Daily updates – Page 164 – a sibilant intake of breath

First familial visit

My mother arrived in Oxford this evening – the first family member I’ve seen since I left Vancouver in September. We will be in Oxford until early Saturday morning, when we are heading to Gatwick for our flight to Malta.

By the time my mother had deposited bags in my room and the one in college where she is staying, it was already getting dark. We took a quick spin around Wadham – looking into the chapel and gardens – before walking past the Radcliffe and across the Magdalen Bridge for dinner at Kashmir, on the Cowley Road. Fortified with curry, we stopped for a pint at The Turf, sitting outside beside one of the coal fires while something like a bachelor’s party raged within.

Tomorrow, I am planning to give a couple of short walking tours for her. The first will sweep northward, past Rhodes House and the Natural History Museum, stopping at St. Antony’s and the Church Walk flat where I will live for the summer. Heading back through the university parks, we will stop by the department before returning to Wadham via New College. The second, longer, track will go into the Codrington and then University and Magdalen Colleges, before heading to the Christ Church Meadows through the botanical gardens. Stopping at Christ Church itself, we will then go have a look at the main quad of Nuffield. That should constitute a good introduction to Oxford that includes most of the places that are personally important to me.

Along with some new clothes, my mother brought other valuable provisions. Pens – including nine of the four colour pens that are my note taking staple – and bike accessories are both very useful, as I suspect the small sling style pack may prove. She also brought a travel alarm clock, wicking toque, and book by Jeffrey Sachs that was a gift from a family friend. Unpacking it all in my room in Library Court felt like a kind of belated Christmas. Once again, I feel very well equipped.

The upcoming Malta trip is increasingly exciting, even though Claire’s studiousness is making me anxious about the upcoming exam. I will be sure to acquire what books remain at the SSL to accompany me to this small Mediterranean country, though I have no doubts about how many of their pages will get flipped while I am there. The pressure of immanent examinations is good for young minds, anyhow.

PS. Congratulations to my friend Matthew Tindall, who got his iron ring today. In Canada, they are given to new engineers, as a symbol of responsibility, in reference to a bridge in Quebec that collapsed due to miscalculations. More information is here.

Happy first day of spring

As I carry on with the early stages of revision, I am getting more nervous about the upcoming qualifying test. While it’s only three hours long, the total amount of material covered is highly extensive. While nobody will have read all the hundreds of books on the various reading lists, there is still the general requirement that we be knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics and able to write upon them under formal exam conditions.

One piece of solace is that there will apparently be quite a lot of choice on the exam. We are to write three essays: with either two on history from 1900 to 1950 or two on international relations theory. Within each of the two subject areas, there are apparently going to be five or so options. That implies that it may be better to know about a moderate number of areas in detail, then about all possible topics in a more superficial way. Having never written an Oxford exam, it’s difficult to strategize. I suppose the practice exam that I will be writing for Dr. Hurrell and then discussing with him on the 12th of April will give me some useful guidance for my last seven days of revision.

By the end of my time at UBC, I was feeling pretty confident about final exams. I knew the different sorts that were out there, the kinds of expectations professors had, and the general amount of effort I would need to put in in order to do well. Here, all of those things are much less certain. Also complicating things is the marking system. The passing grade is 60% and a distinction is 70%. On past form, it is probable that nobody in the program will fail and that two among the twenty-eight will get distinctions. It seems reasonable to think that those will be people already familiar with OxBridge examinations, though it may not be. For the 93% of people writing who will simply pass, there is ultimately very little difference between doing decently well and doing very well, just shy of a distinction. As such, it’s hard to determine how much effort to put into the entire matter. My supervisor certainly seems to think that – while important – studying for the QT should not be the focus of this break, which it does seem wiser to spend thinking about and working on the thesis.

Even so, I’ve resolved to bring my history notes and perhaps a text or two along to Malta.

Four weeks of break remain

My mother arrives in the UK tomorrow, and is coming to Oxford on Thursday. On Saturday, we are leaving for Malta, where we will remain until the 1st of April. After that, there will be nineteen days remaining before the qualifying test, during which I also need to do thesis preparation. On the 10th, with automotive support from Kai, I will be moving out of Wadham College and into the flat on Church Walk where I will live until September. By the 15th of April, I mean to have submitted an edited version of the fish paper to another journal. I don’t revel in the work that is upcoming, but I am definitely looking forward to the Maltese trip.

I opened up the fish paper the other day. It seems an eternity since I wrote it. I don’t remember the details of the sources, and I certainly don’t have them on hand. The extent of rejigging that is possible is probably limited to summarizing the more tedious or esoteric segments and focusing on a single aspect of the argument. I don’t think it will be necessary to reformat the footnotes, at this stage, which is a blessing since this is a pre-EndNote document.

It had been far too long since I had seen Margaret, prior to meeting with her for a while this morning. Of all the M.Phil programs I know people in, the economics program seems to be the most work. Constant worksheets and math seem calculated to drive them to depression or madness. Kudos to Margaret for enduring thus far.

iPod voyages

The iPod seems to have benefitted from its trip to the Netherlands, even though they decided there was nothing wrong with it and sent it straight back. More precisely, they decided they among “issues reported concerning [my] iPod” “were found to be within Apple’s specifications for acceptable performance, usability and/or functionality.” I guess crashing several times an hour isn’t serious enough to warrant repair.

I am considering making V for Vendetta the first film I see in theatres in the UK. Has anyone seen it? If so, comments on it would be appreciated. I’ve had the comics recommended several times, but they aren’t in any of the Oxford libraries and cost about twenty Pounds in bookshops.
For Neko Case fans, her new song “Hold On, Hold On” strikes me as very good. It has the same combination of a solid melody and innovative lyrics as the rest of her better work.
Congratulations to Meaghan Beattie for winning top speaker at the French Debating Nationals.

Nervous, trundling day

On the basis of a highly scientific and statistically valid one-night, one-person study, I wake up feeling much more rested when I sleep with earplugs. I also dream about getting attacked by a huge scruffy black house cat in the woods beside Capilano River.

I spent several hours today in the Oxford Country Library, near Nuffield, reading Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary. As you would expect, it’s a fairly ugly book. The kind of thing that stays funny when it’s in the realm of absurd abstraction, yet is always still tinged with the certainly of loss and failure. It’s nice, at least, to just pick up a book and read it, without major pause. You would need to be superhuman to do it with an environmental politics book, but for a 400 page pseudo-autobiographical novel, the pattern fits. Reading Thompson is like taking insurance against the possibility that you’re a hub in the machine that he seems to understand and mostly exist outside of. The danger is that you might see your loneliness reflected in his own.

All told, it’s not the greatest book, and it certainly doesn’t add a lustre to your day. At the same time, Thompson wrote it when he was my age and there is a sense in which you can see the future laid out in it: his future, in particular. You see that in what may be the most notable phrase:

It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.

Your classic “narrator arrives in a place, things go wrong, he leaves” story, it reminds me of a lot of contemporary fiction. It’s the anti-journey story, where there is no clear end and even the process of travel collapses upon itself.

Spending time in the public library reminded me of one of the great truths of travel. Almost everything about your experience in a city is determined by how many doors you can open, or have opened for you. If all you can muster is the automatic doors at the entrances of libraries and shopping malls, you’re in a pretty bad way. The idea was reinforced as I took a quick walk around the long pool in Nuffield – perhaps my favourite quad in Oxford – and contemplated with appreciation the benefits of position and connection.

Oxford is peppered today with people in green, with top hats and Leprechaun boots. Were it not for my very early morning rise tomorrow, and the importance of being awake and aware subsequently, I might make a foray to see how this de-Christianized celebration of a saint takes place here. I was nervous, at first, to see people walking around with this kind of regalia – images of football related violence and painted fans flickering in my imagination – but when I saw that it was mostly people under fifteen or over thirty-five, my mind was largely put at ease.

I suppose I should spend tonight getting a start on the new Economist, making sure I have a clean shirt, and checking that I can remember how to tie a tie.

Ides of March, safely passed

First Easter break expedition imminent

My train to Chichester – via Basingstoke and Cosham – leaves Oxford at 7:15am on Saturday. Despite the best intentions of shifting my sleep schedule to make the requisite 6:00am wakeup more tolerable, I have been pushed further and further towards the pattern that I can only conclude is natural for me at present. That is to say, going to sleep sometime after 2:00am and then waking up at about the same point after 10:00am. Without classes or lectures in the morning or the burning shame of the scout discovering you still asleep, there is little that is able to propel me into wakefulness before then. Even my best efforts at setting the alarm on my phone and then hiding it across the room with a can of highly caffeinated energy drink have met with no success whatsoever.

In the end, it’s not much of a problem. I will have plenty of time to sleep on the train.

I am meant to arrive in Chichester three hours before the wedding and it seems probable to me that I will be able to walk to St. Richard’s Church, wherever it may be, from the train station in a fairly small fraction of that period of time. After the wedding and the reception, I will have most of Sunday to spend exploring the area, prior to my 4:30pm train back to Oxford. Is anyone familiar with the region? If so, is there anything you would suggest having a look at? The distance to the seashore seems modest, so I may go have a look at that.

Where there’s smoke

After five months of exposure to the social lives of Oxford students, my leather jacket is now thoroughly saturated with the smell of tobacco smoke. Despite efforts to air it out – sometimes even hanging it directly in front of an open window where I induce air flow – the scent seems to have become fairly deeply ingrained. Maybe entombing it in a box with some baking soda or activated charcoal for a while would be more effective.

The psychological impact of wearing the jacket has become odd. My earliest associations with tobacco have to do with somewhat threatening, carpeted places where I wasn’t happy to be. It’s a feeling that lingers whenever the stale smell of absent but infused smoke is present. The odour is certainly not one that I enjoy, or an happy to have lingering around me. It seems to be much more easily and thoroughly integrated into things made of natural substances. My wool and leather clothing has all taken on some measure of the smell, while no article of clothing made from artificial fibers has done so to an overly great extent. It all makes me disappointed about how months still remain before the smoking ban in British pubs comes into effect.

I have set up a temporary fix for the Blogger images problem. For the present, I will host the images on the BlogSpot servers, using a different account. Once the bug is fixed, I will repost the images on my FTP server. [19 March: This has now been done.]
I got more useful mail today: information on the Malta adventure, from my mother, along with details on the next student loan installment. Once this arrives, I should have this year and about 20% of next year covered. Still waiting on word from the Chevening Scholarship, Armand Bombardier Scholarship, Canadian Centennial Scholarship, and the Oxford Overseas Research Scholarship. The next batch of applications goes out in April.
In terms of blogging and being on instant messengers, internet activity among my friends in Canada seems to be markedly down. Is this because nice spring weather is starting to appear?
Did you know that light bulbs in England don’t screw into their sockets, like their North American equivalents? Along with running at twice the voltage, they also have somewhat fearsome looking sockets with large bare electrodes spring-loaded to hold the bulb in place.

Socially accomplished day

Happy Birthday Astrid

Good things in the mail

This morning, I was delighted to find a package from Meghan Mathieson in my pidge. Along with a letter, she sent me a vegetarian cookbook published by the British Columbia Ministry of Health and a package of that fieriest of snacks: Kasugai Roasted Hot Green Peas. Covered in a layer of dry Wasabi, they can have an exceptional amount of kick to them. They are just the kind of food that is ubiquitous in Vancouver, but quite unheard of here. Many thanks.

The cookbook, called The Vegetarian Edge is liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks and the kind of statements over-excited camp counsellors might make. For instance, it exclaims: “All right! You’ve decided to go vegetarian” before suggesting how to “Get to THE MAX each day!” It promises to be quite useful, though I have my doubts about whether I could consume the recommended 200-300g of tofu a day. I will provide extra protein in lentil form.

Good things in the evening

Spending some time with Nora, Kelly, and Bryn today was both enjoyable and appropriate, seeing as how I have less than a month left of living in the main site at Wadham. The aspect of the move that I regret most is that it risks further detaching me from social life in the college. Hopefully, that will not prove to be the case.

Social happenings later in the day also went very well. Spending three and a half hours talking with Roz tonight was really excellent. It was the kind of conversation in which you could feel the seeds of a great many future conversations – especially in the areas that I know relatively little about. It’s interesting to see how many of the same ideas come up in IR and literary theory, respectively, and how similar perspectives are associated with completely different people. All in all, it was the kind of conversation that strongly reinforces your sense that you were right in thinking a person interesting, as well as worth knowing better.

I hope I have the chance to see her again before she goes to Italy and I go to Malta.

It looks like I will be going to Cambridge for a Wadham exchange dinner on April 4th: the day my mother will be leaving the UK.
Seems that image posting is still broken. Sorry.
Private, to Meghan: I’m sorry we spent so many days eating spicy curry on potatoes…

The thesis or gadgetry: one will drive me mad

Educational matters

During an animated ninety minutes, Dr. Hurrell and I went over my two most recent papers and a number of ideas for the thesis. I feel like we’ve hit upon something exciting. The idea is less to look at institutional arrangements meant to use science to develop better policy, and more to look at the conceptual linkages between science, politics, and policy.

The most straightforward view, which I identified, is what I call the planning/engineering dichotomy. Planners decide that it might be nice to have a bridge across Burrard Inlet. The engineers work out if it’s possible, what it will cost, and how to do it. A similar model is commonly implicitly applied to the relationship between science and policy. Science identifies problems, and then outlines possible solutions for policy makers to debate and implement. Really poking at that model could be a good starting point for a broader discussion. What is the character of science, as it relates to politics and policy? What does it let us do? Without getting off topic, the question might be expanded still further. For instance, asking what the purpose of the natural world should be, from a policy perspective. Is it simply a matter of working out how much good stuff we can squeeze out of it without destroying it for ourselves or future generations?

The next stage is to read probably a dozen or so books, in order to get a more extensive sense of how science and policy are understood with regards to each other and what it might be interesting and useful to expand upon. I will start with Dr. Hurrell’s own book, as well as Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought. It’s also worth re-reading Peter Dauvergne and Jennifer Clapp’s Paths to a Green World. I am excited about the project, in any case, and not just because of the enthusiastic energy that I tend to leave supervisions with an excessive amount of.

Without giving too much away, I will also say that there’s something in the works on the fish paper front.

Damnable contraptions

Due to its increasingly erratic behaviour, iPod the third is going the way of iPod the first and second: back to Shanghai to be replaced. The first one was defective straight upon arrival, pausing automatically at the slightest jolt. The second one had a hard drive that failed while I was driving through Hamilton, Ontario with my cousin and brother. Sasha’s iPod later succumbed to the same fate. Because it is laser etched, it will probably take them three weeks or so. Whereas the first one had the tendency to pause whenever it was bumped the slightest amount, this one is just freezing every ten or fifteen minutes, changing languages once in a while, and refusing to be recognized by a computer that recognizes its brethren with alacrity. Godspeed, little white rectangle.

Apple is quite good, if a bit slow, about fixing things. The lesson is probably that it’s worth spending the extra $60 on a three year Applecare plan. When I can actually manage to tolerate a few weeks without it, the iBook will likewise be going in for service on account of its one defective USB port.

Strange IR theory words:praxis: The practice or exercise of a technical subject or art, as distinct from the theory of it ; Habitual action, accepted practice, custom. ; Action that is entailed by theory or a function that results from a particular structure.reify: The mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing. Also, depersonalization, esp. such as Marx thought was due to capitalist industrialization in which the worker is considered as the quantifiable labour factor in production or as a commodity.PS. One email I’ve been most anxiously awaiting since Saturday night has still not materialized. The only thing for it, for the present moment, is just to keep waiting.

PPS. No word either on the Chevening, ORS, or Armand Bombardier awards. No word is better than a negative response, but I am really crossing my fingers to get at least one yes this time.

End of term festivities III

Parallel to Iffley Road, there is a whole collection of sports fields, bounded on the southern edge by burdock and the soggy shoreline of the Isis. This afternoon, after finishing a second draft of my take-home test, I walked a few kilometres along the river. I was in an exceptionally good mood all day, largely because of how enjoyable yesterday was.

One thing I notice about Oxford veterans – those in their third or fourth year here – is that they see the breaks as the time in which they really get work done. I suppose that’s partly a reflection of how directed the coursework can be; it doesn’t leave a lot of space to pursue your specific academic interests. Once thesis writing begins, I imagine that my breaks will be taken up with it. The best approach for now, I think, is to use the break to do a lot of general reading on environmental politics. That way, the thesis can adopt a fairly definite shape within a more thoroughly understood area of conceptual space.

I am going to drop of the test in Marga Lyall’s mailbox tonight, rather than trucking over to Manor Road before 9am tomorrow. It’s strangely empowering to have a 24 hour keycard for the department. It’s one of few things that really make me feel like a grad student.

End of term festivities II

Between finishing more than half of the qualitative methods test today and attending two interesting bops tonight, this has been a day well spent. The New College event tonight took place not in their MCR, but in an elegant sort of attic-like structure upstairs, with bare rafters and illumination from Christmas tree lights spread along the walls.

After that, a circuitous route brought us briefly to St. Antony’s College. There, I saw Emily in the process of leaving for Morocco before we scaled the wall (St. Antony’s simply will not let you out at night) and went to respective homes.

The day has certainly been indicative of the manner in which Oxford students mark the conclusion of terms. Mine won’t really be over until this take-home exam is submitted and another pair of supervisions take place, but I can still appreciate the spirit.

End of term festivities I

Happy Birthday Alison Atkinson

I spent a while at the Wadham MCR party tonight, but it was so absurdly loud that I could only occupy the purlieus. Within ten metres of the speakers, the sound was so distorted as to make even familiar songs seem bizarrely warped. As a consequence of tonight being a guest dinner night, I only recognized about one in ten people there. I fairly quickly adopted the rational strategy of going back to my room to listen to Tracy Chapman, eat tofu sandwiches, and talk with Bryony over MSN.

Today did not involve a great deal of progress on the take-home exam. I’ve decided to whom I will write the hypothetical letter requesting an interview. I can therefore also begin formulating appropriate interview questions. Since I’ve never conducted a formal interview and our course didn’t actually involve any training on what kind of questions to ask, I am essentially on my own in terms of coming up with them. I suppose that if I make them pretty heavily technical, it will seem reasonably impressive to whoever marks it, though it may or may not represent an effective way of getting useful information.

I went to Beeline Cycles today and learned that their two cheapest bikes – both new – are a generic steel framed mountain bike for £80 or a hybrid for £130. They were really pushing the hybrid, saying it’s less likely to get stolen and better suited to Oxford commuting, but I’m not sure it’s worth almost twice the price. I won’t buy anything until my mother brings my D-lock and helmet from Vancouver. To have a bike and neither of those would be to court disaster.