After an excellent but late night yesterday, it was difficult to get into a proper reading stride this afternoon. The necessity of getting the reading done for the core seminar on Tuesday, preparing a potential presentation (20% chance of being called upon this time), and working on the statistics assignment means I will be opting out of tonight’s IR social event tonight.
I quite like the style of writing in Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis: though written in 1939 it still seems highly cogent and relevant. Carr is definitely on his strongest footing when he outlines the tension between pragmatism and idealism in world politics and the way in which the former is sterile without the latter, and the latter powerless without the former. While interesting, Carr’s book is less than entirely useful for the core seminar, as it is much more theoretical than historical. With luck, I shall be able to muster the energy to read the Clavin or Feinstein book tonight, though all the noise from Saturday-night-crazed undergraduates is in league with general tiredness to reduce the likelihood of such outcomes. Even with headphones on and the loudest possible music that does not totally demolish my ability to read, abrasive screaming and laughter penetrates my small and patchy cloud of studiousness.
At some point tomorrow, I am to meet Emily to read. It’s certainly a thing that I generally do more efficiently with company, as I am more effectively constrained from moving on to more interesting tasks.
Miscellaneous:
- Those who appreciate The Shining should see the odd satirical trailer linked on Alison’s blog
- I am now quite seriously in need of a haircut. If someone can suggest a place in Oxford that will restore my hair to something generally akin to its appearance in the blog profile, at a reasonable cost, I would be most appreciative.
- During my first month in England, I spent £168.72 on food: £136.29 at Sainsbury’s. That’s C$352.98 in total, with C$285 at Sainsbury’s. Those figures do not include the cost of dinners in hall, before I began opting out of all of them. That represents 46.5% of my gross spending, compared with 7.6% for just four binders, four pads of paper, and a hole punch at Staples.
Carr is a cunning and convincing realist, quite unlike some of the less capable thinkers who have followed him.
“Ethical notions are very seldom a cause, but almost always an effect, a means of claiming universal legislative authority for our own preferences, not, as we fondly imagine, the actual ground for those preferences.” Bertrand Russell
Agreed. Chapter 6: “The Limitations of Realism” is particularly convincing.
Are the cost-of-living stats meant for those who might be considering going to Oxford (for whom your blog might be a useful primer) or just the product of self-obsession and an incomprehensible passion for stats?
All three, plus a heavy dose of procrastination.
Milan,
I’m really enjoying reading your blog, welcome to our beautiful city. Have to break it to you, though, that decent cheap haircuts in Oxford don’t exist…
Antonia,
Thank you for the greeting and for the somewhat unwelcome news. Surely, even in Oxford, there must be places that are better than others, conditioning approximately equally for tolerable quality and tolerable cost?
Milan,
To be honest, I don’t know too much about men’s haircuts, so you may be in more luck looking for a cheep barber – the one on the High Street inside the sub fusc shop may be worth a try. But for women, the best value cut I can find is for £30, and that’s in Cowley centre.