Et In Arcadia Ego

Sure - 2010 isn't over yet. But I have so, so many awesome corkers already that I thought I'd start this term afresh.

So come one! Come all! Marvel at tautologous dialectic debate! Gasp at speculative heuristic modalities! Speculate as to exactly what academics are compensating for! You've seen it on your television screens, you've heard it on the news - now live for one night only, the one, the only:


Junior Division: prizes for individual words.

Academic Puns
Calypso notes that the use of puns are "pretty much the only fun academics have". This year's most popular word:

"DissemiNation" - about diaspora from Nation and Narration

"Nation, Space and Politics" from last year's champion, Terry Nation. See what they did there? The sub headings are even better: "Nation-wide influence"; "The blurring of Nations"; "the birth and death of a Nation"; "a Nation divided: geographical and social space"; "Microcosmic, allegorical Nations"; "Binary Nations"; "dystopian Nations" e.t.c...

On this model, here are some suggested titles for future Doctor Who essays:

"Little Miss Moffat: Fairytale Stylings and the Dream Landscape In Season Five"
"What's On and Holmes: Reimagining the Gaslight Detection Narrative Under Hinchcliffe*"
"Masterplan or CartMelodrama? Developing the character of Ace."

*I know jokes aren't funny once explained, but this is funnier if you know the Hinchcliffe era was script-edited by Robert Holmes, packed with gothic horror and and once featured the Doctor in a deerstalker...

Made Up Words
"The Gothicity of Slime" - I presume gothicity means "gothic-ness"

A repeated word in a poem was described as an example of "geminisation"

"Hauntology" - investigation suggests this (broadly) means "nostalgia"; Calypso simplifies things by explaining "it's the study of queer spectrality"

"Fraudomy" - I suspect the pronounciation ought to be something like "fraud-oh-mee" - but who knows? Or cares? Let's call it "Frodd-om-mee"! Logic suggests it means: "I thought I was a sodomist - but it's OK, just kidding!". But having googled the book in question, the author himself can explain:

I propose to read sodomy in a way that has less to do with revealing a particular "truth" (or "truths") than with thinking about sodomy as a mode of knowledge, a way of reading the articulations between these various forms.

So now you know.

"Phallologists" - people who examine queer philology. Ignoring it's Just-A-Minute ring, I don't even like this as a concept. Why would queer philology have to be all about phalluses anyway? Can't we have Rainbologists or something?

Junior Division 2: Phrases

The "Water is Wet Except When It Isn't" award: Saturday Morning Censorship

"Censorship both prohibits and produces meanings"

The Stephen Fry Goblet For Using Twelve Words When Two Would Do - forgot to cite the source for this, but I think it's "Terry Nation" again.

"Very frequently, linear narratives and parallel montage are combined, creating dramatic structures emphasising repeating patterns of character separation and reunification"

Translation:

"The Doctor and companions are split up. All the time."

The Doctor Seuss prize for Prose: Just Gaming (JF Lyotard); pg 41

"As narrator she is narrated as well. And in a way she is already told, and what she herself is telling will not undo that somewhere else she is told."

Ah, but who is telling you, Baloo? Have you told about them too? Ah! Let's talk as we walk to the zoo!

Runners up:
"Patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism" -Nation and Narration (pg 300)

Senior Division One: Titles

Lovecraft Memorial Goblet: Syllables Will Eat Your Soul
"The Darwinian law of competitive Devolution versus the Kropotkinian law of symbiotic Evolution & its Metaphysical Manichaeian Division"

In some alternate world, surely this is Saturday Morning TV show - "Oh no! Kropotkinian is destroying the city with his tenticles! When trouble strikes: call up the Manichaeian Division!"

Most Arresting Title:
"The Masturbating Venuses of Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Ovid, Martial, and Poliziano"

Some academics will do anything for a grant. This chap seems to have hit jackpot by getting all serious about the world's favourite topic. Incidentally, the paintings under discussion are this one and this one

Runner up; and winner of the Words Prize for Using Words

"Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama"

...so, Queer Virginity, eh? What does that mean, when not being eyecatching?

The "Surely This Is A Parody" Fiji Mermaid Statue

"Stripping the Public Bare: Theorising the Politics of In/Equality from Nudist Encounters"

This has it all, ladies and gents: it scores four shots on the academic title bingo. The focus of the paper is on, broadly speaking, Nudist Equality as compared to race, gender and sexuality struggles. You'd think this was fairly easy to answer, as three of these four activities is a quirk of birth, and the other a one-way track to hypothermia. But nothing can ever be that simple, as the abstract explains:

"Equality here gets read away from its calculative, distributive modality, to focus instead on textured, touch-based equality fantasies."

So now you know.

Runners up:

'Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World 1851-1914' is hosting a roundtable discussion on 'Global Theory; 'Theory' in/of Motion'

Senior Division 2: Special Interest Awards

The Cold Fish Trophy for Academic Missing The Point

"...the refusal to accept norms of behaviour or social constraints is an advantage that allows Blake to pursue his visions of a better world, but it also makes him somewhat ruthless and uncompromising."

The key here is "somewhat". Blake's transformation from Generic Hero Guy to very flawed and surprisingly nasty is a brilliant and uncomfortable turn of events. Dismissing it as "somewhat", to my mind, suggests they just weren't watching properly.

For those operating at the other end of the spectrum, we have the Taking It Too Seriously Memorial Garland: http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/Essays/neil-A-B.html

"That the Blake/Avon relationship is not only the most developed and most significant relationship in the series, but also one between *two men*, means there is no attractive female role offered to the female viewer. She must therefore insinuate one into the inter-male relationship by ascribing traditionally female role qualities to one of the male characters..."

"I propose, therefore, that Avon is asked to fill, simultaneously, the roles of Man, Woman and Child, and things naturally get confusing. Hence Avon's relationship with Blake, operating in all three spheres, is likewise confused."

Ripperologist of the Year
This new award is dedicated to "experts" in a specific field. This was an especially competitive field, with casual, amateur lunatics fighting to distinguish themselves from professional fruitcakes. Some of my faves:

"Connecting the Dots: Were the Ripper Crime Scenes Chosen to Form a Pattern?"

What do you think?

Most Respectful Ripper Memorial:
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Witches-Vol-Babylon-Graphic/dp/1560972416/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t

Oh yes. Well, there would be porn. Words...defy me...

The Award for Academic Thoroughness: Jack the Ripper: A New Theory (William Stewart)

"Could a Jack the Ripper today evade the police as easily as 1888? If Jack the Ripper was the sort of person I imagine there can only be one answer: yes"

This statement's vagueness is rivalled only by it's pointlessness. "If Oliver Cromwell's pancake making skills were as formidable as I suspect, he would undoubtedly singlehandedly bring peace to the Congo."

Senior Division 3: Personalities

Department of the Year
"Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence" Sussex

You just know they all lounge around wearing nothing but Venetian masks and expensive slippers, and write all their essays using the backs of recently-debauched maidens in place of desks, while pages dressed as Cupid bring them strange fruit, and wine in curious jade goblets fashioned in crude forms. I'd love to listen in on their dissertation proposal day...

Runner up:

Could the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies get any more vague?

Study of the Year
It is vital to correctly reference all academic works. Luckily, there's the "Study on Empathy for pain in Couples":

This project investigates empathy for pain (that is, how an ‘observer’ understands the pain of a ‘sufferer') in people who are in a romantic relationship. Please note that this study DOES NOT involve fMRI.

Oh really?

Male participants will experience mild to moderate heat pain during the study (e.g., like that of touching a hot cup or plate) in regular brief intervals, and will be asked to rate their pain experience. Their partners will be either in the same room or in a separate room, and will be asked to rate their level of empathy for their partner. Both participants will also have to complete some questionnaires on personality traits where they are asked to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements concerning: anxiety (e.g., "I feel calm/tense"); mood (e.g., "I feel content/unhappy"); romantic attachment (e.g., "I feel comfortable/uncomfortable depending on romantic partners"); and pain attitudes and beliefs (e.g. "I find it easy/difficult to ignore the pain"). The device used to create pain (i.e., a small stimulator attached to the arm), is safe and it will not cause damage to the skin. Also, participants will get to sample the experience of pain at the beginning of the study and the amount of pain will not exceed the levels agreed by them at anytime during the study.

Gee, thank goodness! I'd been worrying how I'd substantiate the outlandish claim that "my other half gets upset when I am in pain"...on a more pedantic note, I'm interested by their use of "couples" and then the assumption that one member of this couple will be male...but I suppose that would necessitate a special study to establish that queer couples empathise just like regular sized ones do. Darned academic rigour!

Scholar of the year
A translation of Petrarch's sonnets in Senate House Library bears the following frontispiece quote:

"In the resurrection of science, Italy was the first that cast away her shroud and the eloquent Petrarch, by his lessons and his example, may justly be applauded as the first harbinger of day" - GIBBON

Beneath, a later reader has added in pencil:

"Likewise Ms. Wollaston's translation might justly be derided as the harbinger of new Barbarianism"

As much as the destruction of books chills me, I am always cheered by the appearance of satiric pencil notes. In my perfect world, readers would be encouraged to write margin-commentaries in library books for the next reader to discover. The world of academia would be much improved. In other places, he points out a "non sequitur", adds a Latin quote "parva sed apta mihi", and underlines paragraphs which - at first - I thought were those most relevant to his reading, but am now convinced highlight its worst excesses. He has also counted and made note that Ms W's whinging introduction runs to 68 words:

"It is not without a feeling of anxiety and diffidence, that I submit my poetical translation of "One hundred sonnets of Francesco Petrarca" to the world of critics, when I reflect how vast is the ordeal to which I have voluntarily exposed myself, in having undertaken a task none have thought fit to accomplish before me, whilst my sovereigns in intellect have not hesitated to acknowledge its difficulty"

Because there's nothing like modesty. And having flicked through the book, her introduction is indeed pants. My favourite passage is this piece of incisive and rigorous scholarship:

"The cord of life which had bound Petraca in union with so many friends had so unexpectedly snapped, that he looked fearfully round upon those still in existence, and fancied he heard the fatal shears contracting still more his narrowing circle, whilst one torturing vision clung night and day to his mind - it was a presentiment of his Laura's death. It was not long before his fatal foreboding was verified; intelligence reached him at Verona that she too had sunk a victim to the plague. We will not pause to describe the poet's feelings on this severest of bereavements...

But she does:

"...Who that has enshrined every hope and happiness in the existence of one loved object will not feel how complete must have been the wreck of both to Petraca in this his loss. Death had robbed him of his sweetest and tenderest tie, his only golden link to life - now his heart was widowed, his hope elsewhere. But did religion permit his noble mind to remain a darkening void, busy only with distorted images of despondency and gloom? No! once more he roused himself and found consolation in projecting schemes for his suffering country."

e.t.c. e.t.c., and this is before you even get to the poetry.

A runner up in this category commented on the introduction of Barsby's Ovid. He describes a poet whose women are no more than beautiful, silent stautes as having fantastic insight into the female mind. Our later pencil-bearing reader added:

"Really, Mr Barsby?"

Book of the Year:

Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis

Is to academia what aura reading is to a CAT scan, and is apparently the results of a professor's bet that anything can get published: "what about theorising that each book of the Narnia series was deliberatly based on the Copernican model of the universe?"

I recommend visiting his website - the Independant calls his theory "sensible", the Heythrop Journal "extremely convincing", and the Slime O' The Grot Express "Oh God Just Return The Children, I'll Say Anything." It also slyly quotes endorsement from the author of "The Da Vinci Hoax". Convinced? It's certainly true that, however marvellous, the Narnia books are a slightly mad inconsistent mess. So have a go now, and see which planets you would relate to which. I now quote Wikipedia, quoting Ward:

"In The Lion [the Pevensie children] become monarchs under sovereign Jove; in The Dawn Treader they drink light under searching Sol; in Prince Caspian they harden under strong Mars; in The Silver Chair they learn obedience under subordinate Luna; in The Horse and His Boy they come to love poetry under eloquent Mercury; in The Magician's Nephew they gain life-giving fruit under fertile Venus; and in The Last Battle they suffer and die under chilling Saturn."

How did you do? For my next trick, I shall relate each of the Care Bears to a Tarot trump...

Linguist of the Year: our very own Calypso!

We stumbled across this arcane passage in a book which we were increasingly sure was the lost tome Diacritics, by that elusive alchaemist Judith Butler. For fourty days and fourty nights, we poured over the occult text, trying to make the smallest sense of the strange characters and inhumanly contorted syntax.

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony, in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence, and rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It was in no small part my rigourous study of the Ancients contributed to our success, and together we mapped out the structure of a vital fragment by identifying subject, object, verb, and linking antecedants with subclauses e.t.c:

“The move from a structuralist account
(in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways)

to a view of hegemony
(in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence, and rearticulation)

brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure //

and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory
(that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects)

to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Yet Calypso provided the final, elegant translation: "Structure is being rethought because power isn't as simple as we thought"

The fabulous thing about writing coursework is the things your brain chucks out there, in random desperation that you might stop.

Looking through my browser history, I discovered that the exam period was apparently also the right time to...

> Revisit your childhood love for X-men:Evolution and learn How to Throw Playing Cards so they cut through fruit and stick in walls.

> Research First Aid...just in case. I know know what to do in case of major bleeding, unconsciousness, heart attack and stopped breathing. Arguably useful when imperilled by exams?

> Read up on politics. Particularly the Pirate Party, who have 50% of my support and 50% of my severe disapproval. Art should be free, but also owned by its creator for longer than five years. How do you balance something like that?

> Make safe my Facebook account. This took longer than expected. But also much reading around the topic, particularly on the EFF...

>Consider buying a "corporate America" flag, with the stars replaced by famous logos.

> Read XKCD. Natch.

> Discover my lousy sense of smell has a fabuloso Greek name and is a real condition. Cue Calypso attempting to make me a "disabled rep".

> Haircare. Learn how to do victory rolls and 1920s starlet hair waves. Then spend longer in the bathroom than ever before (1 hour!) achieving the aforementioned, then spend more on haircare products than ever before (I mean in total, not in one go: £1) to go professional. Ace!

> Learn how to get into Urban Explore. Research dilapidated London buildings and, from my sofa, contemplate breaking-and-entering dangerous abandoned properties after exams are over. Gaze in awe at the chaps and chapettes of Sleepy City, who scaled the Victorian tunnels behind the Niagra Falls, and once UrbEx'd the London Underground...

> Collecting more bad music, from Music for Maniacs and the 365 project.

> Are the Jehovahs Witnesses as bad as they seem? After they came to visit, multiple times, I thought I'd better make sure. As it turns out, yes, yes they are - thanks Wikipedia, impartial moral arbiter that you are...

> attempt to defeat sweatshops, on the principle that Victorian Whitechapel has merely been outsourced to the developing world. Work out that putting companies in a position to pull out of the developing world will actually be worse for workers who no longer have a job. Give up on campaign. Blake would be ashamed...

> fall in love with George Formby. Irritate fellow housemates.

> troll Fitfinder

>research Synesthesia

> save oodles of printable Dolls House furniture...for that Dolls House I don't own

> research an actor from a webgame I played once

> Origami, natch

> take a survey about AntiDepressants for a Kings study. Confirmed what I already sort-of suspected; that I have what could be regarded as actual medical depression not just a tendancy towards melancholia. Balls. The study suggests I'm about 75% depressive, but I scored very highly on the self-esteem, self-image sections. Proud and confident of my opinions

> Leant how to talk about racism on the internet. They're mostly trolls, and to be honest most of the rules are stupid, counter-intuitive, and lead to people talking about how they should be talking about things. But at least now I know how to do it if I ever need to, and some of what I've learnt has helped in real-world terms, for talking about all sensitive subjects. I suppose it's like all systems - being dogmatic is stupid, but that's not to say there isn't also some good.

> google "How long does mead keep". Obviously fancying a tipple...

> ebay, Doctor Who section. I try to kepe all my DW stuff pretty nice, as I know some of it will ultimately be valuable. One of the exceptions is Avon, my cuddly Adipose, because it's a darned soft toy and there to be cuddled. Ironically, of everything I own, this is at present the highest selling item...£30 or £40 in a nice condition. Not that I could ever sell him, but still! Another interesting was So Vile A Sin selling for only £10, a book known to go for about £70. Is it worth jumping in there as an investment? LoL at naming him Avon. At the time, the joke was I wanted to name him something unsuitable and something alliterative. First bash was Adric, but that backfired as Adric really is little and cute. Avon becomes more of a bad joke by the day...

>Fandom secrets, natch

> The Fanfiction archive. WHY WAS I THERE I DON'T EVEN READ FIC.

Here is the full list of everything I wikied:

A Secular Humanist Declaration - Agincourt - Altered book - American Revolutionary War - Anosmia - Artist trading cards - ATC - Baklava - Battle of Agincourt - Beliefs_and_practices_of_Jehovah’s_Witnesses - Blissymbols - Bobby pin - British America - Cadaeic Cadenza - Care Bears - Carl Fletcher - Cave Clan - Cheyenne language - Cinema of Iraq - Colonial - Colonial history of the United States - Continental Army - Crack - Crack cocaine - Criticism of Facebook - Criticism of Jehovah’s Witnesses - Crossmodal - Culture of Iraq - Danger Man - Daniel Tammet - Darwin Day - Database management system - David Rees (author) - David Tennant - Diest - Disposable camera - Epilepsy - Facebook - Fall Out (The Prisoner) - Feynman point - Finger wave - Found art - Freedom Tunnel - French colonization of the Americas - Futuroscope - Gallifrey - Essentialism - Gender_essentialism Geni.com - George Formby, Jr. - Golden line - Grapheme–color synesthesia - Great Britain in the Seven Years War - Greek language - Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner - Hauntology - Herpes labialis - Herpes simplex - Hi5 (website) - HumanLight - Human Rights Day - Humanism - Humanism (disambiguation) - Humanism (life stance) - Humanism and Its Aspirations - Humanist Manifesto - Humanist Manifesto I - Humanist Manifesto II - Hundred Years War - Hyposmia - Ido - Interlingua - Intravenous therapy - Iraq - Iraqi literature - Jamie Kane – Jehovah’s Witnesses – Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions – Jehovah’s Witnesses and child sex abuse – Jehovah’s Witnesses - Joani Blank - Karl Fletcher - Kim Peek - Kwanzaa - La damnation de Faust - Lady Gaga - Latin - Legend tripping - Lexical-gustatory synesthesia - LinkedIn - List of Care Bears - List of Doctor Who serials - List of Doctor Who writers - List of dystopian music, TV programs, and games - List of social networking websites - List of writing systems - Lojban - London Underground - Lots Road Power Station - Mamihlapinatapai - Midnight (Doctor Who) - Model (art) - Model - Modular origami - Mole Day - Mole people - Multimodal integration - Nadine Coyle - Napoleonic Wars - National Labor Committee in Support of Human and Worker Rights - Ning (website) - Novial - Number form - Occidental language - Olfaction - Olfactory receptor neuron - Orkut - Outnumbered - Outnumbered - Phantosmia - Pi - Pi Day - Piphilology - Prisoner - Private network - Reality hacking - Recovery position - Repdigit - Rochester Subway - Savant syndrome - Section 28 - Secular humanism - Sextus Propertius - Shamu (SeaWorld show) - Silentlambs - Simple English Wikipedia - Simple English - Six (band) - Skyrock - Skyway - Smell - Smound - Social media - Social network - Sonobe - Special:Random New features - Square Root Day - Storm drain - Susan Pevensie - Sweatshop - Synesthesia - Synesthesia - Tetragrammaton - The_Brave_Little_Toaster_(film) The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland - The Lion King - The Prisoner - The Prisoner (2009 miniseries) - Time travel - Treaty of Paris (1763) - Trespass (album) - Twin Peaks - Underground - Underground City, Montreal - Underground city - Underground living - Urban exploration - Virtual private network - Volapük - Volcanic ash - West Park Asylum - White Mountain (song) - Wikipedia:Wikipedia logos - William Hartnell - World Humanist Day -

My dreams define my days. Yesterday, I dreamed I was in Italy and woke up with an indefineable sense of peace. This morning, I had a dream so calculated in its cruelty that I refuse to believe it wasn't deliberate. I don't know what Morpheus is playing at, but I want him to know that it really isn't fair. Uuuuugh.

The barstools at Guernsey Post don't think they'll be able to deliver the post today because of the weather. Goodness knows what Gsy would do if we got proper snow. Right now, we've been frosted white by the most incompetant airbrusher ever - barely a scattering - and the whole island's gone to pieces. But what of my sister, and everyone else on the island, whose Cambridge letters are due today? Unfair much!

The good news is, you could ask them to email you. The very good news is: she's got an offer :D thus breaking the family curse. None of us have ever gone - I bet generations of Victorians, Tudors and Bretons are grinning with pride. Or possibly embarassment, that we couldn't find her a nice husband instead.

Work on my essay is almost complete. I've decided to go without stabilisers on this one and write 3,000 words of my opinion, using footnotes only when totally necessary. According to my marks, I have never done a great film essay anyway, so at worst this will be a disasterous experiment. I've put my current draft through Wordle, and the result is pretty funny:



Note: this is actually what my brain looks like right now. But howcome I've used the word "Lil" less than the word "Ze", when his name is Lil Ze and I've only ever used the phrase in one piece?

I'm listening to Patrick Wolf's concept album "The Bachelor", about young warrior in a sort of spiritual, metaphorical battle against homophobia, racism and the rest. You can see why this would appeal to me - it's just one Magnu-the-horse-with-the-golden-mane away from being Warriors at the Edge of Time. Bachelor explores all different aspects of what goes on in war, and has a lovely sense of character, and this morning (of all mornings) I find myself rather itchy for Part II (yes! Tell me it's not prog! There are even flowy cloaks!), "The Conqueror", its sequel. If only to find out what happens at the end.


Thought of the day: the name Spielberg, as in Steven Spielberg, is probably not a German portmanteau meaning "story-mountain." But perhaps it ought to be?

After a year stuck in journals, I've found some real corkers. Let's start at the beginning, with the prize (this year awarded jointly) for my favourite essay titles:

"Crying over the Melodramatic Penis: Melodrama and Male Nudity in Films of the 90s"

"Videographies of Navigating Geobodies"

Spectators are reminded there is a contest running in the foyer, for anyone who thinks they know what the latter title actually referrs to.

Lets not forget their propensity for making words up. This year I was particularly fond of
"Folkloric" and "telegrammatic", but nothing could challenge the hegemony of this year's winner "being-looked-at-ness".

The best essay of the year is definitely "Murder's tongue: identity, death and the city in film noir"

As well as being utterly incomprehensible, it wins extra bonus points for:

• A title following the familiar pattern: "Arty pretention: W, X and Y in Z"
• Starting with an otherwise irrelevant Hamlet quote
• every single line being underlined by an enthusiastic biro fiend

I give you some quotes:

"an initial contention is that different types of commercial films mobilise legible, empirically quantifyable consturctions of physical brutality and death. by this view the loosely held terrain of film noir - in both old and new versions - is haunted by a spectral semiotics or textual ecology of mayhem understood as separate from idioms develiped for horror, gangster, Western or combat narratives, with a proviso for obvious instances of generic overlap and hybridization[...]"

Translation: Film Noir has its own style of showing violence which is different from other films, although sometimes it is the same. Particularly fond of "combat narratives, which I think is what the rest of us call "war movies".

"That is, regardless of the lack of a shared vocabulary for describing modalities of violence, there exists a heuristic horizon of expectation around how this category generates, ramifies and resolves its lethal dramas - thus we believe we know it when we see it. What is it that we see, who does what to whom, where and under what circumstances?"

Translation: the best thing about this sentence is that it apparently seeks to qualify and further explain the previous one...loving the "riddle me riddle me" rhythm of that tautological nightmare at the end.

"Perpetrators may be known at the very outset, or revealed in a following scene, or figure only marginally, or not at all in the ensuing action."

Translation: his coat was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and blue. In other words, colourful.

Alternately: different films are different.

"At risk of oversimplifying a rich spectrum of critical initiatives, the display of violence was cast as an ancillary figure in a textual system whose primary loci of signification were maooed according to formal, narratalogical, or metaphorical coordinates"

Translation: is offered in the next sentence by the author, making one wonder why he didn't just say this in the first place: "thus why characters commit criminal acts, what they think they know about their predicaments and what remains unspoken, superceded analysis of how or where criminal infractions occur". Particularly moved by his worry that he might "oversimplify".

But this was only the winner in a very fierce contest. What of Critical Approaches to World Cinema?

"It is important, however, to note that Anserson employed the term "imagined" and not "imaginary". "imaginary signifies absence, or nothingness, while "imagined" foregrounds a nice balance between the real and not the real."

Also notable because it refutes the term "World Cinema" and "Third Cinema" in the first paragraph, and is thereafter forced to say "Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America" every single time instead. And what of fierce contender "Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem":

"What we will attempt to do below, therefore, is not so much to provide an answer to the question "what is world cinema?" but to trace the processes by which it has been discussed and conceptualised, to examine how these conceptualisations work and where they come from, to account for their embedded contradictions and tensions, and perhaps, most importantly, to underscore the situatedness of each discourse in its specific context, including that of our own"

The worst argument award is still a matter of fierce debate - the panel despute whether our own Reservoir Dogs as Menstruation Metaphor counts. Nevertheless, when that is resolved, it will have to face stiff competition with "Power Rangers as Metaphor for Transnational Film Production".

The final award is for "worst book", an easy victory for "Terry Nation" - a book which spends chapter after chapter drawing academic attention to statements such as "the Doctor and the companion separate and get into trouble", or "Doctor Who has a mystery which is solved at the end". Particularly notable for spending ten pages writing about how cliffhangers work, all the while referring to them as "suspended enigmas". Best quote:

"We believe that the work credited to Nation as creator and/or writer fails to fit some of the traditional criteria of 'quality'. It is largely in familiar generic forms, was made on a comparativelyt low budgets, and is addressed to a mass audience. As Bernadette Casey et al (2002:209)"

We now turn to the VOTER'S CHOICE awards. In the comments, nominate the worst essay titles, quotes, words and books you've waded through!

This week continues to be a bit lumpy. Doctor Who rather knocked my chocks out, I think. Typically, when Real things go wrong I have some Fiction to fall back on - but obviously right now, that's not the case, as the Fiction is as bad or worse than anything Real can reasonably throw at me. I suppose there's always Blake's 7, that bastion of love, optimism and happy endings. And lots of bad Real stuff is going down too: everything has gone wrong this week. The highlight was probably almost getting electrocuted. Has my dad mortally offended Morgoth or something?

It doesn't help that I've been set a presentation of perennial emo-fave Nietzsche. I feel like I've finally become a teenager, and am going through my existentialist, t-shirt-icon, pretentiously pessimistic phase. I'm even listening to the Manic Street Preachers.

The Birth of Tragedy - by Mr Nietzsche. I can see the Doctor written all over it. Because of my associative mind, I tend to link up absolutely everything. This time last year, when the news of Tennant's departure came out, I remember reading about Aristotle, pain and fear, catharsis, and why we enjoy watching miserable drama the very next day. Now obviously the topics are related, but in retrospect (lovely Latinate word, that...) it was probably mostly my preoccupations colouring things. In the year which Tarantino and Shakespeare shared my obsessions, I remember a fantastic debate which occured about Reservoir Dogs AND Hamlet simultaneously. I'm sure it made sense at the time - I think I was criticising suspense and second act problems. I suppose no theory of art is comprehensive if it doesn't include low-art as well, and I was most struck with this:

"Because the Apollonian impulses of the Greek tragedians give form to the Dionysian rituals of music and dance, the death of the hero is not a negative, destructive act but rather a positive, creative affirmation of life through art."

Which is what I was trying to express last post. By Dionisian, he means wild, primal, frenzy, suffering, the reality of life. By Apollonian he means contained, light, dreamlike and detatched. His theory for perfect art is that the two should be balanced. On the one hand, I'm handling the full Dionysian brunt of that episode with my emotional response. But my inner Apollonian is very satisfied with the "form" of the thing - the way it mirrors Planet of Fire, the completion of arcs, the evolution of characters. Not sure what to say about the second half though. You'll be able to see me affirming the creative nature of life through art at the bottom of my second bottle and third Kleenex box on Boxing Day.

No one really knows what Nietzsche stands for, aside from a vague idea that he's a miserable sod who killed off God. Having read some I feel myself moved, impressed and with a huge boost to my morale, due to positive and beautiful philosophy. Am I doing this wrong? I feel like I've missed something, or else the universe has done Mr N. a huge disservice all these years. This is Sparknotes' summary:

"For Nietzsche, art is not just a form of human activity but is rather the highest expression of the human spirit. The thrust of the book is well expressed in what is perhaps its most famous line, near the end of section 5: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” One of Nietzsche’s concerns in The Birth of Tragedy is to address the question of the best stance to take toward existence and the world. He criticizes his own age (though his words apply equally to the present day) for being overly rationalistic, for assuming that it is best to treat existence and the world primarily as objects of knowledge. For Nietzsche, this stance makes life meaningless because knowledge and rationality in themselves do nothing to justify existence and the world. Life finds meaning, according to Nietzsche, only through art. Art, music, and tragedy in particular bring us to a deeper level of experience than philosophy and rationality. Existence and the world become meaningful not as objects of knowledge but as artistic experiences. According to Nietzsche, art does not find a role in the larger context of life, but rather life takes on meaning and significance only as it is expressed in art."

I think you can see why I'd find that appealing. Oscar Wilde said something similar about nature: we only understand it as beautiful because Art has told us a blissful hill is beautiful. In truth, it's scratchy and uncomfortable and there are insects everywhere. And much like my witterings about decay and mundanity being "ugly" purely because we don't expect to find it beautiful.

My whirlwind romance with Nietzche was, however, not to last. Turns out the World was right about him being a misery guts. This was an early work, and he goes on to describe it as:

"badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness"

Which is funny when you consider that would also be a perfect description of your humble authoress. Of course, the whole point of the essay is how Socrates invented rational thinking and therefore destroyed art - a valid point. I wouldn't blame Socrates, but then, with a bit of luck I won't have to give a damn what Socrates thinks very, very soon. More details as they emerge. I think I've just been rescued.

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while - I've been doing interesting stuff, but no time and less inclination. Here's a few updates:

I finally have a film season! I tried setting up a film club in the other place, and it didn't really work. When Calypso was brainstorming alternate ideas for LGBT events, I suggested queer cinema evenings. We found some helpful people in the Film Department who have given us huge rooms with huge screens, and at least 30 attendees and hundreds of recommendations for films. Woo hoo! The screenings will be on Wednesday afternoons, will be a mix between the more populist "camp classics" and serious/landmark movies. We've even had offers from lecturers to come and give talks. On my agenda? Definitely Madchen in Uniform, Victim, Beautiful Laundrette, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and (though I've already seen this one) Paris is Burning. I think Calypso is keen to show Boys Don't Cry, and the first screening - Transamerica - is set for next week. Very, very excited.


Greek is killing me. Our teacher is really nice and all, but she insists on going through the homework in lessons sentence by sentence. This is intensely frustrating: if I've done the homework, then it's really a wasted hour. I've been entertaining myself by doing Greek composition in the back to brush up my vocab. I was going to do some summaries, but I don't have enough words: I know Doctor and Master, but the closest word I have for Dalek (aside from ο Δαλεκ) would be η υδρια - water jar. Luckily, I do have enough generic words to do Blake's 7 -or ο του πολιτου χορος as it is best rendered in Greek. It's keeping me immensely entertained every time we get a new word list, working out what I can now write. This week we finally learnt "ship", "sail" and "kill" enabling me to much expand my mini-masterpiece. It certainly saved my neck in the Greek test we had this week. So far, I've summarised the first two episodes and introduced a few characters - Blake is ο πολιτες (the citizen), while Travis is obviously ο στρατεγως (the soldier). The best I could do for Avon and Jenna is ο φιλος (the friend) and η γυνη (the woman) - both of which are hilariously inappropriate. Still, it allows me to do a lot of "he frees the slaves" and it is coming in handy, albeit in a crazy way.

One of my favourite free-London-mags is Shortlist and Stylist. They come out one day after the other, courtesy of the gender binary. Shortlist is blue, and typically has a tough actor on the cover, and it has stories about cars, TV and technology. Stylist is a day later, is very pink - or has a very full-lipped and feminine close up of a lady icon on it, and naturally has sections on make up, travel and fashion. It's not quite as bad as it sounds: Stylist is actually pretty progressive, once you get over the hilarious covers. But that's not why I mention it. Stylist has just mentioned a documentary featuring five actresses, all who will be playing the Queen but in different decades. Barbara Flynn, for example, "depicts HRH during her "anus horribilis", 1992"

Oh, how I love geeky giggles. Spot the mistake! What Stylist was attempting to say is "annus horribilis", miserable year. Not "anus horribilis", which means miserable old woman. What a Freudian slip!

Did I update you all about Swapbot? I've now got about 20 art cards in my collection on topics as various as Alice in Wonderland, Imaginary Friends and the Disney Haunted Mansion. Half made by me, half made by partners all over the globe. The fun of it is really the scope - everyone has a different style, so while they are all individually a tad shoddy they look marvellous next to one another. One thing I've noted is how unsurprisingly female based it is: they're either teenage girls, or hockey moms from Idaho, with a penchant for scrapbooking. This has been a source of amusement, but also guilt - as I prepare to send off cards inspired by Watchmen to a woman who loves rabbits and whose favourite film is The Notebook, and one based on Reservoir Dogs to "Rainbow Colour ! Theme: Orange". So I was quite taken aback to find this swap in the listings. O-kay then. Not all scrapbookers and ribbon-obsessives then. I am really confused. I know there are people into True Crime and the like - I think it's a bit sick and strange, but each to their own. But WTF?! And who in their right mind has a favourite serial killer?

Oh yes. Right. Moving on.

So I had to sign up for it. My motivation is this: as a collector, I want a diverse and interesting collection, and I'm sure this bizzare oppertunity will never come back. You have to design two cards, one with the serial killer of your choice - and the other your partner chooses. I still haven't found a way of requesting Jack the Ripper that doesn't make me feel like a horrific individual. Even though I designed a card partly inspired by him a whole two months back (but it was also about London, Dark London, smog, gothic horror, Victoriana, the Valeyard, Doctor Who and all sorts of other things). And I don't know what I'm going to do when I get a serial killer prompt from my partner. At least Jack is dead, and shrouded in fiction: part of the point of the card I made was exploring the ways he has been appropriated by the gothic horror genre and made "acceptable" by it. He's cameoed in Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and Doctor Who in a way I can't see Charles Manson doing any time soon. Take a look at the two images on this page and see if you can spot the difference. I've found the pictures from the previous Serial Killer swap (there have been two. Why on earth has there been not one, but two?!) and they are quite beautiful as art.

But Jesu. Maybe I'll do my first kooky-collage, with all the art-bits I've been sent by the hockey soroity, and create something deeply ironic and brightly coloured.

I've updated my birthday list a bit. Expect stuff to keep crawling on there as I remember them

As a result of working hard on my film coursework, I am getting increasingly sickened with academia.

It's been exacerbated by a volume in the Maughan library with which I am feeding my obsession, while picking through on spoilerific eggeshells. An academic volume dedicated to that great and ground breaking author of challenging post-numismatic discourse of the neo-Prydonian School: Terry Nation. He created the Daleks, invented Blake's 7 and wrote a lot of ace stuff for both series. What fun! Paragraph two, for example, begins a discussion on how far you can identify a single author in a television series. A very valid point - but it scuppers it by starting in this manner:

"authorship has been associated wiht power since the beginning of history in the Judeo-crhistian worldview, since God was seen as the author of the world and of humankind"

We now have academic substantiation to deify both him and Holmes. The second section of the introduction is even funnier - entitled "popular television and 'quality' :

"We believe that the work credited to Nation as creator and/or writer fails to fit some of the traditional criteria of 'quality'. It is largely in familiar generic forms, was made on a comparativelyt low budgets, and is addressed to a mass audience. As Bernadette Casey et al (2002:209)"

Oh, do you think? I can't believe they need to footnote statements like "Doctor Who often had crappy special effects".

I'm still waiting for them to do a serious discussion of his characters and themes. Normally, I bow to the Obviously Superior Wisdom of academics. After all, they might just know more than me underneath the scrambled prose. Doctor Who is something I do know the odd thing about, and so the illusion is broken - especially, while analysing form, they insist on referring to "cliffhangers" as "suspended enigmas". It's a childish and simplistic exercise in stating the obvious - inferences anyone could make from watching a single half hour of Genesis of the Daleks. Identifying things like "the Doctor and the companion separate and get into trouble", or "Doctor Who has a mystery which is solved at the end", and then crossreferencing it via Surviors and Blake's 7 which - amazingly! - does the same things. Damn you, that's what drama does!

So I have lashed out with violence, and this is the unpleasant result.

It's become an Accepted Film Studies Fact, much like the oedipal reading of Hamlet, that Alien is
"about" the male fear of pregnancy. Personally, I always thought it was a monster movie with a killer xenomorph first, and Freudian discourse second. Caylpso argued that it is a strong underlying theme - after all, what I choose to see as "people's innate phobia of having something growing inside them" is effecively pregancy. But I still think the focus on it is ludicrous.

To counter this, Calypso and I have decided to make our own unique contribution to the wonderful world of Film Studies wank.

Because Reservoir Dogs is undeniably all about the male fear of menstruation. Spoilers in the next paragraph.

Think about it: when Mr Orange is shot by a woman, it is a form of symbolic castration as she transfers "the female problem" straight at his poor, male abdomen. It is signified by the extreme fetishation of blood, and represents the terror Man has for the bleeding Female. The introduction of a feminised element into the hypermasculine atmosphere is the pivot around which the plot turns. As the blood seeps out, so does the femininity - through which Mr White is transformed into protective mother figure, creating the mother/daughter dynamic: helping a child through a first period. While the characters are confident to anatomise women at a distance - Madonna's big dick, the story of the super-glued-prick e.t.c. - they are unable to cope with a female influence brought into their all-masculine sphere. It provokes violence, suspicion and disgust, and causes the men to become even more masculine archetypes. Particularly in the patriarchal figure of Mr Blonde (straight razor = masculine attribute = Great White Phallus*), who lashes out with penetrating stabs to protest against reproductive expression. Ultimately, the menstruating feminine must be neutralised for the safety of the group.

I hope we call all agree that was the largest pile of bollocks this blog will ever produce.

But what is literary theory but a method to read film through? A Marxist will see every novel as about revolutionary politics - a revisionist will say anything as long as it hasn't been said before. If you've just been dumped, then everything you read is about your ex. Opinions represent your pre-occupations more than anything true and immutable about the text.

And you can't deny that most of what I said in the analysis above was correct. Mr Orange's injury does raise the tension, his presence drives the plot and he is mostly responsible for the eventual outcome. Mr White does behave in a motherly manner, that razor is long and straight. Men are unnaturally skeeved by periods. And Reservoir Dogs is the man's movie which women seem to love - perhaps because they see their own biological dilemma reflected in it. Subconsciously, obviously.

The facts are all correct - it's just been peverted through the prism of a crazy point of view. And yet the more we argue it, the more genuine it seems - which to me exposes the big lie at the heart of academia. You can convince yourself of anything.

And this is why I hate the footnoting obsession. Surely the first priority should be the film, the second one's own opinions - and third, third should be the weight of academic deforestation? Unless you are writing a response, the film is your primary evidence and your reaction the only prism through which you can appreciate it. "Who's Afraid of Literary Theory?" claims that Literary Theory exists so you can understand books. If you didn't know what a hero or a three act structure was, you wouldn't understand the significance, much like the way Indian music sounds awful to people not used to rasas and such. In other words, you cannot judge a work except in the context of your own opinions. The film is the primary source; all opinions are secondary, but yours takes priority because it is only from your opinions that you can interpret and then form any stance on a work.

It's not that other people's opinions aren't interesting. But they are not important compared to the film itself, and equally irrelevant to your own opinions, and the opinion of Bob the bus driver. A applied to B creates theory C - then C applied to D creates theory E and so on, further and further away from the topic under discussion. The ultimate aim of any writing on a book or film should, surely, be to enhance the enjoyment of that book or film by looking at it through different perspectives, on different levels and through different themes. If an essay doesn't make me rethink the film on a second watch, then it has failed. The film-snobs equivalent of pointing out movie trivia.

In a way, I'm reminded of my views on the Doctor and Master. I've never pinned down the exact nature of their relationship and wouldn't want to. Instead, I toy with different theories. Are they just friends? Lovers? Brothers? Father/son, both ways around? Is the Master the Doctor's dark side? Each of those perspectives gives you a slighly different reading, different things to notice or interpret or to think about. Much like sifting through various essays. But I would never pick just one, because at the end of the day, I come back to the text - the text which is totally ambiguous. An academic would pick one, argue it, argue how that related with Cuban Nationalism, argue how Cuban Nationalism could be explained by the Time War, and would be discussing the Marxist dialetic inherent in the nominisation of "Doctor" by tea-time.

This afternoon I found the Maughan's violence-in-cinema section, and because I've an urge to rewatch Reservoir Dogs, hunted down some academia. It genuinely distressed me. I was upset me to read how Holdaway has the ability to distinguish between the reality and artifice of postmodernity; and how the naming scene ("Mr Pink is too close to Mr Pussy") exemplifies the notion of catachresis and mimics the naming of Adam by God - but the idea that the name Mr Black causes quarrels signifies that blackness = violence and signposts the crisis in white cultural identity.

"The characterisation of Joe Cabot as "The Thing" from the 1950s D.C. comic The Silver Surfer foregrounds Joe as a fantastical genre character - also bringing to mind the Lacanian "Thing of the Real", the material embodiment of the chaotic and lethal violence of the Real - which is what Joe fails to control through the imposition of the conventional codes of reality of the gangster."

See, the difference between that and the menstruation theory is that I know I'm being ridiculous. And I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Let's talk Tarantino's representations of "blackness". QT is an offensive individual who likes shocking people, writing about offensive individuals. He scatters his works with the "n-word" because he can get away with it and he thinks it's streetwise, cool and also funny. But many of his characters behave in a way which that author identifies as codified "black bodies". That's because Tarantino is interested in, and has pilfered from, what white academics call "black culture". END OF DEBATE. I don't see anyone proposing to write a paper about the high levels of violence in my writings - and I think that's because it is perfectly obvious that it is only there because I enjoy violent literature and films. It's not a protest against the patriarchal system, or a representation of buried race anxieties - it's because I like shooting people up.

Applying that sort of deep-level analysis is especially upsetting to me when referred via Reservoir Dogs - a film which is deliberately surface deep, deliberately nihilistic. It means nothing: life is cheap and mundane. All we know of their world is given to us in 90 minutes of real time - the message, such as there is one, is quick and meaningless. By the end of the movies, nothing has changed and it's not meant to. That's what the final juxtaposition of horrible tragedy and comedy music signifies - it's reminding the audience not to worry, because it signifies nothing.

There is interesting academia to be written on the film, but on the story and characters. The way they are set up, and placed in opposition, the information we are given. The intensely clever way Tarantino uses and witholds information from the viewer: that's what academia should be studying.

So, any comments to make on my Reservoir Dogs theory? I'm horribly tempted to write and footnote it properly, and try and get it accepted.

*Yes, this is a real academic term.

Today: film studies day!

I'm gonna try and get through a topic an hour - yes, I've not really done any work for it yet, but I do have an excuse. While revision is surely better than no revision, well, if I do no work for Entertainment Cultures I'm screwed. Whereas talking about film - that's what I do. I could pass and do OK if you'd asked me to sit this three weeks ago. So it's not exactly top priority compared to Entertainment Cultures which I could concieviably fail. Take a look at my schedule:

10.30 - genre

11.30 - stardom

12.30 - performance

1.30 - gender and sexuality

2.30 - women's cinema

3.30 - national/transnational cinema

Then I break to actually watch a film. I'm tossing up between L.A. Confidential, Morocco (Marlene Dietrich, for stardom), La Haine (for realism), Watermelon Woman (from women's cinema, but also cos the premise is fascinating) or All about my Mother (Spanish cinema, but I've been meaning to watch it for years). Swiss Cottage library will probably determine this.

I'm cutting auteur theory. We have to answer on two subjects, so I figure I can safely ignore one of the modules entirely. Our auteur was Lars Von Trier, and I don't really feel like studying him.

So tune in every few HOURS for an updated rant on each of the topics above.

Last night, I dreamed about Apocalypse Now and The A-Team, which was pleasanter than you'd expect. There's a damn great piece of scholarship which needs to be written about The A-Team...for now, I'm going to note three observations. 1) B.A.'s fear of flying is surely a post 'Nam thing? 2) Murdoch IS nuts. But not quite as nuts as he pretends to be. Some of his comments are rather Hamlet-esque. 3) You know, dumping Face and Amy together every single week is not going to work, because it's a Boys On A Mission/Buddy Movie show where women have no value, and romance does not exist except in a manly-platonic way within the team. So stop it!!

Any more comments before the hard slog begins? Not really, except Steve Hackett is causing me trouble. I've been listening to Please Don't Touch, which many regard as his finest album. I certainly like it a lot. The problem is "Icarus Ascending" and the title track. The album notes suggest:

'For maximum effect, this track should be listened to as loudly as possible with
as much treble and bass as your system can muster - not to be played to people
with heart conditions or those in severely hallucinogenous states of mind'.

Which is something I do, everytime I play the album and everyone is out of the house. But we've got a loud sound system, so generally I do have to sit in another room, which isn't so hardcore. This leaves me with problems listening to it in Hamstead Gaol, with us all packed in room by room by cell by cell by two by two, because I can't go up to 11. I can't even go to 5. But I'm only used to it played SO LOUD YOU CAN'T THINK ANYTHING; quietly, it's like a different song. Maybe I should start listening to a different Hackett album...interesting trivia, my guitar - Steve - is named after Mr Hackett. So now you know.

Chariot Racing

The Chariot race is a very old thing. Pottery evidence shows the Mycenaeans at it, and the first literary reference to it is at Patroclus' funeral in The Iliad - i.e. in the first work of literature bar none. In 680BC both 2 and 4 horse racing was made part of the Olympics.

For the Romans, the legendary origins were in the story of Romulus and the Sabines: in the year 753BC, he invited them to view chariot racing, and made off with their womenfolk while they were distracted. In most likelihood, however, they pinched it from the Etruscans, who in turn took it from the Greeks. Some evidence for this exists in the Monteleone Chariot, c. 530BC, discovered in an Etruscan chariot burial.

In Archaic Rome, the "ludi circenses", or chariot race, was linked to the gods - in particular Murcia, Consus and Sol - or festivals - the Consualia, Equirria, Equus October and Ludi Romani. It was introduced to the official festival calender in 194BC for the Ludi Megalenses, in honour of Cybele.

Like the gladiatorial games I'll be posting on next, chariot racing was adopted by Republican generals for triumphs. To put on chariot races would be seen as a demonstration of your wealth and power, and in turn Rome's dominance.

Then my notes are interrupted by a series of Watchmen sketches, of which only Rorschach is very sucessful. Dave Gibbons, artist, once claimed that "if you can draw a hat, you can draw Rorschach", and he's 100% correct. Ozymandius is getting there. There's also an adorable doodle of "Dusty" Miller from Guns of Navarone. That film makes me want to fic, or at any rate draw cute chibis of the characters....

But I;m sure I have more info on this somehwere...


Athletics and Olympics in Greece and Rome

I've discovered the next set of notes written upside down in a different notebook entirely - although its occaionally interrupted by a rant about why Oasis by Amanda Palmer should be played on the radio. Oh, it is a terrible thing to be distractable! Speaking of distraction, what I must not do is engage in any potentially upsetting fiction for the next five days - books, films, episodes, graphic novels. And as fiction tends to want to be dramatic and moving, this translates as: no fiction full stop. I don't want anything like that throwing me off!

The first Olympic games were supposedly held in 776BC. It was one of the four "panhellenic games", and these together made up the Olympiad cycle:

> the Olympics, the most important, held as today every four years for Zeus (at Elis)
> the Pythian Games - every four years, in honour of Apollo (at Delphi)
> the Nemean Games - every two years, for Zeus again (at Nemea)
> The Isthmian Games - every two years for Poseidon (at Corinth)

At the Pythian games, victors would recieve a crown of laurel, at the Olympics an olive branch, at the Isthmian a crown of pine, and at the Nemean, a crown of wild celery. I bet the deligates from the Praxis Range were pleased. All four were "stephanetic", which is to say winners would win the glory but no money. They tended to recieve a triumphal procession on returning home. People would come from all over the Greek world, although they tended to be rather wealthy. Nero bent the rule by competing himself.

Those were the biggies. There were smaller local festivals, such as the Panathaneia, which also took place every four years. It was begun in 566BC and modelled after the Olympics, but unlike the panhellenic games, these were all about the prizes - typically, success would be rewarded with an amphorae of olive oil. The winner of the chariot race would win 140 of the damn things - what on earth was he meant to do with it? How would he carry it? Most of the events were the same, but there were some for Athenians alone: the torch run, a beauty contest, mock cavalry battles and other odd stuff.

All this athletics was an important part of Greek identity. It was tied to the gods, and brought strong civic honour. The larger festivals separated Greek from the Other*, with its monumental architecture and the alien* idea of competing for honour. They were an important part of a good education, providing an outlet for aggression and preparation for war, and the gymnasium was a noted gathering place for intellectuals.

*i.e. barbarians, women, slaves, non-Greeks. Not the third mythic founder of Timelord society, along with Rassilon and Omega. I'm pretty sure at least...
** in the sense of "strange, weird, hard to understand", not "from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous". Just to clear that one up...

Like much of Greek culture, when the Romans saw what was going on they went wow and decided they wanted some too. I'm gonna pinch a quote from the New Number Two now, because it defines the relationship between Greece and Rome excellenl:

Greece and Rome. I always think of England and the USA. Much that the
Romans admire came out of Greece (architecture, theatre, etc) and posh Romans
accentuated their learning with Greek stuff. You often see token Greeks crop up
in Roman history (the Hugh Grant effect). As I recall Greeks were also regarded
as a bit effete and old-fashioned compared to the Robust, practical Romans. The
Romans oddly combined a stiff public morality with some quite beastly immorality
and a brutal approach to warfare (Bush Administration, anyone?). The Greeks had
an aloofness from the upstarts but were ultimately dominated by them (51st
State). Indeed the Romans did bigger, better, more technologically advanced than the Greeks. The Romans would have loved Disneyland (especially if more killing was
involved).

Roman participation in the games started in 228BC at the Isthmian games, but Augustus soon wanted his own, starting the Actian Games in 30/28BC and the Sebasta in 2BC/2AD. Nero adored Greece and took part in the '67 Olympic games as a singer and charioteer, did badly, but won lots of crowns anyway. He also set up the Quinquennial Neronia, which only ever happened twice, for singing, gymnastics and riding. Domitian set up the Agon Capitolinus also after the model of the Olympics, once every four years and with musical and athletic contests, and built a stadium and odeon on the campus martius for them.

Enough of the details, what went on at these things? Chief of all was the running:

• the stade, a 192m sprint
• the dioulos, a double-stade
• the dolichos, which was 20 or 24 stades long.
• the hoplitodromos , for which you had to wear armor
• the hippios, a mere 4 stades to run

After that came the wrestling, the first non-running event added in 708BC. This was known as the pale, and it was followed in 688BC by boxing (pyx or pygmachia). For this, they would wear hymantes, leather straps which would protect your fists, but really sting if you got hit by one.. The Romans used the cestus - same principle - except studded with glass or metal. Frankly, the only nice thing about all this brutality is that boxing and wrestling would be taking place naked...and then there was the pankration (648BC) for people who really didn't want to take prisoners. Faintly equivalent to modern mixed martial arts, it combined wrestling and boxing, and almost anything goes - except eye-gouging and biting. That's nice to know. For a moment I was worried. It was bloody and vicious, and I'm amused to see that when the Olympics were revived, the Cardinal of Lyon stated "we reinstate all events - except the pankration".

Pausanias - Greek travel-writer and forerunner of Michael Palin - described an incident at the Nemian Games. Brace yourselves. Damoxenos of Syracuse thumps Creugas under the rib cage, penetrates the intestinal cavity then yanks out his intestines, at which point Creugas died on the spot. Ah, but there's a happy ending: Damoxenos was disqualified, and a statue raised to Creugas as rightful victor. Thank goodness for that! For a moment, I was worried!

Then there was the chariot racing, as disussed above a bit, and the Pentathlon as today. Prizes were soley glory, and carved victory wreaths have been found on sculpture and reliefs. Single women were allowed to watch, but not take part, except for the chariot racing. The award for a winning chariot went to the owner of the horses, not the actual rider, and a Spartan princess once won in this manner. The Heraia was a female series of games held at Olympia, although it's hard to get information about exactly how that worked. Nice girls were not encouraged to be athletic, while Spartan women were all for it.

Athletics spread out in the Roman empire, although not always enthusiastically. They were seen as unacceptable all over the place, on the grounds of the nudity, or the unpatriotic Greekness of it all. But we have evidence that it did spread from material cultures, from the authors Philostratus and Pausanias, and athletes such as Oxhyrnchus. Some places even created their own festivals - i.e. the Isolympic and Isopythion in Ephesus.

It always had greater popularity in the east than west - partly due to the "second sophistic", a boom of writers celebrating Greek identity, and partly due to the sheer joy of eurgetism.

The last lesson of the term was a happy overview of all we hadn't talked about yet. Drama and pantomime were far from the only entertainments available to the Greeks. If that was the BBC prestege drama, then there was also a motley collection of reality TV for the masses - in other words, the Greek popular culture.


Jugglers, sword swallowers, knife throwers, acrobats, balancers, harpists, rope-walkers, clowns, boxers, stilt-walkers, magicians, puppeteers...


None of these ever achieved the respectability of tragedy, which is a shame because I think this all seems pretty fun. Unsuprisingly, the intellectuals divided legitimate entertainment, of taste, refinement, rational - from the unworthy crowd pandering, based in spectacle and show. Athenaeus complained that "the Greeks came to exteem vulgar skill of hand very highly, more than the ides of the cultivated intellect", and that they had "yielded to Potheinus the marionette-player the very stage on which Euripides and his contemporaries performed their inspired plays". It was sneered at as sensual, and senseless: "no significant contribution to make to the entertainment of the soul, because they have no meaning and no rational content, and cannot speak to us".



On some level, maybe they had a point. Horace complained about a performance where the actor "only needs to stand on the stage and hands start to clap", as the audience applause the richness of his dress, and ignore the words in favour of the spectacle of elephants. Seneca even paniced that their whole culture was threatened: "so many schools of philosophy are dying without a sucessor...but for pantomime, their arts there are many students and many teachers!"


This snobbery was rife in public life. A few posts back I mentioned that actors would perform in private contexts. Juvenal describes Spanish floor shows, then claims "you won't find frivolities like that in my humble home!", while Pliny - with his studied attitude to everything - asks "let us then be tolerant of other people's pleasures so as to win indulgence for our own". But only after clearly pointing out that he doesn't enjoy "a mime's impudence or a clown's folly".


Pliny was the original blogger, publishing his letters that he might air his views on pretty much everything. Reading a lot of them is funny, because of the carefulness of his style.


So what was considered legitimate by the high-brow, outside of drama? Supereducated orators who would improvise a speech, on Athenian history or on myths, in response to requests from the audience. Sounds like something I could do, actually. They would speak as a character, and was praised as entertainment for the brain. Did it catch on? Well it couldn't compete with the low-brow stuff, probably due to being really boring. So they pinched tricks from the enemy, made sure to dress well and sound impressive. Even serious historians such as Themistius liked to scorn the way these display orators would be "adorned in gold and purple, exuding the smell of perfumes and painted and rubbed with cosmetics all over, and crowned with garlands of flowers".

Lucian argued that pantomime could be reclaimed for the highbrow crowd, and that it was to the masses what tragic drama was to them. Nice try, Lucy.

So, to sum up Greek entertainment

The highest form of entertainment was drama, specifically tragedy. Initially, this was in the control of the city and part of the religious calendar: The City Dionysia, the smaller Lenaia and then the Dionysia in the fields. This gradually seeped out into a national obsession, helped by the invention of actors. Early drama was in the control of a single poet, who wrote, performed and directed. As up to three actors were allocated by the archon, the actor could exist separately as a career and gain autonomy from the poets, able to win their own awards and create their own repetoires.

Greek audiences expected the same of their actors as a modern audience, more or less. They liked to be moved, they liked realism (arguably not the same as we'd use the term). Plays were seen as didactic. In addition, they had the concept of "catharsis", or purging unhappiness through completion.

Pantomime dancing involved a single masked dancer, portraying a whole myth. It was both criticised and praised for it's femininity. Some people felt threatened by the genderbending, others regarded it as its greatest triumph.

There was a lot of regular entertainment around too, but this was scorned by intellectuals.

Next up: the Romans. Oh, no pansy flutes and womanliness for them...

The word "pantomime" comes from the lovely Greek word mimeisthai, he who imitates everything. Greek pantomime was effectively this balletic peformance. A single masked male dancer, who would be accompanied by music and a singing chorus, would perform every role in a mythic story. The chorus would supply the narrative, while the dancer remained silent. There is occasional evidence to suggest historic topics were also covered, but presumably not as often. This dancer would present the story in sequence, from the point of view of whichever character he was currently enacting - denoting the change by a change of mask. They would whirl around - "continuity of many pirouettes" - then stop, and hold those beautiful poises like figures in a painting.

Most sources are problematic: diehard fans are as reliable as my defence of Doctor Who, while the early Church went in the opposite direction with their criticism. Therefore we know little for certain about its slow development or earliest emergance.

For example, all this nancing about would naturally require the dancer to impersonate female roles as well as male -sexus arte mutetur, to modify his sex by means of his art, as St. Cyprian puts it. Especially as love stories were very popular, especially those of the gods, and especially those of Zeus. You can imagine that all this made the Church fathers very unhappy, both the cross-dressing and the depictions of what Zeus got up to.

What we do know is that it seemed to reach it's peak in the 2nd century AD. It was seen as a sort of sucessor to tragedy - some inscriptions describe the pantomimos as "actor of tragic rhythmic movement", and the genre of pantomime as tragike orchesis, "tragic dancing".

Yet even more than the Greek drama, it's hard to discuss or judge pantomime dancing as it existed without scripts. For example, how formalised was it as an art? Was it accessable to all, or did you need to understand the conventions to follow it? An example of the fandom war mentioned above. Lucian claims it was so clear, an ambassador requested a dancer as an interpreter: "this man will interpret everything for me by signs". And St Augustine, noted miseryguts, recalls that "if someone comes to the theatre uninitiated into such trifles, unless someone else enlightens him as to what the dancer's movements signify, he gives his whole attention in vain".

They are not necessarily opposing views. Pantomime dancing had a Hollywood popularity - could it really be so obscure? Maybe, much like Doctor Who, could it have developed its own traditions while still appealing to the masses? It doesn't wholly matter whether or not viewers recognise the Genesis of the Daleks reference in Journey's End, it's just an added extra for people who were paying attention.

We do know more about the training of dancers. Libanius and Lucian both speak about the right body being required - unsuprisingly, fairly tall, well proportioned, "a straight neck and a look which is not furtive, and fingers naturally well formed, and in a word beauty, which is an essential attribute". Yummy. They were trained in gymnastics, so their bodies were flexible and supple. Libanius describes a rather barbaric practice, where a dancer would be trained to make a contortionist-style ring with his body, which would then be rolled as you would a hoop with a stick. Apparently, it doesn't do any harm. Because apparently, their bodies become "like wax".

The funny thing is, next week's lesson answers perhaps the most obvious question about pantomime dancing: um, wasn't this all a little bit girly.

Unsuprisingly, the answer to this is yes: the Greek ideal was straightness (literally), and a man would not bend his legs, or hips or neck. These things were seen as effeminate, and so all this pansying on stage, "playing the wanton on stage with dainty clothing and bawdy songs and imitate amourous little women", was not taken too kindly by many audience members. Most hardcore opposition was focused on the gender issue, and the unvoiced fear that this emasculating behaviour might be contageous. This would be funny, were it not still true in the modern world. A terrifying amount of people are alarmed now as then by the idea of "breaking up their nature in tandem with the bending of their limbs: men, women, effeminate males, frankly speaking, neither male nor female..."

This is another topic on which we have no objective accounts - yet there are some facts beyond dispute. For fans of the pantomime, the female roles were the most beloved, especially those in which they were in love and lust. Myths tended to be told from a female perspective - i.e., you rarely hear of the triumphs of Apollo, compared to the ubiquity of Daphne.

These were the ones which best demonstrated the male dancer's skill in imitation, that they could actually convince "not that he is in the process of imitating others, but that he really is by nature the object of his imitation". Like the earlier posts on Greek tragic (method) actors, the joy was to see the actor become the role. Lucian and Arnobius both praise dancers especially for depicting "the birth-pangs of Leto" and "the labour of Alcmene". O-kay...

This female acting was supposedly very convincing - part of the reason why the macho men of Greece were so alarmed by the idea. St Cyprian, outraged, describes:

"Men are emasculated, the entire honour and vigour of the male gender is
softened up because of the dishonour of a sinewless body, and whoever goes to
greater lengths in order to break down virility into womanishness gives the
greatest pleasure at this point"

And indeed, there is a level at which all this playing around with gender was very erotic indeed. Ovid claims that the actor "teaches you with his art how alluring is the thing that you must guard against", and that the actor mimicing love also "inflicts the wounds of love" on his audience. Oh, I can see why the Church fathers were scared. As mentioned often before, the topic on Greek/Roman entertainment struck me most for it's modernity. Nothing has changed. Actors are powerful, rich, and use their positions in world affairs. Audiences love them for their convincing transformations, and enjoy being made to cry by drama. And the manly men of the human race has always terrified by the idea of men in dresses.

“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?” ~ Hamlet, Hamlet

Today, we will talk about pity and fear, the two aims of the Greek dramatist. And another exercise in creepy paralells to modern life. Notes on my worksheet indicate that this lesson was on the morning after the Tennant departure announcement, so you'll understand a whole hour on the pleasures of being sad at fiction struck a very loud chord.

The Greek audience drew chief pleasure from sympathy with characters, who would all be drawn from myth. They typically got very involved, and there are many sources indicating the ultimate joy for both actors and audiences would be to end up in tears. “In the midst of being joyful they weep” as Plato put it in one example.

There is an importance to the fiction element. The play Capture of Miletus, based on contemporary events, also made the entire audience cry - and was banned for being too close to home.

This pleasure in crying was apparently the chief point of theatre. St Augustine wrote about Warriors of the Deep, when he discussed Peter Davison’s final season* in his Confessions:

“what is the reason that a spectator desires to be made sad when he beholds
doleful and tragic scenes which he himself could not endure to suffer? Yet for
all that, he desires to experience sorrow from such spectacles and this sorrow
becomes his pleasure. What is all this but a strange insanity?”

As myths were seen as the distillation of human nature, the other aim of Greek drama was as cautionary tales. Several lines from Aristophanes in Frogs – “young children have a teacher who guides them, adults have poets” “we make people better members of their communities”, “in the hope of inspiring every man in the citizen-body to measure up to their standard every time he hears the sound of the trumpet”. “taught them always to be eager to defeat their opponents”

And the opposite, as Aristophanes discusses the real life implications of Tarantino's violent and immoral movies in real life**, “what evils is he not responsible for?”

Greek dramatists often pointed out the moral or didactic content of their plays. Sophocles' Philoctetes asks the audience:

"Take pity on me! Look how men live, always precariously balanced between
good and bad fortune. If you are out of trouble, watch for danger. And when you
live well, then consider the most your life, lest ruin takes it unawares!"

And that's far from the only example. Myths tend to depict the mutability of human fate and mortal vulnerability. A slightly warped example of this is the idea of drama as schadenfreude. Timocles describes it in Women in the Dionysia:

"the man who is poor finds Telephus to be even poorer than himself and so bears
his own poverty more easily...Someone's child has died - Niobe is a comfort. The
lame sees Philoctites, an old man in misfortune learns about Oineus; so neach
one, having learnt of all the greater misfortunes having befallen others,
laments his own lot the less."

Or Libanus, on Behalf of the Dancers, claims powerfully:

"Do you want to learn how you will have the strength to lift up a soul plunged in
grief and make it feel easier? Take a man deprived of his dear ones, or his
money, or wantonly insulted and beaten., and bring him to the theatre; show him,
through the dancer, ancient kingdoms destroyed, and you will lift him up."

Cute theory, but I'm not sure this works. Tends to make me feel even more wretched.

Generally, the chorus would deliver this exposition. A little on the chorus, who was there to dance and sing between scenes. But literally placed between the stage and audience, their role was to tell the audience how to react: a little like those "applause!" and "boo!" cards.

Pity mixed with fear governed the audience - in short, the Athenians were upset by the image and idea of characters suffering, and it might do you well to notice that nothing has changed in a millenia. Aristotle believes on this front that pity for suffering comes from our fear that it will happen to us. At the time, my notes read "I disagree with this". In the cold light of day, however, I think the basic root of sympathy is in selfishness.

All this weeping and terror lead to the basic objective of tragedy: catharsis. A hard to translate concept, which approximates a purging or purification through fear and pity. Maybe it's like when you've been worrying so much and sob, and when you stop you feel fine.

At this point, I stopped taking notes. It was a bad day.

*not technically true.
** also not exactly correct