Dylan

So I'm (by coincidence) listening to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and reading an article about the climate negotiations in Bali. When did Canada become such an obstructionist power? And why does our generation have to resort to the protest music of the last to find something that seems apropos? Apparently one day recently Canada won first, second AND third place in the "fossil awards" for doing the most to hold up negotiations. In the totals, we're only behind the US - yes, that does mean we're ahead of Sauid Arabia. And yes, this makes me very very sad.

On the plus side, there's a Canadian company called Zenn that's making and selling electric cars. In the US. Not in Canada, because there's no approval for it yet....grrrrrr...although they did recently get approval in BC, so hopefully they'll be some rolling onto the roads there soon once they get distribution networks up and running. 

anyway, check out the angry-making and the car story

New Media

Somebody researching at the Oxford internet institute pointed out something interesting to me - despite the hype about the rise of new media, it's barely a drop in the bucket. We still overwhelmingly get our news and analysis from the same old sources. I felt this was a cynical way of looking at it, but then realised that I definitely am one of the people who fits his analysis: the podcasts I listen to are from the CBC and BBC, and all the news online I read is from the websites of traditional media sources. So I am faced with giving in to cynicism or changing my habits...and I'm going to try for the latter.

I've figured out (sort of) the RSS feed thing, but now am just looking for good stuff to fill it with...alternative news sources, interesting columnists, blogs, that sort of thing. Anything to balance out the perspectives I'm normally exposed to. And then I'm looking for other things too - good websites, maybe good newspapers, and particularly any interesting podcasts. Anyone in the ether with any ideas on this one?

Nostalgia is Odd

Today, I am missing drinking hot chocolate in airport waiting lounges. Well, specifically, in the parts of the Calgary and Toronto airports that became so incredibly familiar from flying to and from debate tournaments all the time while I was in undergrad. It wasn't like I was there all that often...but it was several times a year in each of them, which is probably more often than I have been to a lot of places (restaurants, coffee shops, etc.) And yes, I know being stuck in an airport is a messed up thing to miss. But there it is...

Des Bon Mots

So I continue coming across new words in random places (ok, half of them on free rice...but only half) and I figure that I'll maybe actually remember them if I throw a few up here. So, new vocabulary, take 2:

• latitudinarian - (n) allowing latitude; showing no preference among varying creeds and forms of worship
• pettifog - (v) quibble about petty points; practice legal deception or trickery
• chary - (adj) cautious, wary (generally chary of ___); cautious about the amount one gives or reveals (e.g. chary with details...)

I find it amazing that what looks at first like a particularly unlikely typo for wary is in fact another word that means almost precisely the same thing. Trust the economist to use the one nobody has ever heard of... 

Every plan is a tiny prayer

"And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time."

- Death Cab for Cutie

I want to talk a little about plans, and making them, and why we keep doing it, and why it makes us feel better to do so. I started thinking about this recently because a father of a friend of mine died, and I realised then that I'm only OK with being away from home for so long (indefinitely, really) because of a number of assumptions I have about what and who I can return to eventually. The reality is that those aren't all safe assumptions - either I'm making prayers to father time in planning on the basis of such assumptions, or I'm willfully ignoring that chaotic nature of the future. And so I wonder a little what role making plans has in that process - what it is I do when I make a plan, and why it is that it salves the anguish of thinking about an uncertain future.

It's tempting to think of plans as an assertion of control over that uncertainty, of control over your life and your future and your being. Certainly, a plan that is carried to fruition is just that: a conscious determination of a definite path through a field of chaotic and uncertain possibilities. And making plans is both a symptom and solution to control issues; when life is out of control I tend to feel an urge to make plans. But more than that, doing so takes the pressure off gaining control over the present. Plans in that sense, by giving a feeling of future control, help us to tolerate present uncertainty.

I feel, however, it would be ultimately self-destructive to think of plans this way. We have to cope with the seemingly constant fact that the even the best laid plans of mice and thingumagummies go awry. Our plans fall apart as the future asserts its chaotic and destructive power over our fragile attempts to build certainty. If we think that by planning we control the future, we deceive ourselves.

Plans, then, can be a willful deceit, but I'm not very comfortable with that. The alternative, for me, is that plans can be a willful act of defiance. Our plans are our way of screaming in the teeth of the storm or building sandcastles in the path of an incoming tide. They're our way of acknowledging the impossibility of victory, but putting ourselves to the hazard nonetheless. Certainly, if you look into the abyss it stares back at you. But that doesn't mean you have to avert your gaze. I think the only solution is to keep making plans - even to make outrageous plans. As Kipling put it, "If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss." You may lose. Scratch that, you probably will lose, from time to time. But then the only thing to do, when you "watch the things you gave your life to, broken" is to "stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools."

There's beauty in simply escaping the paralysis that comes with awareness of the fragility of our existence and our creations. There's beauty in the attempt to make something anyway, knowing it's not likely to last. And maybe, there's even beauty in the breakdown of all of that. Either way, we win some or we learn some. And out of all of that, we make something we call life.

Illocutionary Power?

So - some new words...there are lots here. Apparently this is where a certain old teacher of mine picked up a tendency to be delighted at any opportunity to use a neglected word.

A quick sampling:

1. polysemy - the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase
2. elision - omission of a sound or syllable when speaking; ommission of a passage in writing; the process of joining together or merging things, esp. abstract ideas
3. decoct - to boil down or crystallise; extract the essence of 

The point of this is not, however, to show off my new vocabulary...it's that possibly the coolest online time-wasting game of all time has appeared on the web: http://www.freerice.com/index.php

It's a vocabulary quiz game - but for every word you get right, they can donate 10 grains of rice. Not much - but it adds up. So far, enough to feed 50,000 people for a day. And its only been online since October. Check out the "totals" page and see how fast it's growing. Then practice your vocabulary and feed the hungry!

Remembrance Day

So I definitely slept through all the remembrance day stuff in this country, because their crazy debating tournaments don't end until so late. But I thought I should do something so I did a little remembrance of my own when it was 11:11 at home. I thought it would fall flat, but it actually worked really well - you can pull the last post and reveille and various poems off the internet in mp3 format and do the whole thing that way. 

No tremendously profound thoughts in my moment of silence - just that I'm really, really glad I'm not having to fight a war. 

Oh, and then we watched 300 in the MCR. And I remembered how much I disagree with it, in oh so many ways. 

Politeness

So, I've always thought of politeness as a formal of socially regulated empathy: that is, guidelines about how to treat one another kindly and with consideration. This seems to be radically at odds with the British notion of politeness, or perhaps more correctly etiquette. Here, it seems to all be about strictly following certain unwritten, unspoken rules (like about how to queue) and saying the correct things (please and thank you). There doesn't seem to be any link between saying thank you and meaning thank you, or between being polite and being kind. Hence, its perfectly OK for someone to shout at a stranger in Sainburys over a misunderstanding about places in line. I'm not sure I'll ever really understand. 

Don't get me wrong - I really like it here, and a lot of people are both polite and friendly. But they seem to be two different things. In general, I'm beginning to find Britain more and more foreign feeling. It's not that anything is much different from back home, it's that it's all almost the same but very slightly different. And like the unreal plateau they hit with almost realistic computer graphics at some point, it makes you feel a little queasy. 

Many worlds after all?

So, there's been speculation for some time that Oxford may exist in a sort of parallel universe. Goodness knows, its been the inspiration for most of the great sub-creative worlds of 20th Century fantasy. But I think whatever the conclusion is on the general question, it is clear that the Senior Common Room (and high table) is a completely different world. There's a butler. A real one. And champagne (in the SCR), then dinner (including dessert) then you keep your napkin and carry it down to a different room where there's 2nd dessert with complicated rules about the direction of passing the port and dessert wine and lovely little plates of fruit, and then from there back to the SCR for coffee and tea. The whole thing takes almost four hours. And is filled with people with titles and college benefactors and just does not seem like something from a world I am used to at all. 

Fog and Fireworks

Two kinds of creepy in Oxford:

1) The fog. When this place does fog, it does it seriously and properly. As in, you go into an event and its sunny, and you come out and its dark and you can't see more than 50 yards. And the buildings, they loom. Seriously creepy. Cool, but creepy.

2) Guy Fawkes night. Although the big city-wide fireworks were on the weekend, on the actual Guy Fawks night (the 5th) there were lots of medium-sized displays at various colleges. But you can't really see them because of all the big buildings. Instead, what you get is the noise. It sounds pretty much like I would imagine sporadic small-arms fire as like, with periodic punctuations of artillery (larger fireworks?). Anyway, I thought I was being crazy about it until I was out walking and realised the insane echo effects they get off all the buildings and college walls and things...which is why it sounded creepy and like warfare around the corner instead of just fireworks. Oh, and given that in the past there was large-scale violence between town and gown, it kind of makes you think about why exactly the colleges are essentially fortified, walled enclosures. 

Purity

I totally forgot I big one when I was meandering along about positive and negative valuation: purity. Good, when you're talking about the genuine Canadian maple syrup I manage to procure for my pancakes this morning. Scary, when you start talking about blood or the like. 

Intensity

I've been thinking a lot about intensity recently. Partly I wonder how much a lot of our behaviour comes out of a desire for intensity of experience. For those of who lead such sheltered lives, it seems like relationships can be some of the the only really properly intense things that happen to us. Whereas others live intensity day in and out - and it seems to be them that write great poetry and stories and so on. I'm thinking of the war poets, or the Zabbaleen who write poetry to process their lives, or the street graffiti on the downtown East Side of Vancouver. I realise its a gross generalisation, but I think there's something to it. And I think a lot of what we do is chasing after some sort of intensity. 

Anyway, there's not a huge amount to that thought - there seemed to be more when I was talking about it last night. But I have a question to think about - does time really heal all things, or just it just make them fade away? Does it just kill the intensity?

Wednesday's Entry

So I'm terrible at keeping up with this. Pretend I made this post on wednesday evening.

A friend of mine is doing his research on the coptic garbage collectors of Cairo, known as the Zabbaleen. He gave a presentation on it tonight that raised some really fascinating issues (for me) - as did the continuation of the discussion in the pub. On a more mundane side-note, having someone take notes on what you're saying in a pub is a very weird experience. Half-flattering and half just plain odd. But in terms of what we were talking about:

What is dirty, and what is clean? The classic definition of dirt is, apparently, "matter out of place" and, if you think about it, that probably encompasses most of what we regularly think of as dirty. But for the Zabbaleen, living constantly amidst the garbage, it isn't things that are dirty. Instead, they speak of corruption and exploitation as dirty. Which leads on to a broader question about how we express negative and positive valuation. Since western political thought fused with Christian morality, the notion of good and bad/evil has been dominant. But before that, Greek thinkers were as likely to speak about things (people, societies, and so on) as healthy or sick. And then there's beautiful and ugly (which can be interestingly applied to valuation outside aesthetics), sacred and profane, and so on. How we speak of these things - and how we conceptualise them ourselves - can give radically different outlooks on how we interpret our lives and how we think we should respond to them. And that's before thinking about the other areas where these things get turned on their head...like when dirty is seen to be desirable. 

There was more, but that's all I can remember and express (I wasn't the one taking notes...)

Ups and Downs

So this weekend was a bit of a roller coaster. Or rather a very nice walk in the woods, except for falling in the pits with spikes in. Basically, had my sister visiting, which was in itself amazing. But also we had a really good time touristing it up around Oxford and seeing the bits I haven't seen yet, including the unbelievably cool museums that are scattered around. Old scientific instruments and dinosaurs aplenty. The less good part was the me hurting myself with sports (my knee and then just a particularly nasty bit of overexertion). I learned, to my detriment, that the lasting legacy of my quasi-Nietzschean sports schooling is an ability to push myself that radically exceeds my current level of physical fitness. Oh, but I forgot some more of the good bits, which included more time with new friends and seeing another play - King John, a lesser-known and less-performed Shakespeare. 

Anyway, the last few days in general have made me put a lot of thought into relationships, and my role in them, and what that means to the other parties...there is such a diversity of relationships, and I could probably do a lot better by a lot of other people if I just thought a little more about how I impacted them. From the trivial and mundane - I had a nice chat with the lady at Sainsbury's today, for instance, that seemed to brighten both our mornings - to the very important, like the role I play in my sister's life. Anyway, no particularly profound thoughts yet - mostly just I think its something I should think about more with everyone, rather than the few people I do spend a lot of time thinking about how I relate to. 

A thought and a question

I had an interesting point made to me today about my educational heritage. I think of myself as coming from an academic family - both parents with PhDs, an older sister already finished a masters, book around all the time and so forth. But it was pointed out to me that I also have aunts and uncles who dropped out of high school and university, a grandmother who only finished grade 8, and a great-grandmother with only one year of formal education. And I'm at Oxford. I'm not sure what that does to my feelings about the responsibility that comes with being here. It was supposed to calm me, by pointing out that just being here is an achievement. I think it only makes me feel more like its a responsibility - I feel like the accomplishment in being here belongs to them, not me, and that I need to take the next step. I'm just not sure what the equivalent step is, starting from this point...

The question then - if you had two groups of people, living in complete separation - if there was no contact or possible causal relationship between the two - and one group was a lot better off than the other, is that unfair? Or rather, can you speak of it as unjust in any meaningful sense? Are differences between people morally relevant when there can be no relationship of any kind between those people? 

And yes, political philosophy does seem to involve these crazy hypothetical questions. Seemingly (and hopefully) for good reasons, although that remains to be seen for sure. 

Quick Notes

A couple of quick notes:

1) I've realised I'm actually quite, quite bad at the seminar discussion format. It's fine when it operates at a relatively simplistic level - then it's easy to be concise and constructive with what you want to say. But if, for instance, you want to express to a bunch of Oxford students why exactly you think that lottery voting has no independent fairness value because its an unjustified reification of probability applied to a series of different one-off decisions, well it takes forever and nobody really understands what you're saying. And ends up more confrontational than necessary. I shall have to work on this.

2) re: last post, figuring out what you want to do, etc...I think this is a good place to be doing that. Went to another interesting lecture (on Rwanda, by a functionary in the current government) that got me thinking again and then had a really good, long conversation with a friend about things in the world we either feel strongly about or should do...I think part of the key to actually getting stuff done is to make sure you talk to other people about it, and then push each other/hold each other to it. 

An Inauspicious Start

     So I've decided to begin a blog. Motivated primarily, like most people, by lack of productivity in other areas. But no matter - I think the idea is, at present, just to jot down some of my impressions of this place before I forget about them entirely.

     The thing that has made the greatest impression on me today is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamid Karzai's speech at the Oxford Union. The whole thing was impressive, of course, but a couple of  things struck me in particular. 

    First, that I found that I regard Karzai as much more of a genuine leader than I would my own prime minister or the leaders of many states - perhaps because of what he personally has to face down or the challenges his country faces, but perhaps also because of his bearing. He explicitly recognised that he was under constraints as President in terms of what he could and could not say, and that he wished he could speak as freely as a student. And yet he seemed to attempt to say as much as possible within those constraints; there were several times that I thought he was (quite successfully) dodging tricky questions, but invariably he was simply making preferatory remarks before confronting the tough issue head-on. He also seemed to construct his remarks within the constraints so that we could guess at how he genuinely felt, rather than the all-too-familiar obfuscation practiced by those who could be far freer with what they say. 

    Second, one of the questions was about the role of the Canadian troops in rebuilding Afghanistan, and his response touched me deeply. He was asked if the Afghan people wanted the Canadians there. I think recent poll data support his response, but the way he said it expressed something sharper than numbers can. He said that Canada's contribution was beyond generous, and the willingness of Canada to sacrifice her daughters and sons to help Afghanistan was something they were very grateful for. And then he paused a bit to search for words before saying that human language has not yet evolved to be able to express the kind of gratitude he means - which is why when he spoke at the Canadian parliament he said it in the simplest form possible: thank you. Something about the way he said this - about the feeling he could put into expressing it, really cut me to the core. I cried a bit (three tears). And it really made me upset about the level of debate over Canada's involvement in Afghanistan at home - the maneuvering, the jockeying for position, the inability of anyone, it seems, to give us a really good explanation of their stand. 

    I don't want to make it out like I think Karzai is the ideal leader or anything - but I was deeply impressed. And I certainly have a lot to think about. Not least the guilt I currently feel. Karzai prefaced his remarks by saying how great a pleasure it was to speak at Oxford. He said that all students, wherever they are, dream of going to Oxford (or Cambridge) - and that he had been one of them. It drove home again the ridiculous life of privilege I enjoy here. And so I'm not feeling good that knowing that, and thinking about it, all I have achieved since I got home is cooking lunch, washing dishes, doing a quarter of a reading and starting a blog. I need to figure out exactly what it is I am doing, and what it is I want to do, and how to bring the two closer together. Hopefully this whole writing things down thing will help. 

That's it for this post - except for a closing thought (not mine) that sort of sums up what I'm trying to say:

"You are all busy. It's important to be busy, 

but if you don't find the time to change the world, 

then you're busy keeping it the way it is."

- Albert Jones, Boston janitor & volunteer bus driver