Dangling carrots

I have just recovered from having a draft chapter (that will hopefully serve as a conference paper, or perhaps it's the other way round...) knee-capped by my supervisor. Her criticisms were almost all valid (per ugge), but it's the old 50s-style no positive feedback or simple 'you can do it' encouragement which, made me, already tired and vulnerable, feel so punished.

I have this dreadful sense that I will, on some level, feel tired, defensive and inadequate until I submit (Kate???).

When you're in write-up mode, small escapes count, like yesterday when I rode up from my Department to Summertown, North Oxford. It was thrilling.

Here are a few carrots that I am dangling from a stick attached to my head:


1) The 12 October release of the Cohen Brothers movie, Burn After Reading. I am certain my cousin, cinemaphile Alice, will provide a deft analysis (hint hint!) on her blog. I saw the preview a couple of weeks ago and it made me feel uncomfortable excited, as if small stars were being drilled into my stomach. The cast alone makes you froth, right?



2) Seeing Frankie Boyle, the acerbic, outrageous Scottish comedian in early October. I just found this YouTube tribute to him. (Be warned. It contains a lot of slut jokes which makes him seem misogynistic instead of what he is: dark about everything.) Later that month, I am seeing Russell Howard, the little Brighton-born cutie who is less stinging than Frankie but no less witty. Click here for his YouTube salute. They're both regulars on an excellent television show I try to catch: Mock the Week, a satirical comedy based on the week's news.


3) Receiving used books from the exchange system, BookMooch. I have the black heart of an idealist - I can't quite believe that people are so honourable. Three goodies to....walk into my arms soon. I will let you know when they arrive.

Nerds are super hyper disco chouette...

They send you email invitations like this one that was sent to me from an English DPhil student in Physics (one of my oldest, most adorable pals in Oxford) who is about to start a post-doc in the big bad US of A :

Ladies,

On Thursday (or possibly Friday, its a bit like Smiths's driving test) next week, four years of dubiously allocated government funds will hopefully terminate with my viva.

Young master Brown has become strangely coy about advertising a house warming party/Sarah's birthday planned in his very own house on the evening of Friday the 29th which no doubt you will all be invited to anyway. Perhaps he hasn't officially informed the rest of his housemates yet, who can say?

Now that my supervisor has given me a massive vote of confidence, viz. "we should probably assume you'll pass, just don't say anything stupid", I intend to hijack the party with viva celebrations. Pending the outcome
of our deliberations there will either be a presentation on my far reaching and momentous contributions to human knowledge or a selection of alcoholic beverages.

It would be good to see some of you there, especially if you are good looking or witty. If you are both then I'm not sure we've met and if you are neither then I doubt I'd pretend to like you, so your inclusion in this list must be accidental. Any significant udders are also welcome, so that I can judge you by your choices.

If you can't come then don't fear, I'll hunt you down in the days and weeks to come and make you pay for the slight by selling you into the Dale Winton topless prize fighting circuit.

Incidentally and for your edification, I have attached a picture of a genuine physicist in America.

Peace out,

Ambient Dog Fuck.

PS. I can't find Beckths email address so she's not invited.

I am indeed attending this party, but I have asked that the hosts desist from the following: sitting in groups of three on the grass to compare bike repair stories or cycling routes, juggling any objects (especially those on fire) and playing hacky sack. Whenever you play hacky sack with these guys, for instance, no one playfully grabs you when you miskick. They just laugh at you nervously or kick it at you even harder. I have asked for some splashy-splashy. One of the guests overheard me making this request and he said he was too scared to come now. I told him we needed to learn from each other.

Meet you at the bonfire?

I have spent most of the last few weeks in a manky, mismatched tracksuit. I would like to think I look like the cutie (Alexa Cheung) below, but I rarely have a lollipop by my computer and my hoodies are for boys.
When you're a student it's easy to continue to dress like a teenager. Every year I tell myself that I will dress my age, more like these pretties:





I have decided that the end of my thesis means goodnight to my grotty teenager wardrobe. Who wants to come to my thesis submission party and burn tracksuits, and 1991 conference and heavy metal band t-shirts with me?

Fragmentation is Freedom

This is my first post in a while. I have been preoccupied. It's been so tragic and lovely.

I had an old boyfriend in town. He's been travelling. We ran from College to College, avoiding the angry rain and the hordes of Italian teenagers. We passed neat quadrangles, stone corridors and important man paintings, shouting out things over the heads of school teachers like 'So you didn't find yourself in India then?'

I had to say goodbye to a new friend, on the last corner of Queens Lane. He did not like how I kept on looking away. His eyes made me feel uncomfortable.

And The Boy thinks that I, as a PhD student, am making him grey. I did back-hand the pile of my birthday cards off the table and onto the floor in front of him two days ago. I was raging against my unruly conference paper. It has been causing me trouble for weeks and I have no one to talk to about it. I didn't feel ashamed by my tantrum, but I do feel a bit bad that I am quickening The Boy's decay.

I had a long telephone conversation with one of my brothers recently. One by one, he listed our family members and his complaints, peppered, of course, with careful qualifications and some more generous remarks. I understood. He hadn't seen them in a while.

I had a friend, Kate, come over to play. She took the photograph of the two of us in our 50s party dresses in the bedroom next to where I work. I was a little bit scared.

A local man from the village with a big face and a hidden chin told me that as an Australian, and with Australia lower on the Olympic medal tally than Great Britain, I was a miserable peasant, a bad loser and without electricity. It made me think about some things.

So these are some fragments of my life and only glimpses. I have only been offered glimpses by them too.

I found this little gem from Eric G Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University:

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

Walk of Shame!

I decided to video myself giving a birthday messsage for a loved-one back in Oz yesterday and, completely against the spirit of the whole exercise, it led to two shame laps for me: the recording itself and then the play back.

In the recording my lips are slightly tighter than usual, my voice is rather shrill and my gestures noticeably more girly; twisting hair around finger, looking up as if to ask the camera to tell me what to say. While watching it, I started to do a mad robot dance on the spot to reflect my malfunction in front of the camera. In both instances I alleviated my discomfort by ducking my head into the chest of the Boy, as if by hiding it would mean that it didn't really happen.

Am I this lame?

I cheered myself up by spotting a blog entry by Merlin Mann:

I thought I was the only person in the universe who made an unconscious little noise when remembering something stupid I did or said.

It is dedicated to the sounds one makes when one feels embarrassed or relives embarrassing moments. So, my sounds would be those of a dalek or some baby bush animal. When I am by myself, I relive the pedestrian moment in my head and then say dryly and slowly until the last two words, with exaggerated mouth shapes: 'I can't believe you DID THAT!' If it's particularly atrocious, I may add a Napoleon Dynamite 'You idiot' on the end.

I have a beach of shameful moments that are replayed from time to time (brought on by stress and fatigue). They range from grossly inappropriate things I have said (like when I was 8, I asked someone whose parents had died in a car crash whether there was blood and guts on the bumper bar. I had heard that line in a movie, Bigfoot and the you-ruined-my-life Hendersons, and thought it would cheer them up), done (a Jerry Maguire Mission Statement-style research funding proposal that I realised only after, having discovered more about the funding body, would have caused much amusement and was duly rejected) and worn (my androgenous phase of my late teens/early twenties makes me quite uncomfortable). I have plenty of noises and mannerisms that accompany these images.

What about you? What's in your shame file? What do you tend to do when you're being sent on that lonely, well-lit march off The Weakest Link?

Aussiephobia

I did not give much thought to my Australianness when I nervously anticipated how I would be received as a new student in Oxford way back in 2004. I thought about my first days of high school, and about not having my brothers and sisters around. I wondered whether I would be able to continue to say to myself, 'It doesn't matter what people say about me or my personality, I have loved-ones who have said worse things about me'.

What I did not prepare myself for in the slightest was the barrage of balls that would be thrown at me for being Australian and therefore either (or a combo of) competitive, brash, obnoxious, entitled, unintelligent, anti-intellectual, backward, racist (a cab driver asked me only the other day whether Australians were hateful people), unsubtle and therefore unfunny. The most persistent comments come from the English, but I've got to say, the New Zealanders are up there... Even a South African man came up to me last week (having only met me once) to let me know that South Africa beat New Zealand in rugby union and that it made him feel 'good that the Aussies would get smashed.' How did the Aussies come into it?

Our energy and enthusiasm is seen as crass and annoying or evidence of stupidity. A Danish student remarked to me recently that she'd never hurt such vile things said about a population than the comments her British friends make about Australians. I tried to explain that it was only because of our special, parent-child relationship (where the child leaves the parent) that Brits felt so stridently comfortable about making comments that they never would about Africans or Asians, for instance, or even Canadians (the good son who does his own thing and does not cause trouble). It did make me wonder though. And come to think of it, an English guy recently told me that he could not tolerate 'Colonial women' because they (we...me) were too aggressive and upfront.

I have been trapped in awful, drunken conversations at 2am about shrimps on barbies (caught by trying to explain that no one in Australia uses the word 'shrimp'), Fosters (same thing), backwardness (our literacy rate is higher than that of the UK!), convicts (the proportion of convict descendants; the intentional policy of enforced labour in the colonial period), the arrogance of Aussie males (sporto jerks everywhere; you're projecting because you're smaller than them), The Ashes, our Olympic medal tally. The list goes on. And each time I engage I just feel depleted, infantile (like when your brother used to upset you with the same bait each time) and silly. Usually and increasingly, I concede to a few points - Australians can be too much sometimes in some contexts (especially on Contiki buses) and the male, macho culture (bushman, Anzac hero, sportsman) is intense and sometimes nauseating.

But I still don't like the conversations. I don't like being patriotic. It's akin to loyalty to 'houses' at school. But I must be. How else can I explain why I have to force a smile after the third Aussie-bashing joke in almost every Flight of the Conchords episode?

I didn't even consider that I would be representing Australia in the UK. But I am. I would prefer to represent myself and maybe my family. Apparently I am here to prove or disprove the very strong, prevalent (and most often not jokey) viewpoint that Australians are crap.

What's your problem with Aussies, mate? (eager, but not aggressive tone)

Lady Crush

photo (c) Tom Plant (via LittleFeat.net)

Shaun Murphy, I will have to tell you: you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you...

Shaun is the wonderful, soul singer in Little Feat (est 1969). I saw 'the Feat' play the other night in Woolver'umptun. I feel like a bit of a shonk calling them 'the Feat' when I was one of only a handful of under forty-year-olds, one of three people who didn't dance in a kind of trancy sway, one of two humans without a long grey ponytail, and the only one there who didn't know every word of their songs off by heart. I was in the front row, centre, next to this guy with his chin on the stage sending special messages to (my) Shaun.

Shaun Murphy is talent and goodness embodied. Her smile is magical, she looks at the audience members, nods as though she recognises you, blows kisses and offers her hand to the fans (who you know have cut out pictures of her all over one room of the house). Shaun has a powerhouse voice but thankfully resorts to none of the hand gestures of Celine or Idol contestants. Plus, she is the best tambourine-player I have ever seen. She beats hard but smooth; they have a good relationship those two.

In a baggy buttoned shirt over jeans, with red pointy shoes and a helmet of red hair, Shaun looks like she would cook your breakfast on a Sunday and ask about your homework on a Monday, but then she could also just decide that she wanted to leave you to play tambourine in the fields.

I must say that my hand went pathetically limp when she shook it and I gazed upwards like I was at the gates of heaven (she does have stunning blue eyes). I couldn't get rid of my dumb grin for two days...and I am still in love. But it's a lady crush, which is very different to a girly crush.

By the way, if you want special treatment from grotty little muso kids at record stores, watch a couple of these Feat clips below (the third showcases my Shaun's talent), somehow bring them into your conversation at the desk and you'll probably get a discount. 'Little Feat' is pretty much a secret code in musoland for 'I am a serious musician/music-lover so give me rushpuct.'

Fat Man in the Bathtub

Dixie Chicken

Sailin' Shoes