Milan – Page 97 – a sibilant intake of breath

Autumnal Oxford

Today was a gusty day – the fall wind tore yellowed leaves from the trees and change was in the air. I’ve always felt thrilled and empowered by windy days – they remind me how the world is not only capable of being changed but, at times, practically bursting with desire to do so. Even as you are being blown around, you are reminded inescapably that you have a will and the capacity to make a difference. That was particularly evident after our excellent lecture with Jennifer Welsh, when eighteen members of the M.Phil program met to discuss the matter of salvaging the quantitative methods course. Sitting around in the lounge beside the DPIR, I felt like part of the council of demons in Book II of Paradise Lost.

No! let us rather choose,
Armed with Hell-flames and fury, all at once
O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the torturer; when, to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine, he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and, for lightning, see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels and his throne itself
Mixed with Tartarean sulphur and strange fire,
His own invented torments.

We will issue a joint declaration to the department tomorrow. On a related note, Tristan is apparently now on strike, in his capacity as a research assistant at York. He is not, it seems, terribly keen on the idea. Hopefully, it will not last too long.

Jennifer Welsh, according to many people who spoke to me before my departure, is the Canadian superstar in politics at Oxford. I spoke with her for a while after her lecture about how many of the problems of political theory evaporate once you have a normative determination. Once you get beyond theory for its own sake, you can pick and choose the useful bits of all the theories out there, as a means of understanding the world and advancing certain goals. I look forward to how she will be heavily involved with the core seminar next term, when it changes focus to contemporary debates in international relations theory.

Her lecture outlined the key elements of neo-realism, reo-liberal institutionalism, and constructivism as general areas within IR theory, as well as the critiques they make of one another. She was an engaging and effective speaker who made her points comprehensibly and with skill. Overall, it was a reminder of the reasons for which the Oxford IR program is really quite excellent overall. She has encouraged us to read the Sage Politics Text on International Relations, which may end up being the first book I buy for myself in Oxford.

In the evening, I went to my first lecture for the Professional Training in the Social Sciences course which, according to the Notes of Guidance, we are all meant to be taking. As it happens, it was delayed and poorly publicized. Only three of us were actually in attendance. The session focused on professional ethics in social science research, so it struck me as particularly ironic that it took place in the Said School of Business. As the lecturer explained, most people interested in business think that Ethics is a county in England.

Tonight, I am going to take a bit of a break: see whether I can find something good and non-scholarly to read, generally relax, and go to sleep early. Tomorrow, I will get started on the readings for next week’s core seminar though, having presented last week (however badly), much of the pressure is off.

PS. No animals or gargoyles passed near my camera today, but I am keeping my eyes out for them.

PPS. I am eyeing the signed Philip Pullman editions of Paradise Lost at Blackwell’s with ever-diminishing restraint.

Just drifting

After a month in Oxford, you begin to realize the extent to which this is nothing like a unified institution. I don’t have the foggiest idea about who coordinates the departments and the colleges, if anyone. I’ve never had to deal with them. The closest I’ve come is some vague contact with pan-university organizations, such as inter-college mail or the university computer services. Ultimately, this place is a million academic niches; a weird underwater ecosystem where it is equally possible to thrive and be eaten by a barracuda.

This morning, I headed over to the Manor Road Building to work on statistics. I ended up banging off a strongly worded letter to the people at the department responsible for course organization. The extent to which stats is interfering with everything else I am trying to do, while not conferring anything of value upon me, is just not tolerable anymore. I finished the second assignment but, after getting 58% on the first one for failure to use the right sort of graphs and label them as desired, I am not confident. I feel rather better about the paper for Dr. Hurrell, which has now been delivered to a Nuffield pigeon hole.

I finally met my college advisor today. I dropped by the tutorial office to say hello to Joanna – my favourite Wadham employee – and discovered that Dr. Paul Martin was in the room at the time. We’ve now exchanged a few emails. It seems that he will be organizing some kind of tea with his various neglected charges in the days ahead.

Soon, I hope, I will have the chance to head down to London. Getting out of the three kilometre circle that is defining and enclosing my life might be empowering. I don’t particularly have anything to do in London, or any money to do it with, but I am definitely open to suggestion.

On a completely different note, I’ve decided to try taking photographic requests. You post something from Oxford that you want to see, whether specific or more theoretical, and I will see what I can do to capture it on a digital sensor.¹ Please keep in mind that this blog is meant to be the kind of thing that bright young eleven year olds who dream of going to Oxford one day can read. Well, almost.

[1] This idea has nothing at all to do with how boring photos of computers and libraries can be.

A very skippable post

Today was a hectic, but purely academic, Oxford day. It’s funny what kinds of things you start to miss about a place, after you have been gone for a long time. Now that Oxford is frequently dappled with rain, I find myself missing the network of buses, skytrains, and seabuses that were my best means of getting around Vancouver. Riding a 4 or 10 bus up Broadway to UBC in the afternoon, while rain makes the pavement and buildings all around look far more real than they manage in the sunshine, creates a of trance of patient familiarity. There is a comforting regularity to choosing to take the 246 from Lonsdale Quay, even though it takes 15 minutes longer than the 236, just because you don’t know what time the other bus will come and you prefer to wait while moving.

My fifth issue of The Economist in Oxford just received its last check mark. (I check off articles when I finish them, marking them according to how interesting they were, whether I might be able to write a printable response, and according to how relevant to ongoing projects.) I’ve also finished Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, though only one of the two essays which I was meant to dispatch today. I will finish the other tonight and early tomorrow, then hand deliver it to Nuffield. I hope I see Margaret again soon.

I was called upon to present in seminar today; of course, it would happen in the week when I was least prepared. That said, the essay I submitted to Dr. Wright and Fawcett is a perfectly acceptable one. That is less true of the paper for Dr. Hurrell that I am trying to finish now. It just sort of thrashes away, trying to make points but never quite managing to do so as cogently or systematically as one would want. The prospect of being back, yet again, in the Social Sciences Library at 9:00am tomorrow in order to do our second statistics assignment really doesn’t help matters.

Tomorrow night, John Ralston Saul will be speaking in New College, at 5:00pm.
Also at 5:00pm, inside Rhodes House, there will be a Rhodes Debate on reparations (not the Versailles kind).

Public service announcement

Windows users should be aware that several companies are now making music CDs that actively sabotage your computer: both by preventing it from being able to make mp3s and by installing trojan horse software that monitors and manipulates what you can do. Sony Music is among those companies. Luckily, you can get around most of it by disabling the autorun feature in Windows XP.

During the next few years, in all kinds of areas, we need to deal with the issue of intellectual property. We need to decide when countries can violate the patents of drug firms, either due to short term emergencies like an avian flu or long term ones like AIDS, We need to decide what fair use means, with regards to copyrighted materials, in an age where copying and distribution has become so much easier. We need to decide what to do about patents, which have the serious potential to be exploited and hamper both innovation and the public welfare, while confering underserved monopolies on those who hold them.

Whatever the answers to these questions are, and some of them are really very tricky, I don’t think they can legitimately involve the kind of backhanded dealing described in the first paragraph here. I don’t buy music from the iTunes music store, for the simple reason that I have no reason to believe I will still be able to use that music five years from now, or on a different computer or device. The nature of ownership, when it comes to things like software and music, is becoming ephemeral and uncertain – except for those people who have illegal copies that evade these feeble protections anyhow. I remember how, with my legitimately bought copy of Half Life 2, I needed to muck around for hours with registration, web updates, and a little Steam applet that seriously restricts how and when you can use the software which you bought. My friends who downloaded it from one or another peer-to-peer service just played.

Enjoying Halloween afternoon with a pint of… coffee

In the morning, a STATA course from the Oxford University Computer Services. In the afternoon, finalization of the core seminar paper, progress on the paper for Dr. Hurrell, and an attempt to prepare a presentation for tomorrow. There’s a certain irony bound up in how, as my chances of having to present continue to increase, my level of preparation continues to plummet. Another irony – which Emily pointed out – is that our ‘core’ seminar occupies two hours a week, while we spend twice that amount being instructed in statistics: not terribly well, as it happens. When a group of clever and hardworking students despise and disparage a course as we have been, you can be fairly confident that the fault does not lie in ourselves.

Last night, I spoke with Kate for about an hour over Skype: Kate Dillon, in Victoria, not Kate from the IR M.Phil or Kate from the bloggers’ gathering. Happily, she now has keys to go along with her desk in the Whale Lab at U.Vic. It’s always interesting to get an update on what she is doing. Today also included a brief social pause, when I had coffee in my room with a collection of Wadham grad students. All sorts of curious political jostling seems to be surrounding the MCR elections, though I can truthfully proclaim myself completely indifferent to their outcome. I hope people don’t get at one another’s throats for no reason about it.

Tonight was very productive. I finished the last edit of the core seminar paper and printed the thing off. I did some good work on the paper for Dr. Hurrell, which I will finish and edit tomorrow evening, after the quantitative methods lecture. I spent an excellent collection of hours inside the SSL, finishing the relevant section from one book and making a good start on the second. I shall be back in there at nine tomorrow. I have come to appreciate the general wonderfulness of confined books; on their account, I shall have to learn how to read in libraries.

As I made my way into the library, I spoke with Bryony for a while at the intersection of St. Cross and Manor Roads. On the way out, I spoke for a little while with Rachel: a D.Phil student in development studies at Balliol. Who’s to say that library time can’t, in some brief and narrow sense, be social?

PS. Today begins my final month of twentyoneness. Any suggestions for how I should use my final weeks?

Affection for books

Just now, I had a quintessential graduate student moment. On Halloween night, inside the Social Sciences Library, I was practically moved to hug Frank Costigliola’s Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933, after I found the last confined copy: just 13 hours before the seminar where it may well save me from the embarassment of having to give a presentation based on hugely inadequate research. I got Offner’s Origins of the Second World War as well, so I will have an exciting three hours of trying to race through them before the library closes.

Happy Birthday Greg Allen

I felt really strange for most of today, while sitting in the DPIR and working on one or the other paper. I felt significantly lighter than usual, as though I should sort-of bounce along like a moon astronaut. Also, I felt this impulse that seemed like a signal that should normally be attached to some need, as if to say VERY X, where X is an impulse like hunger or tiredness. When I checked, however, there was no X to feel VERY about, just some sense that I was missing something big. Such things can reduce one’s ability to concentrate.

Rather later, when walking back from dinner with Emily and her father, it occurred to me that the M.Phil in IR is rather like doing the front crawl. There are two phases: one in which your head is underwater and you are trying to move forward and the other in which you are trying to breathe, so as not to die. Like while swimming, the breathing part is always a matter of necessity and relief. It’s cyclical and it doesn’t last long. For me, it happens between Tuesday evening and Thursday, more or less.

Having dinner with Emily and her father, by contrast, was rather like getting out of the pool. sitting on the agreeable patio, and reading a good book. That has something to do with the relief of being ripped out of the narrow context of colleges, libraries, and shops where I have spent virtually all of the last month. Even though some of the time there was spent having a look at Emily’s paper and some more of it was spent discussing issues relevant to the course, it felt overall like a more thorough kind of non-school than anything else I have done so far. Even going for walks and reading books feels like the breath between two strokes, you see.

Meeting Emily’s father was engaging and worthwhile. It amused me to slip a birthday note (Ave Avi A vie) into the mail slot of Avi Shlaim, who lives next door and whose book I read in Emily’s company a few days ago. Likewise, sitting beside a fire and eating omelette were both pleasant reminders of the enormity of the non M.Phil, non IR world.

Speaking of that world, I feel compelled to respond to something Emily told me. Apparently, a good share of the M.Phil program seems to be reading this blog. (Something similar is true of the college.) My first response to hearing that is fear and the concern that I’ve said something stupid. My second response is the general feeling that people really ought to have better things to do with their time, though far be it for me to tell people what to do. In general, then, I suppose I should offer my greeting to the concealed masses. Your presence forces me to do a couple of things. Firstly, it forces me to at least try and be interesting. Even during days when I wake up and feel ghastly, try to read, do some laundry, and go to bed, I need to come up with something that won’t have people drooping with boredom and slamming shut their laptops in disgust. Now, I should be clear about one thing. I try to be entertaining for the people back in Vancouver as well. The big difference is that, since they are not here, I could probably entertain them most easily in ways somewhat different from those in which I might entertain those in Oxford. It’s the second group – the closer group – that compels me to be reasonably accurate, as well as interesting.

The second, and rather more difficult, thing that I am forced to do is be tactful. As much effort as it can require to be at least a bit interesting, it is much harder to maintain a blog as a relatively sane, civil, rant-free place. When one has the nestling comfort of obscurity all around, these things are not important. When one is standing at the centre of a group of unidentified figures, it comes rather to the forefront. All in all, it will probably be good practice. Please forgive me, in any event, the occasional lapse. Much as I try not to be, I am a fallible creature. Part of the reason for this blog is to help me process my thinking into a more refined form. It is quite possible to believe something for a long time that you instantly see the wrongness of as soon as you are challenged to write it down and explain it. Self-improvement is an aim of the blog, and life in general.

At the moment, however, there is no time for that. I have two papers due on Tuesday that exist, at present, in the state between when the individual components are welded together and laid out according to the design and the part where everything is strapped and attached and the thing is ready to fly on its own.

Many thanks to Emily for a very pleasant evening. Let us hope that the revitalization it has induced will help me to overcome the latest batch of hurdles the program has thrown my way.

PS. One last note to people reading: I would appreciate if you would participate, in some sense. I much prefer a discussion to an extended one-sided rant. I realize that it might be awkward to comment in a space that I basically have exclusive dominion over (though certainly not complete control). Therefore, I suggest that people with nothing in particular to do should consider posting on the IR forum. I really think we might be able to help each other out with things, if not actually get to know one another better.

PPS. To those asking her about it, Emily never promised to get me a job of any kind. She merely indicated that she might be able to set me looking in appropriate directions. It’s quite unfair to approach her with requests for similar treatment, just because I was careless enough to post the initial incident here.

Milan out.

Procrastinator-in-Chief

For the whole length of my academic life, I have been a shameless procrastinator. Every time I have some new and lengthy project to complete, I manage to forget this and feel increasingly ashamed and alarmed at my inability to make progress on it. At some level, this is probably predicated on the background knowledge that I’ve put off so many other projects before and made my way along relatively unscathed afterwards. At another, it reflects the curious nature of my ability to do work – especially writing. It’s something I am occasionally able to do in great, bounding bursts – completing several pages in ten minutes or so. It’s actually partly an effort to level out the rate at which I write that I have been updating this blog. Hopefully, it will beget a habit of greater consistency.

There is a certain irony in how cogent and comprehensible arguments are more easily attacked. When presented with something full of unfamiliar terms and complex arguments, it is difficult to formulate a response. Even in cases where a lot of that complexity masks underlying flaws, there is a great hesitance to accuse someone of nebulous thinking, for fear that their argument has simply been too subtle for you, or grounded in strongly differing assumptions.

Four weeks into my first term, it seems awfully early to be thinking about summer employment. That said, I will be damned if I end up working for £3.50 an hour this summer, with no benefits. Emily has suggested that she could help me get some kind of banking or consulting job in London and that, furthermore, my total lack of knowledge about either is not a serious impediment. While I do have some doubts about whether anyone would give me a real job for the period between June 17th, at the end of Trinity term, and the start of Michaelmas term on October 6th. If such a job can be found, it will be a welcome way to reduce the amount of student debt I will be taking on.

Daily miscellany:

I’ve been corresponding a bit with Astrid in Quito. It’s fascinating to read about what she has been doing down there – volunteering for a maternity clinic – though the stories can be quite startling, as well.
In the spaces where I previously just stared blankly around my room, between periods of reading or writing, I’ve started reading Terry Pratchett‘s Witches Abroad. Some reminder that all books are not about IR is welcome. Also, Meghan has been recommending Pratchett to me for ages. I remember reading Night Watch with Laurie, Tish, and her atop Palatine Hill in Rome.
Here is an interesting article on seafood menus and fisheries.
Nick Sayeg has some nice photos from Norway on his blog.

First Bloggers’ Gathering

In short, the bloggers’ gathering was a success. It was interesting and enjoyable to meet a diverse group of engaging people, none of whom really have an appearance that screams blogger!, whatever sort of appearance that might be.

The Library Court party afterwards, to which I brought two of the people from the bloggers’ gathering, succeeded in blocking any attempts to work on all the academic things that need to be done. That said, I was not fighting and kicking to make progress on them. Why, there are hours left yet.

This afternoon included a quasi-valiant effort to move forward on the various projects that must be complete next week:

Paper for Andrew Hurrell (Tuesday)
Paper for Dr. Fawcett and Wright (Tuesday)
Presentation on American isolationism during the interwar years (Tuesday)
Statistics Assignment (Wednesday)
Pay fees and battles (Friday)

Tomorrow, all these things will begin to orbit elegantly around the gravitational centre of whatever intellect I still possess: condensing and organizing themselves to the point where they are both internally and externally comprehensible.

Bonsoir.

Some perspective

I read something tonight – something Astrid sent me from Ecuador – that makes me feel ashamed about how trivial all the thoughts and concerns represented on this site are. How is it that we can legitimately complain about this or that aspect of life in Oxford when the whole experience of it is incomparably safer and richer than that of a huge tranche of humanity? A vignette of some of the more shocking products of that inequality lends incredible poignancy to the question. A more important question that follows is: what must we do?

To be exposed to the enormity of poverty and injustice is to be charged with an overwhelming ethical sense that something must be done; and yet, the content of that something is unclear. The experience is reminiscent of that of reading an article my aunt wrote: one of an astonished powerlessness. All that I feel as though I can do now is not to forget about it, just because it is usually concealed and peripheral to my thinking. If we are go get anywhere, as a world of people. we need to deal with this.

Perhaps, on the basis of her experiences in South America, Astrid will be able to understand – and help many more of us understand – the complexities and the imperatives involved.