Milan – Page 98 – a sibilant intake of breath

Utility of force lecture, etc

Today was a lovely day and a good one: bright enough to justify the use of sunglasses, with quite a good amount of work completed, to boot. Before my lecture, I finished this week’s Economist and completed a solid outline (including introduction) for the paper I am writing for Dr. Hurrell. With luck, by the time Emily and I meet on Sunday evening to edit papers, I will have both of the ones due for Tuesday finished.

After today’s advanced study of IR lecture, which was delivered by Dr. Hurrell, I had the chance for a very brief stopover at Wadham before moving onwards to the exam schools and a Changing Character of War Program lecture. It was delivered by General Sir Rupert Smith, on the topic of the utility of force. Most of his points were quite familiar, but the one bit that struck me as quite clever was a rebuttal to something that has become the accepted wisdom with regards to fighting terrorism: namely, that it is an asymmetrical conflict. The idea goes that when states with regular armies try to fight non-state groups with irregular forces, they have a rough time of it. The point General Smith made is that it is a requirement of good generalship to turn any conflict you are involved in into an asymmetrical one, to your advantage. To designate the wars where we are doing badly as ‘asymmetric’ and leave it at that is a therefore both a misunderstanding and a poor excuse.

His more familiar contentions include how terrorist groups and other non-state military actors have adopted the practice of operating below the threshold at which the forces of states have utility. He also talked a lot about generating and maintaining support from both your domestic constituency and within the areas where you are operating, as well as the new role of the armed forces in creating the conditions under which stability can exist, rather than defeating the enemy in a straightforward and conclusive way.

After the talk, I had dinner with Roham at St. Antony’s, watched a few minutes from Pirates of the Caribbean, and had a beer. The film reminded me pleasantly of the first time I saw it, in Montreal with Viktoria P. It’s definitely the sort of trend that it would have been nice to extrapolate for the evening, but my two upcoming essays are wailing at me for completion and there is much else to do besides. Tomorrow, I am determined to spend as much time as possible (aside from the quantitative methods lab and bloggers’ gathering) in the Social Sciences Library reading for the papers and next week’s seminar.

Miscellaneous other:

Thankfully, I’ve been able to defer my battels and fees, yet again. Anyone considering coming to Oxford should take note of how astonishingly difficult and time consuming it can be to transfer money here.
If people in Group B, with Dr. Roberts and Ceadel, could take a look at this thread on the forum, that would be excellent.

Tallinn trip confirmed

I am now officially booked to go to Tallinn from the 16th of December until the 22nd. It’s an area I’m excited to visit, since I’ve never been anywhere remotely like it. After my EndNote course today, I went to Blackwell’s and looked through the travel books on Estonia for a while. Some of its appeal as a destination comes from how I know so little about it. It should be an adventure. There also seems to be the possibility of going to Finland for a day or so; apparently, Helsinki is a cheap three hour ferry ride away. Sarah and I intend to have a look at that, as well.

The other thing that caught my eye at Blackwell’s was a collection of large laminated wall maps of the world, each with metal strips along the top and bottom, such that they can be hung. The strict new prohibition against Blu-Tac in Wadham increases the importance of the latter feature. Given that I’ve just spent one hundred pounds on flights to and from Tallinn, as well as some travel insurance, now is not the time to buy such a map. At the same time, it’s a thing I should definitely get eventually. I remember spending long periods of time perusing the one on the wall behind the fax machines at the law firm whose mail room I used to work in. The more time I spent within three kilometres of Wadham (35 days or so), the more I begin to fantasize about exploring much farther afield.

This evening, Nora and I drank the tea that Meghan sent me. It was a pleasant reminder of good things left behind on the west coast, and I appreciate her sending it. Thinking about Vancouver reminds me of how odd it will be to spend Christmas in Oxford. It will probably be a bit like the days in the December of my first year when Nick, Neal, Jonathan, and I occupied the near-empty dormitory for the winter solstice and “Pagan X-Box Con 2001.”

Later in the evening, I had a good wander with Emily: talking about the program, upcoming papers, plans for the break, and such. She says that she can help me get some kind of decent and well-paying job in London for the period between the two years of the M.Phil. It would be incredible to both have my first ‘real’ job and have the chance to somewhat reduce the amount of debt I will be taking on next year. I’m also excited that she has invited me to have dinner with her and her father at some point. As I may have already mentioned, he is a sculptor who lives in Oxford and who, if I recall correctly, made the heads around the top of the Sheldonian Theatre, as well as the friars at the Blackfriars tube station in London.

The walk, up and down St. Aldate’s Road and then to St. Antony’s along St. Giles, was a good conclusion to a day that has restored me to some kind of productive emotional equilibrium, after the curious dip of these past two days. Now, I can get on to the serious work of drafting two papers and a presentation, all for next Tuesday.

PS. This Friday, there is to be a gathering of Oxford bloggers, at a yet-to-be-decided location. It will be interesting to meet some contemporaries of that kind. Perhaps it will offer some tips on how to improve the rudimentary formatting of this blog, as compared with the slick complexity of some of the others.

Day that can’t be described much

Today was an odd day, heavily tinged with the uncertainties of yesterday. I attended many hours of class, followed by an IR social, followed by a pilgrimage to The Turf.

All told, it was a much more enjoyable day than yesterday. I wasn’t called upon to present in the core seminar, though Bryony did an excellent job with the topic. While tedious, the quantitative methods lecture covered some good material. The subsequent round table on national and regional responses to American hegemony was extremely interesting, and the IR social event afterwards was good fun. In particular, there were good conversations to be had.

[Content Removed: 29 October 2005]
[Photo Replaced: 29 October 2005]

Speaking with Margaret for a few hours later also did much to make the day a good one.

Happy Birthday Lana Rupp

I had written another omnibus entry for today, all arrayed in neat paragraphs, but after attending the research forum Bilyana invited me to, I think I can do better.

Today, I had my first real pang of intellectual exhaustion. The whole day was like wading through mucky weed-strewn bog: unpleasant, unproductive, and liable to make you question why you are where you are and whether you should set yourself trudging towards the nearest edge of the mire. While I was sitting in the back of the room – peppered with fellows, cheeses, and ports – I decided that if I am going to carry on to a PhD, I absolutely must do something else first. Something in a world far removed from this and hopefully more connected to the world which all this purports to examine.

The irony of the moment is that graduate work is so much more haphazard and general than the last years at UBC were. Here, we have no choice about what we study. Worse, we are thrown at narrow questions without any real context, without the perspective to judge and speak with authority or relevance. We’re just picking up books and trying to smash through windows with them and, beyond identifying who can handle it and who cannot, we’re not achieving a thing.

I realize that such criticisms themselves lack balance and long-term perspective, but it’s often better to express an idea when it is still unsteady and vital: before the addition of stabilizing girders makes it impotent.

Day of reading

Today basically involved nothing but reading. I finished The Twenty Years’ Crisis and more of this week’s Economist. The end of Carr’s book is much less convincing than the beginning, particularly due to its conception of international law. It strikes me as one that, in many important respects, has been undermined and transcended in the years between the book’s publication and the present. While there may always be causes of egregious breach in international law, it seems to me that the institutional framework for it has developed considerably, as has acceptance of international rules and norms both among general populations and political elites. It may not ‘bite’ when it comes to the very most contentious issues, but it is more than the mere distillation of power that Carr generally portrays it as being.

Another task accomplished today was the completion of what I hope is a solid draft of the statistics assignment. I feel decidedly shaky with regards to my ability to use STATA and it’s never comfortable to be using a dataset that is basically unknown to you in terms of origin and methodology. Still, I think I’ve done a decent job of answering the questions, given rigid space constraints, and it feels like now is the time to move onto other tasks. Nobody will assert that I am lacking for them.

While there is definitely a lot of work that exists to occupy my time, I nonetheless feel that some kind of voluntary organization would be a good place to invest some energy. It would balance out life a bit, offer me the chance to meet new people who aren’t residents of Wadham or students of international relations, and generally deepen my Oxford experience. The Oxford Union is definitely out, at the present time, due to excessive cost. The mountaineering club has been suggested to me, but I have no experience with such things, really. Are there any other groups that people would urge me to consider?

Aside from a brief foray to buy discounted soup at Sainsbury’s, I have not left my room today. I shall endeavour to be more interesting tomorrow.

Today’s short items:

A more interesting post than mine is here. This one even more so.
I think I need to vary my diet a little. I haven’t eaten anything cooked, apart from microwaved Sainsbury’s soup, since the last meal in hall I did not opt out of (October 11th).
After using the LCD monitors down in the college computer lab to finish the stats assignment, it is a pleasure to come back to a screen with a proper contrast level and the beauty of anti-aliased fonts. Windows users: the way Garamond looks in the rendered banner at the top of this page is how it looks all the time in Mac OS, where it is lovingly smoothed.

Reading E.H. Carr

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.

Wine tasting

This afternoon brought the dream of a British bank account another step closer, though still without any knowledge of when the whole process will be successfully concluded. It also involved grocery shopping, the completion of a preliminary read of this week’s Economist, some reading on Dawes and Locarno, and correspondence with Emily and Kate. The former is heading out into the countryside with friends for the start of the weekend; the latter has returned to the city from the woods, and is processing the data on bears collected while there.

Trying to complete our first quantitative methods assignment has been frustrating. I can see that the second and third question, respectively, would be best solved by means of regression and hypothesis testing, but I don’t perfectly recall how to do either. STATA is definitely an impediment rather than an aid. For the first assignment, I am fairly sure they just want us to ‘eyeball it,’ but I would definitely rather do it in a statistically rigorous way.

Last night was great fun. The wine drinking event was actually a competition. In each of seven rounds, we were presented with an expensive wine of a particular variety, for instance Pinotage, and a cheap wine of the same sort. The objective was to use your knowledge of wine (of which I have none) and the descriptions of the wines provided to deduce which was which. Given my total lack of familiarity with many of the genres presented, my ambition was to do better than random chance would have suggested. Much to my surprise, I actually won. This is particularly shocking given that the elimination round at the end was based on one’s knowledge of cricket. Asked how many of a particular cricket related statistic a certain cricket player had accumulated in a tournament, I confidently said “twenty-one” without the slightest knowledge of what was actually being asked or what sort of number was likely. In any event, I now have a bottle of white wine from Nuffield’s own cellars sitting beside my Glenlivit.

Aside from the competition itself, the atmosphere at Nuffield was great fun. I met Carolyn Haggis – presently a D.Phil student at Nuffield, formerly an M.Phil in IR student at Brasenose. She is living proof that the program can be survived, and in such a way that you would be willing to read for a second degree at Oxford.

The event was not at all stuffy and the commentary from the two hosts (and introducers of wines) was rather amusing. We were even treated to a rendition of the South African national anthem, though Margaret tells me that it was not without inaccuracies. All told, it was a night of excellent company and good fun; hopefully, a suitable prelude to getting a lot of work done today. Many thanks to Margaret for the invitation.

Observations

The subject emerged from his room shortly after nine, showered, and left Wadham College through the back gate. He walked along Saville Road to Jowett Walk, turned left onto St. Cross Road, and then turned right onto Manor Road – approaching the Social Sciences Building from the south. After greeting some fellow students, he chose a station near the middle of the information technology room, where he remained for the duration of the two-hour workshop. He was not attentive, spending the time completing the bulk of the first assignment rather than following the printed instructions. He also spent time responding to emails and reading blog entries. When the class ended, he walked northward along St. Cross road, accompanied by two colleagues, and passed through the University Parks before separating from them and walking southward down Parks Road to Wadham College. At no point was contact with the subject lost.

St. Antony’s foray

I got a package from Vancouver in the mail today which is very well appreciated. My mother sent me a coffee press and a pound of coffee. I am now decidedly well prepared for coffee accelerated reading and caffeine-bolstered comprehension.

Today’s lecture on the advanced study of IR was really excellent. It was a presentation by Dr. Marc Stears about ideological and historical approaches to political theory. It was about two schools of textual interpretation in political theory: the Cambridge School and the Ideological School, based in Oxford. Basically, each tries to address questions about which texts we need to study, how we should go about doing it, and how we should write about texts. Each is based on the perspective that all writing that seeks to forward political ends can be viewed as ‘speech acts’ and need to be evaluated according to the context in which they were written and the intentions of the author. Decidedly not post-modernist (since it embraces, rather than rejects, authorial intentionality), it nonetheless seems like a useful way to think about texts. Some of my enthusiasm definitely derives from the rhetorical skill of Dr. Stears, who was probably the most effective lecturer we have had in the program so far. If the opportunity arises to see him speak again, I will take it up. Also, I’ve added Quentin Skinner’s Visions of Politics to my discretionary reading list.

I learned today that, in addition to the paper which I need to write for Dr. Hurrell in the next nine days, I am supposed to write a paper for the core seminar instructors, due on the Tuesday of 4th week. Worse, it is means to be written on one of the topics for which I did not prepare a presentation. That means I have to do another whole week’s worth of reading. Given that I now have Charles Feinstein’s The European Economy Between the Wars, Patricia Clavin’s The Great Depression in Europe, 1929-1939, and E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 on two day loan, I think I will have plenty of motivation to start drawing down my newfound strategic coffee supply.

Having dinner with Emily tonight was most enjoyable. We ended up having dinner, and later going to the Green College bar, with Roham and some of the other members of the M.Phil program. Roham is an extremely personable young man – good natured and somehow capable of enlivening those around him, while making everyone feel comfortable. Both individually and as a pair, he and Emily make for superb company.

Dinner at St. Antony’s is quite a different affair from the process at Wadham. It’s cafeteria style, to begin with, and includes much more selection that at Wadham, where a binary meat/vegetable decision is all the choice you get. They also have the benefit of a salad bar, the opportunity to get beverages apart from water with your meal, and a more flexible timetable with regards to when you can eat. They even have candles. Wadham may be closer to the authentic medieval hall-dining experience, but I don’t think I would be opting out of all meals at St. Antony’s.

After dinner, coffee in the MCR, and a brief foray to Emily’s room, we set off on a short walk to the interesting grounds of Green College. In particular, I found the observatory buildings which I located while wandering outside to be quite interesting. The bar itself was noisy, though not crassly so, and seemed to have reasonably priced drinks and good conversations ongoing within. Emily and I ended up staying until a bit before 10:30, when it seemed wiser to retire to respective colleges for reading or sleep.

With two papers to be done in the next two weeks, I’ve the feeling this will be a bit of a grinding period. I just need to develop a schedule that meets out productivity and recovery in doses of the right size, to maintain both forward motion and sanity.

Tomorrow, we have our second quantitative methods lab. Infinitely more appealing, Margaret has invited me to a wine tasting event. The description which she has passed on from her college is too good not to quote here:

When this was suggested, the economist in the room at the time said something about demand, supply and why bad things happen when prices are set at zero. I didn’t really understand it, but I retorted that we shouldn’t worry because most students at Nuffield are quantitative social scientists and therefore don’t have any friends, wine-drinking or otherwise. As a result, I have been sent to my room to think about what I’ve done. On the upside, this means that there will be (marginally) more wine available tomorrow for you and your (sensible and not excessive number of) guests.

One one final note (these entries are getting too long as it is), I realized today that I haven’t been more than three kilometres from where I sit right now for nearly a month. A trip somewhere – with London the obvious choice – seems to be in order. Do any of the Oxfordians who seem to be reading the blog share my desire for some kind of short expedition?

Invited to Sarah’s wedding

This morning, I received an invitation to Sarah Johnston’s wedding, to take place on the 18th of March in a church in Chichester. This will be the second friend’s wedding I attend and I am looking forward to it. It will be good to meet Sarah’s parents again (I did so, very briefly, last summer) and to meet some more of her friends. My congratulations go out to her and Peter. I look forward to when I shall be able to refer to the pair of them as Doctors Webster.

After working for a while on the Commonwealth Scholarship application, making and drinking a half litre of coffee, and inquiring at the domestic bursary about fees, I wandered through a very rainy Oxford to Nuffield. From the eighth floor of their tower, I got my first really elevated look at Oxford. Later, in the Nuffield Library, I read Dr. Hurrell’s article: “Global Inequality and International Institutions” (Metaphilosophy Volume 32 Issue 1&2 Page 34 – January 2001). I appreciate the normative character of his argument and his determination that world politics can be changed for the better. Reading something that is heavy on references to political theory is a welcome contrast to wading through hundreds of pages of unfamiliar history written by academics unknown to me.

Despite its apparently excellent politics and economics collections, the library was quite empty. I mustn’t have seen more than three people during the three hours I spent inside. Cornmarket Street is consistently the only part of Oxford that really gets crowded. While there are often throngs of tourists marching along the High Street, they only rarely seriously impede passage. I always feel a bit odd walking past tour groups in Wadham. I feel as though I am on display as a sample of Animalia Chordata Vertebrata Mammalia Primate Hominidae Homo sapiens studentis graduatis Oxfordius. I try to look very clever for them.

By the time I left the library to meet Dr. Hurrell, it had become quite beautiful out – in that way which can only quite be managed after a proper downpour, when the trees are still dripping and the warm colouration of sunlight comes as a surprise. Today featured both the heaviest rain I’ve seen in Oxford and the most stunning emergence from rain into one of those slightly sodden afternoons where the sun is welcome rather than unpleasant.

My meeting with Andrew Hurrell went very well. From what other students had told me, I expected meeting one’s supervisor to discuss a paper to be something akin to facing an inquisition. In actuality, he both complimented and criticized the paper and we had quite a good hour-long discussion about some of the theoretical issues involved.

In particular, we identified the character of domestic German politics as an area of exploration that wasn’t well treated in the paper. Recently unified, Germany both had an unusual impetus to engage in some kind of national project (say, colonization) and an unusually broad dialogue about what that project could be. As Dr. Hurrell pointed out, the phrase “a place in the sun,” which is constantly used to refer to Germany’s ambition to develop a place for itself as a rising power in the international system, possesses a vagueness that underscores the lack of definition behind what such a project could involve. We also discussed that issue of how states perceive themselves internally and as components of an international society in the contemporary contexts of Russia in the G8 and the matter of nuclear proliferation. Those are the big tables around which great powers sit today and, given things like the rise of China, understanding how developing powers can be peacefully and effectively integrated is of immense value. The conversation increased my conviction that Dr. Hurrell is a man with whom I will be able to work well.

I also indicated to Dr. Hurrell that I would like to write one of my two optional papers on some issue having to do with nuclear weapons. For years, nuclear politics has interested me insofar as it represents an unusually explicit arena to examine the structure of the international system, as well as the psychologies of individual leaders. He suggested that I keep my eye on what the Institute for Strategic Studies in London is doing, and that perhaps they will hold an interesting conference or seminar on the matter this year.

During the next ten to fourteen days, I am to write another paper. It should either be on the topic of last week’s core seminar or this week’s and Dr. Hurrell insists that this one should be most historical and less theoretical. Helpfully, he recognizes that we do not necessarily have much background in these time periods. The assignment is therefore an explicit test of my ability to work in an uncertain area. Walking across the Nuffield quad, right after the meeting, I had my first solid sense that I have what it takes to be a graduate student.

After the meeting ended, I met with Margaret and we spoke in her room for a while before walking to New College to see the mound erected there in honour of those hurled over Oxford’s city walls after dying of the plague. As she demonstrated to me, it manifests a peculiar acoustic property if you clap at it.

In February, it seems that my mother will be going to Iran. Either on the way out or back, she will visit me in Oxford. A few years ago, she began teaching English as a second language to people who have recently immigrated to Canada or who are seeking to do so. Many of her students have been Iranian and it is at their invitation that she will be going. Having living in Pakistan for many years, and having visited Turkey a few years ago, it’s not a part of the world with which she is unfamiliar. She has actually lived in a remarkable number of places: from Czechoslovakia to Antigua to the United States.

Also in the news:

I may be forced to change my primary email address due to a trademark dispute in the U.K.
Anyone who wants or needs a GMail invitation, just ask. I have 94 of them.
Did you know, entries posted at “12:01” were almost certainly posted before then, but with a modified timestamp to maintain the one-entry-per-day format?
Here is a blog with some powerful photos