Posts Tagged ‘Oxford’

never let it be said

{ April 28, 2010 @ 9:21 pm } · { Oxford, Topic-specific discussions }
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Dinner today: steamed Alaskan salmon (lightly salted) on a bed of rice mixed with wolfberries, accompanied by fried onions, boiled broccoli and raw carrots. Salmon and rice turned out pretty good (it really does make an immense difference if you buy a better-quality, fresher fish…), and I was quite pleased by the contrast in the vegetable textures and tastes. I was contemplating raw onion at the start (also because I was a little lazy and wondering whether it be worth the effort of washing out the pan) but I figured that would be too biting, and I was right. Unfortunately, I think I have yet to get the hang of frying onions very well – I think it might have been because some of it was a bit thin? – and some of it was a bit charred. I didn’t eat those bits, though. *laugh*

I’m still unfortunately very far from true culinary prowess, however. One thing I do want to achieve this Trinity term is to perfect my grasp of the omelette, though. (I’m the kind of person who thinks that eggs should be a separate food group. More than rice or bread, I think I need eggs to be happy.) I think I’ve conquered the straightforward, plain omelette. I can do them fluffy or non-fluffy (I personally am fonder of them non-fluffy, though?) and while I doubt I could do them in my sleep, when I’ve just crawled out of bed and brushed my teeth, I think I’m pretty close.

So the next step is to be more imaginative. I tried a ham filling today, and that came out quite well. I’m wondering how many ingredients I could fold into an omelette before it gets unwieldy and strange, but one of my dearest fantasies is a ham-and-three-cheese-and-spinach-and-chicken-and-onion-and-bacon-and-pepper omelette.

Hey, a girl can dream!

But that’s not really the point of this post. The point is, I finished eating my dinner and was washing the dishes while fantasising about said omelette, and I just laughed a little to myself when I thought of saying, ‘Goals for Trinity term: get a first in prelims and perfect my omelette-making skills.’ It’s just not the sort of thing that one reports to the scholarship board, you know?

And then I caught myself. Why is it that I see it as a lesser accomplishment? And from there it rapidly segues into my belief that I don’t want to be a housewife.

Fresh from The Social Contract: one does something when one has the will (or inclination) to do so and the ability to do so.

I know I have the ability to do so. I can cook, clean, do the laundry, write the household accounts, etc, etc, so the basic elements are there. And I’m an intelligent person (I hope!) and therefore I could certainly learn any skills that I still lack. (Such as the ability to create my dream omelette.)

How about will? That’s rather more problematic. You see, the thing is, I don’t dislike the abovementioned tasks. I think they have their place in a well-kept home. I enjoy cooking and even the washing up after is tolerable, especially when the meal is good and it affords me time to think. (Nobody likes laundry, but that’s just the way the world turns, aye?) My heart goes all a-flutter in Boswells. I coo at egg timers and get excited by tupperware. I smile at the coffee makers and the salt and pepper shakers. I reach out to the mugs and the bed linen. So there’s clearly some degree of inclination going on here.

But I remember saying – and only recently at that – that I wouldn’t want to be a housewife because, to put it plainly, it’d be a waste of my degree.

I think there’s a very valid practical reason. If I get my degree and become an investment banker or a management consultant, I get pots of money. Housewives don’t get paid.

But assuming that I marry an incredibly rich man and hence the money consideration is moot. (And before you tell me there’s no such thing as too much money, let’s say I marry an oil sheik of some kind, in which case whatever salary I can realistically earn pales beside the immensity of black gold.) to be honest, I think (or at least, I thought, up to the point I started questioning myself and now I have to rethink all this and stop myself thinking what I’ve realised are illogical thoughts) being a housewife is a waste of my degree because it’s an unworthy job.

And that’s something that I think a lot of people think. The really scary thing, though, is that people think it on all sides of the divide. Chauvinists look at the housewife’s job and think, ‘Ah, women’s work.’ Feminists look at the housewife’s job and think ‘Patriarchal structure confining Woman and preventing her from manifesting her full potential.’ And ordinary people who have no chips on their shoulders about gender and gender roles presumably think of it as just mundane work. Or even less than that – it’s not even work at all, perhaps because it certainly doesn’t help that housewives are not paid, so there’s no obvious monetary value. Neither are there barriers to entry (say, the bar exam for lawyers). Further, there is no evaluation of a common standard of housewifery. (In any paid job, the obvious evaluation is how much money said person is making and how many clients he or she has, be that person a plumber, florist, singer, or doctor.) And it’s not a well-defined role, and there are no unions to represent housewives’ interests, and so on.

But isn’t that a damningly condescending attitude I’ve been taking? To be a housewife (and presumably a mother) is, if you really, really think about it, one of the most difficult jobs you could probably ever choose to do:

At the most basic level, you physically clean the house. That takes effort, and the maxim is true – dust just doesn’t go away. Beds always have to be made. The laundry (oh, the laundry) refuses to end. Maids are paid to do such labour, as are cleaners in public spaces – and a housewife is expected to be more thorough and do better.

But that’s just basics, right? The housewife is also expected to make her home pleasant. So she has to be an interior designer. She picks out the furniture and wonders whether the velour makes good curtains. She pauses over whether the floor should be in parquet or marble, and does she want a side table? Are the lamps too dim or too bright? She could buy a lampshade, or perhaps she should replace them altogether and put in a ceiling light instead… and then she takes a step back. The coffee table, the sofa, the television, the piano and the various knick-knacks  have to be arranged such that the room presents itself as neither cluttered nor empty.

Hallelujah, we’ve finished with the living room, haven’t we? Now there’s only the rest of the house to be concerned with.

Well, she comforts herself, interior design is a once-off, major job that occurs only when she first moves in. Now that that’s over and done with, we slide smoothly into the kitchen, where she’s expected (again) to clean, but also to cook. So here she becomes restauranteur and chef and nutritionist. Who is she cooking for? A husband with high cholesterol, a couple of picky children. She has to cook meals that give them all the dietary balance that they need, and it had better look appetising because that’s part of giving them that balance, after all. So she trims the fat carefully from the chicken and earnestly reads books on the positive properties of different vegetables and superfoods and tries out different recipes, and every time her food is sent back, she will smile like a proper restauranteur and redo it the next time. When it’s eaten, she smiles in satisfaction.

But that’s not where it ends, does it? She dimisses the chef’s hat and picks up the accountant’s calculator. She begins to think about her husband’s salary and how she can write the household budget on it. She keeps track of the ins and outs, she files the taxes, she studies the various investments and insurance policies that they could buy to determine the ones they should buy.

Alright, the money’s been settled and the college fund has been set up. But on the subject of the college fund, speak of the little devils, the children are home, they’ve finished lunch, and suddenly she’s the teacher and mentor that they need. She’ll help them do their homework, she’ll stay up night glueing ice-cream sticks together so they can take the model house to school tomorrow, she’ll set them boundaries and teach them about life. She’s a first-aid worker too, occasionally, when they go out to the playground and come back with scrapes. And unlike an ordinary teacher, she’ll have to learn how to deal with children ranging from the time they’re tiny tots to the time they’re terrible teenagers.

And then her husband’s come back from work, and she’s an amateur psychologist, because she’s got to smile and listen while he tells her about anything from work stresses to childhood traumas and his quarrels with his parents. She serves as a willing listening ear, and later that night she’s available for his sexual gratification. What does one call that job, I wonder?

And, calling to mind that proverb about straws and camels, this is one job that you can never finish.

*

To be fair, I exaggerate, of course. You can hire domestic help and interior designers and nannies and eat out, and that makes the situation a lot easier. It gets exponentially better if you’ve got a husband who’s willing to do his share and while the litany of things to do seems rather bleak, I’m sure there are plenty of happy housewives.

The point I’m trying to make is that I think housewifing (hardly a word, but still) is an underappreciated, overlooked profession. The thought of a woman who has a PhD or a DPhil who does nothing but stay at home inspires pity in me. I personally experience this incredible terror when I think being in that situation myself.

Amongst my circles, it’s just not PC for a woman to say, ‘Yeah, I want to be a wife and a mother.’ Just like I would tell my scholarship board: ‘I wrote a novel’ or ‘I acted in a play’ or ‘I got a first in prelims’, but I wouldn’t say ‘I cooked the best damn omelette ever.’ But is that truly in keeping with my feminist principles? If every profession should be open to women, why should I feel distaste for the woman who chooses one of the toughest and unrewarded jobs there are? I can respect lawyers, actresses, aid workers, marathon runners. I could even respect a prostitute. (If she chose the profession. This statement does NOT apply to women who are victims of sex trafficking, but that is a rant for another day.) What gives me the right or rationale to think that the dowdy woman in the mum jeans and the tangled hair and the food-stained sweater is not as capable – or even more so – than the woman striding along the streets in the Louboutin heels and power suits with her immaculate coiffure?

I still don’t want to be a housewife. But after that epiphany while  washing dishing in the sink, I won’t allow myself to think that it’s because housewifing is not challenging or a waste of my degree. (Hell, if I decided to abscond to Frisco and write novels after I finished here at Oxford, that’d be a waste of my degree too, but I wouldn’t think it was a bad decision – at least, not if I made it.)  I still think that parts of the feminist argument on housewifing is valid (because women still feel compelled to adhere to a role, because there are women who want to be something else but are housewives because of social pressure to be such). There are only two justifications that I will allow myself to think from this point onwards:

a) I just don’t have a taste for it. It’s like why I prefer to write prose instead of poetry.

b) Being a housewife’s too damn hard. I’m not equal to that task.

But yeah. A jolt for my feminist self, this time, to remind myself not to fall into the complacent commonplaces and in doing so, shoot myself in the foot. A woman should be able to choose whatever she wants to do. I have no right to judge. Even if she’s a Harvard PhD or an Oxford DPhil, if she personally and genuinely finds being a housewife more rewarding than writing academic papers or having a high-flying job – I have no right. None at all.

(I’m very tempted to talk about how Rousseau thinks you can be forced to be free, though, i.e. are these women truly acting in their own interests? How can you ever tell if her judgement on her personal satisfaction is ‘valid’? If I were talking to a woman who’d grown up somewhere in the rural Middle East, would I be quite as generally accepting of her choices? But this entry is really too long as it is. Going to go read Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Really, the thing about writing something as mindblowing as Brave New World is that people tend to neglect the rest of your work. Am off to remedy my ignorance.)

the pressure game has no limits

{ February 6, 2010 @ 8:56 pm } · { Oxford }
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Sitting in my room on the sofa with my legs up on the table, near-lethal quantities of Darjeeling, Belle & Sebastian and Gackt and the Cirque du Soleil soundtrack for Varekai on the laptop, surrounded by Keynes and Trevithick and Mankiw and assorted books on politics. Having finished a proofreading task and my economics essay earlier in the week, my politics essay is performing a striptease in an attempt to grab my attention from blog ramblings. My mother keeps asking me why I have no boyfriend, the answer is that I spend most of my time locked in my room with erudite and intelligent men who are also unfortunately generally dead, and even more unfortunately, usually a bit boring.

This term at Oxford is going by faster than I’d anticipated. It’s the end of third week already, and it feels like I just came back and like I never left at the same time. To tell the truth, I cried when I had to leave Singapore and come back (sitting on the plane with the blanket over my head pretending I was asleep and weeping silent tears), because absence makes the heart so fond and I spent so much time bonding with friends and family during the holidays. Also because coming back for the second time, you don’t have that same sense of anticipation and adrenaline to carry you through the blues, perhaps. But the minute I got back into Oxford – the minute I stepped past the familiar little blue gate in Trinity – everything just felt so right again. (I have the sinking feeling that when it comes time to leave Oxford I’ll be bawling again. Or maybe not, because I head straight for Taipei for WorldMUN + adrenaline of being in a new and exciting country!)

I think this is what studying overseas and travelling gives you – a sense of your place in the world and a glimpse of how amazing everything is. I fall in love with places: much, much more than I do with people. I want to live as an effervescent bit of neon street lighting in Tokyo. I want to stay forever in the quietude and solemnity of Oxford. I want to turn my collar to the chill grey clamour of London. I want to strut down the aggressive, reaching streets of Hong Kong. I want to wake up in laidback, charming San Francisco (preferably with a hot boy in my bed, and this applies to every city I’ve just mentioned, any offers out there?). But then there’s Singapore, with eighteen years of associations, safe, comfortable, with its own quirky. If you can just tilt your head thirty-nine degrees to the left and make your heart do a handstand, every city is romantic and infinite. Solitude is glorious.

This term I’m feeling a bit more passionate about my work than I was last term – or maybe I’m just adjusting properly now! I do keep dozing off in lectures, but the other day I crashed a couple of second-year lectures, and they were absolutely awesome. Forget sleeping – I scribbled so hard that my hand seized up for a little bit there. *laugh* The first one was on international relations during the Cold War – fascinating because we studied it in JC, of course, but we don’t really do a proper historiographical / interpretive approach. The lecture related to a lot of internal material from the Soviet archives, talked a great deal about point of view, discussed Soviet Russia as an imperial power, and in that paradigm her relationship to Eastern Europe does change a lot, and you do get a good sense of how bewildered the Kremlin was sometimes. That, of course, goes back to a more fundamental question – how much of international relations and power in general is based on personality? You’d think that a country like the USSR could run two ways – that the bureaucratic machine would not allow for expressions of personality except at the very absolute top of the hierarchy, but then again I think if you went to the primary sources, you might be surprised. Similarly, that lends itself to thinking about the trends in today’s politics: why is it that American politics nowadays keeps looking for a saviour? I do see it as a leaning towards a cult of personality – it happened with Obama, it happened with Sarah Palin, it’s happening a little bit with Scott Brown. And I’ve been reading a lot about politics, and it’s just such a dirty, unpleasant but ultimately fascinating fact about life.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. … It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

One of my favorite insights into the formation and continuance of government.

I love this feeling. I love being twenty (I know I don’t actually turn twenty until October, but I want to be twenty now, you have no clue how much I’m looking forward to my second decade of life), because it just feels like I’m coming into who I’m meant to be. I think I can consider myself a success if I can still feel like this at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty… I remember reading Michael Cunningham’s A Home At the End of the World and thinking to myself, sometimes the real tragedy is our bewilderment in the face of age. It’s a beautiful book, by the way, I recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a good read, but back to the topic… I love being able to discuss politics and philosophy and do Lagrangians in economics, I love finding my own sense of style and fashion, I love slouchy sweaters (I would ADORE a vicuna sweater from Loro Piana, if I can’t have a hot boy, I’ll settle for one of those, thank you very much), I love skintight jeans and dresses and leather trousers, I love cooking experiments, I love writing and reading. I love teaching myself what it means to be self-sufficient and self-confident, because I look back on my previous years and most people would say that self-confidence is not something that I ever lacked but sometimes I think, ‘Yeah, I was an arrogant little snot. I knew a lot about how to speak like I had life down pat but didn’t know very much about how to live with myself.’ Strength of convictions and all that jazz. I think the next thing is to teach myself how to be beautiful.

On yet another note: Claire and Jo and I went to watch Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai in London and it was so brilliant and so amazingly worth every single penny I spent on it. Talent is always breathtaking, more so when it’s a trapeze artist just winging towards you with one hand closed on a rope. Their whole body is a study in grace. You look at them and you think, ‘Every single step they take is a deliberation, an abstract.’ It must be the mark of a person whose brain has been immersed too long in academia, but the phrase ‘Platonic form’ kept flashing through my mind. But the point stands. You watch them fall and rise again at the last second and wonder how it’s even possible to trust yourself so much. You brace your hands against your mouth to stifle your gasps of admiration and you applaud until your hands are sore, because you look at these people and you wonder how many times they’ve had to fall. You look at them and think, ‘I’m not even half that graceful even when I’m not spinning upside down in midair.’ And the music! Cirque du Soleil often has absolutely amazing music – I heard the soundtrack for Alegria years ago and I can still hum the title song, and Varekai was the same. Ah, so good, so good. Constellations of life.

everyone’s perennial favourites:

{ November 19, 2009 @ 1:15 am } · { Oxford, Topic-specific discussions }
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Science and religion, ladies and gentlemen and Daryl! (Daryl, you get a specific mention because I know this sort of thing really, really gets you going.)

This is a really late post, and I must apologise for that. It’s been hovering in draft status for weeks, while I’ve been trying to live and struggling with trying to understand my work and myself. But intellectual curiosity is part of being an Oxonian, so I figured that I shouldn’t just let this post rot off, so, have a miniature discussion of two talks! First, John Micklethwait, the editor of the Economist, speaking on how God is Back, and second, Professor Peter Atkins, chemistry professor at Lincoln College, speaking on how science and religion are an irresolvable conflict.  Both were extremely interesting.

I think the main thing I took away from Micklethwait was the rise of Christianity in China, through the rise of a phenomenon called ‘house churches’. Which, as the name implies, is essentially the study of Christianity and its gospel in small groups. There’s apparently a law in China forbidding gatherings of more than twenty-five people, and this apparently prompts a rather amoeba-like fission, where, as a house church approaches 25 members, they split in half and go gather more.

The next interesting point was his mention of the profile of house church members, who, according to Mickelthwait, are generally young and well-educated: the rising class of China’s intelligentsia. Professors, businessmen, bankers, artists, writers – all of them are turning to Christianity in a surge that is posited as a search for a new and perhaps more spiritual ideology.

Lastly, the major point that I want to emphasise from Micklethwait is the possible effects that religion has on politics – both in terms of a country’s internal power politics and its relationship with other countries. He gives the impression that the Chinese government is a bit ambivalent about the current rise of Christianity. Some don’t see it as a serious threat to the current ruling structure, some do. I think it seems instinctively valid for a Communist government to worry about the rise of a potential challenging ideology (especially when you take into account the fact that Christianity is not the only religion to experience a surge in China – all religions are essentially surging there), but the specific form and mechanism of that danger doesn’t seem quite clear yet.

Right: to my own specific views, then! I think what was particularly good about the Micklethwait talk was that it expressed a different sort of religious profile. Marx’s “opiate for the masses” is out of fashion, clearly, because it’s not the uneducated masses that are getting on the religious bandwagon. I think it’s relatively uncontroversial that the sudden rise of religion in China is an expression of angst – the search for meaning in a society that hasn’t quite got a soul that it can reconcile with the sudden speed of its progress. At the same time, I can’t help but think that there might be a sense that Christianity in particular is part of the modernising trend. (China playing catch-up with the West?)

That leads to the rather interesting question of how Christianity is going to be interpreted in China, though. It does seem like such a Western religion (God as a bearded white man, etc, etc). I refuse to believe that Christianity is going to be bought wholesale by the Chinese, and yet at the same time, it’s easy to notice that Christianity in particular is an extremely adaptable religion, adopting leftover bits of pagan practice here and there. (Much like English acquiring bits of other languages, really.) I think that with Christianity in China, we’re going to notice not only the effects that Christian doctrine has on a population, but the effects that a population and its cultural history is going to have on Christianity, and that’s going to be fascinating.

Lastly, I really want to think about how we could go about studying all this. Perhaps its the academic slant in me emerging (that’s one thing that I’m really glad about taking away from Oxford), but how would one go about studying this kind of on-the-ground change? Micklethwait made quite a strong use of statistics, which I do acknowledge as an objective source, as objective as these things get. But then again, statistics is a fairly modern method of looking at my subject areas (though not so much in economics, perhaps, and I don’t think that statistics are ever going to make a serious dent in philosophy, but politics is intriguing right now as a field that is undergoing scientification (no such word, really, but I think you all understand me), and it is worth noting that the major important political texts that we consider classics were written by people who had a strong idea of what was happening on the ground. How does one get insight into the situation itself? (Makes me think that a career in journalism or diplomacy is probably the route to take if I do eventually want to become an academic proper… especially if i want to focus on politics.)

Enough of my own views, though – let me give a quick summary of the next speaker who talked about religion. Peter Atkins, who’s a chemistry professor with several best-selling chemistry textbooks to his name (apparently he’s pretty much used worldwide), spoke on the utter incommensurability of science and religion. I was quite amused at several points in his talk. He’s a mildly offensive speaker, so I did get the feeling that he was trying to court controversy, and I do think that his type gives atheism a bit of a bad name. You could probably label it frankness or honesty, but… hmm. That really depends on the individual listening to him. And I do think he got off easy, because when you’re talking to a bunch of college students, you’re talking to a demographic which is, if not outright atheist or agnostic, is at least generally more sympathetic to such points of view, regardless of their own religious convictions.

I won’t go too much into the content of his speech – it’s the same sort of straightforward atheism that (quite rightly, in my opinion) puts religion down as a complete sham and argues that there should be no space for religion in our discourse. I quite like that he tries to reframe the debate by emphasising that there are only some questions that are fundamentally important: mainly the question about how the universe began. He dismisses as rubbish questions about whether there is an afterlife and even what “meaning” our lives and the universe have.

To be fair to him, he does hold up some fairly harsh criteria for science to fulfill, and I am actually very interested in the way he says that any scientist who professes to hold religious beliefs is half a scientist only. He was quite careful to say that even as half a scientist you can produce brilliant and incredible work, but you haven’t fully subscribed to the philosophy of science, as it were… which is in its own turn interesting because the way he holds up science as the only and ultimate arbiter of knowledge makes me feel like his arguments against religion apply equally to the humanities, which should either move towards a scientific expression of their arguments or fall in the illegitimacy that he ascribes to religion… which I can hardly subscribe to wholeheartedly.

Having said all that, I shall now go get back to my Mill essay, and my game theory problem sheet… or, given that it’s so late, I think I’ll pop off to bed and wake early tomorrow to work instead.

Art Undressed, or, PORN!!!

{ October 26, 2009 @ 10:56 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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I really really ought to be continuing with my microeconomics work… but I think one of the wonderful things about being here is that I’ve begun to realize just when I can and can’t do work anymore, and I know that forcing myself to go on isn’t going to be the answer. So I figured it’d be a good time to make a quick blog post!

It’s been, in short, a pretty busy week. I know that last post I said that it was the second week I’ve been in Oxford, which was true, because Fresher’s Week is a week, but that was actually the end of the first academic week. So now it’s essentially Monday of 3rd week, which already means that I’m a through a quarter of my first term here. An eight-week term really does mean that work builds up, and the learning here is seriously independent. There’s no way to miss a week of work and make up for it at another point, which is why I really, really don’t want to fall sick. I think falling behind here is going to be absolutely agonizing.

I had my first philosophy tutorial on Mill and it’s really, really amazing. Two students to one professor, and I know you’re not supposed to be intimidated by authority and all that but you know you’re being taught by someone whose erudition comes from years of study and digesting and thinking about these issues and it’s not possible to be unimpressed. I had to read my essay out, and after every point we stopped and discussed the ideas which came out and really, really thrashed out everything, and you walk out reeling but in a really excited way. Ellie and I continued arguing about it all the way down the street. It’s not just the specific issue that becomes a lot clearer – by trying to answer the professor’s questions you really start trying to think in his mindset and because of that you come that much closer to what you have to be doing to really get to the heart of an issue and to the heart of what a philosopher was saying. Why would Mill say this? Why did he feel that this was a sufficient or insufficient answer? It’s great. I adore it, it takes so much effort out of you but in such a brilliant way.

I spent the weekend in London at UCL with Clar and really enjoyed myself! Oxford’s new and great and I’m making some pretty good friends, but Clar and I have known each other for five years and that’s really something that can’t be compared in any instance. It’s a case where you really can talk about random stuff or just not talk at all, and it’s great fun just being with her. If you’re reading this, dear girl, I LOVE YOU LOTS! *hearts* Also, Oxford’s an awesome place, but I do think that I’m a city girl at heart. London’s confusing and I like it lots too… also went shopping, which is of course always great. But I shan’t bore with details of a shopping trip. *laugh*

Went to the Tate Modern, and I was immensely amused. Clar doesn’t like modern art because she thinks it’s rubbish, I generally agree but approach it from a different angle. I don’t like any individual piece of modern art but am extremely amused by what it does say about our culture today, and what art is becoming as a whole. The cynic in me is laughing really, really hard. There’s a room in the Pop Art exhibition covering the work of Jeff Koons, and essentially:

It’s just him and his porn-star wife, fucking.

They’ve been sculpted fucking, photographed fucking, photographed fucking in various poses… there’s a shot where they’ve been transplanted onto a natural scene with waterfalls and rocks… there’s even a shot of his cock entering her pussy, a huge close-up of that with his fingers spreading her ass open. There’s really no other way to describe it. I could use the clinical (or politically correct) terms for the various genital paraphernalia, but then I wouldn’t be doing justice to the sheer, stupid crudity of the whole thing.

I suppose you could be highbrow about it. You could argue about the value of shock and an unashamed, unabashed look at the sex act which is self-mocking and self-referential. You could say that it’s ironic and makes a strong point about the way we see sex in our society. You could even say that it makes a statement about our voyeuristic culture and the link between sex, celebrity and art.

I still don’t see how it’s anything other than porn, though. Really, just go to Google, type in the word ‘porn’, find a free site, and screencap a shot. Then blow it up really really big on canvas and try and sell it to the Tate Modern. They’ll buy it – them and the National Heritage Fund (or something similar). Bonus points if it’s an amateur video that you and your partner filmed with a grainy scratchy camera, probably. It’s so ridiculously self-indulgent, and I guess that’s where I feel I appreciate modern art? If art is supposed to represent the spirit of our times, sure, this is it, modern art’s doing a fantastic job. Vulgar and banal and stupid.

It’s the Emperor’s new clothes, redux. Now, we’re all free to say that he’s not wearing any clothes. (Neither is Jeff Koons.) But now, no one’s pointing out that it’s really not cool to be prancing around naked.

But don’t worry, there’s hope for the future of mankind. I attended a talk by Lord Hannay, who was British ambassador to the UN, and he was discussing the problems that face the world and the role that the UN can play and how it should develop. It’s awesome because he has all these ideas, and while I do appreciate that there are very many obstacles to progress and to fixing things like climate change and nuclear disarmament and terrorism, his message overall was a fairly hopeful one: there is a way to go about fixing many of these things. It’s a matter, of course, of bringing together the political capital and clout and cooperation, but none of the problems that face us are beyond us.

I really appreciated the questions that got asked as well – the questions were fast and furious and incisive and ranged across a massive range of issues – issues on how to treat rogue states like Iran and North Korea, issues like America’s place in the world and Britain’s place relative to America and the EU, questions about the veto on the Security Council and whether the membership of the council should be expanded, about the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, questions about bringing China into alignment with the rest of the world… a range of questions that really demonstrated that the people in the room had thought really hard about their topics and weren’t afraid to ask serious and genuine questions.

Later this week I’m going to troop down to Corpus and hear the editor of the Economist talk about the revival of faith in the world today. Daryl will probably be interested in this one, so I’ll make a post when that comes up.

Busy busy! I have the time to go out with friends and make new ones, to work and study hard, to see some porn, to attend fascinating talks, and to think about all the huge issues that the world is presenting to all of us. What more can I ask from university life?

all a little bit dreamy, and all astoundingly clear

{ October 13, 2009 @ 8:37 pm } · { Oxford }
{ Tags: , , , , , } · { Comments (2) }

Right, it’s the Tuesday of my second week at Oxford, I’m starting to get into the swing of things, and I am so happy here.

It is an absolutely beautiful place, of course. Just being here turns running down the street to the bank into a minor romance; because the cobblestones are old and rough and uneven beneath your feet. They prompt my heart to leap as I turn into Trinity, and in the sunshine even the cold autumn air is something to be tasted and savoured, the sensation of a chilled nose tip to be pressed against my arm and enjoyed. The streets are for walking down in a brown dress and red tights; the air is for interrupting with an improvised tune. Oxford makes me want to sing and hop and run with delight.

I don’t think this magic will ever fade for me. As I wake up and watch the sun rise over Balliol from my bedroom window – as I tromp down the High Street to lectures in Examination Schools – as I wander into the Union for a debate – as I give a little squeak of joy at my first (and second) sighting of a compact brown-grey squirrel (possibly the only creature to walk with impunity on Trinity lawns) –

Oxford is sombre, atmospheric; her reality is everything I dreamed of and so much better.

Being in Trinity is a huge part of that, really. I can’t wait for Trinity term in the spring, now in Michaelmas all the lawns and flowers are being re-dug or some other gardening term. I know it’s so that they’ll flower better come Trinity term. It’ll be glorious. Trinity’s lawns are the stuff of postcards and TV series.

And the food! The food! Forget every single stereotype about lousy college food. Also forget tempting saints; saints are for wimps. The food at Trinity would tempt God himself. Formal Hall requires us to wear academic gowns (I look a bit stupid) but for less than four pounds you get a three-course meal that is easily the equal and probably the better of a lot of restaurants. The other day I had fried Brie with cranberry sauce, steak with green peas and potatoes, and black forest gateau. Words fail me, they really do. You have to bite it. At self-service lunch, you get things like turkey escalope with mushroom sauce… like poached salmon with cream… like chicken wings with garlic and Thai sweet chilli… rice is always available on the side… the brownies and apple crumble are to die for… Trinity is essentially providing me with some of the best meals I’ve ever had… and while multiplying by 2.4 always breaks my scholarship-student heart, it’s ridiculously cheap prices.

The work is challenging, yes, and I know that the tutors really haven’t hit us hard with everything yet, but I’m enjoying myself and I have promised myself to continue enjoying it. I am keeping up with the math in economics, and my tutor is an awesome, if slightly scary man. I am horrendously rusty at essay writing but I know I can do it anyway; it’s only a matter of getting back into the right frame of mind. I am anticipating formal logic and learning it and I hope to do well at it, because I do think it’s an immensely sexy discipline. My philosophy tutor Edward Kanterian is absolutely quintessential – he shares a study with fellow philosopher Mike Inwood and they just have piles and piles and stacks and stacks and shelves and shelves of books. Old books new books falling apart books haphazard books. They also have crumbs on the sofa and a used teabag on the floor, so there you have it. I also love picking up random books in Oxfam, and I could die of happiness in Blackwell’s.(I hope to keep my room relatively tidier, however.)

I also feel like I’m discovering and honing bits of myself that I really like, and perhaps doing a little rediscovery here and there. There’s the fact that life here is so hugely autonomous. I have so much control over what I can do, and to my surprise I’ve turned out to be ridiculously organized. I plan the next day’s schedule the night before, down to the hour. I follow it. (Largely.) I leave myself time for work, power naps, laundry, dishes, CCAs, slack. I have so much control over the food I eat, and it turns out that I eat huge amounts of fruit and wholemeal bread, and relatively little junk. (Though Sainsbury’s does do some amazing brownie bites, and I can’t help myself from time to time…) I’ve rediscovered how excited debating makes me feel, and I’ve definitely decided to devote myself properly to it again. Truth to tell, I was more than a little tired of it after JC: our results at MIDCs were infinitely disappointing, and I just wanted to stop for a while. Being at the Union – watching the debates and attending a quick crash course in British Parliamentary style – it just woke it all up again.

And with regard to social life – haven’t found any soulmates, but I’m not the sort of person who requires very, very close friends, anyway. I get along well enough and can confidently say that I know about a quarter of my cohort, though for the other sixty people or so, I’m not even sure I know their names. I know and like a lot of the second years, who are awesome and nice and really intelligent. Some of the seniors are a bit weird as well, but it’s awesome. For the bop (college party), a senior shaved his arms and legs and went as a woman. *laughs* It was awesome. A PPE third-year also has what he calls Naked Thursdays at his flat in Woodstock Road. No prizes for guessing. First week was a bit tentative and I won’t deny that it was a bit difficult for me – coming from a different culture means you talk about different things and have different references – but I’ve settled in and found my place and feet.

How beautiful can life be?