Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Cartoons and cultural clashes

A quick comment regarding the continuing row about the Danish cartoon depictions of Mohammed. No collective response to an incident becomes this big or carries on this long without some kind of coordination and organization. While the whole situation is clearly based on a great deal of legitimate anger, it is nonetheless sentiment that is being excited and manipulated. That’s not to imply that some kind of global conspiracy is at work, but simply to say that I don’t accept that these protests are spontaneous or free of manipulation. Given their destructive nature, I think it will be instructive to eventually determine what forces have been trying to exploit this issue, through what means, and to what level of success.

As I was discussing with Tristan earlier today, the symbolic character of conflict is an essential dimension for understanding it. It’s one that requires examination both of individual psychology and the ways in which groups of people think. One excellent book I can recall from Brian Job’s security studies class at UBC is Kaufman’s Modern hatreds: the symbolic politics of ethnic war. Those wanting a far better explanation of some of these issues than I can provide should have a look.

Seventeen days until the equinox

Sheldonian head

During our qualitative methods class today, on institutions, Dr. Ngaire Woods made an excellent point. Each of us has a year to become an expert on a particular subject. There are hardly any people in the entire world who ever have the chance to devote such time and attention to an issue and there is a good chance that, at the end, we will know more about our subject than anyone in the world. This underscores both the importance of choosing a topic well and of really committing yourself to writing something excellent. Producing something that will be read by people beyond the examination committee and people kind enough to edit it for me would also be a big advantage.

The institutions section of the qualitative methods course is much better than the scattershot attempt at foreign policy analysis that came before it. That is welcome, especially since I have a take-home exam to write on the course between the 9th and 13th of this month – most inconvenient timing. Hopefully, I will be able to get the thing mostly done next Friday, leaving the weekend relatively unencumbered.

After class, this afternoon, I had coffee with Claire, Josiah, and another of her St. Cross friends who I am embarassed to be unable to remember the name of. Followed that closely was tea with Joelle Faulkner. We tried the Tieguanyin tea that Neal sent. It’s more subtle than I expected, though not nearly so much so as the Jamine Pearl tea that Kate once gave me. I am going to try making it with bottled water, in the knowledge that the amount of dissolved minerals in Oxford tap water is quite substantial.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will be able to finish most of Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffer’s Democracy, Liberalism, and War, William Connolly’s The Terms of Political Discourse, and what remains of this week’s readings on institutions. I have a paper due for Dr. Hurrell on Wednesday, evaluating the democratic peace theory. I will also have a new issue of The Economist upon which to complete a preliminary read.

I’ve now finished the first book of The Wind up Bird Chronicle and perhaps the first tenth of Democracy in America. I don’t know if it’s an overly self-serving thing to believe, but I don’t think that any kind of reading is irrelevant or a distraction. While there are certainly things that it is more urgent for me to read, to neglect other areas of interest would ultimately be counterproductive and unwise. Neither American democracy nor Japanese literature are even distantly divorced from the question of democratic peace, and good writing is never irrelevant.

25 things I am:Canoeist, geek, webmaster, environmentalist, caucasian,
student, heterosexual, reader, writer, photographer,
Czech, Ukranian, atheist, Oxfordian, skeptic,
liberal, vegetarian, single, Canadian, hiker,
bilingual, healthy, rich, educated, male.

War is a Force that Gives us Meaning

This afternoon, I read Chris Hedges’ War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. It made me wonder whether the wars of my generation: Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the others, have just re-taught lessons learned by other generations before. Much as we might hope that justice or democracy can be spread by such means, it now appears that our hopes were misplaced. What’s worse, perhaps, is the failure of many to understand what’s going on, or even make an honest effort to do so. There has been an absence of inquiry and, even worse, interest in the truth of the matter or, at least, the closest approximation of the truth we can reach. Whatever else the present American administration is guilty of, it has, at many points, been dangerously unhinged from reality – at least in terms of what it presents the public. I don’t mean to take a general commentary and direct it in a cliched and partisan direction, but the world is awash in evidence that war and truth are frequently incompatible.

Similar grim revelations accompany the missed opportunities to curtail bloodshed: Bosnia, the Congo, Rwanda, and elsewhere. These are, perhaps, the strongest reminder that simple pacifism isn’t an adequate answer to the problem of war. We have to wade into the more complex, the more ambiguous, terrain of responsibility and intervention.

Hedges’ many personal anecdotes – both stories of his own and stories acquired from others over the course of a long and distinguished journalistic career – form the heart of the book. Beside them, generalized philosophical reflections about warfare, nationalism, and culture seem to be lacking in poignancy. It is the role of journalism, perhaps, to deliver that poignancy to those for whom an event or conflict is just some distant abstraction: much as the ongoing genocide in Darfur is for almost all of us now.

Citation: Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Oxford: PublicAffairs, 2002.

Alternative Careers Fair

Vines on a wall

The better part of today was taken up attending the Alternative Careers Fair, over in the exam schools. I attended two sessions: the one on ‘Arts’ because it included Philip Pullman and the one on ‘Environment.’ Neither was exactly what I expected. Overall, the experience was interesting – and it was good to meet Mr. Pullman – but it did not assist me in finding employment for the summer. Of course, a ‘careers fair’ is generally meant to have a longer term focus than that.

The arts panel was heavily dominated by Lorraine Platt, a painter who spoke first and for more than twice her alloted length of time. A series of disjointed observations and repeated statements, I didn’t find much that was useful or insightful in her presentation. That said, if I was contemplating a painting career, I might feel differently.

Mr. Pullman spoke last, after a musical therapist, for about twenty minutes. A bespectacled, balding man, I am amused to note that he wore exactly the same shirt as is featured in his portait on his website. His presentation was interesting partly because it seemed to portray an unusually focused life for a fiction author. While he described a number of jobs he has done over the years, none of them involved any writing or any cessation from attempts at novel writing. While you obviously can’t get the sense of a person’s life in twenty minutes, it was nonetheless a vignette of a committed person. Three pages a day, he says, has been his standard from the beginning.

Pullman spoke comfortably and with humour, quite unlike the more overbearing characters who directed the next seminar. His stress upon the importance of writing a good first page, and a good first chapter, is definitely reflected in his books: particularly The Golden Compass, which I consider to have one of the most skillful openings of any book I’ve read. As for motivational advice, he offered the following tidbit: “You need to be slightly insane, really. That’s what kept me going.”

After the session, I spoke with him very briefly and got him to inscribe my copy of Paradise Lost, since it was already signed and represents the only piece of his work I have with me in Oxford. It was amusing to note that, among the group of young women with whom I stood in order to have a book signed, more than half were past or present students of Wadham College. That said, I didn’t recognize any of them.

The environment panel, which I attended after wandering the booths upstairs for a while and speaking with Natalie Lundsteen from the Career Service, included George Marshall and John Manoocherhri. Aside from an evident shared passion for the environment and for their work, the men were quite different. Mr. Marshall spoke with skill, but some hesitation, like someone who has never really enjoyed addressing an audience. He was careful to at least bracket and identify the bits of his short autobiography that might seem presumptuous or vain. His work on tropical forests in the Asia Pacific reminded me of Peter Dauvergne.

Mr. Manoocherhri, in stark contrast, tended towards the bombastic, the arrogant, and the foul-mouthed. While he initially came off as plain speaking, energetic, and direct, over the course of his presentation he became decreasingly attractive. He had a great willingness to pronounce himself expert on a matter, as well as a general mode of speech that was saturated with an over-certainty that diminished his credibility. While he did tell people much of what they wanted to hear (about how we will all have superb jobs in the environmental field), I don’t know if he actually contributed a large amount of usable information. That said, I am still glad to have attended his talk.

Employment possibilities for the summer remain elusive. My three forays to the career service have produced starkly different pieces of advice. I was told, the first time, that I should apply for a job doing consulting or investment banking, because they would help pay down my student debt and they aren’t terribly hard to get into if you can say the right things. The next time, I was told that I absolutely should not apply in those fields and, if I did, I would just get rejected anyway. Instead, it was suggested, I should look for a job related to writing or the environment. Today, I was told that any work I did on the environment or doing writing over the summer would almost certainly be unpaid, and that I should get a job in the college or in a pub in order to sustain myself.

‘Marketing myself’ is just the sort of thing I find difficult, frustrating, and profoundly unappealing. Applying for things requires exerting effort towards no productive end, save overcoming the various obstacles between yourself and a job. It requires a certain kind of distorted self-presentation that frequently borders on being deceptive. I hope I will be able to find some sort of position for the summer without too much of that.

Anyhow, I shall be working on my core seminar essay tonight. Not the most exciting option for a Saturday, by any means, but that which is presently required. Since all copies of the readings that can be withdrawn from the SSL have been, I need to go there at a time when the confined copies are relatively likely to be free. Tomorrow should be better, if I can get a good amount of work done tonight. I am looking forward to coffee with Margaret in the morning.

  • I realize that I never wrote anything about the big birthday party in Wadham last night. This is an intentional response to how bothersome writing anything about the college has generally been. Between people who absolutely do not want to be mentioned and people who are annoyed when they aren’t, the level of diplomacy involved is just beyond what I am willing to put up with at the moment. That said, I was quite glad to meet Seth and I hope the bloggers’ gathering he has mooted comes together soon.
  • My French is seriously slipping, due to total lack of usage. Does anyone know of a good free French news podcast that I could listen to, just to have some exposure to the language? Thanks.

Of blogs and brevity

A quad in Christ Church College, near Merton Street

I have a new rule: at least for the time being. I am going to aim for focused, interesting blog posts that are no more than a few paragraphs. The writing should be better, more people should feel inclined to read it, and I should consequently have more time for academic work, or at least non-computer stuff.

I need to adjust the structure of life so that it involves more reading. Having seminars of 14 to 28 people, it isn’t really necessary to have read anywhere close to the total amount assigned in order to contribute to the discussion. As such, and especially without the possibility of being called upon to present, there is a lack of structural incentive to do a great deal of reading. For me, this might be most easily overcome by making reading a more social experience. The presence of others helps keep me focused and aids in resisting the desire to go and do something else – a desire that always becomes more powerful when the matter I am reading is not particularly compelling.

I started the copy of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind up Bird Chronicle that Tristan sent me for Christmas. Three chapters in, it definitely has the oddity that seems to be characteristic of Japanese film and literature. At the same time, it lays out the oddity in a way that is intentionally structured like a mystery – it’s clear that we’re meant to eventually learn what’s going on.

As always, speaking with Astrid this afternoon was interesting. Her personal policy of not engaging in meaningless chatter over MSN of the “so, what are you up to?” variety is one that frequently proves laudable, particularly when combined with her infrequent forays into that domain. She is in Argentina now, returning to Vancouver in about a month.

Academic and non-academic reading

The Wednesday Market in Gloucester Green

Ten January nectarines, a pound of red peppers, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and ginger: at Emily’s suggestion, I went to the Wednesday Market in Gloucester Green today. As I’ve said before, ‘green’ is a definite misnomer. That said, to get a sack of fruit and veggies for £5 makes for a nice contrast with Sainsbury’s.

Aside from reading, not a great deal happened today. In a productive piece of procrastination, I read Around the World in 80 Days. I hadn’t not read it before, but only heard parts of it read aloud during one of my family’s traditional trips down the Oregon Coast (on which both Jonathan Morissette and Kate Dillon accompanied me more than once). While rapidly digestible, it’s certainly not the most complex of novels: fuelled more, perhaps, on national stereotypes and an early anticipation of the consequences of globalization than on solid characterization or description. Verne’s frequent misunderstanding about knots – thinking them a unit of distance, rather than velocity – is particularly irksome, despite being only a very minor point. A steamer that goes “eight and nine knots the hour” would be going very fast indeed after a few days. Reading it after the demise of the British Empire, one cannot help being struck by a tinge of collective nostalgia. Collective because the British Empire is something I’ve only experienced by distillation, and by virtue of being Canadian.

Tomorrow, we have our first qualitative methods class. The three focuses are foreign policy analysis, interviewing, and archival research. All strike me as things likely to be useful.

  • No sign yet of the form I need for formally request exemption from future college meals. I will make a third request for one tomorrow morning.
  • Hardly anyone from Oxford is on my MSN contact list. If you want to be, send me an email, find my MSN username from my Facebook profile, or contact me by some other means. I am also on AIM and Skype.
  • Everyone back home is fixated on the new series of 24. I rather liked the first series, watching the whole thing twice, but found the second ridiculously implausible, in terms of politics. That said, their energetic accounts make me envious of those with television access: a very unusual feeling for me.
  • At times, we must all curse how there are no university run wireless networks in Oxford. The DPIR IT people tell us it’s because the colleges can’t agree how to do it: an explanation I believe, even as I find it frustrating. The iBook would certainly wander farther from my desk if it could talk to other machines from elsewhere. This is part of why Oxford’s continued devotion to old ideas and old rivalries will sink it in comparison to American schools in the next few decades, unless things change a great deal.
  • Seth’s blog directed me to a community of LiveJournal users all trying to get into Oxford. Take a look, if it interests you.

1000 Extra/Ordinary Objects

This afternoon, in little jots between reading Keohane and Waltz, I finished the coffee table style book that Margaret gave me for my birthday: 1000 Extra / Ordinary Objects. Edited by Peter Gabriel and part of the Taschen series, it’s much less innocuous than the title and skillfully photographed pages would suggest. Indeed, it deals constantly with themes of warfare, violence, oppression, and abuse. Throughout, objects intimately connected with some of the worst of human activities are presented, often ironically situated alongside a more innocent item with a thematic connection.

Jello is presented alongside a description of the mechanical slaughter of 6-month-old calves, from which it is made, and on the page beside a sauce designed to be used for flavouring dead animals found alongside the road. Packets of branded heroin adorn the same pages as chocolate bars. All told, the book presents a fairly disturbing picture of humanity: a glimpse into an image-obsessed, casually violent, and quite possibly seriously deranged collective.

As you would expect from a Taschen book, it is certainly elegantly presented. Each object is photographed under studio conditions, devoid of context except insofar as it is not provided by the sans-serif gray descriptive paragraphs – written in English and French. The tendency to associate even innocent objects with disturbing descriptions highlights the extent to which the book sets out to shock; the Pikachu doll comes accompanied with a description of how children were accidentally given epileptic seizures by a flashing light display in one episode of the Japanese television show. All this makes the strange Japanese products that are staples of the curious object genre seem particularly innocuous, by comparison. This book could easily be reformatted into a gallery show at the Tate Modern.

Working, once again, to increase the number of facts known per cubic centimetre of brain

Upper Camera

Today was based around several rotations of the great term-time wheel of reading positions that I have established. Cornmarket Street Starbucks to Nuffield Library, to High Street Starbucks, to Upper Camera, to Codrington, to Wadham Library, to Wadham JCR (when quiet), to Wadham MCR (when quiet), to Blackwell’s on Broad Street and around and around again: reading a chapter or two in each position. The strategy keeps my brain from just skipping over long sections of text, while also helping me resist the desire to do something more complex than reading.

I was assisted today by the subject matter. I finished the second half of Richard Overy’s excellent Why the Allies Won: possibly the most engaging book I’ve read since arriving in the U.K. It is well written, convincing, and authoritative. Even though it covers the very familiar terrain of the second world war, it still conveys a great deal of new information and a deepened sense of understanding. Recommended to anyone with an interest in military history.

Dramatically less engaging was my continued slog through Keohane’s Neorealism and its Critics. While it has demonstrated that my conception of neorealism is, in some ways, a bit of a parody, it still isn’t the kind of book you wake up early or stay up late for the enjoyment of reading. Tomorrow morning, I will try to do one of my circuits with it as the sole book in my possession. Despite my best efforts to train myself otherwise, I will almost always read books in order from most to least interesting. This means that I neglect books that are important but very boring, but it does maximize the overall amount of reading I do. Related personal tendencies: eating food I buy in order from least to most preparation time, until I only have food that requires extensive preparation, and wearing clothes in order from most to least comfortable, until I have no clean ones left.

Tomorrow afternoon, good things are planned. For now, I am going to bo back to at least another four hours’ reading, even though most of the nodes on my circuit have already closed.

  • I was pleased to receive a barrage of comments from Meghan today. A surprising number of people seem to find it difficult to post comments. For their benefit, here are some brief instructions.Instructions for commenting:
    First, you need to get to the page specific to the post you want to comment about, rather than one of the archive pages that lists a whole month worth. To do that, just go to the bottom of any post and click on either the blue underlined time at which is was posted, or on the blue underlined bit where it lists the number of comments. For instance: “9 comment(s).”

    Once you are on a single post page, like this one you will be able to see existing comments. Click the “Post a Comment” link to leave one. Clicking the “Home” link will take you back to the front page of the blog.

    Once you have clicked “Post Comment” a new page will open. Then, in the page that comes up, just type your comment. You can enter Blogger login information, if you have it. If you do, it will put your default picture beside your comment, as well as allowing you to delete it later. You can also use ‘Other’ to leave a comment under your own name or alias or ‘Anonymous’ to leave a comment marked as such. Such comments, only I can remove. You will need to copy the squiggly letters that appear below the comment box into the text box below them. This is to keep spam robots from leaving hundreds of comments about their various sordid wares.

    Clicking the blue underlined “Milan” at the bottom of every post opens a window for sending a message to me, if you have configured your email client to do so. Using the “Contact Me” link in the sidebar does the same thing. Finally, the little white envelope lets you email a post to someone else. Please don’t send them to me, I already have them.

  • At some point, I will produce an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the blog, but I have resolved to do no more structural modification until I’ve dealt with the stats exam and next term’s pre-reading.
  • On a related note, please stop going to the old address (sindark.blogspot.com). The continued existence of that page is causing problems for search engines. The new address, sindark.com, is what everyone should use.
  • The iBook is increasingly grinding and heaving its way through collections of tasks it formerly had no trouble with. I’ve taken to using my iPod to listen to music while on it, just to free up some RAM and CPU time from iTunes. Given my extremely hesitant attitude towards installing new software or keeping programs I do not use, I don’t know what’s going wrong.
  • The comment about a relative dearth of environmental politics related stuff here is spot on. It’s partly a question of what the course and life in general brings to my doorstep. That said, I will make more of an effort to read and talk about my alleged intended speciality.
  • This is my 1050th post made through Blogger. That obviously doesn’t include the hundreds of OpenDiary posts in the pre-Blogger era.

Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

A clever take on an old tale, namely Homer’s Odyssey, Atwood’s short book manages to be critical without being abrasive. It definitely makes for an interesting complement to a text that has become central to so many literary and narrative traditions. In addition, there are a great many clever little nods to Greek myth and subsequent literature. I especially appreciated the sometimes-overt, sometimes-sly references to Tennyson.

The best thing about the book is certainly the character of Penelope as the narrator: speaking from Hades and interrupted on occassion by contributions from a chorus consisting of her murdered maids, around whom the story also revolves. The anachronism is handled skillfully, as aspects of modern and classical fiction sit side by side in the same way as Penelope’s observations about the ancient and modern world. This is the work of a confident author.

The book is concise to the point that there isn’t an enormous amount that can be said about it save that it’s clever and well worth the time it takes to read.

Final post for 2005

Culinary attempt

I made an attempt at an omelette today, using a new non-stick frypan I bought at Boswells at half price. While it never quite entered the world as an omelette – the word ‘scramble’ comes to mind – it was nonetheless quite tasty. It had peppers, sharp cheddar, garlic, ginger, tofu, and potato. That is to say, every kind of vegetable matter I had at the time of production. Tofu is enormously better when cooked in a frying pan – it loses the squishy mud texture. As a culinary experiment, I rate this a low pass. It didn’t quite end up an omelette, but was still enjoyable to eat. I really need to get a cutting board: it’s absurd to be using my Swisstool and pieces of paper towel to chop up all my cheese and veggies.

The book which I’ve previously mentioned being in the process of reading and enjoying is Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: the Myth of Penelope and Odysseus: a retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. The best thing about it is definitely the skilled narrative style: delivered from Hades with an impressive emotive range. If I were to teach The Odyssey, I would assign this as a companion work. It’s also good to see some of the dodgy aspects of a piece of literature addressed in a way that is creative, as well as cutting. I will post a full review here once I finish it.

Now, I need to don my suit and head out in search of both dessert – I am thinking pie and ice cream – and beer for tonight’s New Year’s party. Judging by the high quality of Claire’s last party, which I remember partly for the lengthy argument I got into about superstring theory, it should be a good one. There look to be rather fewer people this time round, which will doubtless alter the character of the gathering considerably. In any case, I am glad to be going. I shall write something about it tomorrow.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope people have fun tonight. There’s really no point in me specifically listing resolutions. It has all be said here before.