Daily updates – Page 156 – a sibilant intake of breath

Quick London summary

Happy Birthday Nora Harris

Today’s trip to London was very successful: I got to spend time with Sarah for the first time since her wedding, I saw a large number of new Kandinsky paintings at the Tate Modern exhibition (including the spectacular Composition VI), I saw the Haitian film Heading South at an arty theatre in Soho, and had a number of tasty meals. Meeting Sarah’s husband Peter for the third time, as well as her father again, was also excellent.

Sarah and I saw some of the artwork at Somerset House: another London institution that I had previously known nothing about that turns out to be well-stocked with Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and such. They even had a respectable collection of Kandinsky paintings – organized in an identical thematic fashion to the Tate Modern exhibition.

I had seen Kandinsky’s work first-hand before: in New York in 2003, both at the Guggenheim and at the Museum of Modern Art. Of course, their new location had not yet opened at that point, so they were only showing a limited assortment out in Queens. By comparison, the Tate Modern exhibition was a much more comprehensive look into the progression of his work. Of all the paintings there, the massive canvas of Composition VI was most interesting and compelling. I urge people not to search for it online, because on the basis of my previous viewings of it as some little JPEG file, I can assure you that it cannot be understood in that format. You need to see the wall-sized painting to have any comprehension of it at all.

While the trip really deserves more ample description, it is 2:00am. I will do so soon.

Official daily post

This has been a weekend full of surprises: mostly good, a few bad, and one simply baffling. Much as I am inclined to respond publicly to a certain recent provocation, I know it will be wiser to simply submerge it, and allow the author to float back to sanity of their own volition, or simply remain out of sight. Not to let that dominate the paragraph, it should be strongly affirmed that life is proving satisfying and interesting at the moment – if also quite tiring. Given my 6:30am projected wake-up time tomorrow, the plan is to be asleep by midnight, at the latest. Hopefully, my neighbour with the passion for early-morning chain-sawing (seriously) won’t be to to their wood-destroying ways tomorrow.

Writingandmacgeekery

For the first time, I found a reason to consider upgrading the operating system on my iBook from 10.3.9 to some version of Tiger (10.4). Namely, a program called WriteRoom that consists quite simply of a completely black screen, onto which you type basic green text. No fonts, no spell checking, no instant messenger windows popping up. Ironic as it might be to upgrade my operating system so as to use a program with fewer features than any text editor I have ever used, there is still a certain appeal. I already use TextEdit almost exclusively for writing on the Mac; Word uses too much RAM and does idiotic things like automatically trying to insert the last names of anyone in my Entourage contact list whenever I type their first names. I type: “He drew… a blank” and it ‘helpfully’ suggests “He Drew Sexmith a blank.” Much as I like to be reminded about friends from high school, this feature is much more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

That said, a new version of OS X is meant to be coming out sometime in the next few months (Leopard). As such, I think I will probably wait until it is possible to move forward by two bounds instead of just one. Of course, doing so will probably require that I get the extra 1GB of RAM that I have been considering. Initially, I was annoyed that I would need to remove the 256MB RAM upgrade that Apple overcharged me for when I bought this computer, but it seems that the mobo of the 1.3GHz 14″ iBook can handle a maximum of 1256MB of RAM anyhow.

Boots and letters

This morning, I got an impressive array of mail. I got postcards from Alex and Bryony (who are still off hiking), as well as from Tristan in New York. Meghan sent me a letter, and my mother sent me a package that can only be my hiking boots. With the second supervision I am teaching in an hour and a meeting with Dr. Hurrell shortly after, I haven’t the time to go through all this right now, but many thanks to all those who sent things.

I am glad to know that nothing now remains in the way of the Scotland trip. My unrelated trip to London tomorrow promises to extend my pattern of minimal sleep. This looks to be another 7:00am or earlier style departure. I should be back in time to catch the tail-end of Nora’s birthday barbecue.

Already July?

I hit a rich vein of thesis materials today: a thesis on a related topic that is a veritable gold mine of sources. So often am I likely to be making reference over the next year, I had the thing printed and it now resides in one of the curious two-ring binders that are the UKs equivalent of our three-ring sort. Once I finish it tomorrow morning, and perhaps print off a few of the key cited journal articles, I will be in better shape to discuss the thesis plan with Dr. Hurrell tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow will also bring the second tutorial that I am teaching for the St. Hugh’s summer school. I got the essay tonight, so it has become another element of the clutch of reading material that I need to get through in the next fifteen hours or so. Little time remains for Sweetness in the Belly – a novel my mother sent me – or “Barn Burning” – a short story that I told Linnea I would read months ago. I also picked up a used copy of Far From the Madding Crowd. For some reason, I absolutely love the sound of that title. Somehow, the sounds and syllables combine magically in a way that has nothing to do with its meaning, which has never been very clear to me anyhow.

For the rest of the summer, I’ve decided to feel guilty about not traveling whenever I am doing thesis work, guilty about not doing thesis work whenever I am not traveling, and absurdly guilty at times when I am doing neither. That way, I will hopefully manage to accomplish the two major goals of the summer in the time that remains before Michaelmas 2006 begins. To anyone who worries that such guilt will keep me from enjoying things in general, they need not be concerned.

PS. Life is full of unbloggable surprises (though I don’t have time to relate them at the moment, anyhow).

Touristy Oxford summer

Summer Oxford Saturdays are utterly saturated by groups of visitors. Between Church Walk, Wadham, Sainsbury’s, and Church Walk I saw at least twenty such groups – many with matching backpacks, hats, or t-shirts. I suppose that is a mechanism to ensure that the various herds stay distinct, and don’t meld or dissolve during the course of their passage through historic Oxford.

The university must spin an enormous amount of money off the summer trade. Conferences, summer schools, concerts and all manner of means of drawing people here and extracting pounds and pence for the greater wealth and glory of the colleges. I know UBC does the same kind of thing, but I don’t think they will ever be able to manage quite the densities that exist here. That is befitting of an old and famous university located close to one of the world’s major metropolitan centres.

Annoying as it may sometimes be to have to push your way through massive crowds to buy groceries or use a library, it would be terrifically wasteful to leave all this capacity essentially idle over the summer. There are streets, beds, and classrooms to be filled – not to mention brain capacity on the part of scores and scores of tutors and grad students who are generally desperately trying to both complete and avoid their own research.

PS. Canadians would do well to read the special report on Afghanistan in this week’s Economist. With more than 2000 Canadians still serving there – either as part of Operation Enduring Freedom or NATO’s International Security Assistance Force – the situation there should be of considerable interest to us all.

Reading, writing, walking

With all that is ongoing, it has been a busy day. That said, things now seem to be on track for tomorrow’s lecture. Monday, I will be teaching another seminar and meeting with Dr. Hurrell to discuss the lacklustre result of the research design essay. Tuesday, I am going to London to see the Kandinsky exhibition with Sarah Webster. This is especially welcome, as it will be the first time I’ve seen her since her wedding, back in March.

A postcard from Kelly arrived today. She will be returning from Scotland sometime in the next week, though things are uncertain given all the vagaries that attach themselves to what is simultaneously a research trip and a family holiday. Her safe return is much anticipated.

While retracing a portion of the bike ride I described here a few days ago on foot with Antonia this afternoon, I managed to take some photographs with which I am reasonably pleased . Once you have more than 4000 from a place as small as Oxford, it becomes hard to come up with something good every day. As such, I’ve used a few of them to adorn photos from past days that were lacking images. The general idea is that posts without specific topics (ie. this one) should include photographs at the rate of about one per day. This is to compensate for the fact that I am just summarizing things at you.

Reading in the rain

Between bouts of thesis reading and lecture preparation, I finished the copy of Milan Kundera’s Immortality that I was leant during the Walking Club expedition to The Weald. It is very much like his other Czech books: full of observations about how human beings think, how they interact, and how they continually misunderstand one another. Reading it had become essential not because I really had time, but because I was embarrassed about having borrowed it for such a long time. I am to return it to the mailbox of a certain name at Queen’s College – the owner of which almost certainly does not remember my name.

For the thesis, I am wading through The Skeptical Environmentalist again. It is a long and opinionated book. The difficulty of establishing whether Lomborg’s figures are used well or badly make the wander through the book a somewhat exhausting one. Alongside it, I am reading Clapp and Dauvergne’s Paths to a Green World. The RDE reviewers were critical of me for calling it philosophy – “a book about political economy.” At the same time, the critical part of the book is undeniably philosophical: it lays out four different environmentalist strands, or world views, on the basis of their assumptions and prescriptions.

For Friday’s lecture, I have re-read a couple of short books and articles on security cooperation between Canada and the United States. With only an hour to speak, that probably wasn’t terribly necessary. Far more important, though more difficult to develop, is the general speaking skill that good lecturing requires. In that respect, I miss no longer being part of the UBC debate society. Nowhere now do I have cause to speak for more than a minute or two without interruption: hardly good training for one hour lectures.

PS. Antonia has reminded me that I should re-read Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, which wasn’t finished when I last read through them. They are an engaging depiction of an alternative version of America, with many fantasy elements and the general good craftsmanship that marks Card’s earlier work.

Quorn: falling away from me

At a friend’s suggestion, I tried Quorn yesterday. For the uninitiated, Quorn is a meat substitute produced by means of a process that would impress 1950s science fiction authors. You grow masses of the filamentous fungus Fusarium venenatum in underground vats, then process it with egg and seasonings to get something that tastes and feels like meat.

I tried the kind that is meant to simulate pieces of chicken breast, in a stir-fry. In terms of cooking, the similarity to meeat was considerable, though the pieces are quite a bit firmer than uncooked chicken generally is. The smell was enough to make me feel like I was breaching my vegetarianism, which was a surprisingly off-putting characteristic.

In the end, the Quorn tasted reasonably meat-like and I think it’s for that precise reason that I disliked it. After about a year of vegetarianism, the only meat I really miss is sushi and sashimi – which can’t be had for reasonable prices here anyhow – and very rarely sukiyaki beef or a Nick Ellan-style steak. Regardless of such occasional longings, I can happily live Quornless.

Unrelated aside: The pint glass that I have been using for tea was made of safety glass, the kind meant to break into little cubes instead of deadly shards. I discovered this by accident last night, after the fuse for all of our lights blew and I realized it’s in a box behind several layers of locks to which I do not have the keys. In darkness, I endure.

Success and direction

Happy Birthday Tristan Laing

The incident of the design essay has reaffirmed for me the importance of doing something else, before really deciding to do a PhD. Terrifying as it is to leave the place where I’ve had the most and most consistent success – namely, the academy – it seems essential to establish by contrast whether it is worth all the time and devotion a doctorate would involve.

In many ways, I am not a good academic. I prefer the general to the specific, and I usually prefer the question to the answer. Great as the appeal of comprehensive knowledge in one or another area is, it is the vacuums of knowledge that my effort generally strives to fill. I feel more vulnerable for knowing nothing of opera than for knowing less than enough about environmental politics or security or American foreign policy.

The moment’s over-riding question is “What is this life to be?” I am nearing, if not over, the point where it stops being an automatic progression of school grades and experiences. It’s like climbing the ladder and walking the length of a high diving board, then being presented with the choices about how to jump that cannot be taken back and can only be half-corrected once you’ve bounded. Presented with such a choice, you can’t help realizing the limited scope of any single life: the limited number of directions it can be taken, very few indeed if the arc is to be a graceful or admirable one.

The matter then comes down to a conflict between aesthetics and hedonism: the one concerned with the appearance of the jump and the other concerned with the experience of jumping. Ambition indicates that we might be able to impress if we strive for the first – though we risk trading enjoyment for artistry. Frantic indecision serves the latter cause while undermining the former – asserting the value of originality over elegance.

Going to Scotland

The first tutorial for the St. Hugh’s summer program has passed. While it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss here, I can say that leading it was a learning experience for me, as well. Being on the other side of any such asymmetry is always uncanny.

In an exciting development, it seems that I am going hiking and camping in Scotland from the 27th to the 31st of this month, with the Oxford Walking Club. We are going to the western Highlands, to Faichem Park near Invergarry. We will spend three days walking in the Loch Quoich and Blen Shiel area. Some of the mountains there are 1100m high, a bit more than Grouse Mountain and Mount Fromme, back in North Vancouver. I am meeting the trip leader to deliver payment and a participant form in less than an hour.

Ever since watching the documentary where former Pythons revisit the places where Holy Grail was filmed, I have really wanted to go to Scotland. I promise to do my utmost to bring back some interesting photos: both using my increasingly ailing digicam and using the Fuji Velvia that Tristan so generously sent me.

[Update] Moments after paying the £80 for the trip, a serious difficulty arose. The club absolutely requires proper hiking boots for this trip. That’s fair enough, but mine are in Vancouver. The options, therefore, are:

Have my boots shipped from Canada
Buy boots here
Cancel the trip

Boots here, like everything else, are markedly more expensive than in Canada, and the ones I have in Vancouver are quite good. I do need to have them by the 26th of this month, but that leaves three entire weeks. Having them sent would mean digging them out from wherever in my big array of boxes of stuff left behind they are, plus paying postage. That said, I could use them for subsequent trips, it would almost certainly be cheaper than buying them here, and they are already broken in. Worth investigating.

[Update II] It seems extremely unlikely that my boots weigh more than 2kg – as much as a 2L bottle of soda. Estimating that they would fit in a 12″ by 10″ by 8″ box, they would cost $43.05 to send by Small Packet International Air. That’s about 20% of their original value, and probably about 1/4 of what inferior boots would cost in Oxford. They would cost $68.42 to send by Xpresspost International (with guaranteed four day delivery). Of course, the question of extracting them from whichever 55 gallon plastic box that has become their temporary abode remains.

[Update III: 5 July 2006] My mother has very kindly put my hiking boots into the post. As such, nothing remains between me and the realization of this trip. They should also prove useful when the Summer 2007 Kilimanjaro plan starts really coming together.