath as a youth - that I really had life pegged - produced some entertaining cliches, sure. But an enabling spirit and enquiring mind gave rise to moments of genuine wonder, palpable excitement. I remember sitting on the front lawns of USyd, reading my Norton Anthology of English Literature, pencilling the odd annotation in my variable handwriting, the legibility of which was inversely proportional to the importance I invested in it. My body started to tingle and I knew I was on the edge. Suddenly, lightning struck brain, and I could 'see' what it was all about, like innumerable identical sheets on an overhead projector, randomly coalescing into one after eons of manual manipulation. Moments like those, I'm certain - can we suspend my all-embracing dictum, or is it water-tight? - caused me to incise the cardboard with a nib of fool's gold. I could leave the product. But fark, what I would give to feel that galvanic force of enthusiasm coursing through veins, pumping life into and extracting interest from everything!
That enthusiasm is still there, somewhere. But the appetite for omniscience has been stapled with a kind of prohibition: an awareness of its own limitations. Clearing out a space I used to inhabit has given me a sense of loss far, far beyond the donation section of the charity shop. Buried with the dead, processed trees, gathering dust and fallen clumps of ceiling vermiculite along with them, was my former zest - displaced by a tempering cynicism which had tricked me into thinking it had always been there. Ousting skeletons from the closet often uncovers elephants in the room.
Appendix
I also struck an unpublished seam formed in the heyday of my rap career. Tons of poor metrics and backing myself into tight rhyme corners. I think it was begun with a future 'Team Cool' project in mind - 'Team Cool' being our rap crew of four members. G-Real, Slav Daddy, D-Rock, and myself, the Toad. Editorial commentary in square brackets. Enjoy.
Yo, yo, yo...
Well it's the universal entity, structural anomaly
Designed for you dissers who diss us while playing monopoly,
Vocalised integrity, Team Cool will give you dysentery,
Galvanising microphones like energiser batteries, [getting out of it with a simile - clever]
Hey, ho, what's the word Slav diddy?
You mean to say this quarter pounder only cost a fiddy?
We'll bust it right and take it down as if it were a middy [a relatively small measure of beer served in Australian pubs)
And though we sure ain't wiggidy, we enjoy gettin' giddy,
Coz giddy's for the kiddies that can't afford the moon, [the meaning of this is obscure]
Big Toddler blast you off with a few litres of goon, [Australian slang for cask wine]
Stanley our compadre gets a monetary boon [Stanley is a famous and particularly execrable variety of goon]
Every time, everywhere you see a Tizzle Cizzle hoon [Tizzle Cizzle = Snoop Dogg speak for Team Cool]
To all you bottled MC's, heed these rhymes as decrees [bottled - a pointed reference to rich peoples' tendency to drink bottled wine, but also their tendency to repression and narrow rhyming]
You can never inflate the silver cushion for your knees [goon is traditionally packaged in a silver bag]
Please, please Mr Venerable Bede [I think I'd been reading Simon Schama. I've definitely never read Venerable Bede.]
Chronicle the history of these sinners by degrees,
Condemn their capacity to pay full uni-fees [I too could have paid, being firmly middle class, but they let me in for free on account of the quality of my rhymes]
Rebuke the posing potentates with unrelenting bees [can you rebuke someone with bees? Whatever the answer, bees surely rhymes with fees]
Send them overseas, throw away the keys [awkward conflation of exile and prison metaphors]
Wealth and social conscience will play out the final scene [The meaning of this is obscure]
So if your school is private, beware the team's wrath [ooh, political]
Incurred coz we're sick of equality for the froth [Cf. the sentiment in George Orwell's Animal Farm: 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Patently an allusion to this, given the next rhyme.]
Of society, piety has no place in the troff [sic - variant spellings of 'trough' were common among rap artists of this period]
Here the text as we have it breaks off. Scholarship worldwide can only mourn the loss.
We've quite obviously changed topic. So let's move cities.
To Sydney, Christmas Day, 2009: drizzle does a convincing visual impression of England, and it might have carried it off, if not for the short and shirt signposts of humidity, the enemy of those trying to keep up the dramatic illusion of green Buckinghamshire in the semi-tropical colonies since 1788. Like a flashy rolex in a period film, sweat gives the game away every time. It was a blast from the past for me: salads as far as the eye could see, my aunt's famous bean dish, one terabite of meat, red, white and pink. Two plates later, on went the fly guards and out came the tiramisu and mango ice-cream, coffee so strong it dissolved your food for you and burnt the image into the walls of your lower stomach (a hint of grappa to give some real kick), and finally, some port for dad, who definitely wasn't driving. Mutatis mutandis, it was much as I remembered it: a sustained exercise in forced consumption. The indigestion is self-feeding: as stomach fills and lethargy grows, you're even less equipped to defy the command from above to eat again. For Aunt and Uncle, bless 'em, seconds are never questions. They are vehement, military statements. Speech acts that whack you on the widening arse and wobble you towards the serving spoons of never-ending more.
Weaned off the dripping udders, I had to chase away the withdrawal either by siesta or bustling activity. I jumped on the latter, for my mind had been pressed for weeks by mother's gentle suggestions that I clean the junk out of my old room - all of which had been flung into the wardrobe over the years in a desperate strategy confusing problem solution with solution deferral. In addition to the longer term accumulations, there was also the rubble of an impressive last minute effort at storage before I left for Cambridge: clothes I had put in the 'probably never wear this again but just in case because I wore it once and for this reason has sentimental value' category brushed shoulders with past HSC Latin exams...which also received mercy from 'in a rush, can't trust judgement, don't be hasty, might need them' thought processes. There were precious bank statements and phone bills dog-eared into my abortion of an expandable file. Complete with envelopes. Keeping bank statements - ok, perhaps still excusable, but definitely approaching the anal end of the sphincter spectrum in this online age. But keeping the envelopes? The worst thing was that my collecting mania wasn't even ob-compulsively comprehensive. Phone bills from June and December were there. Envelopes from June, Augustus and December were there. My hoarding was only superficially effective. Everything was crammed into the reusable green supermarket bags which were all the rage at the time. No order was discernible; the only governing principle was opportunistic utilisation of space. If it was empty, I filled it.
And that was only the top stratum in the unique geology of my wardrobe - time-capsuled, the thing would have baffled scientists of 2500. It would have baffled scientists of 2010. The upper compartment was packed with every bit of paper I had ever collected during my later school and early university life. So very many trees, felled so that I could: churn out practice papers for extension maths in the shade of uneven parabolas, gain very vadose understanding of physics but follow a syllabus to the dot-pointed letter, write sophistic aphorisms in the back of my first year English lecture book which were designed to distil the TRUTH I had learnt that very term: 'The uncertainty of existence exists as a certainty.' No joke. That was scrawled across the back of my book, given pride of place in the structurally important cardboard section. The embarassment isn't even remedied by placement amid more obviously spontaneous squiggles and vandalistic wisdom, of the kind that appeared on my Yr 10 pencil case: 'Nazis are Gay.' I'm sure I recognised the self-confuting humour in that at the time. Anyway, you can have that little gem of an insight - and hold onto it, because it took about 24 lectures, lots of French Revolution reading, a bit of Victorian poetry, and Heart of Darkness to craft it - for your kids if you like. I'll throw in 'Nazis are Gay' at no extra cost. Just be sure to quote your source (there's no such thing as free wisdom): the Sydney-based philosopher Tom Geue. You know he wrote them at 18 and 15 respectively? Precocious insight!
While the fact that you could find exact replicas of these nuggets cloned across numerous exercise books and pencil cases throughout the adolescent world doesn't breed nostalgia in itself, the feeling that engendered the nuggets does. The misapprehension I laboured beneath as a youth - that I really had life pegged - produced some entertaining cliches, sure. But an enabling spirit and enquiring mind gave rise to moments of genuine wonder, palpable excitement. I remember sitting on the front lawns of USyd, reading my Norton Anthology of English Literature, pencilling the odd annotation in my variable handwriting, the legibility of which was inversely proportional to the importance I invested in it. My body started to tingle and I knew I was on the edge. Suddenly, lightning struck brain, and I could 'see' what it was all about, like innumerable identical sheets on an overhead projector, randomly coalescing into one after eons of manual manipulation. Moments like those, I'm certain - can we suspend my all-embracing dictum, or is it water-tight? - caused me to incise the cardboard with a nib of fool's gold. I could leave the product. But fark, what I would give to feel that galvanic force of enthusiasm coursing through veins, pumping life into and extracting interest from everything!
That enthusiasm is still there, somewhere. But the appetite for omniscience has been stapled with a kind of prohibition: an awareness of its own limitations. Clearing out a space I used to inhabit has given me a sense of loss far, far beyond the donation section of the charity shop. Buried with the dead, processed trees, gathering dust and fallen clumps of ceiling vermiculite along with them, was my former zest - displaced by a tempering cynicism which had tricked me into thinking it had always been there. Ousting skeletons from the closet often uncovers elephants in the room.
Appendix
I also struck an unpublished seam formed in the heyday of my rap career. Tons of poor metrics and backing myself into tight rhyme corners. I think it was begun with a future 'Team Cool' project in mind - 'Team Cool' being our rap crew of four members. G-Real, Slav Daddy, D-Rock, and myself, the Toad. Editorial commentary in square brackets. Enjoy.
Yo, yo, yo...
Well it's the universal entity, structural anomaly
Designed for you dissers who diss us while playing monopoly,
Vocalised integrity, Team Cool will give you dysentery,
Galvanising microphones like energiser batteries, [getting out of it with a simile - clever]
Hey, ho, what's the word Slav diddy?
You mean to say this quarter pounder only cost a fiddy?
We'll bust it right and take it down as if it were a middy [a relatively small measure of beer served in Australian pubs)
And though we sure ain't wiggidy, we enjoy gettin' giddy,
Coz giddy's for the kiddies that can't afford the moon, [the meaning of this is obscure]
Big Toddler blast you off with a few litres of goon, [Australian slang for cask wine]
Stanley our compadre gets a monetary boon [Stanley is a famous and particularly execrable variety of goon]
Every time, everywhere you see a Tizzle Cizzle hoon [Tizzle Cizzle = Snoop Dogg speak for Team Cool]
To all you bottled MC's, heed these rhymes as decrees [bottled - a pointed reference to rich peoples' tendency to drink bottled wine, but also their tendency to repression and narrow rhyming]
You can never inflate the silver cushion for your knees [goon is traditionally packaged in a silver bag]
Please, please Mr Venerable Bede [I think I'd been reading Simon Schama. I've definitely never read Venerable Bede.]
Chronicle the history of these sinners by degrees,
Condemn their capacity to pay full uni-fees [I too could have paid, being firmly middle class, but they let me in for free on account of the quality of my rhymes]
Rebuke the posing potentates with unrelenting bees [can you rebuke someone with bees? Whatever the answer, bees surely rhymes with fees]
Send them overseas, throw away the keys [awkward conflation of exile and prison metaphors]
Wealth and social conscience will play out the final scene [The meaning of this is obscure]
So if your school is private, beware the team's wrath [ooh, political]
Incurred coz we're sick of equality for the froth [Cf. the sentiment in George Orwell's Animal Farm: 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Patently an allusion to this, given the next rhyme.]
Of society, piety has no place in the troff [sic - variant spellings of 'trough' were common among rap artists of this period]
Here the text as we have it breaks off. Scholarship worldwide can only mourn the loss.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Seminars II - The Giving
So it must have been approximately this time last year when I - dazzled and fuddled by a newer older University with a more capital U - blogged the powerpoint (should be a dirty word) out of 'the seminar'. Aah, it was all so wonderfully novel back then. The leaves floated down from the stiffening branches, slowly, delicately, until the last remnant of clinging foliage took the plunge and gave itself up to be ground into earth by an indifferent bicycle wheel. The browns turned grey. And yet it was the stuff of life. Because I didn't yet realise that this happened every year.
Anyway, 'approximately this time' is a bit of disingenuous romantic uncertainty for ya; of course I could just look up the post and the accurate time-and-date stamp would do the rest. You have to work to recreate the pleasant melancholic fuzziness of memory in this digital age. I (choose to) imperfectly recall that I framed for you a window onto the range of seminar experience available to the diligent Cambridge attendee - from the vantage point of the audience. Now comes the vengeance. This time I'm going to look down my nose onto a piece of paper in front of me, crammed with neat paragraphs of right justified 12 point times new roman, and occasionally make eye contact with you. If you're lucky. I'm going to make you listen by the sheer force of declamation and visual centrality of the speaker's platform. I'm going to give you a lecture dressed up as a seminar dressed up as a blog. The only difference being: when it's so overdressed, you don't have to listen. That is, the advantage of reading is that you can abuse me without risking an awkward moment in the post-seminar pub. 'Hey Tom, shut up.' 'Er...just stop reading.' 'Oh yeah. That's better.' Silence.
Look who comes crawling back. Exploiting your mouse-scrolling desire for narrative. How cheap of me. But I've never held words too dear...have I?
So, this term has been all about giving oral over receiving aural. In my bright-eyed 'First Yr PhD - Yeah!' hat, I stupidly signed up to give three papers within four weeks. The overall arc went nicely: the first felt good, the second took a dive, the third rallied and almost held an untenable fort. It was a seminal reproduction of that form introduced to me in a teacher training day last year as the 'criticism sandwich': fine, shit, fine. As long as the bread is intact, the filling will be rendered tolerable...even if it's the scrapings of a dying goat's anus (primary source of goat's cheese. Fact.).
The graph also showed a neat upwards movement when nerves were plotted against time. The first presentation was the neural nadir: a King's Lunchtime Seminar. This is run in college by graduates/for graduates over a free lunch of bagels/fruit/juice; the formula of nourishing mind and belly simultaneously is, to my mind and belly, a winning one. It usually nabs about twenty people of widely divergent academic backgrounds as audience. Keep it General's the guiding principle. The papers themselves reflect the sprawl; look across any given weeks and you're sure to find priceless juxtapositions. For example, my paper, on a poem of Ovid published in 8CE, was followed the next week by a pimping expose of the straw-plaiting industry in 19th century Hertfordshire. Yes, we get paid. Yes, it's important.
A good (?) outcome to emerge from the exercise was my induction into the brave new world: I used powerpoint for the very first time. And what a time. Because the stuff I do is very, very textual, the only images I can ever justify including are very, very tangential; in other words, lack of graphs and tables = license to fun. I've always had an appreciation for google images, but never quite tested the depth of potential humour released when the relation of equivalence between word and image goes horribly wrong. I'm talking about the server-exploding moments when you type in a weird phrase which is converted into a picture ten times juicier than any fruit of the human imagination. I entered 'Latin Water Cup Full' (long story), the computer paused in thought, then deemed it best to offer me an image of: Darth Vader's head at the dinner table, about to dive into a bowl of nachos. Surely it's for this, rather than any meagre 'utility', that the world's greatest search engine should be praised to the star(war)s.
Most of the images I unearthed went down well, apart from the climactic one. I was doing a bit about Ovid's exile to Romania. I could have served up a map I suppose; but geography is rarely striking. So I scanned pages of results and finally hit on the killer:
I thought it was funny. More so (or less so) because there were no Romanians in the room. So it had a tinge of cheap Borat-style 'let's laugh at overweight eastern europeans' about it; a synonym for charm, I would have said. Anyway, muffled laughter was mingled with gentle, egg-and-mayonnaise dribbling disgust. I lingered on him for a few seconds and mercifully took him away. Such are the laws of British etiquette: a scantily clad Romanian ambassador may not be viewed while eating.
I didn't quite get away with that, to be sure. But I find that being Australian definitely works in one's favour when trying to push the boundaries in this country. The stereotype of uncouthness is one with and inside which I'm quite happy to work. On the other hand, with great power to offend-without-offense comes great responsibility; and I think an inflated sense of this power had a small hand in the downfall of my next seminar. This was the GIS (Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar - pronounced 'Jizz', and the phonic connection may prove fertile...), an intra-classics faculty meeting of graduate minds. High on my new ability to manipulate a sliding powerpoint story, I filled this one with visual jokes to complement the verbal: I metaphorised the sticky task of interpreting Virgil's Eclogues into the process of immersing one's hand in cowpat. Yep, image of poo on-screen and on-duty. To explain: the Eclogues are poems broadly re herdsmen milling about in the countryside, so when we critics navigate their world, we're bound to get caught in a fresh pile of shit at times. Like a fat Romanian from a diving platform, toilet humour flopped - as did most of the other jokes. I also grossly overestimated people's knowledge of the material (for which I duly kicked myself...because it's one of my own pet (cow) peeves of academia that everyone assumes that people will have thought about exactly the same things as them for the last five years). And I went too fast. The freshly laid waste-egg became an unintended icon for my paper, as no-one asked questions afterwards (the sure measure of paper-flop), and it all went to shit.
The next and last was the most important and quakeworthy: THE faculty literature seminar, where all the profs congregate to fall asleep and destroy arguments at the same time. No powerpoint this time. Just sobre paper handouts. But it wasn't all black and white. I couldn't resist rubbing a few jokes in to the texture - and a few laughs were won. Sure, I didn't raise the roof like an early Eddie Murphy. But people warmed more than expected. Criticisms were, perhaps, even funnier: one prof told me to deliver 15% more slowly, another that I should read metrically (i.e. according to the rhythmic pattern of the verse), because I was mispronouncing all of my Latin. It takes more than playing Cicero in a Latin musical to fool the keen Cambridge ear.
So the tour dates are technically gone. But if you have a spare forty-five minutes, I'd be happy to give a repeat performance. I'm still learning the ABC's of oral packaging, which is why I'll gladly send you straight to...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Anyway, 'approximately this time' is a bit of disingenuous romantic uncertainty for ya; of course I could just look up the post and the accurate time-and-date stamp would do the rest. You have to work to recreate the pleasant melancholic fuzziness of memory in this digital age. I (choose to) imperfectly recall that I framed for you a window onto the range of seminar experience available to the diligent Cambridge attendee - from the vantage point of the audience. Now comes the vengeance. This time I'm going to look down my nose onto a piece of paper in front of me, crammed with neat paragraphs of right justified 12 point times new roman, and occasionally make eye contact with you. If you're lucky. I'm going to make you listen by the sheer force of declamation and visual centrality of the speaker's platform. I'm going to give you a lecture dressed up as a seminar dressed up as a blog. The only difference being: when it's so overdressed, you don't have to listen. That is, the advantage of reading is that you can abuse me without risking an awkward moment in the post-seminar pub. 'Hey Tom, shut up.' 'Er...just stop reading.' 'Oh yeah. That's better.' Silence.
Look who comes crawling back. Exploiting your mouse-scrolling desire for narrative. How cheap of me. But I've never held words too dear...have I?
So, this term has been all about giving oral over receiving aural. In my bright-eyed 'First Yr PhD - Yeah!' hat, I stupidly signed up to give three papers within four weeks. The overall arc went nicely: the first felt good, the second took a dive, the third rallied and almost held an untenable fort. It was a seminal reproduction of that form introduced to me in a teacher training day last year as the 'criticism sandwich': fine, shit, fine. As long as the bread is intact, the filling will be rendered tolerable...even if it's the scrapings of a dying goat's anus (primary source of goat's cheese. Fact.).
The graph also showed a neat upwards movement when nerves were plotted against time. The first presentation was the neural nadir: a King's Lunchtime Seminar. This is run in college by graduates/for graduates over a free lunch of bagels/fruit/juice; the formula of nourishing mind and belly simultaneously is, to my mind and belly, a winning one. It usually nabs about twenty people of widely divergent academic backgrounds as audience. Keep it General's the guiding principle. The papers themselves reflect the sprawl; look across any given weeks and you're sure to find priceless juxtapositions. For example, my paper, on a poem of Ovid published in 8CE, was followed the next week by a pimping expose of the straw-plaiting industry in 19th century Hertfordshire. Yes, we get paid. Yes, it's important.
A good (?) outcome to emerge from the exercise was my induction into the brave new world: I used powerpoint for the very first time. And what a time. Because the stuff I do is very, very textual, the only images I can ever justify including are very, very tangential; in other words, lack of graphs and tables = license to fun. I've always had an appreciation for google images, but never quite tested the depth of potential humour released when the relation of equivalence between word and image goes horribly wrong. I'm talking about the server-exploding moments when you type in a weird phrase which is converted into a picture ten times juicier than any fruit of the human imagination. I entered 'Latin Water Cup Full' (long story), the computer paused in thought, then deemed it best to offer me an image of: Darth Vader's head at the dinner table, about to dive into a bowl of nachos. Surely it's for this, rather than any meagre 'utility', that the world's greatest search engine should be praised to the star(war)s.
Most of the images I unearthed went down well, apart from the climactic one. I was doing a bit about Ovid's exile to Romania. I could have served up a map I suppose; but geography is rarely striking. So I scanned pages of results and finally hit on the killer:
I thought it was funny. More so (or less so) because there were no Romanians in the room. So it had a tinge of cheap Borat-style 'let's laugh at overweight eastern europeans' about it; a synonym for charm, I would have said. Anyway, muffled laughter was mingled with gentle, egg-and-mayonnaise dribbling disgust. I lingered on him for a few seconds and mercifully took him away. Such are the laws of British etiquette: a scantily clad Romanian ambassador may not be viewed while eating.
I didn't quite get away with that, to be sure. But I find that being Australian definitely works in one's favour when trying to push the boundaries in this country. The stereotype of uncouthness is one with and inside which I'm quite happy to work. On the other hand, with great power to offend-without-offense comes great responsibility; and I think an inflated sense of this power had a small hand in the downfall of my next seminar. This was the GIS (Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar - pronounced 'Jizz', and the phonic connection may prove fertile...), an intra-classics faculty meeting of graduate minds. High on my new ability to manipulate a sliding powerpoint story, I filled this one with visual jokes to complement the verbal: I metaphorised the sticky task of interpreting Virgil's Eclogues into the process of immersing one's hand in cowpat. Yep, image of poo on-screen and on-duty. To explain: the Eclogues are poems broadly re herdsmen milling about in the countryside, so when we critics navigate their world, we're bound to get caught in a fresh pile of shit at times. Like a fat Romanian from a diving platform, toilet humour flopped - as did most of the other jokes. I also grossly overestimated people's knowledge of the material (for which I duly kicked myself...because it's one of my own pet (cow) peeves of academia that everyone assumes that people will have thought about exactly the same things as them for the last five years). And I went too fast. The freshly laid waste-egg became an unintended icon for my paper, as no-one asked questions afterwards (the sure measure of paper-flop), and it all went to shit.
The next and last was the most important and quakeworthy: THE faculty literature seminar, where all the profs congregate to fall asleep and destroy arguments at the same time. No powerpoint this time. Just sobre paper handouts. But it wasn't all black and white. I couldn't resist rubbing a few jokes in to the texture - and a few laughs were won. Sure, I didn't raise the roof like an early Eddie Murphy. But people warmed more than expected. Criticisms were, perhaps, even funnier: one prof told me to deliver 15% more slowly, another that I should read metrically (i.e. according to the rhythmic pattern of the verse), because I was mispronouncing all of my Latin. It takes more than playing Cicero in a Latin musical to fool the keen Cambridge ear.
So the tour dates are technically gone. But if you have a spare forty-five minutes, I'd be happy to give a repeat performance. I'm still learning the ABC's of oral packaging, which is why I'll gladly send you straight to...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Saturday, October 24, 2009
A round year, squared
You can safely infer from my silence over the last two months the following: I fell into a coma after the previous apoplectic rant and have only just now woken up. Or per'aps the silence went unnoticed, or seemed so indistinguishable from the white background noise of the blog itself that it was mistaken for a post. In fact, I'll claim that. I felt the genre to be fatigued and in need of regeneration, so I posted two months worth of absence-of-posts. Space is interesting, and that's a vacuum. Thus it follows that nothingness is, for the blog, the final frontier.
Which takes this back down to earth. Apologies for the interval, but, contrary to usual reasons of sloth, this time it's justified. Loads has gone down inside the respiring Cambridge animal over this period of cyber-quietude; alas, it's often hard to prevent stuff from stealing writing-about-stuff's thunder, or vice versa. Only so many hours in a day ordinarily, and a fraction of these are cultivatable. But of late, there have been even less in a day. It's not just the shrinking northern sun. As I dance the two-fingered keyboard duet, the view has changed completely. From the strange twilight zone of West Cambridge, where the juggernaut of an endowment bears fruit in brand new apartment blocks, conference centres, faculties of William Gates, I've flung myself to the other side of town. East side. Wrong side of the tracks (I do have to cross a railway bridge to get here, so comparison not entirely facetious). I'm now in the slightly less-monied neighbourhood of Romsey, where live slightly more-diversed peoples. Though Cambridge's answer to multicultural hotspot is still a bit muted and imbued with a 'stuff-white-people-like' - me included - smell of asian grocers and moroccan restaurants and charity shops, it definitely feels less unreal than bells hourly bouncing off chapel spires and eighty-year old dons overtaking you on their bikes. This is Mecca for students who symbolically reject all that the privileged intra-college life has to offer by living - gulp - outside the ring road. Usually because our colleges didn't have any accommodation to spare. If there's one thing we're good at, it's turning necessity into nobility.
So I'm moved, but in a widened sphere, I'm very much back. To square one, on the round trip. August and September dissipated in a blink: I look at them and remember my prophecy about resolutions for extreme productivity crumbling into extreme online newspaper reading. Unfortunately there was no extremity to speak of. My routine went: bit of Greek in the morning, Shakespeare play or two in the afternoon. But most of the memories feature abortive literary encounters in starring roles. Tried to learn Italian for the eleventh time. Gave up. Tried to read some Philip Roth. Gave up. Sorry Phil...short attention span. Tried to revise some German vocab. It's gone. Tried to read 'The Philosophy of Money', on account of being poor and grappling with the idea of what I was missing out on. But the thickest German, watered into English, passed straight through me. When not coming face to face with my inability to learn anything anymore, I was working twenty hour weeks in the college library, playing a key strategic role in the Sisyphus-sized task of reorganising the infrequently used books that sit behind the frequently used books on the shelf. I also recorded books on a dictaphone for a blind undergraduate student. I enjoyed a bit of novel read-aloud time and relished the chance to insert entertaining asides into what must be pretty laborious learning for the poor guy. When I reached a long passage in French, for example, I butchered the lovely melody and stuck the knife in by saying 'pardon mon Francais' in a disgustingly Australian accent. Fun at times, but mostly monotonous - and I didn't retain a single thing. The work I performed for the library pretty much encapsulates those last two months of my break: being in close proximity to lots of books, sometimes even reading them, yet absorbing nothing in the process. It almost resembled reading for pleasure, the holiday slump where one happily yields to the drag of the airport novel, liberated from the chore of raking up bits of use and beauty for later. Almost. But the type of book I had to read came with titles like 'Order in World Politics' or 'The Complete Works of Thomas Aquinas.' Textual s+m, if you're into that sort of thing. If not, just plain pain.
The hand-to-mouth existence was - who would have thought? - poor on romance, but rich in life skills. Necessity is the mother of boredom, but also of innovative ways to stay alive whilst suffering boredom. A three-hour shift in the library would come with a free meal voucher for the college cafeteria: and I redeemed that shit good. I'd strut in, fill my tray with a smorgasbord of earthly delights, pig out, and keep a sandwich for later. Bam. Two meals in one, made lovingly for you by paid staff! I became versed in the intricate art of food dilution: pasta sauces went further than ever, distributed just above the key threshold whereat the depressing realisation that you're eating chunks of wheat kicks in. The stomach is a naive consumer easily fooled into thinking it's getting a great deal. Boiled rice is just rice; but stick it in a wok with one pea and half an egg, and it's Traditional Chinese Fried Rice. Baked beans + baked potato = Pomme de terre a l'air de bum. The only necessities for bowel-deception are that there be more than one ingredient, that these ingredients be different colours, and that the end product be given a non-literal, preferably non-English, name. Sainsbury's Basics sausages, for example, can quite happily carry the adjusted title 'viscera Catonis' (Guts of Cato). Raw matter bought for near-nought becomes food for thought when purse strings are taut. That's what grandma used to rap. I also found made-up rhymes concentrating depression era scraps of wisdom to be grand consolation.
To come clean after all that: the poverty was basically self-imposed, since I had any number of avenues for incurring debt at my disposal. And I yielded as soon as the prospect of a holiday came up. Hear that? It's the bourgeois fire alarm going crazy. But at least the spirit of the holiday was sobre and carbon-lite, even with a belly full of baked beans. A friend and I did the West Highland Way, a wonderful trek just north of Glasgow. There was glory: surveying the conquered incline of the nominally intimidating 'Devil's Staircase' as the sun turned on and off in the distance, its switch flicked by clouds moving a lot faster than we terrestrial snails ever could. The solitary energy bar I'd had for breakfast played its part, but the giddiness must have equally derived from that most simple of pleasures: release capping struggle, summit achieved, result paying for input. I think that's the reason I love walking so much, and walking uphill even more: the fact that achievement is so quantifiable, commensurable, that you can look back straight away and commit to memory the distance covered and terrain trodden, because you weren't thinking about it at the time. Perhaps it focuses, in a very visible, spatial form, the pattern I've been attracted to my whole life. I confess, I find the ideal of perfect reciprocity sexy: the circle which smooths off and rounds out punishment and reward, completes the square, balances the equation. The minor and major corrections to be made keep me going in entertaining orbits. Inescapably, the Simpsons satellite in all of them. As Kang, disguised as a presidential candidate, says in Treehouse of Horror VII: 'We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.'
There was pain also: my hiking companion injured his knee midway through, soldiered on for a day with impressive male defiance/stupidity, but decided to bail for the final stage. Which left me alone with the elements - and Scotland has a generous supply of them. Sheets of rain, inclement, incessant, made a dramatic landscape all that more dramatic; the track turned into a riverbed as torrents began to wend their way around the big rocks and stream straight over the small. It was like walking a twelve-mile tyre-strewn obstacle course: every step had to be closely considered. The rain dried briefly the next day for my hike up Britain's highest mountain (Ben Nevis), but only at the bottom: the peak is ever shrouded with dark grey vapour, which provided an interesting exercise in that it rendered the above-mentioned 'glory moment' impossible to realise. Instead of casting an arrogant glare over three hundred and sixty full degrees, mistaking godlike panopticism for omniscience, I fumbled my way across a lunar landscape, sat on a cold wet rock and tried to warm my fingers on a portable gas cooker so that they would reach sufficient temperature to perform complex tasks such as opening a packet of dried beef stew, and repeat with snickers for dessert. Maybe it was a more fulfilling conquest: you couldn't verify it by a horizon of external reference points, so you had to trust the sign saying 'summit' and the fact that you couldn't see any higher points in the twenty metre radius of visibility at your disposal. Fulfilling, but chill: I was so cold that I ran halfway down the mountain to get my extremities back online.
So went the last hurrah before the business of re-starting the academic year avalanched on me. All I know at this stage is that I've left Ovid behind, and have signed up to spend the next three years with the ancient world's greatest misanthropic arsehole: Juvenal, the satirist who hates everything and fixes nothing. Get ready for heightened bouts of negativity as I do in-character research. That means I should end this post, by rights, on a gloomy note. But I'm no slave to the subject.
It's the end of Cambridge year one. Have I run out of stuff to say about the place? Will life - as I always fear - contract as I get tangled in a three year mental death trap? The pessimist has plenty of options: the law of diminishing returns, Juvenal, the rule fixing the inferiority of the sequel to the original. But there's room for hope, a gloom-piercing ray:
Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
This summer...an outmoded model of academic robot will protect the future saviour of humanity from an upgraded model of academic robot with the weapon of highly rhetorical poetry. This robot will be programmed to carry out the pedagogical project of making John Connor into a square who will then teach others how not to cause apocalyptic wars with machines by complaining about the prospect of them instead.
Cambridge 2: Cambridge Squared.
Which takes this back down to earth. Apologies for the interval, but, contrary to usual reasons of sloth, this time it's justified. Loads has gone down inside the respiring Cambridge animal over this period of cyber-quietude; alas, it's often hard to prevent stuff from stealing writing-about-stuff's thunder, or vice versa. Only so many hours in a day ordinarily, and a fraction of these are cultivatable. But of late, there have been even less in a day. It's not just the shrinking northern sun. As I dance the two-fingered keyboard duet, the view has changed completely. From the strange twilight zone of West Cambridge, where the juggernaut of an endowment bears fruit in brand new apartment blocks, conference centres, faculties of William Gates, I've flung myself to the other side of town. East side. Wrong side of the tracks (I do have to cross a railway bridge to get here, so comparison not entirely facetious). I'm now in the slightly less-monied neighbourhood of Romsey, where live slightly more-diversed peoples. Though Cambridge's answer to multicultural hotspot is still a bit muted and imbued with a 'stuff-white-people-like' - me included - smell of asian grocers and moroccan restaurants and charity shops, it definitely feels less unreal than bells hourly bouncing off chapel spires and eighty-year old dons overtaking you on their bikes. This is Mecca for students who symbolically reject all that the privileged intra-college life has to offer by living - gulp - outside the ring road. Usually because our colleges didn't have any accommodation to spare. If there's one thing we're good at, it's turning necessity into nobility.
So I'm moved, but in a widened sphere, I'm very much back. To square one, on the round trip. August and September dissipated in a blink: I look at them and remember my prophecy about resolutions for extreme productivity crumbling into extreme online newspaper reading. Unfortunately there was no extremity to speak of. My routine went: bit of Greek in the morning, Shakespeare play or two in the afternoon. But most of the memories feature abortive literary encounters in starring roles. Tried to learn Italian for the eleventh time. Gave up. Tried to read some Philip Roth. Gave up. Sorry Phil...short attention span. Tried to revise some German vocab. It's gone. Tried to read 'The Philosophy of Money', on account of being poor and grappling with the idea of what I was missing out on. But the thickest German, watered into English, passed straight through me. When not coming face to face with my inability to learn anything anymore, I was working twenty hour weeks in the college library, playing a key strategic role in the Sisyphus-sized task of reorganising the infrequently used books that sit behind the frequently used books on the shelf. I also recorded books on a dictaphone for a blind undergraduate student. I enjoyed a bit of novel read-aloud time and relished the chance to insert entertaining asides into what must be pretty laborious learning for the poor guy. When I reached a long passage in French, for example, I butchered the lovely melody and stuck the knife in by saying 'pardon mon Francais' in a disgustingly Australian accent. Fun at times, but mostly monotonous - and I didn't retain a single thing. The work I performed for the library pretty much encapsulates those last two months of my break: being in close proximity to lots of books, sometimes even reading them, yet absorbing nothing in the process. It almost resembled reading for pleasure, the holiday slump where one happily yields to the drag of the airport novel, liberated from the chore of raking up bits of use and beauty for later. Almost. But the type of book I had to read came with titles like 'Order in World Politics' or 'The Complete Works of Thomas Aquinas.' Textual s+m, if you're into that sort of thing. If not, just plain pain.
The hand-to-mouth existence was - who would have thought? - poor on romance, but rich in life skills. Necessity is the mother of boredom, but also of innovative ways to stay alive whilst suffering boredom. A three-hour shift in the library would come with a free meal voucher for the college cafeteria: and I redeemed that shit good. I'd strut in, fill my tray with a smorgasbord of earthly delights, pig out, and keep a sandwich for later. Bam. Two meals in one, made lovingly for you by paid staff! I became versed in the intricate art of food dilution: pasta sauces went further than ever, distributed just above the key threshold whereat the depressing realisation that you're eating chunks of wheat kicks in. The stomach is a naive consumer easily fooled into thinking it's getting a great deal. Boiled rice is just rice; but stick it in a wok with one pea and half an egg, and it's Traditional Chinese Fried Rice. Baked beans + baked potato = Pomme de terre a l'air de bum. The only necessities for bowel-deception are that there be more than one ingredient, that these ingredients be different colours, and that the end product be given a non-literal, preferably non-English, name. Sainsbury's Basics sausages, for example, can quite happily carry the adjusted title 'viscera Catonis' (Guts of Cato). Raw matter bought for near-nought becomes food for thought when purse strings are taut. That's what grandma used to rap. I also found made-up rhymes concentrating depression era scraps of wisdom to be grand consolation.
To come clean after all that: the poverty was basically self-imposed, since I had any number of avenues for incurring debt at my disposal. And I yielded as soon as the prospect of a holiday came up. Hear that? It's the bourgeois fire alarm going crazy. But at least the spirit of the holiday was sobre and carbon-lite, even with a belly full of baked beans. A friend and I did the West Highland Way, a wonderful trek just north of Glasgow. There was glory: surveying the conquered incline of the nominally intimidating 'Devil's Staircase' as the sun turned on and off in the distance, its switch flicked by clouds moving a lot faster than we terrestrial snails ever could. The solitary energy bar I'd had for breakfast played its part, but the giddiness must have equally derived from that most simple of pleasures: release capping struggle, summit achieved, result paying for input. I think that's the reason I love walking so much, and walking uphill even more: the fact that achievement is so quantifiable, commensurable, that you can look back straight away and commit to memory the distance covered and terrain trodden, because you weren't thinking about it at the time. Perhaps it focuses, in a very visible, spatial form, the pattern I've been attracted to my whole life. I confess, I find the ideal of perfect reciprocity sexy: the circle which smooths off and rounds out punishment and reward, completes the square, balances the equation. The minor and major corrections to be made keep me going in entertaining orbits. Inescapably, the Simpsons satellite in all of them. As Kang, disguised as a presidential candidate, says in Treehouse of Horror VII: 'We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.'
There was pain also: my hiking companion injured his knee midway through, soldiered on for a day with impressive male defiance/stupidity, but decided to bail for the final stage. Which left me alone with the elements - and Scotland has a generous supply of them. Sheets of rain, inclement, incessant, made a dramatic landscape all that more dramatic; the track turned into a riverbed as torrents began to wend their way around the big rocks and stream straight over the small. It was like walking a twelve-mile tyre-strewn obstacle course: every step had to be closely considered. The rain dried briefly the next day for my hike up Britain's highest mountain (Ben Nevis), but only at the bottom: the peak is ever shrouded with dark grey vapour, which provided an interesting exercise in that it rendered the above-mentioned 'glory moment' impossible to realise. Instead of casting an arrogant glare over three hundred and sixty full degrees, mistaking godlike panopticism for omniscience, I fumbled my way across a lunar landscape, sat on a cold wet rock and tried to warm my fingers on a portable gas cooker so that they would reach sufficient temperature to perform complex tasks such as opening a packet of dried beef stew, and repeat with snickers for dessert. Maybe it was a more fulfilling conquest: you couldn't verify it by a horizon of external reference points, so you had to trust the sign saying 'summit' and the fact that you couldn't see any higher points in the twenty metre radius of visibility at your disposal. Fulfilling, but chill: I was so cold that I ran halfway down the mountain to get my extremities back online.
So went the last hurrah before the business of re-starting the academic year avalanched on me. All I know at this stage is that I've left Ovid behind, and have signed up to spend the next three years with the ancient world's greatest misanthropic arsehole: Juvenal, the satirist who hates everything and fixes nothing. Get ready for heightened bouts of negativity as I do in-character research. That means I should end this post, by rights, on a gloomy note. But I'm no slave to the subject.
It's the end of Cambridge year one. Have I run out of stuff to say about the place? Will life - as I always fear - contract as I get tangled in a three year mental death trap? The pessimist has plenty of options: the law of diminishing returns, Juvenal, the rule fixing the inferiority of the sequel to the original. But there's room for hope, a gloom-piercing ray:
Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
This summer...an outmoded model of academic robot will protect the future saviour of humanity from an upgraded model of academic robot with the weapon of highly rhetorical poetry. This robot will be programmed to carry out the pedagogical project of making John Connor into a square who will then teach others how not to cause apocalyptic wars with machines by complaining about the prospect of them instead.
Cambridge 2: Cambridge Squared.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)