Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

First trip to London

Leaving critical notes in the ambassador's scrapbook

Happy Birthday Matthew Tindall

Tonight’s event, in the residence of Canada’s second most important ambassador, comprised about 300 Canadian graduate students. The residence was quite lavish: richly endowed with artwork and the various trappings of high class hosting facilities. The project of meeting and mingling with dozens of Canadians from Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, and elsewhere was a daunting one for me, but one which I think I rose to dealing with fairly well. I met a few interesting people from the Environmental Change Centre at Oxford. In particular, Andrew Robinson from Trinity College, who worked for the UNEP and is working on a master’s here now. Hopefully, I shall see them again.

On the bus ride out, I sat beside a Canadian woman who studied French previously and who is now studying law, with an aim to practicing in the area of shipping. In a few days, she is heading to her flat in the south of France, where she will be spending Christmas with her boyfriend. Despite her assurances that it will be extremely cold, I think there are a great many people languishing back in Oxford who will envy her the journey. Hearing her plans made me doubly glad about being invited to London for Christmas with Sarah and her mother. I enjoyed speaking with my co-national about points of law, language, and education – while heading southeast to London.

We disembarked at Marble Arch and soon found the High Commissioner’s residence. As I said, the inside was quite opulent. I suppose that is unsurprising given the importance of Anglo-Canadian relations over the short but broad sweep of Canadian diplomatic history. I spoke with the Commissioner himself for a while, as well as with several members of the Canadian diplomatic service. Chris Yung was there, as were Emily and a number of the Rhodes Scholars who I met at the outset of the year.

After a few hours of mingling, the staff stopped serving drinks: a message for postgraduate students to leave as unambiguous as firing tear gas. Despite a brief attempt to relocate to a nearby pub, I soon ended up shivering at Marble Arch, waiting with Sheena and Emily for buses back to Oxford. They were picked up fairly quickly by an Oxford Tube, but I huddled a while yet while waiting for the X90. I would have liked to do more in London, but there is little that a person can do to access a city when it is rainy, strange, and dark. As I observed on the homeward bus ride:

How hostile, how alien a dark strange city in the rain. The solidity of buildings and the alienation from our huddled fellows all remind us how we are to be jolted and feared, rather than embraced.The collective of experience of life now is such as to conjure intense questioning. Education is not just that investment of time and money that yields more money in the future. It is a wrestling with history, with isolation, and with our own limitations.

Self doubt is the main concern now. It’s a thing that you can seek to defeat – building walls of false confidence around yourself. Alternatively, you can plunge right into it and pray that you will emerge wiser on the other side. That process can only be attempted along with the realization that we can falter and drown.

A bit grim, I know, but it was a chilly and unpleasant night in the period after which it became a solitary one. I was hoping to derive some motive energy from the great metropolis of London, rather than scamper back, spurned, to the small town of Oxford. That said, it was worthwhile and enjoyable to see what an extensive mass of grad students Canada has dispatched to England. While it does have the unhappy impact of reminding you how unexceptional you may well be, you still cannot quite help being impressed by it. (I really do hope that I manage to find some way in which I am properly exceptional, after all, before I leave here.)

One piece of unambiguously happy news, in closing. Tomorrow morning, at 11:00am, is the final STATA lab. I hope that I shall never launch that most reviled of programs again.

Election news: gay marriage

The Canadian Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, announced today that, if elected, he would support the reinstatement of the ‘traditional’ definition of marriage: barring the kind of same sex marriages that have now happened more than 3000 times in Canada. It seems to me that this kind of a campaign strategy demonstrates how irrelevant the Conservatives are – hung up on yesterday’s issues when everyone else has realized that the question is pretty simple and not something to get up in arms about. One thing about the Martin government that I did admire was his willingness to recognize that the gay marriage issue is a simple one of equality and Charter rights. As such, it really shouldn’t be subject to such low politicking. Moreover, to repeal it now would probably require the use of the notwithstanding clause: an extreme response to a non-existent problem.

As much as I would like to see the emergence of a viable alternative party of government, someone to challenge the effective Liberal monopoly at the federal level, the kind of callous, opportunistic policies that tend to come out of right wing parties should rightly be opposed by Canadian voters.

I often feel anxious about how much of this blog is just crude description of what I have been up to in a particular day. I can justify it partly because there are people who read the blog to get a sense of what life in Oxford is generally like. I imagine them as versions of myself, about a year ago, trying to decide where to go to school.There are also those, like my parents, who read it to know what I am individually up to. Still, I think it’s a higher calibre of writing that discusses issues or produces cunning or beautiful descriptions. Revealing much that is mundane is relatively safe, and you needn’t worry who reads it, but it is ultimately neither skilful nor satisfying. While revealing things too passionately felt is foolhardy in such a public context, not to do so is stifling.

Oxford Blog Listing

[Update 17 May 2006] This listing is no longer being updated, as a blog entry. The latest version will be available at this location, from now on.

I thought I should create a centralized listing of Oxford blogs, as a means of keeping track of the community. Blogs that don’t include enough information to categorize, based on a cursory examination, have been filed under ‘other.’ Blogs are added in the order I discover them. These have all been located through Technorati (a blog search engine) or through links on other Oxford blogs. Blogs that haven’t been updated in months will not be added.

People who I’ve met:

  1. Pandora’s Blog
    Run by Kate, who I met at the Oxford Bloggers’ Gathering on October 29, 2005.
  2. Storyteller’s World
    Run by Tony, who I met at the bloggers’ gathering.
  3. Jo’s Journal
    One of the political bloggers I met at the gathering.
  4. Antonia’s Blog
    The other political blogger, a self-described Labour party activist.
  5. in vino veritas
    Run by Lee Jones, who is in the second year of the International Relations M.Phil.
  6. Mike’s Little Red Page
    A socialistic blog, run by Mike.
  7. Consider Phlebas
    Run by Robert Jubb, who I met at the second Oxford bloggers’ gathering on February 21st, 2006.

General:

  1. but she’s a girl…
    Blog of a cool female photography and Mac geek, living in Oxford.
  2. Head in the Clouds
    Run by one of the Wadham College porters.
  3. Feroce
    A blog about books.
  4. Chocolate and Zucchini
    A blog about cooking with very nice pictures.
  5. OxBlog
    The off-the-cuff political commentary of David Adesnik, a 2000 Rhodes Scholar and graduate student in international relations at Oxford currently residing in Washington DC and Patrick Belton, a graduate student in international relations at Oxford.
  6. Cycle & Run in the Sahara Desert for Charity
    Run by Nicolas Bertrand, the title basically says it all.

Students:

  1. Beer, Bikes, Books, and Good Eats
    Blog run by Ruth Anne and Jake. Ruth Anne is a Rhodes Scholar, presently at Merton College.
  2. Falling Into Grace
    Blog run by Rachel, student at Christ Church.
  3. In Other News
    Blog run by Adam.
  4. KRS Adventures
    Blog run by Kristen Rosina.
  5. The Virtual Stoa
    Blog run by Chris Brooke, a politics tutor at Magdalen College.
  6. Praesidium
    Blog run by Ben Saunders.
  7. The Virgin Student
    The title basically says it all.
  8. EternalBlog
    Blog run by Seth Wilson, student at Trinity College.
  9. Sha Crawford’s blog
    Blog run by Sha Crawford.
  10. Militant Moderate
    A political blog run by Ken Owen and Richard Huzzy.
  11. Richard Huzzey
    An eponymous blog.
  12. The Carp’s Blog
    Run by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo, a blog devoted to Canadian federal politics.

Other:

  1. Outside the Ivory Tower
    Blog of a former Oxford student, now living in Vancouver.
  2. Shaikley in the OX
    A blog run by Ali.

Oh, and there’s always my blog: a sibilant intake of breath.

If you want your blog added to the list, just leave a comment. Likewise, if you want the description amended.

Last updated: 22 February 2006

Statistics ER: A play in one act

Dramatis Personae:

Dr. Von Spatz: Haggard and unshaven, Dr. Spatz carries a clipboard and coffee cup. Bleary eyed, he has the tendency to rave very slightly at times.

Nurse Wilhelm: Beautiful, but shrill, Nurse Wilhelm wears a freshly pressed, very white nurse’s uniform and fiddles with various medical instruments and sensors.

Intern

Patient: Convulsing and comatose, in alternating fashion.

NURSE WILHELM, clearly in a state of considerable agitation, stands beside a gurney in the crowded ER, frantically looking at a chart, then at the clock, and back to the chart again. 

Through the double doors, SPATZ enters, cup of coffee in hand.

WILHELM: Thank God you’re here, doctor! He’s been heteroskedastic for the last twenty minutes!

SPATZ: (wearily) What’s your confidence level, nurse? Don’t think that your frantic and increasingly standard deviations from close medical practice are going unnoticed.

WILHELM: The p-value is .08 and rising, doctor! He’s regressing!

SPATZ: (more alarmed) Multivariate? Have you checked the concavity?

WILHELM: His r-squared has been falling ever since we took the log of the dependent variable.

SPATZ: Adjusted r-squared?

WILHELM: Also falling! Now at 0.13!

SPATZ: (whistles softly) Houston, we have an endogeneity problem.

WILHELM: Shall I induce multicollinearity, doctor? The data are increasingly dyadic.

SPATZ: Nurse, drop the outliers and set his IQR to red. STATA!

WILHELM: It’s no good, doctor, I can’t reject the null hypothesis! His t-test scores are neither unimodal nor symmetric.

INTERN enters and begins watching with a shocked expression. Noticing him, SPATZ turns to address him.

SPATZ: There’s not much we can do when we get them in this late, I’m afraid. It’s a standard error of people to wait until the variance is far too large, before bringing it to our attention.

Looks down into his coffee cup.

SPATZ: Some nights, it breaks my heart. Makes me think life’s nothing more than one big scatter plot for us to try and put a best-fit line through. Every time you think you’ve minimized the square of the residuals, some new outlier crops up to throw the whole thing off again. Sometimes… I wonder why I even bother.

INTERN: Because you’re a doctor, dammit, Spatz! Or have you forgotten your own causation? I remember when you used to run DFBETA tests all the time; now, you just throw away the outliers like yesterday’s newspaper.

SPATZ: Maybe you’re right… Maybe you’re right… Nurse, I am straightening up my game. Our relationship has been spurious all along, it’s only your close correlation with Nurse Whimpleton that has made it seem significant.

WILHELM: (gasps)

SPATZ: As for this poor fellow, make sure to check the interaction terms earlier next time.

Milan (Prazak) Ilnyckyj: definitive guide to pronunciation

Part I: Ilnyckyj

While it looks fearsome, this part of the name is quite easy. It is pronounced: ill-knit-ski, as in sick-crochet-snowboard.

Part II: Milan

For starters, how do you know if you are pronouncing it wrong?

If you pronounce the first syllable ‘mah’, as in “Mah name is Slim, what’s y’urs?” you are pronouncing it wrong. If you pronounce it ‘my’, as in “My blasted quadruped has scampered,” you are also pronouncing it wrong.

The first syllable is ‘mill’ as in: “Let’s head down to the Old Mill, where I hear John Stewart Mill has cooked up his famous cider.”

If you pronounce the second syllable ‘lawn’, you are pronouncing it wrong. This is especially bad if you used ‘mah’ as the first syllable, because then the two together sound like you’re saying: “Mah lawn needs watering.” Lynn, as in Lynn Creek or Linseed Oil, is also incorrect for the last syllable.

The right way to pronounce it is ‘lhun’, as in London.

The hardest part of all is properly timing and stressing those two syllables: mill-lhun. The l-sound should be pronounced twice, with a brief pause between them and the first l-sound lasting quite a bit longer than the second. This part takes practice, but frankly I would be rather pleased just to see the errors described above diminish somewhat in their frequent usage among my friends.

Part III: Prazak

My middle name is pronounced prah-Jacques and not pray-zack or prah-zack.

So, there you have it: Milan Ilnyckyj = mill-lhun ill-knit-ski. Perhaps it will help you remember that ILL-KNIT-SKI is like SICK-CROCHET-SNOWBOARD.

Happy Birthday Greg Allen

Fireplace in Emily's father's living room

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.

First Bloggers’ Gathering

Bloggers gathered in The Turf

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:

  1. Paper for Andrew Hurrell (Tuesday)
  2. Paper for Dr. Fawcett and Wright (Tuesday)
  3. Presentation on American isolationism during the interwar years (Tuesday)
  4. Statistics Assignment (Wednesday)
  5. 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.

Happy Birthday Sarah Stewart

Jonathan at Mosquito Creek

Last night, I followed the link that Marga Lyall sent me to the M.Phil in International Relations reading list. Looking at the week-by-week list for a single course, I am flabbergasted. It’s an astonishing amount of reading. It includes 25 books as ‘general reading’ and a similar number for every week. Even reading 14 hours a day, I don’t think anyone could actually read all of this. There must be something I am missing.

I am happy to note that Jonathan is now on board for the hike tomorrow. I met with him this afternoon for coffee and then a walk up Mosquito Creek with their dog, Buddy. I remember that perpetually energetic black beast accompanying us on my first two trips to Hornby Island: the one where I slept in a hammock in a grove of Arbutus trees; the one where I met Kate. Jonathan has been off canoeing for the past few days and it was certainly good to spend some time with him. I learned that he just got a job at the bakery in the Whole Foods within the new addition to Park Royal. From what I’ve heard, they are an unusually good employer and I am glad for him.

After having a cup of tea with Jonathan and his father, I headed home and spent the evening reading – not from the intimidating reading list above, though that may have been wise. Instead, I finished most of this week’s Economist and read to nearly the end of The Great Fire, which I still recommend heartily to most everyone. As I walked home, I saw Sarah Stewart outside of Starbucks, learned that today is her birthday, and invited her to my farewell party. Though I’ve been mildly smitten with her, to varying degrees, since high school, this will be the first time we do anything social and not related to school or her employment at Starbucks.

With five days left in Vancouver, the few hurried hours I will have on Wednesday morning not really counting, the time has come to turn to packing and other final preparation. In some sense, the hike falls into the latter category: a symbolic traverse of North Vancouver as a prelude to my dispatch. I find the flavour of my own apprehension difficult to assess. While there is definitely a manic, racing excitement that sometimes speeds my step when walking, there are elements of uncertainty – even dread – to counterpoint it. I worry about money, about the amount of reading that must be done, about the whole academic world. The last, in particular, is a concern. While I’ve certainly read and studied a lot, I’ve never really paid attention to specific authors. I know next to nothing about International Relations as an academic discipline. My exposure to IR theory is limited to the one Crawford class, which was mostly a savaging of Realism in all its forms.

While the whole scholarly approach to things is appealing to me, not least because I am reasonably good at it, I can’t legitimately suppress the knowledge that much of it is a waste of time: thoughts just spun around and going nowhere. I think that Kerrie’s decision to go off into the world and make a practical difference is the more courageous, the more respectable course. I applaud her for it and think anxiously of when I will pay off my massive debt to chance: to the million fortuitous accidents that put me here now with the skills, resources, and opportunities I have. In a world where there is to be any kind of fairness between people, that kind of spectacular fortune needs to be paid back to the world.

These daily entries feel solid: obligatory. Blog entries like ships-of-the-line, with cannons at the ready. In my mind, the blog is no longer a place for conspiratorial whisperings or the sharing of anything but the most blue-chip of thoughts. Such intimacy was probably never suited to the internet. Still, I can’t help regretting the loss of a place where entries could be the whispered asides of an unfolding life.

Working for Staples no longer

Fernando working on the NASCA report

Today, my tenure at Staples came to an end. It’s a thrilling turn of events because, with any luck, this will also be my departure from the whole world of entry level jobs. The next time when I have a space open for employment, I will have finished the first year of my degree at Oxford and (I think, I hope, I pray) will be able to get some kind of thinking job in the UK.

Immediately after work, I met with Fernando. First at Tim Horton’s, then at our favourite 24 hour produce shop (on Lonsdale), and finally at my parents’ kitchen table, we pushed the NASCA report forward to version 1-3 and created a new opening segment for it. Tonight and tomorrow, I will finalize the executive summary, while he will write a letter of introduction and produce a cover page. Then, we need only add some photos, tweak the formatting, combine the two sections without screwing up the separate pagination, submit the thing to Allen Sens so he can write an introductory letter, create distinct versions for print and for the web, print and post the thing, and relax. The great majority of the work – I estimate at least 100 hours of reading and writing on my part – is done.

All this was propelled forward tonight by one iced cappuccino of the size bigger than extra large and at least two litres of Earl Grey tea. The latter is strongly reminiscent of late nights in high school, when provincial exams were the most significant thing worrying me. I’ve only just realized how appropriate it was to spend the evening of September 11th writing a report about defence planning. I really appreciate all the hours that Fernando has put into helping me with this document – the only other member of the group who has made a large contribution to the writing or editing process.

I anticipate that Sens will take issue with sections of the report, but thankfully that can actually serve to help us. By saying: “I would never have thought this way, or said these things” he can underline the value, as least insofar as diversity of ideas goes, of having student expeditions like NASCA take place.

Tomorrow night, I am going to a restaurant on Main called Himalaya as part of Kerrie’s visit to Vancouver. I forgot to mention how yesterday, while walking through Fairview on our way to the law faculty, Meaghan and I ran into Kerrie and her husband Nolan beside The Beanery. Their presence definitely also contributed to the dispelling of my sense of Fairview primarily as a menacing place where my ex-roommates might be encountered.

I’ve been meaning for ages to write some appreciative and insightful comments about The Great Fire and I have been writing little notes to myself in my European poet style black lined notebook, but now is not the time for such things.

PS. Anyone who can give me a correct French translation of the following will have my thanks:

The North American Security Cooperation Assessment (NASCA) 2005 Student Tour was made possible through the generous support of the Security Defence Forum Special Projects Fund of the Canadian Department of National Defence. 

Apparently, a single French paragraph is enough to make the report bilingual enough to suit the government. It says something about the state of my intellectual decay that I am not confident about my own attempt to translate the above – confounded by uncertainties about the proper usage of the partitive article.