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.
Friday, December 25, 2009
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.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Tourist, the Resident and I
Cambridge is a small place. Cambridge is an old place. Cambridge is a famous place.
No, I haven't had a stroke/converted to a career in teaching English as a Second Language (not equivalent, but may produce similar sentences at times). I'm merely providing you with three facts which, when locked in a room together with ample booze, devise a simple yet malevolent plan to make life in Cambridge difficult. Once their forces are joined, all they need for detonation is a drop of that widely available resource: the tourist. The plot is executed and within moments you're mowing down Spanish kids on your cycle-cum-deathstar, in one fell swoop ruining the photos of fifty Poles with an ill-timed intercession between Mikhails and the Harry Potter Architecture they're climbing over one another to capture. It's not even a ticking timebomb. It's a bomb that ticks while it explodes. For three long months.
Cambridge can feel crowded at the worst of times, especially during the gloomier term months where the students are in town and the academic machine is in motion. Town planners back in the day obviously had stuff on their plate which both affected their work, in the sense of killing them, and affected their view of their work, in the sense that they didn't feel long-term planning for increased population to be a priority. Wars, bubonic plagues n' stuff. The physical size of central Cambridge means it struggles to perform the role of regional hub which has landed in its lap after the technology revolution (whenever that was): high tech industry has flocked here, and the population is growing accordingly. On winter weekends during term, the centre heaves with students doing what they do: shopping, going to the pub, entertaining their parents in exchange for much needed goods and services. It also heaves with professionals from Cambridge and surrounds doing what they do, probably similar to what we do, much as we'd like to think it not. But then change seasons. Add the tourist packs and you have a town - at least for the busiest hours of the day - in pedestrian gridlock. To walk is to brave an obstacle course of moving objects, even with the streets reclaimed for foot use out of sheer numerical dominance. To cycle is to power your bike with alternate steps like a shambling tortoise, the modern equivalent of a Flintstones foot-powered mobile. Forget about momentum. And if you can't forget it, you'd better have a damn big bell. And a damn fine mudguard to protect your jeans from sloshed blood. For in the class warfare pitting two wheels against as many feet, there will always be blood.
I've never had to negotiate space with so many tourist bodies on a daily basis. Wait a minute, pipe my ever-vigilant critics. You're from Sydney; hardly the sewage treatment plant of world tourist destinations. Yes, I reply. Thanks for paying attention. But it's a simple matter of scale. Sydney is a gigantic sprawling metropolis, meaning inside escape is never far away: walk from the centre to Wolloomooloo and you're instantly rejuvenated by less bustle and more used syringes. Some kind samaritan may have left you something for your trouble, if you're lucky. And even in centrum, where the tourist hotspots are most concentrated, you never feel suicidally claustrophobic. The footpaths are adequate. The roads are wide enough to store stationary traffic in comfort. If it all becomes too much, you can sit just that little too near the couple who are themselves just that little too close to having sex in the Botanical Gardens. Or jump into the harbour after a thunderstorm has filled it with condoms and tampons. As I get grosser, you no doubt get the idea. In general, I find that the presence of water (i.e. harbours, the ocean) makes an enormous difference to a city's psychological landscape. As a camp interior decorator would say of a mirror in a room, 'it really opens the space up.'
None of that in Cambridge. The crowds scribble all over the romantic facade and swell the city to its ever-present potential to become what it is: a very flat prison. The funniest thing that's come from having to regularly deal with these herds is the primitive mindset of entitlement, rising up in me, without fail, almost automatically. A tourist, god bless 'im, in his whale-of-a-time-not-a-care-in-the-world-except-for-the-pressing-whale-problem laxity, unthinkingly steps back and forces me to get off my bike and walk over the bridge. Instead of slapping him on the back and saying 'it's ok, it's not your fault, it's just what happens when the people are too many and the place is too small; watch out for locals on bikes though; they can be cocks; have a great day, sir!', I roll my eyes, grunt ever-so-audibly, and scowl like Gollum. Look at him. Standing there in his white shorts and ill-fitting cap, bouncing a camera off his beer-belly as if he were playing some kind of spastic game of middle-aged totem tennis. 'Hey, juicy prune! Maybe if you thought a bit about where you were going, a) you wouldn't form a key obstruction in my mission to purchase digestive biscuits from Sainsbury's and hence retard my digestion by a crucial three seconds, b) you wouldn't leave the house because you'd be too busy thinking about where you were going, c) your flights of imagination would save the world by replacing your sooty carbon footprint with cleaner fantasies...you filthy Ryanair pervert!' - thus I speak, communicating not via words but through glare. And I stomp extra-heavily to emphasise the energy tax of walking over a hill from stop as opposed to gliding over it from a rolling start. Aah, the gestural eloquence of irrational anger.
But unfailingly, I plough down the back side of the bridge with guilty readiness to dodge, a weak compensation in the form of brief deference to this species. For I too have been known to wear shorts, hats and giant cameras, bumbling clumsily through new places that don't have half as many people to trip over as Cambridge. Tourist-hating, as fun a pastime as it might be, is actually a milder and more transient upsurge of that same feeling that makes tabloids rant against immigration, and people read the rants. 'This is our town, bitch. Stop taking our jobs.' Of course, tourists are actually giving people jobs. So maybe: 'this is our town, bitch. Stop taking our space.' would be better for our purposes. What interests me most is the seniority one instantly gains from being a 'resident' over a 'tourist' - as if one can claim ownership rights and high status for being unlucky enough to be born in the U.K., or stupid enough to move here (ouch...sorry). I ain't talking about public services; of course a distinction between citizen and non-citizen needs to be made in the case of limited resources. But tourists, at least in Cambridge, are literally second-class citizens wherever they go. They pay to enter the big sites and colleges. One could say that charging is a regulatory mechanism, preventing too many tourists passing through and disrupting academic tranquillity. To this I say: 'Oh, John, we've come all the way to Cambridge to see Trinity college - but it costs three pounds.' 'I'm sorry, Martha. I know it's your birthday. But we just can't afford it.' No tourist is deterred by having to pay; just lightly annoyed and marginalised. Does the fee help colleges with expensive maintenance? Yep, but definitely not the damage caused by shameless tourists with their walking habits and whatnot. How much can it cost to replace a scuffed stone now and then? If I were a tourist, I'd walk around St John's court with extra abrasive stabs of the feet, just to do my three pounds worth of damage. Confession: I do it anyway.
There's a fine line between 'respecting the people that live here' and propping rigidly against a wall to salute them every time they walk past. Though it happens elsewhere, the clear relationship of dominant resident/subordinate tourist is more pronounced in Cambridge because it's a town that has always thrived on exclusion: 'enter here, if you are rich and brilliant*.....*former is prerequisite, latter is optional'. As a tourist here, you're experiencing in miniature what the 19th C chimney sweep (resident!) must have done every time he passed the forbidding Trinity gate: sorry pal, no cash, no college. Chimneys could do with a sweep though. In a perverse way, perhaps that's what tourists come after in visiting Cambridge: to have your non-qualification thrust in your face. Cambridge. Pioneering exclusionary tourism for 800 years.
I'm all for the Lonely Planet low-impact 'tread on tiptoes and don't forget your manners' approach to tourism; but it just strikes me how much the advent of mass transit and increased mobility have changed the social status of the 'guest'. In Ancient Greece - well, the poems that I read - the guest/foreigner/visitor was nothing short of divine. When you played host, you gave your guest everything: you filled them with piles of meat, got them smashed on strong wine, clothed them in the choicest garments before you were even allowed to ask their name and nationality. The rules of engagement were clearcut: honour your guest, or Zeus god of hospitality will fuck you up. Now the tourist (for these generalisations read 'I as tourist') is so apologetic and embarrassed about his touristness that he'll be hesitant to remind the shopkeeper of his small oversight in shortchanging him by 26 Euro. I like to think I'm no slouch for courtesy when at home. But I become so paranoid about being a target of local hatred when I travel overseas that my politeness and tolerance blow up the considerate-o-meter. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if threatened with a knife in a foreign country. Projecting from previous behavioural patterns, I think I would take off my shirt and sketch out nice little permanent marker frames around my vital organs. Please sir, be my guest. It's your country.
'I'm just a tourist.' 'I'm just visiting.' As a professor over here pointed out to me last year after a revealing blunder in the seminar, 'just' is a big word. People tend to assume - people including tourists themselves - that there's something inherently frivolous about the very process of tourism. You're just a part-timer. You can't be serious. Sure, the concept of the lazy 'holiday' still presides in entrenched western rhythms of work/play. But people can be deeply serious about their travel. They save their hard earnt moola to visit a destination for which they feel some passion, or connection; about which they might even know a whole lot more than the locals, who thought that church was just a nice curtain to the periodic appearance and removal of graffiti. Tourism can come from real interest, real commitment. Naturally residents will chisel out the cynicism when some Johnny-come-lately comes along - lately, too! - and looks with earnest admiration at the same things for which they can only dredge up a numb apathy. It's just (!) a bite of the old green-eyed monster.
In this way, tourists have sustained the heaviest casualties when it comes to the commonwealth's war on enthusiasm. I say commonwealth because I've now lived in centre and periphery of the old empire; and I'm pretty sure Australian cynicism is deeply bound up with the British variety. The other half of the dichotomy lies across the Atlantic: America. I was talking to an American mate of mine, and he proposed that one of the things that tells against you most as an American abroad is your pure energy, your culturally sanctioned keenness. Keenness is so not cool in Anglo-Australian terms. But cross the pond and you're in the land of milk, honey, peanut butter m+m's, and unadulterated positivity. This must have something to do with the fact that in my mind, the archetype, or caricature, of a tourist is...a Yank. 'Believing you can do stuff and then doing it' - that was the title of my submission for a new American national anthem, but the letter must have been destroyed in a rush of enthusiasm for one thing or another.
I've opened a can of beans prematurely with the question of how nationality affects one's reception as a tourist; so I'm going to cut before things get too windy. In conclusion, consider this: tourists are the poorest (most wretched) rich people on the earth. Their reward for wonderment and cash injections is ridicule and inflated prices. They are universally despised: not only by the residents, who assume tourists will range from ignorant to neanderthal unless proven otherwise, but - and this is the icy nail in the coffin cake - even by their own kind! As a tourist, there are few things you hate more than a fellow tourist. Look at her. Look at those eyes. Greedily snatching up the authenticity of MY EXPERIENCE. And you don't even appreciate it. You're just there, swilling your beer, chowing your feed, paralysed in your repertoire of basic conversational noises, like a parrot being electrocuted. Give me MY EXPERIENCE back! There is no solidarity between tourists, for every tourist perceives every other tourist as a competitor, battling for the finite resources of recordable experience and genuine 'difference.' The tourist is at her smuggest when she has found a restaurant populated only by locals. And she is at her most defeated when she sits down, orders her food in a mumble of badly pronounced pleasantries, closes her eyes, and hears: 'Oh look, Marge! This is perfect! So authentic! I knew it would be just great from the guidebook description.' She shudders once at the crude voice, but then again, and harder, when she recognises her own voice within it. The paradox of a Lonely Planet featuring an 'off-the-beaten-track' section comes a-flooding through her mind.
Tourists, you have my sympathy. You are fighting foreign and civil wars at the same time. You are hated, you hate each other, and above all perhaps, you hate yourselves. If you at any point feel my bike tyre on your calf, maintain some perspective: my scowl will mean 'I feel your pain.' As you dust yourselves off and shout after me with dignity 'don't worry, sir. It's your town. I'm sorry I obstructed your important business.', perhaps my callous bubble will burst. I'll help you up and orate: 'Sir, you are no tourist. You are a temporary resident. And what of us? We are but jaded tourists trapped as residents: excited mice grown into sluggish rats. Give me your hand. For we are all, in some sense, both residents and tourists of the one globe.'
It would be delivered with just the right balance of earnestness and cynicism. I'm an international student: the disfigured offspring of an illicit love affair, when tourist meets resident. We can't procreate; but we can flit between our maternal and paternal camps at will.
End of Tour.
No, I haven't had a stroke/converted to a career in teaching English as a Second Language (not equivalent, but may produce similar sentences at times). I'm merely providing you with three facts which, when locked in a room together with ample booze, devise a simple yet malevolent plan to make life in Cambridge difficult. Once their forces are joined, all they need for detonation is a drop of that widely available resource: the tourist. The plot is executed and within moments you're mowing down Spanish kids on your cycle-cum-deathstar, in one fell swoop ruining the photos of fifty Poles with an ill-timed intercession between Mikhails and the Harry Potter Architecture they're climbing over one another to capture. It's not even a ticking timebomb. It's a bomb that ticks while it explodes. For three long months.
Cambridge can feel crowded at the worst of times, especially during the gloomier term months where the students are in town and the academic machine is in motion. Town planners back in the day obviously had stuff on their plate which both affected their work, in the sense of killing them, and affected their view of their work, in the sense that they didn't feel long-term planning for increased population to be a priority. Wars, bubonic plagues n' stuff. The physical size of central Cambridge means it struggles to perform the role of regional hub which has landed in its lap after the technology revolution (whenever that was): high tech industry has flocked here, and the population is growing accordingly. On winter weekends during term, the centre heaves with students doing what they do: shopping, going to the pub, entertaining their parents in exchange for much needed goods and services. It also heaves with professionals from Cambridge and surrounds doing what they do, probably similar to what we do, much as we'd like to think it not. But then change seasons. Add the tourist packs and you have a town - at least for the busiest hours of the day - in pedestrian gridlock. To walk is to brave an obstacle course of moving objects, even with the streets reclaimed for foot use out of sheer numerical dominance. To cycle is to power your bike with alternate steps like a shambling tortoise, the modern equivalent of a Flintstones foot-powered mobile. Forget about momentum. And if you can't forget it, you'd better have a damn big bell. And a damn fine mudguard to protect your jeans from sloshed blood. For in the class warfare pitting two wheels against as many feet, there will always be blood.
I've never had to negotiate space with so many tourist bodies on a daily basis. Wait a minute, pipe my ever-vigilant critics. You're from Sydney; hardly the sewage treatment plant of world tourist destinations. Yes, I reply. Thanks for paying attention. But it's a simple matter of scale. Sydney is a gigantic sprawling metropolis, meaning inside escape is never far away: walk from the centre to Wolloomooloo and you're instantly rejuvenated by less bustle and more used syringes. Some kind samaritan may have left you something for your trouble, if you're lucky. And even in centrum, where the tourist hotspots are most concentrated, you never feel suicidally claustrophobic. The footpaths are adequate. The roads are wide enough to store stationary traffic in comfort. If it all becomes too much, you can sit just that little too near the couple who are themselves just that little too close to having sex in the Botanical Gardens. Or jump into the harbour after a thunderstorm has filled it with condoms and tampons. As I get grosser, you no doubt get the idea. In general, I find that the presence of water (i.e. harbours, the ocean) makes an enormous difference to a city's psychological landscape. As a camp interior decorator would say of a mirror in a room, 'it really opens the space up.'
None of that in Cambridge. The crowds scribble all over the romantic facade and swell the city to its ever-present potential to become what it is: a very flat prison. The funniest thing that's come from having to regularly deal with these herds is the primitive mindset of entitlement, rising up in me, without fail, almost automatically. A tourist, god bless 'im, in his whale-of-a-time-not-a-care-in-the-world-except-for-the-pressing-whale-problem laxity, unthinkingly steps back and forces me to get off my bike and walk over the bridge. Instead of slapping him on the back and saying 'it's ok, it's not your fault, it's just what happens when the people are too many and the place is too small; watch out for locals on bikes though; they can be cocks; have a great day, sir!', I roll my eyes, grunt ever-so-audibly, and scowl like Gollum. Look at him. Standing there in his white shorts and ill-fitting cap, bouncing a camera off his beer-belly as if he were playing some kind of spastic game of middle-aged totem tennis. 'Hey, juicy prune! Maybe if you thought a bit about where you were going, a) you wouldn't form a key obstruction in my mission to purchase digestive biscuits from Sainsbury's and hence retard my digestion by a crucial three seconds, b) you wouldn't leave the house because you'd be too busy thinking about where you were going, c) your flights of imagination would save the world by replacing your sooty carbon footprint with cleaner fantasies...you filthy Ryanair pervert!' - thus I speak, communicating not via words but through glare. And I stomp extra-heavily to emphasise the energy tax of walking over a hill from stop as opposed to gliding over it from a rolling start. Aah, the gestural eloquence of irrational anger.
But unfailingly, I plough down the back side of the bridge with guilty readiness to dodge, a weak compensation in the form of brief deference to this species. For I too have been known to wear shorts, hats and giant cameras, bumbling clumsily through new places that don't have half as many people to trip over as Cambridge. Tourist-hating, as fun a pastime as it might be, is actually a milder and more transient upsurge of that same feeling that makes tabloids rant against immigration, and people read the rants. 'This is our town, bitch. Stop taking our jobs.' Of course, tourists are actually giving people jobs. So maybe: 'this is our town, bitch. Stop taking our space.' would be better for our purposes. What interests me most is the seniority one instantly gains from being a 'resident' over a 'tourist' - as if one can claim ownership rights and high status for being unlucky enough to be born in the U.K., or stupid enough to move here (ouch...sorry). I ain't talking about public services; of course a distinction between citizen and non-citizen needs to be made in the case of limited resources. But tourists, at least in Cambridge, are literally second-class citizens wherever they go. They pay to enter the big sites and colleges. One could say that charging is a regulatory mechanism, preventing too many tourists passing through and disrupting academic tranquillity. To this I say: 'Oh, John, we've come all the way to Cambridge to see Trinity college - but it costs three pounds.' 'I'm sorry, Martha. I know it's your birthday. But we just can't afford it.' No tourist is deterred by having to pay; just lightly annoyed and marginalised. Does the fee help colleges with expensive maintenance? Yep, but definitely not the damage caused by shameless tourists with their walking habits and whatnot. How much can it cost to replace a scuffed stone now and then? If I were a tourist, I'd walk around St John's court with extra abrasive stabs of the feet, just to do my three pounds worth of damage. Confession: I do it anyway.
There's a fine line between 'respecting the people that live here' and propping rigidly against a wall to salute them every time they walk past. Though it happens elsewhere, the clear relationship of dominant resident/subordinate tourist is more pronounced in Cambridge because it's a town that has always thrived on exclusion: 'enter here, if you are rich and brilliant*.....*former is prerequisite, latter is optional'. As a tourist here, you're experiencing in miniature what the 19th C chimney sweep (resident!) must have done every time he passed the forbidding Trinity gate: sorry pal, no cash, no college. Chimneys could do with a sweep though. In a perverse way, perhaps that's what tourists come after in visiting Cambridge: to have your non-qualification thrust in your face. Cambridge. Pioneering exclusionary tourism for 800 years.
I'm all for the Lonely Planet low-impact 'tread on tiptoes and don't forget your manners' approach to tourism; but it just strikes me how much the advent of mass transit and increased mobility have changed the social status of the 'guest'. In Ancient Greece - well, the poems that I read - the guest/foreigner/visitor was nothing short of divine. When you played host, you gave your guest everything: you filled them with piles of meat, got them smashed on strong wine, clothed them in the choicest garments before you were even allowed to ask their name and nationality. The rules of engagement were clearcut: honour your guest, or Zeus god of hospitality will fuck you up. Now the tourist (for these generalisations read 'I as tourist') is so apologetic and embarrassed about his touristness that he'll be hesitant to remind the shopkeeper of his small oversight in shortchanging him by 26 Euro. I like to think I'm no slouch for courtesy when at home. But I become so paranoid about being a target of local hatred when I travel overseas that my politeness and tolerance blow up the considerate-o-meter. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if threatened with a knife in a foreign country. Projecting from previous behavioural patterns, I think I would take off my shirt and sketch out nice little permanent marker frames around my vital organs. Please sir, be my guest. It's your country.
'I'm just a tourist.' 'I'm just visiting.' As a professor over here pointed out to me last year after a revealing blunder in the seminar, 'just' is a big word. People tend to assume - people including tourists themselves - that there's something inherently frivolous about the very process of tourism. You're just a part-timer. You can't be serious. Sure, the concept of the lazy 'holiday' still presides in entrenched western rhythms of work/play. But people can be deeply serious about their travel. They save their hard earnt moola to visit a destination for which they feel some passion, or connection; about which they might even know a whole lot more than the locals, who thought that church was just a nice curtain to the periodic appearance and removal of graffiti. Tourism can come from real interest, real commitment. Naturally residents will chisel out the cynicism when some Johnny-come-lately comes along - lately, too! - and looks with earnest admiration at the same things for which they can only dredge up a numb apathy. It's just (!) a bite of the old green-eyed monster.
In this way, tourists have sustained the heaviest casualties when it comes to the commonwealth's war on enthusiasm. I say commonwealth because I've now lived in centre and periphery of the old empire; and I'm pretty sure Australian cynicism is deeply bound up with the British variety. The other half of the dichotomy lies across the Atlantic: America. I was talking to an American mate of mine, and he proposed that one of the things that tells against you most as an American abroad is your pure energy, your culturally sanctioned keenness. Keenness is so not cool in Anglo-Australian terms. But cross the pond and you're in the land of milk, honey, peanut butter m+m's, and unadulterated positivity. This must have something to do with the fact that in my mind, the archetype, or caricature, of a tourist is...a Yank. 'Believing you can do stuff and then doing it' - that was the title of my submission for a new American national anthem, but the letter must have been destroyed in a rush of enthusiasm for one thing or another.
I've opened a can of beans prematurely with the question of how nationality affects one's reception as a tourist; so I'm going to cut before things get too windy. In conclusion, consider this: tourists are the poorest (most wretched) rich people on the earth. Their reward for wonderment and cash injections is ridicule and inflated prices. They are universally despised: not only by the residents, who assume tourists will range from ignorant to neanderthal unless proven otherwise, but - and this is the icy nail in the coffin cake - even by their own kind! As a tourist, there are few things you hate more than a fellow tourist. Look at her. Look at those eyes. Greedily snatching up the authenticity of MY EXPERIENCE. And you don't even appreciate it. You're just there, swilling your beer, chowing your feed, paralysed in your repertoire of basic conversational noises, like a parrot being electrocuted. Give me MY EXPERIENCE back! There is no solidarity between tourists, for every tourist perceives every other tourist as a competitor, battling for the finite resources of recordable experience and genuine 'difference.' The tourist is at her smuggest when she has found a restaurant populated only by locals. And she is at her most defeated when she sits down, orders her food in a mumble of badly pronounced pleasantries, closes her eyes, and hears: 'Oh look, Marge! This is perfect! So authentic! I knew it would be just great from the guidebook description.' She shudders once at the crude voice, but then again, and harder, when she recognises her own voice within it. The paradox of a Lonely Planet featuring an 'off-the-beaten-track' section comes a-flooding through her mind.
Tourists, you have my sympathy. You are fighting foreign and civil wars at the same time. You are hated, you hate each other, and above all perhaps, you hate yourselves. If you at any point feel my bike tyre on your calf, maintain some perspective: my scowl will mean 'I feel your pain.' As you dust yourselves off and shout after me with dignity 'don't worry, sir. It's your town. I'm sorry I obstructed your important business.', perhaps my callous bubble will burst. I'll help you up and orate: 'Sir, you are no tourist. You are a temporary resident. And what of us? We are but jaded tourists trapped as residents: excited mice grown into sluggish rats. Give me your hand. For we are all, in some sense, both residents and tourists of the one globe.'
It would be delivered with just the right balance of earnestness and cynicism. I'm an international student: the disfigured offspring of an illicit love affair, when tourist meets resident. We can't procreate; but we can flit between our maternal and paternal camps at will.
End of Tour.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Travels Incontinent
I pop my head back through the fine film separating blogosphere from activitysphere after a long absence, and what do I find? Nothin's changed. Particularly in regard to this blog. So to avoid charges of static and whiffs of ozone, I thought it time for an update. Before I drop the straggling metaphor, I'd just like to clarify that no globes were warmed in the non-making of this blog. Slightly more were warmed in its making, but that's a detachable story, not to be confused with the tale of how I came to write...
this. Since I left you, full of delicate dreams and fragile bank accounts, three related things have happened. Some of the dreams have been fulfilled, others have been shattered, and my bank account has been transformed into a blushing communist: heavily in the red and nothing to its name. First of all, exile update: I've officially passed the masters and been admitted to the doctor stream, which means I'm digging heels into the cow-pat sodden British earth for another three years at least. That's if I don't piss around. But the piss-around is the fiercely guarded prerogative of PhD students worldwide. The forms may vary over space and time - my dad fondly preserves his doctorate by recalling a sample average day in which playing cards and pure maths overlap like venn diagrams - but it's always paid procrastination. Relax, you're trying to become a doctor of philosophy. So-crates wouldn't have worn himself out. He would have taken some afternoon walks in the shade and left it to his good-for-nothing secretary Plato to transcribe the pearls of wisdom dropped orally and casually. That's what it's all about, I imagine. (Check out philosophy of leisure, according to a philosopher, here - thanks Slav for the tiptop-off. Only part I'm not in sync with is the second p'graph: leisure may have been a high good for 'Ancient Greek philosophers', but that was because it was the preserve of the aristocracy. Work was for chumps.)
Where's the blank time gone then? What sort of 'doing' have I done to colour in the space between then and now? Experimenting with exile-from-exile, that's what. I'd never thought about it much before, but living abroad adds a second coat to the old identity. I was staying at a hostel in Krakow (Poland) a few days ago: a wonderful place where the young ladies in charge rise to make you a full Polish breakfast and clean up the remains of your pig-out as you digest. The hospitality and intimacy factor made it feel as if you were crashing one of a long-lost Polish relative's many spare beds. Anyway, the breakfast ritual took place around a long wooden table, long enough to house ten people, not long enough to let them avoid conversation with one another. Talking to my fellow travellers, above all I felt older than I did in my memories of similar situations hostel-hopping around Europe five years ago. The end of youth is indeed nigh. But the stranger sensation arose when I was forced to grapple with the 'explain yourself' question of the international traveller: 'where are you from?' My tagline response, I noticed, had thickened to double the size. 'Sydney, Australia' it once was - aah, the simplicity of youth! - but now it had accrued the cumbersome barnacle 'but I study in England.' This may all seem trivial. A literal snapshot of your living arrangements condensed into a terse sentence might have nothing to do with 'identity.' But in my head, it was bizarre. 'Australia...England' - the terms bounced around like flicked elastic. My homes multiplied before my eyes. I was a one man Ashes. I was Flintoff bowling to Clarke, I was Clarke hitting it back down Flintoff's throat, I was Flintoff dropping the catch, I was Clarke running down the pitch, I was Flintoff completely missing the stumps and conceding four from an overthrow. So I suppose I was still Australian. Like the Ashes, there was the ever-present (though slight) danger that it could go either way, combined with the overwhelming statistical probability that Australia would win. But I was still a little thrown by the threat.
As far as split identities go, you couldn’t get more training-wheels-level than ‘English/Australian’, so I’ll pay it no more angst than it deserves. Back onto the continent. My six days in Poland ticked all boxes of hedonism listed on the standard western ‘holiday’ form. I took loads off in the presence of my loveable Polish friend by putting loads in: delivery trucks queued before dawn through the outskirts of Krakow to feed our collective appetite for Pierogi (Polish dumplings), potato pancakes, stew, sausage, cabbage, beetroot soup and schnitzel. Buckets of schnitzel, single-handedly putting the abbatoirs back in, and completely out, of business. The best ice-cream I’ve ever had. The best beer I’ve ever had. The best glazed jam donut I’ve ever had; the best I’ve had which wasn’t that good. It spiralled into a mess of consumption bests, the stomach’s short-term memory constantly effacing itself as it expanded into eternal presents of more and better, carpe diem and carpe pierogi, a bulging feast of Trimalchio which didn’t know when from when in order to say it.
Actually the indulgence was fairly moderate, but it was a running joke between me and Marts that everything was the best we’d ever had, culminating in a sub-par Warsaw ice-cream, of which Marts: ‘This is the best mediocre ice-cream I’ve ever had.’ There were times of unrestrained sensory pleasure, but there were also some stone-cold sobering moments. Marts refused to accompany me to Auschwitz, so I went by myself – well, with four innocent but douchy Alaskans to be precise. They were nice enough, but I couldn’t help cringing a bit at their automatic douchy tourist reflexes, which they tried to suppress for my sake but failed, charmingly. I was bitching to one of them about people being disrespectful and taking photos inside the buildings (converted into museums) when it was prohibited, and he wholeheartedly agreed with me, until it came out later that he’d taken a few himself. Guiltily…but who could resist a pose with a tangled mass of spectacles which had been plundered from victims for reuse? Surely it was beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams that mass-produced, mass-culled monuments to murder would one day form the main attraction in a digital photograph alongside the camera's owner: to be explained with relish to his Alaskan friends back home, a pause in a slide show, filled by an oral caption which would omit the part about how he wasn't allowed to take a photo but he did. Or don it as a badge of honour.
Tourists aside - herded from our story like the obedient group they are - Auschwitz was the most affecting museum trip of my life. That's no idle 'best' claim. I'd had an average holocaust education: seen Schindler's, read Night, even been to Dachau, the other famous camp near Munich. But the familiarity of the stories didn't detract from inhabiting their setting. There were details I'd forgotten, or never known in the first place, such as the figure of the Sonderkommando: a fellow prisoner who, in exchange for better living conditions, discharged the grisly tasks of hauling the dead bodies from the gas chambers, stripping them of their gold fillings, their rings, their hair - anything of remote value - and putting them in the incinerator. On liberation, the Soviets found a mass of human hair waiting to be reused in pillows and bedclothes. It's now in a display case, behind glass: aged and dry, but unmistakeably hair. It wasn't just the mass slaughter, but the ruthless efficiency with which the resource expenditure of performing that slaughter was recouped by any means possible. In this narrow, perverse sense, the Nazis were the greatest proto-environmentalists of their time: they recycled everything. That was the emo part. But it also got a little more detached and academic. Thankfully I had the chance to talk to the tour guide on her own - a patient Polish woman whose eyes I could see swelling in exasperation every time she had to tell someone not to take a photo - about the afterlife of Auschwitz. She had done her MA in Jewish Studies on the symbol of Auschwitz and the fierce contests still surrounding it. Proportionally, of course, the Jews were dealt the worst hand. But so potent has Auschwitz become in contemporary imagination that it has completely eclipsed the appalling number of civilian deaths in wider Poland during WWII - a couple of million at the least. The guide talked of her problems with retaining the attention of Jewish tourists in the camp, who visibly lost interest whenever 'Polish' suffering came up. But she also tussled with other extremes: the American tourist who was offended that none of her spiels contained mention of German suffering. Along the paths of this still-overcrowded death camp, the politics run on, and refuse to die.
Far from the horrors of Auschwitz in distance and character - though only a paragraph of text away, and that's what an unplanned blog will do to you - was my Italian jaunt. Before meeting up with me mum, I imposed a bit of scenic purgatory-by-exhaustion. A silly idea popped into my head: I would walk a marathon 120 k's along the Ligurian coast of Italy, from Genova to La Spezia, in three and a half days. I trekked with a heavy burden of a rucksack on a hard back (the tent came in handy, the Hemingway didn't, but at least that was a softback), which made the steep ascents and descents fairly taxing at times. The first half stuck to the road, the only option on what must be one of the most densely holiday-settled stretches of coast in Europe. The villas never stopped, but only oscillated between compression and rarefaction as I moved from town to (nearby) town. Then, finally, I hit rugged national park, doing my best to navigate maplessly by the cheery proverb 'If the sea's on your right, she'll be right.' It's a proverb now. The coast really started doing spectacular things with itself at this point: growing pine trees, crumbling rocks, dropping away to the sea at an almost vertical gradient. Tiers of olives, citrus and grapes appeared every now and then, a living reproach to any farmer that thinks they have it tough on flat land. I walked the famous 11km run of the cinque terre on the last day, the sun flashing its pearly whites and breathing oppressive warmth as much as ever. Each of the five towns, evenly spaced along the stretch, is encrusted on its own bit of rock in its own way. As the rock permitted, so the towns formed, until they froze in their current state: rainbow lego villages of pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows, oranges. My shoes have smudged errant tracks over all, now visible only in my poor memory - a lonely life and death, but I'll keep them walking for a while regardless.
Having moaned about multiplied homes, it was nice to return to another place I'd 'lived in' (if only for a month) five years ago: Padova. Mum's longstanding friend Antonio, with whom I stayed last time, was in stellar form. Quite literally: he's a prof of astronomy at the university of Pads. But he's also the jolliest, plumpest Italian bawd I know. When he meets his male friends on the street, he playfully whacks them in the testacles as greeting. I'm all for it. But if I introduced it here, I'd probably have to get people to sign clearance forms. And then I'd have to tweezer out the fine points like the scale and frequency of whack; and destroying fun with tweezers is a decidedly non-fun way to do it. Anyway, I had great fun listening to Antonio discourse on every subject under the stars. Stuff he knew about (elementary optics, telescopes, obsolete measuring instruments from the fifties) and stuff he didn't (the historical roots of south Italian sloth). Five years older and I felt a little better equipped to pick him up on his good-natured bullshit; but I'm yet to learn how to fling it back effectively.
So there you are, punters: put that in your punt and punt it into the racing course where you can take a...never mind. Back in the Bridge, I'm poised to make a grab for the last shreds of summer: penniless. Paying the price for not enough continence. But content.
this. Since I left you, full of delicate dreams and fragile bank accounts, three related things have happened. Some of the dreams have been fulfilled, others have been shattered, and my bank account has been transformed into a blushing communist: heavily in the red and nothing to its name. First of all, exile update: I've officially passed the masters and been admitted to the doctor stream, which means I'm digging heels into the cow-pat sodden British earth for another three years at least. That's if I don't piss around. But the piss-around is the fiercely guarded prerogative of PhD students worldwide. The forms may vary over space and time - my dad fondly preserves his doctorate by recalling a sample average day in which playing cards and pure maths overlap like venn diagrams - but it's always paid procrastination. Relax, you're trying to become a doctor of philosophy. So-crates wouldn't have worn himself out. He would have taken some afternoon walks in the shade and left it to his good-for-nothing secretary Plato to transcribe the pearls of wisdom dropped orally and casually. That's what it's all about, I imagine. (Check out philosophy of leisure, according to a philosopher, here - thanks Slav for the tiptop-off. Only part I'm not in sync with is the second p'graph: leisure may have been a high good for 'Ancient Greek philosophers', but that was because it was the preserve of the aristocracy. Work was for chumps.)
Where's the blank time gone then? What sort of 'doing' have I done to colour in the space between then and now? Experimenting with exile-from-exile, that's what. I'd never thought about it much before, but living abroad adds a second coat to the old identity. I was staying at a hostel in Krakow (Poland) a few days ago: a wonderful place where the young ladies in charge rise to make you a full Polish breakfast and clean up the remains of your pig-out as you digest. The hospitality and intimacy factor made it feel as if you were crashing one of a long-lost Polish relative's many spare beds. Anyway, the breakfast ritual took place around a long wooden table, long enough to house ten people, not long enough to let them avoid conversation with one another. Talking to my fellow travellers, above all I felt older than I did in my memories of similar situations hostel-hopping around Europe five years ago. The end of youth is indeed nigh. But the stranger sensation arose when I was forced to grapple with the 'explain yourself' question of the international traveller: 'where are you from?' My tagline response, I noticed, had thickened to double the size. 'Sydney, Australia' it once was - aah, the simplicity of youth! - but now it had accrued the cumbersome barnacle 'but I study in England.' This may all seem trivial. A literal snapshot of your living arrangements condensed into a terse sentence might have nothing to do with 'identity.' But in my head, it was bizarre. 'Australia...England' - the terms bounced around like flicked elastic. My homes multiplied before my eyes. I was a one man Ashes. I was Flintoff bowling to Clarke, I was Clarke hitting it back down Flintoff's throat, I was Flintoff dropping the catch, I was Clarke running down the pitch, I was Flintoff completely missing the stumps and conceding four from an overthrow. So I suppose I was still Australian. Like the Ashes, there was the ever-present (though slight) danger that it could go either way, combined with the overwhelming statistical probability that Australia would win. But I was still a little thrown by the threat.
As far as split identities go, you couldn’t get more training-wheels-level than ‘English/Australian’, so I’ll pay it no more angst than it deserves. Back onto the continent. My six days in Poland ticked all boxes of hedonism listed on the standard western ‘holiday’ form. I took loads off in the presence of my loveable Polish friend by putting loads in: delivery trucks queued before dawn through the outskirts of Krakow to feed our collective appetite for Pierogi (Polish dumplings), potato pancakes, stew, sausage, cabbage, beetroot soup and schnitzel. Buckets of schnitzel, single-handedly putting the abbatoirs back in, and completely out, of business. The best ice-cream I’ve ever had. The best beer I’ve ever had. The best glazed jam donut I’ve ever had; the best I’ve had which wasn’t that good. It spiralled into a mess of consumption bests, the stomach’s short-term memory constantly effacing itself as it expanded into eternal presents of more and better, carpe diem and carpe pierogi, a bulging feast of Trimalchio which didn’t know when from when in order to say it.
Actually the indulgence was fairly moderate, but it was a running joke between me and Marts that everything was the best we’d ever had, culminating in a sub-par Warsaw ice-cream, of which Marts: ‘This is the best mediocre ice-cream I’ve ever had.’ There were times of unrestrained sensory pleasure, but there were also some stone-cold sobering moments. Marts refused to accompany me to Auschwitz, so I went by myself – well, with four innocent but douchy Alaskans to be precise. They were nice enough, but I couldn’t help cringing a bit at their automatic douchy tourist reflexes, which they tried to suppress for my sake but failed, charmingly. I was bitching to one of them about people being disrespectful and taking photos inside the buildings (converted into museums) when it was prohibited, and he wholeheartedly agreed with me, until it came out later that he’d taken a few himself. Guiltily…but who could resist a pose with a tangled mass of spectacles which had been plundered from victims for reuse? Surely it was beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams that mass-produced, mass-culled monuments to murder would one day form the main attraction in a digital photograph alongside the camera's owner: to be explained with relish to his Alaskan friends back home, a pause in a slide show, filled by an oral caption which would omit the part about how he wasn't allowed to take a photo but he did. Or don it as a badge of honour.
Tourists aside - herded from our story like the obedient group they are - Auschwitz was the most affecting museum trip of my life. That's no idle 'best' claim. I'd had an average holocaust education: seen Schindler's, read Night, even been to Dachau, the other famous camp near Munich. But the familiarity of the stories didn't detract from inhabiting their setting. There were details I'd forgotten, or never known in the first place, such as the figure of the Sonderkommando: a fellow prisoner who, in exchange for better living conditions, discharged the grisly tasks of hauling the dead bodies from the gas chambers, stripping them of their gold fillings, their rings, their hair - anything of remote value - and putting them in the incinerator. On liberation, the Soviets found a mass of human hair waiting to be reused in pillows and bedclothes. It's now in a display case, behind glass: aged and dry, but unmistakeably hair. It wasn't just the mass slaughter, but the ruthless efficiency with which the resource expenditure of performing that slaughter was recouped by any means possible. In this narrow, perverse sense, the Nazis were the greatest proto-environmentalists of their time: they recycled everything. That was the emo part. But it also got a little more detached and academic. Thankfully I had the chance to talk to the tour guide on her own - a patient Polish woman whose eyes I could see swelling in exasperation every time she had to tell someone not to take a photo - about the afterlife of Auschwitz. She had done her MA in Jewish Studies on the symbol of Auschwitz and the fierce contests still surrounding it. Proportionally, of course, the Jews were dealt the worst hand. But so potent has Auschwitz become in contemporary imagination that it has completely eclipsed the appalling number of civilian deaths in wider Poland during WWII - a couple of million at the least. The guide talked of her problems with retaining the attention of Jewish tourists in the camp, who visibly lost interest whenever 'Polish' suffering came up. But she also tussled with other extremes: the American tourist who was offended that none of her spiels contained mention of German suffering. Along the paths of this still-overcrowded death camp, the politics run on, and refuse to die.
Far from the horrors of Auschwitz in distance and character - though only a paragraph of text away, and that's what an unplanned blog will do to you - was my Italian jaunt. Before meeting up with me mum, I imposed a bit of scenic purgatory-by-exhaustion. A silly idea popped into my head: I would walk a marathon 120 k's along the Ligurian coast of Italy, from Genova to La Spezia, in three and a half days. I trekked with a heavy burden of a rucksack on a hard back (the tent came in handy, the Hemingway didn't, but at least that was a softback), which made the steep ascents and descents fairly taxing at times. The first half stuck to the road, the only option on what must be one of the most densely holiday-settled stretches of coast in Europe. The villas never stopped, but only oscillated between compression and rarefaction as I moved from town to (nearby) town. Then, finally, I hit rugged national park, doing my best to navigate maplessly by the cheery proverb 'If the sea's on your right, she'll be right.' It's a proverb now. The coast really started doing spectacular things with itself at this point: growing pine trees, crumbling rocks, dropping away to the sea at an almost vertical gradient. Tiers of olives, citrus and grapes appeared every now and then, a living reproach to any farmer that thinks they have it tough on flat land. I walked the famous 11km run of the cinque terre on the last day, the sun flashing its pearly whites and breathing oppressive warmth as much as ever. Each of the five towns, evenly spaced along the stretch, is encrusted on its own bit of rock in its own way. As the rock permitted, so the towns formed, until they froze in their current state: rainbow lego villages of pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows, oranges. My shoes have smudged errant tracks over all, now visible only in my poor memory - a lonely life and death, but I'll keep them walking for a while regardless.
Having moaned about multiplied homes, it was nice to return to another place I'd 'lived in' (if only for a month) five years ago: Padova. Mum's longstanding friend Antonio, with whom I stayed last time, was in stellar form. Quite literally: he's a prof of astronomy at the university of Pads. But he's also the jolliest, plumpest Italian bawd I know. When he meets his male friends on the street, he playfully whacks them in the testacles as greeting. I'm all for it. But if I introduced it here, I'd probably have to get people to sign clearance forms. And then I'd have to tweezer out the fine points like the scale and frequency of whack; and destroying fun with tweezers is a decidedly non-fun way to do it. Anyway, I had great fun listening to Antonio discourse on every subject under the stars. Stuff he knew about (elementary optics, telescopes, obsolete measuring instruments from the fifties) and stuff he didn't (the historical roots of south Italian sloth). Five years older and I felt a little better equipped to pick him up on his good-natured bullshit; but I'm yet to learn how to fling it back effectively.
So there you are, punters: put that in your punt and punt it into the racing course where you can take a...never mind. Back in the Bridge, I'm poised to make a grab for the last shreds of summer: penniless. Paying the price for not enough continence. But content.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The End of June
Some of you may have heard me bang on in my classics voice - which is loftier and more stentorian than my non-classics voice - about the thesis I've just submitted for my Masters degree. If you've made the observation that such a degree is redundant, since I was long ago promoted from the ranks of Master to Mister anyway, you're probably right. Nevertheless, you may call me Master of Philosophy - if I pass, that is - at any point after 16 July. That's right, I became a deep thinker behind your backs. You know, Descartes n' shit. It's all up here. I'm pointing towards my nostrils.
In reality, not many will have heard me bang on, because I prefer not to bang on full stop (what's this blog then?), let alone about stuff that trips a switch to make the hearer's eyelids stutter and break down. But this approach, which I played in an Australian environment of rich occupational diversity, trading awkward silence on my part for awkward silence on the interlocutor's, is fast becoming outmoded. The other day I registered a point of blinding obviousness to most people, occult mysticism to myself. Here it is: everyone in Cambridge is an academic. Most are interested in what you're doing, and can engage very closely with it if the zoom is withdrawn but a little. Years of social training in dealing with obscurity have made it difficult to wean myself off the assumption that no one wants to hear it. So it's taking me a good while to get better at talking about what I do every day. That's unsurprising, given I've just had the realisation that it's worth talking about.
With the exception of a few shrunken chip packets of humanity, most students here have had a pretty liberal education. So I'll give you an example of a conversation I've had which illustrates the obsolescence of my time-honoured principle (no talk, no bore). Standard practice is to start wide and then narrow, testing the limits of recognition and enthusiasm on the listener's side. But I found myself repeatedly underestimating the other person's knowledge, along these lines:
Dude: So what do you work on then?
Tom: Classics. Latin and Greek. Yep. Latin and Greek.
Dude: I know what classics is. What area?
Tom: Mostly Latin poetry, around the birth of Christ.
Dude: I know who Christ is. Which poets? Virgil?
Tom: Yes! Sometimes. Have you heard of Ovid?
Dude: Of course. Metamorphoses, Fasti...which work?
Tom: Fasti actually. It's one of his lesser known poems, based on the Roman calendar...
Dude: I've read the Fasti. I found it intensely boring. Turning a calendar into poetry! The whole structure is unsound in the first place.
Tom: Sir, I have misjudged you. What do you do?
Dude: Astronomy.
Tom: Stephen Hawking. Black holes. Ok, see you later.
That's a stylised and extreme example; but it's not so far from the more egregious moments of real life misjudgement I've indulged in over the last nine months. I'm mentally redrafting a manifesto for talking about things academic in Cambridge as a result. First principles will be 'omniscient until proven selectively ignorant' and 'fascinated until proven bored by performing acts of self-harm to drown out the pain of classical noises'. Nine months and finally adjusting. They didn't test my reaction time when they let me in, evidently.
None of this is to say that you Oz pals are raging philistines who invariably put me off by deflecting the conversation from Horace to beer, Lucan to barbecues. I locate the fault squarely in myself: I'm a man of habit, and not talking is a bad habit. I know that most of you are genuinely interested, so don't shy from asking me for that crossword answer. We could even use the crossword answer as a springboard for wide-ranging incursions into the classical world. Only if you want, of course. No pressure.
Now that the contract code-named 'permission to bore' has been signed, let's roll. I noticed (tardily yet again) a neat simultaneity between art and life this week. The poem I wrote my thesis on - Ovid's Fasti - is indeed based on the Roman calendar (see implausible dialogue above). It promises to go all the way and deliver entertaining stories behind festivals and stars sequentially for all twelve months of the year. But it breaks off at the end of June. We only have six months. It's the best textual apocalypse I know of: time literally comes to an end. Note that June 30th is today. So the time I've lived with this thesis (I started thinking about it seriously at the New Year) pretty much corresponds exactly to the length of time covered in the poem. I've held Ovid's hand from January to June - and both our works stop. Ovid claimed it was exile (see 'The Pitch' post) that broke the Fasti. I'm not headed for an eternal winter in Bulgaria, but I am going to see my mum in Italy soon. Ovid wanted his work burned after exile, drama queen at heart. Of course nothing was burned and copies proliferated. I burned a copy of my thesis and maintained electronic versions. Ovid wrote verse when he tried to write prose. I write prose when I try to write about his verse. The parallels are astoundingly tenuous!
You'll note I spend a lot of my time trying to get Ovid into bed - a bed spanning 2000 years. It's a big bed. But enough on that. Let's talk about sex. I mean, summer. Cambridge has fallen into a different kind of quietude now: it's hot as western Sydney in November (chose unfamiliar terms for that one - don't really know what western Sydney is like at any time of the year, nor most probably do you, ye of affluent centrality), tourists block your thoroughfare and fan your self-importance, and every man has his shirt off with a view to boiling those back pimples until they shrivel into freckles. The undergrads have upped and left, dwelling on the disappointment or thrill of a 2.1 (exam results are divided into classes: oversimplified, a 1st is 70 and above, a 2.1 60-69, 2.2 50-59, 3 40-49 - by far the majority gets a 2.1). But not before they've enjoyed what a friend described as the only period in which Cambridge is a mentally sanitary place: May Week. Yep, it's always in June. But I like to think of the name as not so much a temporal reference as an index of license. This is the week in which students ask their studious consciences: 'May we have guilt-free fun for once?' And their consciences benevolently reply: 'You may.' Every college runs a ball/party/garden party, which means that there are multiple events crammed into every day. The balls of the monerable (my term for Trinity and Johns etc: both moneyed and venerable) colleges are famed for elegance and extravagance. Black tied men, frocked up ladies, illimitable booze and food, fireworks, music, fun fun FUN till the sun comes up, and then some (they usually close about 7am). I didn't buy any tickets to this sort of thing in 2009 for two equally moral reasons: because I hate stuffy decadence (non-stuffy is permissible), and I couldn't afford to go (tix cost upwards of a hundred pounds a pop). Maybe when I get a job. You'd think I would have realised the problems with that wistful sentence of pleasure deferred by now: for of all things on the event horizon, a job is at the singularity. Black hole reference. That's my conversational trump card reserved for astronomers, as above.
Even if I could afford a ticket to a May ball proper, I think the problem would be the capitalised FUN, the pressure that 120 pounds compressed into 9 hours creates, especially for an Australian. You can perhaps predict where this is going; but I'm going to go, blessing or not. I much preferred the King's answer to a ball: theme, but no dress code, endless basic booze, snacky festivalesque food, inflatable rides, five stages of bands/djs from 9pm-5am. And all for a comparatively modest 60 pounds. Which still sounds pricey to a western mind, hardened in the fine arts of price-taggery, but when you think about the setting - King's college turned into a multi-coloured playground for one night only - this cynical punter thinks it 'worth it'. In so far as experience can be monetarily quantified (which it has to be - and before the event too - otherwise we'd all be paying what we got out of that gig according to our own idiosyncratic conversion rates), I thought the King's Affair landed it spot on.
Thus my past two weeks have disappeared in lazy flights of drinking, punting, unsuccessful mushrooming, Londoning: summering. From tomorrow onwards, the symbolic first day of the rest of the year, where the Fasti's tentacles don't quite reach, I'm stocktaking for the remainder of the season. But for one more day, I plan to revel in the time I have to do everything, and the prohibitive poverty tagging alongside, tugging its loose shirt: yeasayer and naysayer walk, arm in arm, towards the end of June.
In reality, not many will have heard me bang on, because I prefer not to bang on full stop (what's this blog then?), let alone about stuff that trips a switch to make the hearer's eyelids stutter and break down. But this approach, which I played in an Australian environment of rich occupational diversity, trading awkward silence on my part for awkward silence on the interlocutor's, is fast becoming outmoded. The other day I registered a point of blinding obviousness to most people, occult mysticism to myself. Here it is: everyone in Cambridge is an academic. Most are interested in what you're doing, and can engage very closely with it if the zoom is withdrawn but a little. Years of social training in dealing with obscurity have made it difficult to wean myself off the assumption that no one wants to hear it. So it's taking me a good while to get better at talking about what I do every day. That's unsurprising, given I've just had the realisation that it's worth talking about.
With the exception of a few shrunken chip packets of humanity, most students here have had a pretty liberal education. So I'll give you an example of a conversation I've had which illustrates the obsolescence of my time-honoured principle (no talk, no bore). Standard practice is to start wide and then narrow, testing the limits of recognition and enthusiasm on the listener's side. But I found myself repeatedly underestimating the other person's knowledge, along these lines:
Dude: So what do you work on then?
Tom: Classics. Latin and Greek. Yep. Latin and Greek.
Dude: I know what classics is. What area?
Tom: Mostly Latin poetry, around the birth of Christ.
Dude: I know who Christ is. Which poets? Virgil?
Tom: Yes! Sometimes. Have you heard of Ovid?
Dude: Of course. Metamorphoses, Fasti...which work?
Tom: Fasti actually. It's one of his lesser known poems, based on the Roman calendar...
Dude: I've read the Fasti. I found it intensely boring. Turning a calendar into poetry! The whole structure is unsound in the first place.
Tom: Sir, I have misjudged you. What do you do?
Dude: Astronomy.
Tom: Stephen Hawking. Black holes. Ok, see you later.
That's a stylised and extreme example; but it's not so far from the more egregious moments of real life misjudgement I've indulged in over the last nine months. I'm mentally redrafting a manifesto for talking about things academic in Cambridge as a result. First principles will be 'omniscient until proven selectively ignorant' and 'fascinated until proven bored by performing acts of self-harm to drown out the pain of classical noises'. Nine months and finally adjusting. They didn't test my reaction time when they let me in, evidently.
None of this is to say that you Oz pals are raging philistines who invariably put me off by deflecting the conversation from Horace to beer, Lucan to barbecues. I locate the fault squarely in myself: I'm a man of habit, and not talking is a bad habit. I know that most of you are genuinely interested, so don't shy from asking me for that crossword answer. We could even use the crossword answer as a springboard for wide-ranging incursions into the classical world. Only if you want, of course. No pressure.
Now that the contract code-named 'permission to bore' has been signed, let's roll. I noticed (tardily yet again) a neat simultaneity between art and life this week. The poem I wrote my thesis on - Ovid's Fasti - is indeed based on the Roman calendar (see implausible dialogue above). It promises to go all the way and deliver entertaining stories behind festivals and stars sequentially for all twelve months of the year. But it breaks off at the end of June. We only have six months. It's the best textual apocalypse I know of: time literally comes to an end. Note that June 30th is today. So the time I've lived with this thesis (I started thinking about it seriously at the New Year) pretty much corresponds exactly to the length of time covered in the poem. I've held Ovid's hand from January to June - and both our works stop. Ovid claimed it was exile (see 'The Pitch' post) that broke the Fasti. I'm not headed for an eternal winter in Bulgaria, but I am going to see my mum in Italy soon. Ovid wanted his work burned after exile, drama queen at heart. Of course nothing was burned and copies proliferated. I burned a copy of my thesis and maintained electronic versions. Ovid wrote verse when he tried to write prose. I write prose when I try to write about his verse. The parallels are astoundingly tenuous!
You'll note I spend a lot of my time trying to get Ovid into bed - a bed spanning 2000 years. It's a big bed. But enough on that. Let's talk about sex. I mean, summer. Cambridge has fallen into a different kind of quietude now: it's hot as western Sydney in November (chose unfamiliar terms for that one - don't really know what western Sydney is like at any time of the year, nor most probably do you, ye of affluent centrality), tourists block your thoroughfare and fan your self-importance, and every man has his shirt off with a view to boiling those back pimples until they shrivel into freckles. The undergrads have upped and left, dwelling on the disappointment or thrill of a 2.1 (exam results are divided into classes: oversimplified, a 1st is 70 and above, a 2.1 60-69, 2.2 50-59, 3 40-49 - by far the majority gets a 2.1). But not before they've enjoyed what a friend described as the only period in which Cambridge is a mentally sanitary place: May Week. Yep, it's always in June. But I like to think of the name as not so much a temporal reference as an index of license. This is the week in which students ask their studious consciences: 'May we have guilt-free fun for once?' And their consciences benevolently reply: 'You may.' Every college runs a ball/party/garden party, which means that there are multiple events crammed into every day. The balls of the monerable (my term for Trinity and Johns etc: both moneyed and venerable) colleges are famed for elegance and extravagance. Black tied men, frocked up ladies, illimitable booze and food, fireworks, music, fun fun FUN till the sun comes up, and then some (they usually close about 7am). I didn't buy any tickets to this sort of thing in 2009 for two equally moral reasons: because I hate stuffy decadence (non-stuffy is permissible), and I couldn't afford to go (tix cost upwards of a hundred pounds a pop). Maybe when I get a job. You'd think I would have realised the problems with that wistful sentence of pleasure deferred by now: for of all things on the event horizon, a job is at the singularity. Black hole reference. That's my conversational trump card reserved for astronomers, as above.
Even if I could afford a ticket to a May ball proper, I think the problem would be the capitalised FUN, the pressure that 120 pounds compressed into 9 hours creates, especially for an Australian. You can perhaps predict where this is going; but I'm going to go, blessing or not. I much preferred the King's answer to a ball: theme, but no dress code, endless basic booze, snacky festivalesque food, inflatable rides, five stages of bands/djs from 9pm-5am. And all for a comparatively modest 60 pounds. Which still sounds pricey to a western mind, hardened in the fine arts of price-taggery, but when you think about the setting - King's college turned into a multi-coloured playground for one night only - this cynical punter thinks it 'worth it'. In so far as experience can be monetarily quantified (which it has to be - and before the event too - otherwise we'd all be paying what we got out of that gig according to our own idiosyncratic conversion rates), I thought the King's Affair landed it spot on.
Thus my past two weeks have disappeared in lazy flights of drinking, punting, unsuccessful mushrooming, Londoning: summering. From tomorrow onwards, the symbolic first day of the rest of the year, where the Fasti's tentacles don't quite reach, I'm stocktaking for the remainder of the season. But for one more day, I plan to revel in the time I have to do everything, and the prohibitive poverty tagging alongside, tugging its loose shirt: yeasayer and naysayer walk, arm in arm, towards the end of June.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Malfunctioning Boyler
Sboyler alert: the result of Britain's Got Talent will be revealed in the course of this post. That is, now: Susan Boyle lost. Claimer: my anti-populist prejudices will be revealed in the course of this post. No time like the present. Susan Boyle's rise to global phenomenon gives me a sensation too strong for a shitty euphemism. It gives me fully-fledged splats of diarrhoea.
For those of you who aren't exiled in the Mother Country and haven't been touched by the swine-fluesque pandemic of 'I dreamed a dream' on Youtube, Susan Boyle is (now was) a contestant on the much-adored TV show Britain's Got Talent (like the various worldwide incarnations of Idol, but with less restrictive prescriptions for the type of performance). A frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman who openly confessed to having 'never been kissed', she was catapulted to mega-stardom upon her 'inspiring' performance of 'I Dreamed a Dream'; as the powerful voice emerged from the puffy face, it shattered preconceptions of what a frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman is capable of achieving. This is all so bile-boyling that I feel as if it should go into the safe, scorn-surrounded quarantine of quotation marks. Something about the whole affair pissed me off profoundly; quotes will only isolate the malaise, not explain it.
I don't take issue with Boyle's success per se. She obviously has a great voice, and all good luck to her in future endeavours that make use of this 'talent' she has generously showed us she's 'got'. Nor do I object to a performer's appeal being consciously stroked and enhanced by their biography: to put art in context and pinpoint where it comes from is to satisfy our nosiness and flatter our comprehension abilities. In many cases, an artist's captivating back-story eclipses interest in their actual output, or hauls them from mortal to myth. Boyle's story isn't so much a transcendence of adversity as it is of mediocrity; a trajectory which seems to sell much better in the current zest for 'reality'. Even so, if she doesn't exaggerate when she proclaims her lifelong lack of intimacy, I wonder if she wouldn't exchange her fleeting pop-deification for the enduring memory of a first kiss with Ted McCormick, sitting by the edge of the Loch, a tender young lass of wee more than fifteen. Her initial pin-up image of benign, smily old spinster has also been qualified after a few reported outbursts. Something tells me that Boyle would be a formidable presence to stumble upon in her local pub habitat.
Some would say that all of this is superficial shadow narrative: what we should really listen to is Boyle's stellar voice. That's all good and idealistic. But you can't stop an information-greedy populace licking up every last crumb it's fed. I used to argue passionately for a separation between the juries of artist and man when it came to the genius of Shane Warne. Whatever his shortcomings as hubby, he was a marvellous leg spinner. That line was also easy to toe because I find all expressions of public indignation at private (and minor) misdemeanours inherently funny. Still, I liked to think it was just plain fairness and tolerance. My protestations did nothing to redeem Warney at the nadir of his reputation however; my former boss would splutter coffee over the Sunday rags in pronouncing the verdict 'I hate that man.' Likewise in the Boyle case, people surely voted for a story as much as they did a performer/performance. Clever song choice ('I dreamed a dream' - did you then?) neatly tied the two together, such that one became a reminder of the other. The dream is one of the oldest feel-good metaphors in the book. Obama cashed in on the pos. cons too, slipping the word into the title of his autobiography, and thus the wider grammar of his election rhetoric: 'hope' and 'change' etc. I find it difficult to connect with this language, partly because I'm a cynical bastard, partly because most of my dreams feature failure, futile repetition, random numbers, badgers with dentures, Juvenal's third satire, and death. Some of which morph organically into others.
But the dripping sentiment is too easy a target, and predictability is also a recurring bad dream. What really galled me about the whole affair was that the judges, and presumably the public whose collective reaction they were trying to mirror, were unexpectedly blown away by a frumpish 48-yr-old with a good voice (it also galls me that I feel like I have to put in 'frumpish 48-yr-old' to illustrate). It was all so condescending: the frequent cuts to the judges' open mouths, the screaming fans, the proliferation of uses of the adjective 'incredible'. What's so bloody incredible about a good voice? Aah, so it wasn't the voice. It was the shock of witnessing the voice emerge not from a botox-high, orthodontically arranged mouth, but the hair-crowned lips of your ageless aunt Gladys. The subtext was precisely that: how could a woman who looks like that, sound like that? Which brings me to perhaps my most controversial slam: that wasn't that good anyway. It might be my ignorance of most things musical, but I for one felt nothing upon seeing that youtube vid; only a vague sense of resentment at being roped into the circus. If we shifted media, to, say, the good old wireless, would the Boyle reach the same dizzying heights, and cause everyone to swoon with ballooning belief in their own sky's-the-limitless potential? If a tear did appear in the corner of my eye as her hips began to 'rediscover' some dormant sensuality, planted in the first place by hours of staring at gyratin' bodies on the telly, it was shed for lost dignity, not long-denied success.
There's some consolation in the equally swift deceleration into obscurity that waits for Boyle with warm, open arms. The advantage of 'reality' fame in the youtube generation is its comical transience, an unreality that will look completely implausible when you're back on the outside, keeping pace with the ladies and gents who love a bit of implausibility, especially when it's not that implausible. The badgers may come once; but it's not likely they will come again.
For those of you who aren't exiled in the Mother Country and haven't been touched by the swine-fluesque pandemic of 'I dreamed a dream' on Youtube, Susan Boyle is (now was) a contestant on the much-adored TV show Britain's Got Talent (like the various worldwide incarnations of Idol, but with less restrictive prescriptions for the type of performance). A frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman who openly confessed to having 'never been kissed', she was catapulted to mega-stardom upon her 'inspiring' performance of 'I Dreamed a Dream'; as the powerful voice emerged from the puffy face, it shattered preconceptions of what a frumpish 48-yr-old Scottish woman is capable of achieving. This is all so bile-boyling that I feel as if it should go into the safe, scorn-surrounded quarantine of quotation marks. Something about the whole affair pissed me off profoundly; quotes will only isolate the malaise, not explain it.
I don't take issue with Boyle's success per se. She obviously has a great voice, and all good luck to her in future endeavours that make use of this 'talent' she has generously showed us she's 'got'. Nor do I object to a performer's appeal being consciously stroked and enhanced by their biography: to put art in context and pinpoint where it comes from is to satisfy our nosiness and flatter our comprehension abilities. In many cases, an artist's captivating back-story eclipses interest in their actual output, or hauls them from mortal to myth. Boyle's story isn't so much a transcendence of adversity as it is of mediocrity; a trajectory which seems to sell much better in the current zest for 'reality'. Even so, if she doesn't exaggerate when she proclaims her lifelong lack of intimacy, I wonder if she wouldn't exchange her fleeting pop-deification for the enduring memory of a first kiss with Ted McCormick, sitting by the edge of the Loch, a tender young lass of wee more than fifteen. Her initial pin-up image of benign, smily old spinster has also been qualified after a few reported outbursts. Something tells me that Boyle would be a formidable presence to stumble upon in her local pub habitat.
Some would say that all of this is superficial shadow narrative: what we should really listen to is Boyle's stellar voice. That's all good and idealistic. But you can't stop an information-greedy populace licking up every last crumb it's fed. I used to argue passionately for a separation between the juries of artist and man when it came to the genius of Shane Warne. Whatever his shortcomings as hubby, he was a marvellous leg spinner. That line was also easy to toe because I find all expressions of public indignation at private (and minor) misdemeanours inherently funny. Still, I liked to think it was just plain fairness and tolerance. My protestations did nothing to redeem Warney at the nadir of his reputation however; my former boss would splutter coffee over the Sunday rags in pronouncing the verdict 'I hate that man.' Likewise in the Boyle case, people surely voted for a story as much as they did a performer/performance. Clever song choice ('I dreamed a dream' - did you then?) neatly tied the two together, such that one became a reminder of the other. The dream is one of the oldest feel-good metaphors in the book. Obama cashed in on the pos. cons too, slipping the word into the title of his autobiography, and thus the wider grammar of his election rhetoric: 'hope' and 'change' etc. I find it difficult to connect with this language, partly because I'm a cynical bastard, partly because most of my dreams feature failure, futile repetition, random numbers, badgers with dentures, Juvenal's third satire, and death. Some of which morph organically into others.
But the dripping sentiment is too easy a target, and predictability is also a recurring bad dream. What really galled me about the whole affair was that the judges, and presumably the public whose collective reaction they were trying to mirror, were unexpectedly blown away by a frumpish 48-yr-old with a good voice (it also galls me that I feel like I have to put in 'frumpish 48-yr-old' to illustrate). It was all so condescending: the frequent cuts to the judges' open mouths, the screaming fans, the proliferation of uses of the adjective 'incredible'. What's so bloody incredible about a good voice? Aah, so it wasn't the voice. It was the shock of witnessing the voice emerge not from a botox-high, orthodontically arranged mouth, but the hair-crowned lips of your ageless aunt Gladys. The subtext was precisely that: how could a woman who looks like that, sound like that? Which brings me to perhaps my most controversial slam: that wasn't that good anyway. It might be my ignorance of most things musical, but I for one felt nothing upon seeing that youtube vid; only a vague sense of resentment at being roped into the circus. If we shifted media, to, say, the good old wireless, would the Boyle reach the same dizzying heights, and cause everyone to swoon with ballooning belief in their own sky's-the-limitless potential? If a tear did appear in the corner of my eye as her hips began to 'rediscover' some dormant sensuality, planted in the first place by hours of staring at gyratin' bodies on the telly, it was shed for lost dignity, not long-denied success.
There's some consolation in the equally swift deceleration into obscurity that waits for Boyle with warm, open arms. The advantage of 'reality' fame in the youtube generation is its comical transience, an unreality that will look completely implausible when you're back on the outside, keeping pace with the ladies and gents who love a bit of implausibility, especially when it's not that implausible. The badgers may come once; but it's not likely they will come again.
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