tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-849450810600877412024-02-08T13:30:20.319+00:00A Bang and a Whimperlb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-85292699793959990892012-06-04T17:04:00.004+01:002012-06-04T17:04:47.490+01:00Terrible user experience is still terrible; bears still at large in woodsUser experience is something I didn't care much about until I started working at a software company. Or, rather, it was something I cared about a lot, I just didn't have a useful framework through which to articulate how I felt about it. I found it just as frustrating as I do now when things weren't well-designed for humans to use, but I had no idea that there was a name for it, or indeed an entire profession built around trying to make the aforementioned things less gash to use.<br />
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In the last year, after meeting plenty of people who are passionate about this kind of thing, I've found myself noticing it more and more. It doesn't help that the people I know who are passionate about UX are also pretty good at making things which aren't horrible to use - if anything, this makes the many things I encounter which are really badly-designed even harder to tolerate. It's hard to make things incredibly easy to use, sure. But it isn't hard to make them even slightly less bad. So why on earth are so many things so much harder to use than they need to be?<br />
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Yesterday, I went to the Post Office to renew my passport. It shouldn't surprise me when anything even closely affiliated with Royal Mail results in a generally horrible experience - in less than a week, it'll be a year since I quit my awful job there and moved back to Cambridge, but the scars from that job still smart when I prod them. By going to the Post Office, for example.<br />
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The Cambridge central Post Office on St Andrew's Street has done away with the familiar queues common to most Post Offices up and down this fine island nation of ours, in favour of a ticketing system. Like a meat counter. Or Argos. Instead of a long queue of unhappy-looking people, the central area of the Post Office has a few banks of uncomfortable seats, around which the unhappy-looking people swarm. It's kind of a good idea, in that if you're not paranoid about losing your place, and are fairly sure of the speed at which each query is being processed (though there's no way of telling this), you could conceivably wander off somewhere else and drink a small coffee or look at all the lovely expensive things in John Lewis.<br />
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It's not perfect, but it's meant to be an improvement on the old queue system, and in some ways it almost is - the ticket told me that there were eleven people ahead of me, but it didn't seem like very long before my number was called. The new system also allows you to choose in advance what kind of service you require (counter services, travel services, etc.), presumably in an attempt to triage your needs & assign you to the right area ahead of time. It's a good idea, and it (subjectively) seemed to cut down on waiting time.<br />
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What was really, really frustrating about the experience was the ticketing machine itself. It's a red box with a screen which comes up to about waist height, and is maybe two metres inside the door. On the screen are a number of options, including Counter Services, Travel Services and Identity Services. There were two more, but I can't remember what they were.<br />
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Problem #1: nowhere inside the Post Office (or on the machine itself, or anywhere on the screen) was there a sign saying anything like, "We have a new ticketing system; you have to take a ticket now. This is the ticket machine." Maybe they had signs like that for the first few months, and I just don't go to the Post Office often enough. But you'd think there's be some kind of instruction. I consider myself a reasonably smart person, and it took me a good thirty seconds or so after walking into the building to realise that a) there was now a ticketing system in place and b) I had to take a ticket from the red machine in front of me. Demographically, I'm going to hypothesise that most people who go into the Post Office building itself are not people like me. People my age and with my familiarity with technology don't go to the Post Office unless they absolutely have to. I know I don't. And the people who do go to the Post Office are going to be, on the whole, older and less familiar with technology than I am. They're the kind of people who will often need detailed instructions for doing computer-related tasks which I do automatically, but there were no instructions at all in the Post Office, and I was stumped for a little while.<br />
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Problem #2: the little red machine's screen had five options, under headings like Counter Services and Identity Services. These five buttons, with their headings, were literally the only things on the screen. There was no help button, no information button, no further explanation of the different headings and what they encompassed. I wanted to renew my passport, so I took a ticket for Counter Services. Then I looked at the list again, and thought that passport renewals might actually fall under Identity Services. Passports are a form of identification, right? So I took a ticket for that as well, happy that the number of people ahead of me was much shorter for Identity Services than for Counter Services.<br />
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Then a Post Office worker came and stood next to the machine, where she was apparently supposed to be permanently stationed. She'd been distracted by helping someone else use the self-service stamp machine (which probably also has horrendous user experience issues). Not feeling particularly confident about the choice[s] of tickets I'd made, I said, "Passport renewals come under Identity Services, right?" The lady shook her head. "No," she said. "That's Counter Services." She went to get me a Counter Services ticket from the machine. I grinned, and brandished the first ticket I'd taken.<br />
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And then I kind of lost it a little tiny bit, and did something which I don't usually do in public. I tend to try not to become belligerent in these situations, as it rarely helps, but I decided to say something for once.<br />
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"You know, the machine could really do with making the distinction clearer," I said. "It's not easy to tell which option you need."<br />
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The Post Office lady gave me a patronising look.<br />
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"That's what I'm here for," she said contemptuously.<br />
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There were a lot of things I wanted to say at that point. A lot of things I wish I'd said, if I hadn't lost my nerve out of sheer surprise at the ludicrousness of the situation.<br />
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"But you weren't here; you were fannying around with the equally ill-designed stamp machine," springs to mind.<br />
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More than anything, I wish I'd called her out on her attitude. Not the patronising element, though that wasn't great customer service (a different rant for another day). The point I wish I'd made, and which has been haunting me ever since, is that <i>she shouldn't need to stand there all day</i>. If the user experience of the ticketing machine were even a little better, there would be no need to pay someone to stand next to it all day telling people how to use it. If it had a help screen, or an information screen, or an explanation of what all the different options mean - even if it had a little poster stuck to the front or the top of it outlining that Identity Services does not cover passport renewal - then my experience as a user would have been far better. I would not, for example, be ranting about it on the Internet. They could pay the lady to stand by the stamp machine instead, and patronise people over there.<br />
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The idea - the sheer idea - that the best workaround for an ill-designed user interface was to <i>employ a human to show people how to use it</i> is incredibly backwards. And I shouldn't be surprised or horrified really. This is, after all, the Post Office we're talking about. But I can't quite let it go.<br />
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I'm not saying that I expect world-class usability, though (for an interface which is going to be heavily used be people with much less technological familiarity than the average person who encounters any given UI) world-class usability wouldn't go amiss. Even average usability would have been a improvement. I work in the tech sector, I grew up using computers, and I was stumped by this piece of shit.<br />
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And I have no idea how we even begin to go about sorting it out. As long as people don't care about user design and usability, as long as it's not anyone's priority or budgeted for, as long as it's easier to pay a human to explain an interface than it is to pay a UX designer to make the interface better*, this problem is going to keep on popping up everywhere. And nowhere more than in places - like the Post Office - where usability couldn't be more important based on user demographic. It makes me very angry that things like this happen, and I don't have an easy suggestion for a fix. Just a lot of rage.<br />
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*This is analogous with the "give a man a fish" ad campaign that Oxfam used to run back in the 90s, though no one seems to have noticed yet.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-86024101661104947832012-03-20T22:34:00.000+00:002012-03-20T22:34:05.250+00:00Owning the balance we chooseThis week, via the lovely <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/finiteattention">Chris Atherton</a> and <a href="http://noshoku.net/bin/2012/balanced-people-and-four-burners">this</a> blog post, I came across <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_sedaris">David Sedaris'</a> theory of four burners, as on a stove:<br />
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"One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist...[is] that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two."<br />
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It's an interesting model for taking stock of one's life and priorities, and the concept - that at least one and possibly more of what are traditionally considered the important areas of life will need to be neglected in order for a person to be successful - is a familiar one. Women aren't the only people who have been sold the dream of having it all; increasingly, the promise of modern life is one of plenty and abundance in all four of the areas Sedaris conceptualises as burners. We can have great careers, life-affirming friendships, the kind of family life we've always dreamed of and enjoy wonderful, glowing health throughout as we hurtle through the longest life expectancy of any human generation.</div>
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Screw that. Anyone who's tried to keep each of those plates spinning, or burners burning, can tell you quite plainly that it's not as simple as working hard enough at every individual aspect, or just wanting really badly for all of them to go in your favour. Balance can be achieved, but there's always a cost. And it's not always as dramatic as cutting off an entire burner, but, to have all four even close to perfect, a fair amount of compromise is needed in each. </div>
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When I read of the burners theory, my first reaction was surprise. I'm happy with my life, and my initial thought was that this was because I'd managed to strike a good balance between the four burners.</div>
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Then I thought about it a little harder - not much harder at all, really, just for more than three seconds. And it dawned on me, like a cold and unwelcome sweat, that I could immediately and assuredly name which two burners I neglect so that the other two have a chance to flourish. I'm not going to name my two; that's not the point of this. But I knew, and I did not much like my answer, because it was heartless and narcissistic and unhesitatingly certain.</div>
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Luckily, I kept on thinking about it. And I don't think the situation is anywhere near as dire as I had begun to fear it was. The problem with the metaphor of the burners, useful as it is for a surface evaluation of priorities and as a way to conceptualise compromise, is that it's all-or-nothing, and doesn't really encompass the subtleties and nuances of the thing it sets out to describe. </div>
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All of the options, when thought of in terms of being "cut off", are too extreme. They're an appeal to emotion - they conjure images of people whose health fails at the expense of everything else. People who have great friends, fulfilling careers and who are healthy, but who go home at night to an empty house. People who have loving families and who will live well into their eighties, but who have no friends and a dead-end menial job. Think about your burners, especially the one(s) you habitually neglect in favour of the others. Then imagine your future - yourself in twenty or thirty years - if you continue neglecting these aspects of your life. It's a frightening thought, isn't it? Ending up old and wealthy but utterly alone because you didn't invest enough time in friends and family when you were younger. Dying slowly of something preventable because you thought there would be plenty of time to eat better or quit smoking after your kids had left home and you'd retired. Not a single choice, in this game that each one of us is playing, looks like a winner. </div>
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I don't think it's as bad as that, though. After spending some time moping about my own particular choices and priorities, and the miserable dotage I was afraid they were slowly dooming me to, I started to see the idea of the burners in a different light. I came back to my initial reaction - that I was happy, in total, with my life as it stood. That it felt as though I had the balance right, even though I could see clearly that my choices and actions in terms of these four life areas were anything but even-keeled. And it occurred to me that our balance - and with it our happiness - is what we make of it. </div>
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There are even get-out-of-jail-free cards in this game; the great thing about thinking of these parts of your life as stove burners is that you can choose to lavish attention on a neglected part in the short term, or in the future, and make small steps towards evening out the balance. If even is you want. </div>
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I'm happy with my life because what I make of it is what I choose to make. I felt heartless when I thought about the things I currently invest less into, because thinking about the concept of burners made me more aware of the unconscious choices I make, and when I became conscious of these choices, it seemed unconscionable that I should continue to make them. People who neglect x, or so I have been conditioned to believe, are not good people.</div>
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The more I thought about it, though, the more it seemed as though working harder at the areas I was so ashamed of neglecting would begin to suffocate me. I may not give as much time or attention to them as I feel I ought to, or as I should in order to be evenly balanced, but I give them as much as I can, and the results feel comfortable and fit in well with the way I live my life.</div>
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There is no way to burn all four burners on full and end up with a good dinner. Balance - total balance - is elusive. It may not ever be attainable. What is attainable, though, is a balance that you, personally, feel happy with. That is what I have, and I refuse to be ashamed. If everyone's neglecting something, we may as well all own our neglect.</div>
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I'm not saying you should stop calling your mother entirely, or that you should skip work tomorrow and go to the movies, or that chain-smoking a pack of Bensons is the best way to spend your evening. But don't feel too guilty about what you think you ought to be doing - if you're happy with how you've struck your balance, things will almost certainly work out just fine.</div>
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<br /></div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-25464826920095392482012-03-17T15:35:00.002+00:002012-03-17T15:35:59.930+00:00Why I secretly love commutingCommuting is the scourge of the modern age, right? Even if you're lucky enough to have a job you don't hate going to every day, the commute to and from it is nothing but a pain in the ass. By car, by bus, by train, by foot, by ferry, by bike. It adds up. Unless you buy or rent a place that's right on the doorstep of your office, you're going to be spending some quality time every morning and evening with your own thoughts and as many as a thousand other humans (the average 1973-stock Piccadilly Line train has a maximum capacity of 1238 people), none of whom really want to be there.<br />
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Except me. I live exactly 3.5 miles away from my office, and I take the bus. This 3.5 mile journey takes around 40 minutes in the morning and usually longer in the evening, depending on how late the bus service is running and when I end up leaving the office. I've been doing this bus journey for about eight months now, and I thought I hated it. Thought I hated it to the extent that I spent a lot of time plotting how to buy a car with no money. Yes, that's a euphemism for stealing. Partly because I miss driving now that I no longer live in Plymouth. Partly because owning and financing an automobile would allow me tick off another item on the list entitled, 'Adulthood'. And partly because it would at least halve my travel time every day.<br />
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The one thing I thought the bus had going for it over and above driving was the fact that a bus journey, although it throws me into much closer contact than I'd like with forty-odd strangers (some of whom smell noticeably bad, or have a habit of talking to me even when I put up my "I want to pretend that this very public space is in fact intensely private" guard, or like to sit at the back of the bus rapping along to violent, angry music), gives me a good hour and a half of daily reading time. My last job, though I drove to and from it, included 70 minutes of mandatory breaks every day, which was when I <a href="http://abangandawhimper.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_01_archive.html">got my reading done</a>.<br />
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But reading time wasn't enough to sell the bus to me. I dreamt of being able to leave the office whenever I liked, getting into a car and going straight home. No more negotiating pedestrian crossings with traffic light patterns weighted heavily in favour of motorists. No more standing around for twenty minutes because the driver of the previous bus was too impatient to wait and the next one is late. Minimal exposure to inclement weather. Car ownership was the stuff of dreams.<br />
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Now, though, I'm not so sure. I had the tiniest of revelations on the walk to the bus stop after work last night. Like the road to Damascus, except a lot more urban, and I didn't have to change my name.<br />
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My commuting time is also my thinking time. A significant proportion of the ideas I have, good and bad - short stories, plot twists, character development, terrible puns, blog posts - occur to me during the time I spend travelling. The same thing happened when I drove to work at the beginning of last year. I was working on a series of poems with very tight meter, and most of the metrical improvements I made originally came to me while I was driving.<br />
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When I read on the bus, especially in the morning, I'm usually only half-reading (unless the book is particularly engrossing). I put the book down a lot to think. Commuting is just about the only time I'm truly alone with my thoughts. If I spend the evening alone, I'm usually jacked into my laptop with music on; any potential thought-space is crowded with verbal and aural information. The rest of my time involves at least some degree of social exchange, which (as anyone who saw <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/13/why-the-world-needs-introverts">the media fuss about introversion</a> this week could tell you) is both rewarding and exhausting. The commute is the downtime that I need, and it's the time I spend thinking about everything beyond the details that preoccupy most of my day. If I had to describe the last five or six times I thought about big-picture stuff - the huge, pressing questions that used to entrance me for hours at a time when I was younger - I'd bet you decent money that I was somewhere between Mill Road and Milton Road, on a bus.<br />
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The cliché of people having their best ideas in the shower is not as silly as it sounds - showering, along with commuting, is one of the few everyday experiences which involves minimal social stimulus. And it's the time that's freest of social stimulus which is the most rewardingly ruminative.<br />
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The travel time that I wanted to slash in half with my very own Model T Ford is, it turns out, incredibly precious to me. It's when I do the wondering and reflecting that used to take up most of my thought-time as a child, but which has slowly been encroached upon by the massive shift in the way that I live now. I hated the two long bus journeys it took to get to secondary school, because at that point I had more than enough thinking time. I was constantly looking for ways to get outside of my own head. But now, although bus travel has become no less frustrating since I left school, it's also one of the few chances I have to do some proper thinking.<br />
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If you're anything like me, you probably think you hate your commute. It's the insulation on either side of the working day that cuts into your precious free time. But maybe - just maybe - it's also the best opportunity you have each day to do the thinking that gets marginalised by the rest of your life. And, for that reason, commuting perhaps deserves a better reputation than it has.<br />
<br />lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-74368915676119719552012-03-08T00:36:00.000+00:002012-03-08T00:36:18.426+00:00The best thing I read this week......had some stiff competition. I finished <i>Consider the Lobster</i> and read <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>, both of which have ended up pretty high on my "best things I have read so far this year" list. But the best thing I read this week was not fiction or literary non-fiction. It was a very short ebook by <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/alightheart">Andrew Lightheart</a> which has the potential to be game-changing for me in a very important way.<br />
<br />Andrew's current focus can be found at <a href="http://apeacefulresolution.com/">apeacefulresolution.com</a>, on the topic of difficult conversations and how to deal with them. I was intrigued by a blog post on the site which someone linked to from Twitter, and even more intrigued by the existence of the e-book - so much so that I did what I never do, and signed up to a newsletter. With my work email address and everything. I have a couple of dirty email addresses (mostly spam and newsletters, nothing important likely to come through them), one (my gmail) which is a balance of clean and dirty, and my work email, which I like to keep cleaner than clean (except in terms of language and content, of course). Any kind of syndicated email publication is anathemic to my own conception of clean email, so I tend to sign up for newsletters using one of my dirty email addresses and then never read them. But the blog posts I read over at A Peaceful Resolution looked interesting (and visually clean) enough that I didn't think the newsletter was going to annoy me, so I took the potentially-besmirching plunge and signed up with my work account.<br />
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My reward for doing so was the ebook which I have already mentioned, the BTIRTW of this post's title. Now, I imagine that a large part of A Peaceful Resolution's target audience is people who have just come to the realisation that they need to have a difficult conversation (defined as "any interaction that isn't totally straightforward", usually because there are a lot of emotions in play) and, worse, that they are desperately ill-equipped to do so. People with an acute case of difficult conversation syndrome who are looking for topical relief. When I came to the site, it was not as one of them. That's not to say that I never have difficult conversations. They crop up more often than I'd like, and usually when I'm least expecting them. And some important and necessary conversations are always going to be difficult. Therapy, for example, is one long difficult conversation. But (as is the case in terms of conflict resolution with other people as well as within the self) there are times when it's got to be had. No, I did not go to APR because I wanted the eponymous peaceful resolution for some specific conflict. I went there by accident, but when I did, it became clear that there was a lot of stuff worth sticking around for.<br />
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The first weekly email I got after signing up contained not merely discursion, but also a task. A simple task, but one which I hadn't done before. It outlined the concept of the emotional heatmap, with a four-stage scale encompassing green (emotional wellbeing & general good feeling), low amber (niggling anxiety & emotional discomfort), high amber (clenched, high-intensity negative feeling) and red (outright rage or grief), and theorised that most of us spend most of our time shuttling between the ambers - true green and true red are rare. The task was to spend the rest of the day mindful of the heatmap, and to take into account the shifts in feeling which occur during the day.<br />
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Think about how you felt on a particular day and you'll probably pick one static feeling which characterises the whole of that day for you. "On Monday I was really happy because I had a really nice date with x", or "Thursday was a total write-off; I couldn't concentrate at work and went home with a terrible headache." The most overwhelming of the emotions experienced on any one day seems to paint itself into the cracks of time and colour entire days, but, from hour to hour and minute to minute, the reality of human experience is not that clear-cut. I had some idea that this was the case, but didn't realise the full extent of it until I tried thinking about how I was feeling in terms of the emotional heatmap. It turned out, on the day I tried it, that I was all over the place - from solidly in the green to right up at the top of high amber, not-sure-I-can-keep-this-in-check style emotional intensity. Admittedly, it was an outlier of a day because of all kinds of non-typical stuff I had going on. But if I hadn't been bearing the heatmap in mind, and you'd asked me today how Monday had gone, I would probably have said that it was mostly terrible but got slightly better towards the end. Which, based on what being mindful of how I was feeling brought to light, would not even begin to cover all of the places my feelings were going over the course of one afternoon.*<br />
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Already, I was impressed with APR - I'd received an email newsletter which didn't annoy me at all in terms of formatting or tone, and which had contained a task that I found both fascinating and useful. Double win. And then I read the ebook I'd received upon signing up for the newsletter. It was incredibly simple and incredibly effective.<br />
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The ebook, <i>Stop the Dread!</i>, is an 11-step pointer in the direction of difficult conversations. It lays the groundwork which needs to be done before having the conversation itself. All 11 tips are interesting, and some are truly inspired. The best and simplest deal with the kinds of cognitive biases which affect the way we think every day - things like trying to predict how the other person in the conversation is going to react, or being sure of what they think, when really we can't know anything beyond what we can perceive and what they tell us. And the reminder that what you do and what you say is in your control, but, beyond that, not a lot else is - you can't control what the other person does or says or thinks, or how they react. It's really simple stuff, but it's stuff that I have an enormous tendency to forget, especially when emotion triumphs reason (as it so often does in highly-charged situations).<br />
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I'm not a big believer in self-help or personal change, especially not through a weekly email digest or thought for the week format. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that the majority of these self-help- and business help-style newsletters are doing anything more than making money and paying lip service to common sense. The stuff being covered on APR <i>should</i> be common sense, but so often, in the heat of the moment, it isn't. We all lose sight of things, lose sight of ourselves and our control and our reason when we're wound up about or wounded by something. <i>Stop the Dread!</i> is simple, effective mindfulness at its very best; the stuff it contains can be applied to any difficult conversation, conflict or interaction, from medicine to workplace to romance. I recommend you <a href="http://www.apeacefulresolution.com/signuphere/">sign up</a> to the newsletter and read the ebook right now. Go on. It's awesome.<br />
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*Side note: this is the problem I have with every kind of mood-tracking software/app that I've tried - none of them go into enough detail, either in terms of timeframe or in terms of emotional intensity. A graph which is minute-by-minute on the x-axis and able to be distinct and precise into the thousands on the y-axis would be perfect (scale of 1-10 doesn't quite cut it), but the stuff that's around at the moment is too blunt to capture that kind of data.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-46690753899679069452012-02-18T20:18:00.000+00:002012-02-18T20:21:12.300+00:00A Brief Note on the Tesco ScandalBy the looks of things, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/feb/18/tesco-jobless-scheme-work-experience?fb=native">the Tesco scandal has come to a conclusion</a>. Sort of. In that Tesco have come out and suggested that the DWP perhaps shouldn't mandate unpaid "work experience" with the threat of cutting off benefits to the non-compliant. They have not (as Sainsbury's, Waterstone's and TK Maxx <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/stores-quit-unpaid-work-schemes">have</a>) stated that they will no longer support the scheme, so it's not exactly a win. In fact, none of this is a win. Whoever was responsible for the decision on behalf of <b>any </b>of those major retailers (and countless more) to participate in the scheme in the first place clearly did not foresee "major PR nightmare" as one of the potential consequences, or else they wouldn't have agreed to do it. And, of course, it shouldn't be the PR nightmare that worries them - it should, perhaps, be the fact that they willingly participated in state-sanctioned (nay, encouraged) slave-labour*. But that is not, of course, their biggest concern.<br />
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Would Tesco have urged the DWP to reconsider the manner in which this "work experience" is mandated were it not for the fact that they ended up on the wrong side of a vitriolic public backlash when the details of their involvement in the scheme became widely-known? Call me cynical, but it seems very unlikely that they would.<br />
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Gestures, like TK Maxx ending their participation, or Tesco calling for changes to the way the scheme is carried out, may be conciliatory. But they shouldn't be enough to make us forgive and forget. The jobseekers who were and are forced to work in this way don't have the luxury of voting with their wallets, but I do, and so do you.<br />
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Forced labour is forced labour, whether it's in a North Korean detention camp or in your local supermarket. And it shouldn't take public outcry to make big business finally able to tell right from wrong.<br />
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The only good to come out of this is further proof that social media, historic home of cat videos and being able to slag off people you don't like facelessly and without recrimination, is an excellent medium for <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23tesco">slagging off big faceless corporations without recrimination</a> when they do things you don't like. It's a fine expression of democracy, and I'm glad it works.<br />
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*I realise that the "workers" on these "work experience" schemes were receiving Jobseeker's Allowance in exchange for their work. I do not consider this to be payment, nor do I believe that JSA should be given by the state in exchange for anything other than a willingness on the part of the individual to do as much as they can to find work (short of enforced, unpaid work experience).lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-481971442438300712012-02-08T18:40:00.001+00:002012-02-08T18:44:52.610+00:00Try this one cool tip for eternal youth dreamt up by someone's mother somewhere<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You've all seen the kind of adverts I mean. The poorly-executed, poorly-designed scam ads which are plastered over certain websites, bearing horribly-written slogans ("one trick of a tiny belly") that anyone with a basic command of grammar can barely parse. Or the ones which show screenshots ripping off the BBC/NBC/Fox logos, to give the gravitas of television news to whatever confidence trick it is they're advertising. The ones which claim that a British mother has invented a formula for everlasting youth. They're close kin to the most recent round of Twitter spam, the direct messages with a link, saying something like, "hey, I can't believe the nasty things that someone is saying about you on this blog." They're stupid and badly-done, so badly-done that you almost can't believe anyone falls for them, and they're probably best ignored. However, I believe that this family of adverts aims itself primarily at women, and for that reason I find them particularly odious and offensive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The crudely-drawn shrinking figure in the "tiny belly" ads, for example, is always a woman. It's always someone's mother who has discovered a snake oil to rid you of wrinkles. And the 'products' they're pushing - acai berries, and goodness knows what other awful crap - are usually related to weight loss and beauty, two areas of both traditional and non-traditional advertising where women = goldmine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The problem with these ads is not simply that they prey on vanity. Almost all advertising is intended to exploit a combination of vanity, envy and self-loathing; I've just about made my peace with that fact (although I still think it's a toxic cocktail to feed for multiple hours on a daily basis to everyone who has senses). The fact that many people can tune all advertising out reasonably well isn't a mitigating factor or excuse. What bothers me about these adverts in particular is the specific type of (mostly female) vanity they are intended to prey on. They work on the basis that all women with money to spend want to look younger or be thinner (or in the case of the "someone said a terrible thing about you" spam tweets, the idea that people are being mean about you behind your back, which is not so much vanity as insecurity, or, as previously mentioned, self-loathing), or some other similarly ubiquitous and reductive generalisation of femininity. There's also the implicit competitive element - "person x has discovered secret x and won't share it with anyone but us, and we'll sell it to you but only if you get a move on" - which is equally unsavoury, in that it encourages individuals in the target audience (women) to regard the rest of the target audience (other women) with suspicion and fear, in case the other women get to the magical slenderising/anti-aging treatment first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And, of course, it perpetuates the notion that beauty and the ideal body and being worthy of love and respect are all concepts which are in finite and severely limited supply, which is just as much bullshit as the rest of this pernicious trash.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Look past the poor execution and hideous copy for a second. The fundamental message of all of these adverts is - like so much of Western advertising, but vastly less subtle - "you're not good enough, and you hate yourself because you're not good enough, and you hate yourself enough to pay money to make yourself more acceptable to our pre-determined standards, which were decided upon without your consultation." The ads are spectacularly brainless, which makes them easy to disdain or ignore out of hand. But they've bothered me for years, and it wasn't until I began to articulate this irritation that I realised how deep it went, or why I felt it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perhaps it goes without saying, but hear me out anyway: ladies, you are good enough. And dudes, you're good enough too. Everyone is fine, and no one should have to pay £6 to look twenty years younger, or whatever drivel it is they're peddling. No one should feel as though they have to look twenty years younger at all, but that's not a very popular opinion in advertising/media/fashion/<wbr></wbr>cosmetics/plastic surgery circles, and I can't see it gaining any more traction any time soon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The problems I have with this specific subsection of ads are inextricably bound to the problems I have with advertising, particularly when targeted at women, in general. I think it's a battle worth fighting in its entirety, and I've picked these specific examples as both an easy target and as an incidence which is particularly stupid and offensive. There's an inherent dishonesty and subterfuge in all of it, especially these: a little voice whispering in the ear which says, "you can be what you are not and should not be. You can be young when you're old and skinny when you're fat, and the only cost is money." And that's true of a lot of advertising, but nowhere is it more unashamedly open about this than in these particular ads.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don't know when advertising changed from "buy x" to "buy x because it is better than y for these reasons" to "buy x because it is the only thing that will make you an acceptable human being." I'm not sure it was as linear as that - there are hints of lifestyle-aspiration even in pre-Bernays Victorian advertising - but the progression has been made, and carefully-engineered self-loathing is the lot this century's ordinary (and even extraordinary, for none of us can escape it) men and women are dealt.
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In twenty years, I'd like adverts which rely on women (, people) feeling bad about themselves to be as utterly and universally reviled as those from decades past which sold cigarettes by making smoking look cool. Failing that, I'd like some adverts intended to make women competitive and jealous about wanting to be the best lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs and developers and writers and artists and scientists and WOMEN as they can be, and not just about being pretty and youthful and thin. That would be awesome.</span>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-68898158932211015272012-02-03T10:22:00.000+00:002012-02-03T11:32:46.437+00:00Veganuary: A RetrospectiveFrom 00.00 on the 1st of January to 00.00 on the 1st of February, I attempted to be vegan.<br />
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There are three instances in which I believe I may have eaten something that came from an animal, which I will list here:</div>
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- I ate a spoonful of some tomato soup which looked clear (and thus milk/cream-free) but, upon tasting, might have contained dairy. I did not eat the rest of the soup.</div>
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- I ate three black olives which may have been contaminated with tzatziki. I did this because a) it was not clear whether or not they had been and b) I have no self-control when it comes to olives.</div>
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- I ate a crisp which turned out to have "cheddar" in the name. My excuses for this are that it was 8pm, I'd been drinking heavily and I hadn't eaten anything that day.</div>
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These transgressions aren't groundbreakingly interesting, but they do illustrate my general attitude to the whole thing: I was as cautious as it was possible to be within reason, and thought a hell of a lot more about what I ate than I usually do, but I wasn't prepared to beat myself up over a mouthful of soup or three olives or whatever.</div>
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As an experiment, it was interesting. I did not experience the utter, blissful absence of disease, malaise and ill-feeling which the more vocal of the veganazis promise (I guess that's because I haven't given it long enough for all of those pernicious dairy-based toxins to leave my system, right?), but then, neither did I expect to. I wasn't at all ill in the last month, although that's not a great indicator of dietary benefit; I have a pretty tough immune system, and it would be normal in any given month for me to have been healthy throughout. Without going into detail, my digestion was different but no worse or better than usual. I was a little hungrier than usual in spite of eating a decent quantity of food. </div>
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In terms of negative health effects, it's hard to say - so many variables act on the human body on a daily basis that it's impossible to point to anything that I experienced this month and think, "yep, that was definitely a result of veganism." I had some minor sleep and mood disturbances in the first half of the month - very minor - and it doesn't seem likely that these correlate to cheese (it was also January, which suggests itself as a stronger correlative). My skin was a little drier than usual, but that could be atmospheric, or based on spending Christmas in a soft water area and then coming back to a hard water area.</div>
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It would have been interesting to have had some kind of blood work done immediately before and immediately after the month, but it seemed impractical to do so. I gave blood during the month and didn't show any signs of anaemia; the donation went well.</div>
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I felt pretty good, but I felt pretty good in November and December, too.</div>
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I cooked some interesting stuff that I probably wouldn't have made before, as well as some modified versions of old favourites, and in general used more fresh ingredients and spent longer cooking. Houmous became a catch-all savoury dairy replacement. Burritos with cheese and sour cream became burritos with houmous. The cheese-blanket which had of late covered most of my self-cooked meals was generally replaced with a dollop of houmous. It satisfies something creamy and salty and primordial. The lazy dinner option became straight carbs rather than carbs-with-cheese; I don't think this is much healthier objectively, but it might be. I feel much happier cooking with fresh tofu than I did before, which is awesome. I'd always wanted the knack. Lunch at work was nowhere near as boring as I'd feared - with some vegetable-and-salad wizardry and a lot of sweet chilli dressing, I made interesting and delicious lunches every day. My fruit and vegetable consumption - previously already reasonable - skyrocketed.</div>
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On the ethics front, it was a reflective period. I'd been vaguely troubled by certain aspects of commercial dairy farming, and was wondering if this month would push me into the "I definitely want to be vegan full-time" category.</div>
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The short answer is, "it didn't."</div>
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Veganism, to me, is much more of a grey area than vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is easier to make black and white, even if people have a tendency to take the term and do as they will with it (I'm looking at the pescetarians who don't call themselves that here). As a vegetarian, I did not and do not eat anything which was ever alive in an animal sense. Even fish, whose plight and murder does not inspire any immediate visceral feelings in me. Even tasty, tasty bivalves. Now, there were still some ethical quandries inherent in this lifestyle - I believe, for example, that nothing living should have to die so that I can eat it. But I kill insects with something akin to insecticidal glee, simply because I hate bugs and find them weird and gross, and don't want them all up in my personal space. And then there are the lesser-or-greater degrees, like gelatine (I tend to avoid it but am not as troubled if I find I've eaten it by accident than I would be if I'd accidentally eaten meat) or isinglass used in the production of booze.</div>
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Veganism is even less clear-cut. On the surface, the simple, "no dairy or eggs" doesn't sound like an ethical problem area. But most of the vegans I know do it to different degrees, or have different exceptions. Some will eat honey, because bee-keeping might actually be helping the bees. Some have no problem buying woollen products (just like some vegetarians will buy leather), others will drink regular wine and beer, or will drink or eat something that they don't know isn't vegan until they find out that it is, or will make exceptions for things which are advertised as containing trace amounts of something non-vegan. </div>
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In terms of strictness, it goes much deeper than this. I delved into the world of vegan bloggers, and found those who are strictly raw, and people who won't eat tofu or soy products because they disagree with the way soy is farmed, or who will only eat certain types of sugar - all kinds of other distinctions beyond the simple "I don't eat eggs or dairy" which marks where the popular conception of veganism begins and ends.</div>
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The thing that really troubled me about this blog scene (and there were a lot of things which troubled me) was that each more stringent definition seemed to be pursued in an attempt either a) to detoxify the human body entirely from what seem to be mostly imagined 'toxins' and/or b) to be the most virtuous person who ever lived. </div>
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I don't know what it is about food that makes people attach emotion to it. It's something which I try to avoid doing, and it gently angers me every time I overhear someone at lunch talking about "good" or "bad" or "naughty" (that one really gets me) food. Food has no inherent emotional load or value. There isn't an objective scale, with deep-fried dime bar cake at one end and iceberg lettuce at the other, which demonstrates the value of food. It's food. Take it for all in all. Even if all of the pie slices are bright red on the Sainsbury's package. Maybe you shouldn't eat exclusively that thing, but you probably shouldn't eat any one thing exclusively anyway. </div>
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From a very brief foray, it seems that the emotional loading of food is rife within the vegan (and especially the raw/foodblogging) community. On both an ethical and a health level. There are a lot of people who are searching for the most ultimately sanctimonious way of eating - the thing that is the absolute best for their bodies (rarely backed up by decent nutritional science or historical evidence that most humans can eat meat and fish and dairy and not suffer from ill effects), and which has the least impact on the lives of other creatures and on the world around them. </div>
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I'm all for low-impact food, but not when it becomes the sole focus of one's life. It's a fact of the modern world that mass importing/transportation/farming processes aren't always great for the environment, but also that most of us are so damn busy all the time that it's impossible to live the best of all possible lives, food-wise. We balance the two. We do as much as we can to reduce our impact whilst still getting up and going to work every morning and having a good time. And the puritanical aspect of some of the culinary extremism that can be witnessed on these very interwebs is indicative of a mentality which wants to take every drop of joy out of food and eating. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia">Orthorexia</a> may not be medically recognised, but it's an interesting framework through which to view this effect.</div>
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At times, the militance becomes dangerous. I saw at least three examples of people who claimed to manage their cancer/other serious or terminal illness entirely through a vegan/raw diet. It's dangerous both for them and for the people they influence. Touting any dietary changes as some kind of miracle cure for disease - as a cure for the absolute fact of mortality, almost - is irresponsible and should not be encouraged. And yet I didn't see many voices of dissent within those communities. Possibly because the dissenters are all people like me: fans of modern medicine who are angered too much by the concept of a diet curing cancer to stay around long enough to comment. One of the most powerful lessons the Internet has taught us is that you can't engage people in meaningful debate if they don't want to engage, even if you're pretty sure you're right. </div>
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As well as delving into the world of vegan blogging, I also got up to speed with the <a href="http://voraciouseats.com/my-ex-vegan-story/">ex-vegan</a> community, which is pretty interesting itself. It's made up of people who were formerly notable vegan/raw bloggers who decided not to remain vegan and went public about this decision, often because their diets were having a deleterious effect on their health. The response from the hard-line vegans was often outrageous - one woman was told that she and her family deserved to be killed like the animals they had gone back to eating. The response was much stronger than the complaints these hardcore vegans levied against people who had always eaten meat and never been vegan, most likely because of the sense of betrayal invoked by a high-profile vegan publicly going back to meat-eating. Which brings us, once again, to the emotional loading of food and lifestyle.</div>
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At heart, what I do and don't feel comfortable eating boils down to the level of cognitive dissonance which I'm happy experiencing. Everyone is walking around with a head full of the stuff - it's how we're not all constantly curled up in the foetal position, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the world. And I'm reasonably sure that this is also how other people decide what they will and won't eat. The level of cognitive dissonance which someone like <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/01/what-is-an-ethical-vegan">Sali Owen</a> can process is very different to the level experienced by someone who eats everything - and that's fine. I'd spent the last couple of years wondering if I'd continue to be able to justify (to myself) eating animal products which don't result in the death of the animal. And it turns out that I can.</div>
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On a conscious level, I'm concerned about the ethics of dairy farming. I think there are many things wrong with the way we mass-produce food in general, particularly when it's harmful to the welfare of sentient creatures, and to that end I've tried for many years to be as conscious of this as I can when choosing what dairy I do eat (the freest of the free-range eggs, and the like). I drink mostly soy milk, partly because I prefer the taste and partly because I know that it didn't cause distress or discomfort to any cows. But I don't find that I care enough about it to avoid dairy altogether. Objectively, the suffering of animals in dairy production is as distasteful to me as the thought of eating their flesh; on a day-to-day basis, and especially when it's cooked into something pre-produced, or when it's in work, or when it's a trace of milk powder (unnecessary but ubiquitous) in something like tortilla chips, I can't bring myself to care enough to stop eating these things.</div>
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It's now the 3rd of February, and I still haven't broken veganism and probably won't until we go to <a href="http://www.meatliquor.com/">Meat Liquor</a> tomorrow, when I intend to cram large amounts of halloumi into my face. Veganuary was a fascinating experiment, but I don't have the desire or commitment to be entirely vegan all of the time. The current plan is to eat almost exclusively vegan at home and at work (with occasional exceptions), and to be vegan where possible but more likely lacto-ovo vegetarian when I'm eating out. So veg*n, with a tendency towards the vegan end of the spectrum. This is a level of cognitive dissonance I'm content with.</div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-77594617350944652412012-01-25T16:44:00.000+00:002012-01-25T16:47:06.629+00:00"Even if religion isn't true..."<i>Or, why I'll read Alain de Botton's new book but don't like its ad campaign.</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.alaindebotton.com/">Alain de Botton</a> is a fascinating man. On <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/alaindebotton">Twitter</a>, he's one of the most consistently thought-provoking people to follow, dispensing 140-character chunks of serene wisdom, many of which are deeply applicable to the state of the human condition in the modern world.<br />
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I read <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Status-Anxiety-Alain-Botton/dp/0141014865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327402427&sr=8-1">Status Anxiety</a> when I was fifteen, and thought it was wonderful (although it's almost certainly in need of a re-read now that I'm no longer fifteen). His new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-Atheists-non-believers-guide-religion/dp/0241144779">Religion for Atheists</a>, looks like it's going to be lots of things I'm very interested in - not least the idea that one can be an atheist and still appreciate the trappings of religion.<br />
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I love religious architecture and music, but it irks me that such glorious, transcendental, humbling things have been built and made by man to the glory of God, when so few things built to the glory of mankind and man's achievements are on a similarly mind-blowing scale. We're getting there, especially in terms of art, music and literature (less so architecturally, but still somewhat), and I have no doubt that, as society drifts further towards atheism in the most literal sense, this trend will continue. Humans make beautiful things. We can't help ourselves. And there doesn't need to be a higher power to justify this creation. The range of human experience - the vast, mutable palette of human emotion - are enough to keep us creatively occupied until there are no more of us. Having a constant to continually compare that to, in a world where <b>nothing</b> is constant, is impractical and unnecessary.<br />
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My only concern with the release of Religion for Atheists is the advertising campaign which accompanies it. The adverts are a series of <a href="https://p.twimg.com/Aj6oXVFCMAAFvdD.jpg">gorgeous</a> <a href="https://p.twimg.com/Aj6wl9VCEAAlDau.jpg">images</a> of religious structures, with the tagline, "Even if religion isn't true, can't we enjoy the best bits?"<br />
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I applaud and support the sentiment; it's the usage of "true" which troubles me. It jarred my ear as soon as I read it. Of the <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/true">relevant definitions</a> of "true", it's a choice between "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact; factually correct" and "legitimate". And it's clear that the advert isn't using "true" in the sense of legitimate (e.g. referring to the Catholic Church as the "one true Church"). Which leaves us with "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact."<br />
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My issue with "even if religion isn't true" is that I don't like the application of "true" to broad, sweeping concepts. "True" suggests a reasonably straightforward true/false dichotomy. Which is not something that "religion", as a noun, presents us with. You could take "government" as a comparable conceptual noun. No one is going to argue that government isn't true. Whether or not it exists is something you could theoretically doubt ("even if government isn't real..."), and you could certainly take it to mean "legitimate" (though modern English does not tend to use "true" to mean "legitimate" except as an identifier, like in "the one true Church"), calling upon the "true government" either as a request for a government to step up to the plate on something or in contrast to a non-legitimate government, but one would not ask the question, "Even if government is not true, can't we still enjoy the best bits?" Nor, even, would one state, "government is not true." Not valid, sure. Not real, maybe. But "true" or "not true" in a strictly true/false, "factually correct" usage (as I believe it is being used in this case)? No.<br />
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It's a subtle usage - perhaps not even incorrect, but questionable enough to set off my inner alarm bells. On the surface, the statements implied by the question asked by the advert - "religion is/isn't true" - sound as though they mean functionally the same thing as "I do/don't believe in religion" (as a concept, and as opposed to believing in God). The statement "I do/don't believe in religion" are not useful or functional tools for examining the role of religion within society. And whilst "even if religion isn't true" does not quite mean exactly the same thing semantically, there's not much of a mental leap between "I don't believe in religion" and "religion is/is not true."<br />
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The question which the first clause of the advert implies, "is religion true?", is a redundant one, and not useful to the conceptual framework in which the book (I dearly hope) attempts to examine the role of the trappings of religion in the life of the modern atheist. If de Botton's examination will (as I hope it will) open the debate on creating glorious things in the glory of man, not God, then we cannot afford sloppy copy. Atheism, to me, at this time, should need no justification or legitimisation in the eyes of the world, yet still it does. For a long time, we've had some of the best thinkers. Ideas - precious ideas about the infinite potential of the secular life - need to be grounded and clothed in the best possible words we can muster. And "Even if religion isn't true..." doesn't quite cut it.<br />
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<br />lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-23166094894481859912012-01-14T15:11:00.000+00:002012-01-14T15:11:37.064+00:00An Uncensored LifeYesterday evening, at long last, I watched the most recent episode of <i>Sherlock </i>(S02E02, 'The Hounds of Baskerville') and it dredged up a long-forgotten childhood memory <strike>of the fact that my whole family was mauled by giant dogs from Hell</strike>.<br />
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Quick critique on the show itself: I've heard from quite a few <i>Sherlock</i> fans that they were disappointed by last week's episode, and from watching it I can see why. It was interesting that the explanations for the strange occurrences around the Baskerville site as suggested by the locals were along the lines of some kind of horrible beast created by genetic research - I thought this was quite a good 21st Century parallel for the mythological/folkoloric suggestions from the original Sherlock Holmes novel, but at the same time I kind of missed the supernatural element because I really love Dartmoor mythology and folklore (this is what you get when you take nerdy kids to National Trust bookshops and allow them to purchase volumes entitled <i>Ghastly Ghosts of Devon</i> and the like, but more on that later).<br />
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The way they shot Dartmoor itself was also very interesting, although again I was slightly disappointed. There were a lot of panoramic shots where they kind of messed with the colours a little bit to make it look more vast and bleak and forbidding, which is an entirely natural cinematographic response to that kind of landscape, but it didn't work for me (although it wouldn't have looked out-of-place in an adaptation of, say, <i>Wuthering Heights</i>). The great thing about Dartmoor, as a couple of the local characters mentioned during the episode, is precisely how vast and bleak it is, but that for me was lost in the way they shot it. Especially the vastness. There's a certain perspective you sometimes get when standing around on Dartmoor, not even anywhere particularly special like on top of a tor, just by the side of the road looking across acres of gorse scrubland, wherein everything you are feels infinitely dwarfed by the untameable, untillable, barely-inhabitable land. And the big, fancy shots of it that they put into last week's <i>Sherlock</i> managed to completely lose that aspect of the scenery. The more intimate bits shot in "Dewer's Hollow" (which doesn't exist, although there are plenty of places very much like it which do) gave a much better feel for the landscape close-up than any of the panoramas did (although it's entirely possible that those bits weren't filmed on Dartmoor at all).<br />
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A lot of the plot elements were stupid (as one of the people I watched it with mentioned, why would a super-secret CIA experiment have its own t-shirts?), but on balance it was at least an entertaining (if not perhaps as intellectually tantalising) episode. I did like the fact that they showed Sherlock experiencing doubt and fear; that was a really nice piece of characterisation.<br />
<br />
But enough on that. What those ninety minutes managed to remind me of (aside from how much I love Devon) was my first foray into the library held at our primary school. This would have been in late 1994, during my first full term at school; our infant class was dutifully marshalled down to the library in small groups and told that we could pick any volume we chose to take home and have our parents read to us. I would like to emphasise the word <b>any</b>; perhaps this is more about my earliest experiences with the fallibility of adult authority, but I digress. I was overwhelmed by the possibilities offered to me. My reading experience thus far had consisted of the formulaic books we were using to learn to read, filled with poorly-developed (and illustrated, if I'm honest) farmyard characters and little to offer in the way of narrative intrigue. So to be presented with a room full of books which were filled with completely new pictures and stories seemed wonderful.<br />
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I chose, being a morbid five-year-old, an illustrated (and, I presume, heavily abridged) kids' edition of <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>. Show me the five-year-old who would not rather be reading about a flaming-eyed murderous hell-hound than, say, Spot the Dog, and I'll lose my remaining faith in humanity. I cannot fully express how entirely awesome this kids' version of <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i> looked. I was practically foaming with literary rabies at the prospect of taking it home and forcing my parents or grandparents to read it to me. It was like a shining beacon in a sea of battered tomes. I can remember many things about that day, in that room, but what any of the other books offered looked like or consisted of are details lost to my memory. I plucked <i>The Hound</i> off the shelf and proudly presented it to whichever teaching assistant was there with us, to "show us around the library". Or, as it turned out, to censor what we read. For that is what she did.<br />
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I was told in no uncertain terms that <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>, even in such an innocent and childish incarnation, was entirely unsuitable reading material for little girls. Being a ballsy thing, I protested, and was once again told that I could not have it. I believe (although perhaps this is just years of anger about a] the whole experience and b] the way gender is hammered into children from almost every source during every developmental period) that I was offered something more girl-specific as an alternative choice. But no other choice (and certainly not whatever I ended up being fobbed off with, the memory of which escapes me) was in fact anything resembling <i>my</i> choice, since I had chosen and subsequently been denied the right of choice.<br />
<br />
There's an incredibly happy ending to this story, though. The people with the most power to censor my reading - my parents - chose at almost every opportunity not to. I can recall perhaps only one or two attempts made by my parents to stop me from reading something they considered unsuitable, and those were almost certainly both Jilly Coopers furtively stolen from my grandmother at the age of nine. I have no idea why, when they were fairly overprotective about many other aspects of my young life (including in particular the films and television I was exposed to), they made so few attempts to control what it was that I read. It could have been the speed at which I read - books were coming in and out of the house at such a frantic rate, and often with so little involvement from them, that what I was reading was pointless or impossible to police. Or perhaps, especially when I was a little older, it was that they had not themselves read what I was reading, and thus couldn't comment on its suitability.<br />
<br />
It was a glorious and remarkable freedom, and one which I would urge all parents to grant to their children, no matter how much they long to shelter them from the shocks and hurts of the world. It meant that I was occasionally reading wildly inappropriate things, books whose contents I had no register of tone or emotion by which to frame and thus properly understand. Will Self, for example, is a startling writer even now - when I was thirteen, his novels were just penetrable enough to be unsettling without me realising how darkly funny they were also intended to be. The same goes for Don DeLillo - I read <i>White Noise</i> entirely straight when I was fifteen, and it was only when I came back to study it for a dissertation that I realised how funny a book it is. These wildly inappropriate things did not damage me in the slightest - and neither would <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles </i>have done, had I been allowed it. One of my favourite things to do when I was a lot younger was to read something that frightened me so much I could not sleep. That the human imagination is capable of producing such an effect is a glorious thing, to be treasured rather than prevented.<br />
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The great thing about literature is that so much of it self-censors, depending on the reading age (and, perhaps more importantly, the emotional maturity) of the young reader. So much of description, narrative and tone can be gained or lost by the reader. It was precisely because I had been allowed to read widely and rangingly that I came to love reading so very much. Censorship does not protect; it merely makes children bitter and angry towards the censors.<br />
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So please do not censor the reading of your children. Their development will censor itself, up to a point, and even after that they're unlikely to be damaged by what they read. Many of my earliest memories involve reading and books, and for kids who don't easily make friends, a book is a passage into a world where the social constraints of day-to-day life do not matter in the slightest. A book is a true friend, even if it appears to be a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, too-much-makeup-wearing older kid, trying to lead your child astray. Reading is one of the safest ways a child can thus be led.<br />
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<br />lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-91714301665964104942012-01-02T22:49:00.000+00:002012-01-02T23:20:05.388+00:002012 - ResolutionsThere's a word I was trying to remember earlier on, whilst watching The West Wing (Season 3 Episode 6, 'War Crimes') with my housemate. Bartlet comes back from church ranting about how awful the sermon was, how it lacked panache, and how the preacher fundamentally misunderstood the passage from Ephesians that the sermon was meant to be about. The President's interpretation of the verses was not that they pertained to the relationship between a man and his wife, but that they are all about the passage, "Be subject to one another."<div><br /></div><div>The word I was looking for is accountability. Accountability to one another is incredibly important. It reminds us of our better selves. It reminds us that we shouldn't do stupid, hurtful things to other people. It's a great reality check, except in the case of mass delusion: if I do something or want to do something that I'm not sure of the ethics of, and someone whose judgement I trust agrees with me that it's an okay thing to do or to have done, then that's good enough for me, and it's a stronger indication than just my judgement alone. I'm not saying that one cannot live an ethical life without someone to be accountable to, more that for those of us who are particularly human it can be really useful to have a gate. And sometimes both you and the person you consider yourself accountable to are wrong about something, but somehow that makes it better than just you being wrong. At least, it does for me. </div><div><br /></div><div>In 2011 <a href="http://abangandawhimper.blogspot.com/2011/12/2011-resolutions.html">I made resolutions at the beginning of the year</a>. Some of them I kept and some of them I failed at, but I didn't really publicise any of them. I told people casually that I was trying to do this, or that, or the other, but I wasn't really accountable to anyone but myself. And that was fine. I didn't need to be, and I don't think I would have succeeded at any more of them if I'd stated my aims publicly at the start of the year. But there's something nice and satisfying about writing my resolutions for 2012 down on some stone tablets at the top of a mountain somewhere in the Holy Land and then proclaiming them to those who care to listen, so to speak.</div><div><br /></div><div>So I am being accountable here. I don't need or want a cheerleading team, or a stern, authoritarian power outside of myself to shame me into keeping or not keeping them. I just want to let it be known that this is what I hope to achieve this year. </div><div><br /></div><div> - To read all of Proust's <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "> </span><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; ">À</span></span> la recherche du temps perdu:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-style: italic; white-space: pre; "> </span>I received a complete translation for Christmas. Never have I been so afraid of a Christmas <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>present in my life.</div><div><br /></div><div> - To be vegan in January, and to generally eat less dairy in 2012:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I find myself increasingly using cheese as a condiment. I'm hoping that Veganuary will both <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>make me think more about what I cook and eat, and will instil in me a proper and fitting <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>reverence for cheese. </div><div><br /></div><div> - Not to eat a single Ginsters cheese and onion slice:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This is kind of a subset of Veganuary, and is mostly motivated by the fact that the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>aforementioned slices do not even slightly resemble food. That they are frequently reduced <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>in the Co Op, and that I am frequently hung over, are not reasonable grounds for putting <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>these monstrous things into my system.</div><div><br /></div><div> - To be more forgiving and less bearing of grudges:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I come from a long line of grudge-bearers. My mother once didn't speak to her father for six <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>months over a fight they had about a biscuit. I don't want to be that guy, difficult as it can be <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>to let go of stupid, petty things at times. They're always stupid and petty, and life would be <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>better if I didn't hang on to them for a long time, or, ideally, at all.</div><div><br /></div><div> - To be formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church: </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I have been functionally an atheist since the age of five, when a priest could not satisfy me <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>on a point of theology. There have been times in my life when I attempted to find religion, <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>but I'm just not wired for faith. It is ludicrous that a decision could have been made for me <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>at an age when I was not sufficiently intellectually developed to object which is incredibly <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>difficult for me as a rational adult to extricate myself from. It used to be that one could <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>formally defect from the Catholic Church, which was easier to achieve than <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>excommunication, but they closed that loophole in canon law some time in 2010. In order to <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>be excommunicated, I have several options, including assaulting the Pope or a high-up <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Cardinal (I'm not such a fan of beating up old men, and this might result in a prison <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>sentence), desecrating the Host (this would probably require going to Communion, which I <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>don't want to do) or proving my apostasy. I am very much looking forward to writing the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>letter by which I intend to declare myself an apostate. </div><div><br /></div><div>See you in 2013 for an update on how all of these went.</div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-70799405988537814972011-12-31T12:16:00.000+00:002012-01-03T11:56:21.695+00:00The Year of 100 BooksIn an attempt to recapture the frantic hunger with which I would consume books in my youth, I decided that in 2011 I would try to read 100. Now, there's been a lot written about <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/04/death_disports_with_writers_mo.html">how being well-read is a fundamentally pointless endeavour</a>, and <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the-sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything">how no human can hope to catch everything important in one lifetime</a>, and at least one of those articles (if I remember rightly) discusses the idea that any attempt to master any given canon can be read as an attempt to cheat death. I don't think I was by any means trying to cheat death in reading these books this year, but it's an interesting theory.<br /><br />In November 2010 I began (and aborted) a short story about a man who has read every book ever published, and in doing so gains entry to a small society of individuals who have achieved the same feat. The story kind of hinged on the idea that he wouldn't have to keep up with new books that had been published since he stopped reading - that "the entirety of books ever written" was a finite concept instead of one that keeps expanding out towards the borders of space - and in that sense it wasn't a very good short story. But the idea intrigued me. I picked 100 as a nice, manageable number which still sounded kind of impressive. There's a movement of people <a href="http://www.readallday.org/about_nina.html">who try to read 365 books in 365 days</a>, but I wanted a number that wouldn't interfere with the way I live my life - I'd spend more time reading than I had in 2010, for sure, but not to the extent that it stopped me from doing anything normal. There would be days when I didn't read at all, and there was a month when I hardly read anything (July, when I moved back to Cambridge and started a new job).<br /><br />I'd expected, foolishly, that an English degree which ostensibly covered all British literature and some from other countries from 1300 to the present day would chuck me out on the other side with a much better grasp of what had been written in these isles (and other lands) during that time. It did not. If anything, my degree left me feeling less well-read than I had felt before I embarked upon it. And, what's more, I felt like I was losing my edge. In school it had been remarkably easy to be better-read than almost everyone I knew, particularly since I had books instead of boyfriends at that age. And at Cambridge I was doing okay - I was either slightly better-read or about the same as most of the people I encountered. But the degree knocked the sheer joy of reading out of me, and I didn't rediscover it as quickly as I'd hoped I would after I graduated. So this challenge, in 2011, was in part an attempt to get that back.<br /><br />Some of the books I read were works of great literature, and some were not. Some were excellent and some were execrable. Do I feel like I'm suitably well-read now, or that I've caught up, or that I finally have my edge back? Do I hell.<br /><br />The rules were simple: no cheating (a book had to be read from cover to cover to count) and no re-reading of books already read. The second was much harder to achieve - I yearned, at points, for books I'd read before. But ultimately I managed to resist the temptation. I haven't included poetry, as I rarely sit down and read a book of poetry all the way through.<br /><br />Without further preamble, here is the list:<br /><br /><u>January</u><br /><br />Fun Home - Alison Bechdel<br />The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood<br />Morality Play - Barry Unsworth<br />Players - Don DeLillo<br />The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood<br />One Day - David Nicholls<br />A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro<br />Shoplifting from American Apparel - Tao Lin<br />Be Near Me - Andrew O'Hagan<br />The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro<br />Down to a Sunless Sea - David Graham<br />The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald<br /><br /><u>February</u><br /><br />Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham<br />Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides<br />A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick<br />Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick<br />Minority Report & Other Stories - Philip K. Dick<br />Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan<br />The Beginning of Spring - Penelope Fitzgerald<br />Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky<br />Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence<br /><br /><u>March</u><br /><br />The Art Fair - David Lipsky<br />So Many Ways to Begin - Jon McGregor<br />Lover of Unreason - Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev<br />Persuasion - Jane Austen<br />Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen<br />Couch Fiction - Philippa Perry<br />Mansfield Park - Jane Austen<br />Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer<br />The Prescription Errors - Charles Demers<br />Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis<br />The Tent - Margaret Atwood<br />Blindness - José Saramago<br />Model Behaviour - Jay McInerney<br />Identity - Milan Kundera<br /><br /><u>April</u><br /><br />The Bell - Iris Murdoch<br />Frenchman's Creek - Daphne du Maurier<br />Naked Spirits - Adrian Abbotts<br />The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy<br />Tam Lin - Pamela Dean<br />Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy<br />Animal Farm - George Orwell<br />Big If - Mark Costello<br />Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer<br /><br /><u>May</u><br /><br />The Flight from the Enchanter - Iris Murdoch<br />The Spot - David Means<br />The Promise of Happiness - Justin Cartwright<br />The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway<br />The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch<br />The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers<br />The Death of Grass - John Christopher<br />The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios - Yann Martel<br />The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry<br />The Grass Arena - John Healy<br />The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde<br /><br /><u>June</u><br /><br />Fludd - Hilary Mantel<br />Everyman - Philip Roth<br />Bossypants - Tina Fey<br />Mr Norris Changes Trains - Christopher Isherwood<br />A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving<br />The Pale King - David Foster Wallace<br />Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach<br />Oh! What a Paradise it Seems - John Cheever<br />The Quiet American - Graham Greene<br /><br /><u>July</u><br /><br />A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace<br />Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard<br /><br /><u>August</u><br /><br />I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith<br />A Kestrel for a Knave - Barry Hines<br />Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke<br /><br /><u>September</u><br /><br />A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius - Dave Eggers<br />Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys<br />Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud<br />Lincoln's Melancholy - Joshua Wolf Shenk<br />Young Victorians - Marion Lochhead<br />How To Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran<br />Nemesis - Philip Roth<br />V for Vendetta - Alan Moore & David Lloyd<br /><br /><u>October</u><br /><br />Unlikely - Jeffrey Brown<br />Save Me the Waltz - Zelda Fitzgerald<br />Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton<br />The Game - A.S. Byatt<br />A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole<br />The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien<br />Feynman - Jim Ottaviani & Leland Myrick<br />The Green Mile - Stephen King<br /><br /><u>November</u><br /><br />Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro<br />Summer Blonde - Adrian Tomine<br />Sleepwalk - Adrian Tomine<br />Blue Pills - Frederik Peeters<br />A Fairly Honourable Defeat - Iris Murdoch<br />The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid<br />The Lean Startup - Eric Ries<br />Agonizing Love - Michael Barson<br /><br /><u>December</u><br /><br />Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey<br />Scenes from an Impending Marriage - Adrian Tomine<br />Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman<br />Jill - Philip Larkin<br />Hark! A Vagrant - Kate Beaton<br />I Never Liked You - Chester Brown<br />Blankets - Craig Thompson<br />Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman - Ralph Leighton, Richard P. Feynman & Edward Hutchings<br />The Treatment - Daniel Menaker<br />The Millstone - Margaret Drabble<br /><br />By my count, that's 104. I'm not counting the book I'm currently reading (The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers), as it's very unlikely I'll finish it before midnight.<br /><br />The best ten books I read all year were, in no particular order:<br /><br />- Fun Home<br />- The Beginning of Spring<br />- Blankets<br />- The Bell<br />- The Handmaid's Tale<br />- Be Near Me<br />- The Things They Carried<br />- The Pale King<br />- A Prayer for Owen Meany<br />- Fludd<br /><br />I don't know that I can pick a ten worst, but the second-worst book I read all year was One Day (seriously, people liked this?) and the absolute worst by quite a long margin was The Prescription Errors - it was pointlessly violent, meandering, almost entirely plotless, confusing, the shifts in perspective were not well executed and most of what was in it seemed to have been included for the sake of it rather than because it added to the book in any meaningful way.<br /><br />So, that was a thing. In 2012 I plan to make a list of everything I read again but will probably not read as many books. And, although I've barely dented the sheer number of worthwhile books which abound, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-60079060763273362652011-12-28T20:46:00.000+00:002011-12-28T21:39:33.499+00:002011 - ResolutionsI never used to be the kind of person who made New Year's resolutions. I think I thought that self-improvement was for losers, or something, or perhaps that I couldn't be improved - not that I was already perfect, but that I was so far from perfectible that it was useless even to try to work on one small thing. I stopped eating meat on the 1st of January 2006, but even that wasn't so much about self-improvement or about seeing if I could do something for an extended period of time as much as a growing distaste for flesh and disinclination to continue to eat it. The New Year's thing was more a culturally-sanctioned way of finally making a decision I'd wanted to make for some time than anything. <br /><br />And then last year brought an explosion of resolutions. I think I was feeling particularly optimistic around Christmas and New Year - I had just come back from the US, I had a terrible job but was at least being paid money, things were looking pretty good. I'd done things in 2010 that I hadn't ever done before, including graduating, visiting a different continent and living in another country. The time felt ripe for self-improvement, and this is what I vowed I was going to do:<br /><br /> - Learn German<br /> - Keep a journal<br /> - Be more generous towards my friends with my time<br /> - Learn to play the piano<br /> - Finish my novel<br /> - Be more polite in everyday situations<br /> - Read 100 books<br /><br />And here's how they went, in order:<br /><br /><u>German</u><br /><br />2011 wasn't the first time I'd vowed to learn German, and you may not be surprised to learn that I still can't speak it for shit. The fact that I was visiting Germany for the first time in July looked like it would be sufficient motivation to finally crack out the books and make a go of it. And I utterly failed. Of all the things I was trying to cram into my life in the first part of the year, it was the one I was least committed to and the first one to be dropped. Of the BBC listening exercises I did, I can still remember a couple of them almost word-perfect, which says a lot more about the way my memory works than anything. Verdammt.<br /><br /><u>Journal</u><br /><br />Again, this wasn't the first journal I'd ever vowed to keep, nor was it the first I failed at. Selected quotations include,"I rarely meet burritos I don't like" and, "Surrounded by businessmen. Slept v. badly last night." I think a journal is a very worthy thing to keep if a) you enjoy doing it and/or b) you write about interesting things. This exercise ticked neither box for me. I read over all of the entries from January 2011 the other day, and whilst they were very good at evoking some of the exact sensations and events I experienced during that month, the writing and subject matter was fundamentally uninteresting. I tend to feel that there's something more important or interesting that I could be writing if I'm going to be writing at all, and journals therefore seem like a waste of time. My grandmother has kept a diary for that last goodness-knows-how-many years, filled with entries along the lines of, "Charlotte came for tea. Weather mild." She recently said, "my diaries are up in the cupboard in the spare bedroom, so you can all have a good laugh when I'm dead." I don't want to leave a similar burden to my descendants after I'm gone.<br /><br /><u>Generosity with Time</u><br /><br />By this I meant quite specifically that I would try to stop blowing my friends off whenever I didn't feel like being sociable. It was a more pressing thing when I was living 300 miles away from them, and I did it with the best intentions. I can be very selfish with my time if I don't feel particularly like seeing anyone or talking to anyone, and I was curious to see if this was something I could correct by keeping it in mind and trying to overcome it. This was not the case. It worked all right for a month or so, until the periodic desire to make a hermit of myself grew stronger than the feeling of duty I had to be less of a dick when my friends wanted to talk to me. In retrospect, I think the fact that I occasionally need a lot of downtime is more a fundamental part of my personality than anything, and thus this was never going to be an easy fix. I still think mindfulness of personal flaws is worthwhile, and attempting this did at least make me a bit more self-aware, which is probably not a bad thing. <br /><br /><u>Piano</u><br /><br />This got off to a slow start, as we didn't get a piano until early May. As soon as we got one, I practised every day and made some reasonably decent progress. Then I moved back to Cambridge at the end of June, and that was kind of that. I'd still like to continue to learn to play, and will probably take lessons and buy either an electric piano with weighted keys or an acoustic as soon as I have money. And, coming home this Christmas, I found that I haven't become appreciably worse in spite of not having played for six months, which just shows how pervasive muscle memory is.<br /><br /><u>Novel</u><br /><br />Finished Part I at the end of January and the whole thing in May, then spent the summer and autumn editing the hell out of it. It's not exactly a thing of beauty, but I did get a huge kick out of writing it and to that end have begun another.<br /><br /><u>Politesse</u><br /><br />This resolution came out of the fact that I have in the past been notoriously impolite, not so much out of any fundamental rudeness but because I found being publicly and vocally polite deeply embarrassing. I have no idea why I found it so blush-inducingly shameful to thank someone for having me or tell them what a lovely time I had or any of the other little social pleasantries that make everything go along a lot smoother. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful - often I'd be overflowing with gratitude but too awkward to express it. So I jumped in at the deep end and tried to be as courteous as I possibly could in all situations which called for it. And it worked - I got over my embarrassment, I'm now suitable to be received into semi-polite company and I actually really enjoy being polite. I haven't quite been able to stop swearing loudly in the street or in the presence of children (although I've curbed it quite a bit), but the rest of it is pretty much engrained now. An unexpected and happy side effect is that I now find it much easier to make small talk with (and tip!) people working in the service industry, when before I felt embarrassed for both of us that they were making me a coffee or driving me to the station or whatever. The only negative effect I've experienced is that I now notice when other people aren't polite much more than I ever did before, and it really grates on me.<br /><br /><u>100 Books</u><br /><br />This is going to get a blog post all to itself at the very end of the year/beginning of 2012, in part because I reckon I can squeeze at least another book in before Sunday. More on that story later, and a full list (possibly with short reviews of each) will follow.<br /><br />I also took up blogging again in 2011, and whilst I haven't done it as often as I'd like, it seems to be going vaguely okay.<br /><br />I've got a few things lined up that I'd like to work on in 2012 and will probably write them up fairly soon.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-46072166595662242472011-12-24T10:43:00.000+00:002011-12-24T11:03:38.993+00:00It's the time of the season...When I was a lazy undergraduate, frittering away my eight-week terms and revelling in (read: equally frittering away) endless holidays, I used to wonder how real grownups managed when they only got a week or so off at a time. This year has been all about learning that real grownups are in fact immensely grateful that they get any time off at all.<br><br>Don't get me wrong, I love going to work and will very much miss everyone over the break. But it's going to be very nice to do absolutely nothing for ten days.<br><br>Towards the end of the year I'll be doing a writeup of all the books I've read this year, plus some general ramblings and resolutions and all that kind of jazz, so stay tuned.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-54510432451464980512011-11-19T12:21:00.000+00:002011-11-19T13:10:03.172+00:00Fortnum and MasonLast weekend I went to Fortnum and Mason. We'd taken the Jubilee line to Green Park, and I was responsible for piloting a good friend and his raging hangover across Piccadilly after we'd spent sufficient time staring listlessly into the window of the UK offices of the airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The window theme (of Fortnum's, not IranAir) was vaguely Cabaret/<i>La Cage aux Folles</i>-themed, and, as always, they were playing the kind of faint music that they like to play out of speakers above the vast windows, music I've always found slightly disquieting. A siren-song, whispering, "come, spend all your money; it'll make you feel <i>really good</i>."<div><br /></div><div>Now, this is a line that capitalism has been trotting out for a good couple of hundred years already. It's no surprise to anyone, nothing at all new. And, as always, we're absolutely eating it up - in the case of Fortnum's, literally. There are plenty of people who disagree with such luxury establishments, such as <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Protest_at_fortnums2011.jpg/800px-Protest_at_fortnums2011.jpg">these protesters</a>, but to dismiss Fortnum and Mason as "Tory Scum!" (amusing as I find this) seems somehow reductive. Sure, they're purveyors of fine and expensive things that rich people love to cram in their faces, and they've held a dear part in the hearts of the last 150 years' worth of monarchs, but to call them Tory scum and be done with it doesn't strike me as a particularly useful or interesting act of cultural criticism.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I found much more interesting when I visited last week, for the first time in a couple of years and maybe the fourth or fifth time ever, was the overwhelmingly touristy clientèle. Again, not surprising. But it did make me consider the phenomenon more deeply. Tourists come to buy a small souvenir to take away (this is reflected in the selection of branded tea, sweets and chocolates, the smallest examples of which are fairly reasonably priced in the grand scheme of trying to buy status, clustered around the inside of the door) and to have a look at "how the other half live". The main problem is with this is that the other half don't live there any more, if they ever did. And anyone who claims to do (or actually does) their weekly shopping there is as desperate to buy status as any of the huddled masses crowding around the inside of the main doors, trying not to show how out-of-place they feel and reminding themselves that they, too, have money - the great leveller - in their pockets. The only differences are that those who feel they've earned the right to buy everything they ever want to eat from Fortnum's are a) disdainful of the tourists as people who they believe don't truly belong there, and b) vastly more deluded. </div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe it was the better part of a bottle of Waitrose vodka - I, too, am an elitist - that my liver was trying desperately to purge from all my cells which was doing the talking, but I felt for the fifteen or twenty minutes that I spent inside as though I were a free party, unconstrained by either of these status anxieties (I'd urge anyone who hasn't read Alain de Botton's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Status-Anxiety-Alain-Botton/dp/0241142385">excellent treatise</a> on this subject to do so). Of course, I received the usual glares from the shop assistants and the security guards; in my battered Soviet coat and with a large rucksack, I looked, if not poor, then at least like a student. But I didn't care. And I think this is an attitude that has the potential to be healing for both the tourists who feel as though they'll never belong and the people who do all of their shopping there (or in Harrods, or in the Selfridges food hall, or in Harvey Nichols). It's a case of trying to unpick the hierarchical, class-and-status obsessions with which we endow our public spaces. It's fine if I'm standing in Fortnum and Mason on a Sunday morning, and it's fine if you are too. It shouldn't make a bit of difference what we're wearing or what we're buying; you've no need to cower, and you ought not to sneer. </div><div><br /></div><div>There's a lot of money to be made out of encouraging everyone to feel bad about themselves - this is, after all, one of the central tenets of modern capitalism and advertising - and even if it's impossible to prevent on a fundamental level, there's still the chance to exercise free will. I'm not going to apologise for going to places like this, and I'm not going to apologise for not being rich while I'm there, either.</div><div><br /></div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-60075029967721217852011-11-06T15:33:00.000+00:002011-11-06T16:15:51.588+00:00On the BusesI spend a fair bit of time on the bus. It's my preferred method for getting to work (I hate my bike), and £40 a month for an Oyster card-style bus pass seems like a pittance when I get the incredibly luxury of an hour a day of reading time. I mean, I'd pay £40 a month to have an hour each day in which to read even if I didn't get transported to work as part of the bargain.<div><br /></div><div>The buses of Cambridge, however, leave a lot to be desired. Stagecoach's promise of "up to every 10 minutes" rarely holds true, and their copy is both poorly written and thoroughly offensive to any adult who does not enjoy being spoken to like a child. As the bus stop near our office is the end of the line, though, I've had a lot of recent experience with something that is even worse than this: the perverse and seemingly willful obfuscation of what the hell is going on.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's very similar to the way that First Great Western used to run their trains about five years ago (thankfully they've come a long way since then) - long delays and absolutely no information about the cause or likely resolution of said delays on the part of the train manager. It used to be that FGW trains would not announce the expected time of arrival at each station along the way, or even suggest how long they anticipated it would take to get from the current staion to the next one. This used to endlessly frustrate me - it takes very little effort on the part of the train announcer to say, "Our next station stop will be Castle Cary in approximately twenty minutes", and, luckily, they have indeed taken to doing this of late. But to omit such information looks a lot like purposefully keeping passengers in the dark, and that's both inconsiderate and unnecessary, especially when the relevant authorities are in possession of the relevant details. In fact, it's always struck me as something of a power trip.</div><div><br /></div><div>The buses of Cambridge are worse, and seem to follow neither rhyme nor reason in their scheduling and departures, especially at the route terminus. Take this as an example: a week or so ago I left work at around 17.30 and went to the bus stop. A bus (which I will call Bus A) was waiting in the bus bay, totally empty and with its lights turned off. The driver of this bus, Driver A, was stood outside at the back of the bus, staring down the road. A crowd of 12 or 15 people formed. Driver A offered no explanation as to why we couldn't get on the bus or why the bus was sitting there with its lights off. We waited for 2o, maybe 25 minutes. On at least four occasions I was on the verge of asking the driver what we were waiting for, or if he could at least turn the lights on and let us sit in the bus (bonus reading time), but I found myself holding back out of a sense that it was not my place to question this increasingly bizarre-seeming decision. None of the other people gathered there asked either - we were all too reserved, too British, perhaps, to ask for what was under the circumstances very reasonably information.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally another bus turned up with another driver. The insane and pointless mystery was solved when it turned out that Driver A was waiting for Bus B so that he could drive it back to the depot, whilst Driver B switched to Bus A, turned all the lights on and finally let us on board. Again, at no point were we offered an explanation. I realise that the bus company probably has very good reason for making this kind of thing decision, but I don't see any need for it to be so perversely shrouded in mystery. Once again, it feels as though the people who hold the power (and information is very much power in these situations) use it as leverage over the people who have to stand there waiting for 20 minutes to get on a bus that has also been sat in the bus bay for the same amount of time.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes a bus will come and the driver will say that it's only going as far as the centre of town and not to Addenbrooke's. This, like the above incident, is perfectly reasonable from the perspective of the bus company. Scheduling buses is their prerogative (and whether or not they could do a better job of it is neither here nor there), and I have no problem whatsoever with them making these decisions. And I'm not advocating <a href="http://japanter.blogspot.com/2011/10/whole-is-noise.html">the kind of information overload that Grahame has experienced on public transport in Japan</a>. But I do think that giving as much background as possible in these situations is the best way of empowering passengers in a situation over which they have essentially no control and which otherwise has the potential to make them feel entirely powerless. It's frustrating and unnecessary, and perhaps another symptom of the "let's treat our customers like children" mentality which similarly seems to motivate most of their on-bus copy.</div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-66165015399724631632011-10-26T20:40:00.000+01:002012-01-03T11:41:57.891+00:00Young NunsToday I watched <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b016lts7/">Young Nuns</a>, a show that I knew from the articles about it in the <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=guardian%20young%20nuns&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Flifeandstyle%2F2011%2Foct%2F20%2Fyoung-nuns-life-vow&ei=7mioTru6C5SHhQePhu3xDQ&usg=AFQjCNECjHwqaCBbt3mM_DYq9SOnmkuCLQ&sig2=ljj0DxYu4d7oHeH3jUr2tA">Guardian</a> and on <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=jezebel%20young%20nuns&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjezebel.com%2F5853122%2Fwhy-would-anyone-become-a-nun&ei=G2moTuKRNMS2hAfTlOCpDg&usg=AFQjCNHTqWX3PhOPkz9WRcHxBxY66Hm3tQ&sig2=Sm-KHBEE8yX04Ld5-3XLRQ">Jezebel</a> that I really wanted to see and have been mentioning periodically on Twitter (yes, I remembered to watch it). Shows like this don't quite constitute my sausage-wrapped-in-bacon of televisual programming - that honour is reserved for episodes of The West Wing which also featue a heavy medical drama element, e.g. Season 2 Episode 1 - but they come pretty close. I love documentaries, particularly human interest documentaries (although not just from the '<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=the%20boy%20with%20an%20arse%20for%20a%20face&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dm9al-mpqXjc&ei=cmmoTsrmL9OzhAeDmIykDg&usg=AFQjCNEhMLU_xLUJ3oy4hwalSiGGiajdLg&sig2=WnmMDRKAQlBD4zfYFYZC7w">Boy With an Arse for a Face</a>' school of Channel 4/5 voyeurism - and, come on, the BBC is very guilty of that too sometimes - maybe I do want to see a young Scottish man with no visible prospects calling his mother "pure shite" but it's hardly the better angels of my nature which drive this desire), and Young Nuns promised to combine both of these aspects into some kind of awesome whole.<div><br /></div><div>Also, I was raised Catholic. It's not something I go on about a lot (except in order to claim religious immunity when making foul jokes about the Pope and when I want everyone to think I've had a hard life) because faith was never made a big deal of in my house. We were Vatican II and then some. Maybe Vatican IV. My father is something of an outspoken atheist - his response to my childhood questions like, "but whether or not he was the Messiah, do you think a guy named Jesus existed and maybe did some stuff back in the day?" were always met with a roll of the eyes and a kind of 'whether or not he existed is irrelevant because religion is a crock of shit' response. My mother openly admitted that she only took me and my sister to Mass because she wanted us to qualify for a letter from the priest so that we could go to the Catholic school if we didn't pass the 11+ and couldn't go to the grammar school. Even my grandmother, the most prominently Catholic person that I spent any serious time with growing up and the person who used to pray for me (to St Jude, of course) and flick holy water at me when I swore in the house (I think in the hope that it would leave a scald), seems to have come in recent years to the conclusion that whether or not there is a God, He is unjust for the suffering He allows in the world. </div><div><br /></div><div>Any childhood attempts at religiosity were met with puzzlement by my parents - I went to a Church of England primary school and thought that prayer was an essential part of 'being good' (or else why would the school make us do it every day?), thus whenever I went on periodic 'being good' binges, which were remarkably similar to my occasional present-day 'trying to be a responsible adult' attempts, I tried to include praying in front of my parents as an essential, demosntrable part of my newfound goodness. I think they genuinely feared for me at that point, and, for the record, I never kept up being 'good' longer than about three days, maybe a week tops.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other reason it isn't really fair to call myself Catholic is that I basically never was. I mean, I was baptised, and apparently that's enough for. It turns out that even if you write to the Vatican and ask them formally to no longer consider you a Catholic, for the purposes of the Day of Judgement they still consider you one of their own - it's the cult you can't ever escape from, even in death - but I never had a crisis of faith or lost my faith because I never had any faith to lose. I was quite the little heathen. I recall asking a priest at the age of six, "If God was Jesus' dad, who was God's dad?" and finding the response that God always has been and always will be, world without end, amen, to be entirely unsatisfactory. I played devil's advocate (or perhaps just plain devil) with the religious kids at school in most RE lessons - hell, I love arguing - although I've mostly given up on faith-bashing as a) faith is a deep mystery and one which I cannot comprehend and b) it made me kind of a dick. I will still go as far as to say that I believe some people are hardwired for faith and others aren't, but as I have no idea why this is or why it should be, I'm content these days to leave things at that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Young Nuns. I digress. It was fascinating, and not just from the voyeuristic perspective of, 'how on earth can these young women who are the same age as me bear to give up their boyfriends and smartphones and go and sit on their own with Jesus forever?', although it did slightly irk me that this seemed to be the main emotion that the BBC wanted to inspire in people who could relate on the surface to the would-be novices. There was a segment in which some of the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, who were the fun nuns who got to drive around in cars and go to help the poor and actually leave the convent, went into a Catholic school to talk to a Year Seven class about what it was like to be a nun. And they did a very good job of engaging the children, and the children did a very good job of looking horrified by the prospect of being a nun and saying things like, "How can they have no makeup when makeup is the one thing girls are supposed to have" and "I don't think I'd like it if I couldn't wear jeans" and other such things which made me despair ever so slightly for the state of the young women of tomorrow. But it seemed to be this kind of response that the programme makers were really pushing for - a visceral, black and white, "I don't want that" kind of reaction which doesn't really engender any debate beyond the absolute obvious - and they backed this up with shots of Catherine, one of the young maybe-nuns (spoiler alert: by the end of the programme, neither of the girls they follow are nuns), taking part in a charity fashion show and talking about how she's a "girly girl" and she loves makeup and the hardest part about perhaps becoming a nun for her would be giving up the chance to get married and have a family. Which seemed to be selling the whole thing short somehow.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, the other of the two potential nuns, Clara, was given a somewhat more even treatment (although I can't help but wonder if that's because she gave them much less "girly girl" material to work with - in spite of said more even treatment she was still filmed in skirts, and shopping, and drinking wine with her friends and playing with her younger brothers, all of which are perfectly valid things for a young woman about to enter the novitiate to do but all of which do equally emphasise a stereotypically feminine side). And the lit geek in me did enjoy a tiny thrill that she shares a name with Clara Batchelor, the heroine of the final three books of the Frost in May quartet. Clara was shown in the context of her family, who clearly share a strong faith and were utterly supportive of their eldest daughter's decision, accepting that this was what God was calling her to do even though it would be painful for them to be separated. Catherine was portrayed as much more of a dilettante in the Faith, which wasn't helped by the fact that her abbey of choice decided not to admit her in their next intake and asked her instead to wait a year to make sure she was certain of her decision. </div><div><br /></div><div>I found it particularly interesting that both Catherine and Clara wanted to enter closed orders as opposed to the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, the fun nuns with whom the viewer spent all the time that wasn't dedicated to the two would-bes. I did think it was strange that the BBC was clearly allowed to film and interview the nuns in these closed orders (and they did so), but they didn't spend nearly as much time getting under the skins of their faith and their choices as they did with the jolly Franciscan sisters. This, for me, kind of devalued the impact of the choice the two protagonists were on the verge of making, and also made me question their choice of a life of contemplation (which at times sounds heavenly, pun maybe intended) over the choice of a life of out in the world. And in some ways this did strike me as a choice of privilege. Becoming a nun in the 21st century is a very different decision with a different range of motivating factors than taking the veil would have been in the 13th century, or the 19th, or even the early-to-mid 20th century. Convents are no longer seen as a dumping ground for the poor, the unruly, the unmarriagable or the unmanageable. In fact, choosing to become a nun entirely out of faith and vocation is perhaps the purest and truest to the heart of the religious life that this choice has ever been, if also the weirdest to modern sensibilities. Both Catherine and Clara appeared to come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds with no obvious impediments to following their vocations. The poor don't tend to want a life of poverty and mortification of the flesh and spirit if they can help it (although far be it from me to speak for the poor). And what of the girl with strong faith and strong vocation who has to care for a disabled family member, or has to work so that her younger siblings don't go hungry? Does she get to sequester herself away from the world for a life of prayer and devotion? I think this would have been another interesting angle for the documentary to have looked at (okay, so I want a series).</div><div><br /></div><div>The other thought that this programme inspired was also suggested in part by the Jezebel article I linked to at the beginning of this post. The Jez columnist points out, "If something similar existed for female atheists - a quiet single sex residence for devotion to reading, study, gardening, hanging out with your friends, running charity marathons, and singing - the waiting list would be years long." And it's true. I love most of those things (charity marathons I can take or leave, ditto gardening). The idea of reading and singing hymns all the time (okay, so I'm an atheist who loves religious music) sounds fantastic. I'm incredibly drawn to this kind of lifestyle, and have always been particularly drawn to the prospect of solitude - my ideal house, for a long time, was a shed in the woods with a bed and a typewriter, although I think 2011 called and suggested I take my laptop, and Henry David Thoreau also called and told me to quit stealing his ideas and to ask Emerson when he could next come over for dinner. I like the idea of this to the extent that, for a brief time, I questioned whether or not I had a vocation (the answer is no, I think, a] because I'd hope the thought that I might would be a hell of a lot stronger if I actually did and b] because, as discussed above, I am basically the worst Catholic ever). I can definitely see the appeal, though, and thus the programme was interesting for me not just in a raging-against-privilege-and-stereotypes-of-women sense but also in terms of a comparison between myself and Catherine and Clara that ran much deeper than the one which the BBC seemed to be trying to provoke, namely, 'I can see exactly how you would want that; there is some part of me which wants that too.'</div><div><br /></div><div>Should you watch Young Nuns, which is available on iPlayer for another six days? Yes, probably. If you like that sort of thing.</div>lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84945081060087741.post-21608532227965980182009-10-14T18:51:00.001+01:002009-10-14T18:51:16.050+01:00How did it come to this?Sometimes there's a moment of realisation. Some days there are more than one, and one of today's was a sudden onset of clarity, in which I came suddenly to the understanding that it is not exactly normal to be sat in a wood-panelled, neoclassical work of indulgent architectural decadence, sipping Côtes du Rhône Villages out of the bottle, trying desperately to avoid reading Sophocles and waiting for my friends to get home so we can all play a video game where we have to shoot guys who are either terrorists or counter-terrorists, preferably in the head.<br /><br />It is not a game that attempts any discourse on the directions in which modern warfare is heading, neither is it a child of the War on Terror in the way that many US cultural products of the Cold War are the children of McCarthy. Whether you are a terrorist or a counter-terrorist is a matter of personal choice at most, and at the very least a randomly chosen feature determined by an algorithm within the game itself. There are no sociopolitical lessons to be learnt here.<br /><br />This set of circumstances (in particular, I must add, the Côtes du Rhône Villages), prompted me to ask not 'why is this odd?', or 'I know this is not normal, but why not?' (believe me, there is a subtle difference), but 'how did my life come to this?'. At 20, melodramatic? Yes. But there is something to be said for the fact that it was in that form that the realisation came to me, and none other. And so I plan to go on from here.<br /><br />Since, a few months ago, I committed the unspeakably emo act of <a href="http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Deleting_your_LiveJournal">deleting my livejournal</a>, there has been an ineffable but definite void in my productive life. It turns out that there are certain arguments, subjects and considerations that do not fit into the neat 140 characters of a <a href="http://twitter.com/klave">Twitter</a> post, and are either too personal or too irrelevant to be worthy of a Facebook post. The trouble with livejournal, with the relationship I had with it and the specific account I was using and the people I knew through it - people who were fundamentally important to my formative years, but whose company, for whatever reason, I now no longer keep - was that there was too much backstory, too much history, too much of an attempt to keep a community feel. And so, feeling I had nothing left I wanted to say in that particular persona which I had invented c.2003 and tried, failingly, to maintain for five or six years during a period of life that is characterised by its ephemera and transience, I did the big emo and let it go.<br /><br />Lately, though, I have missed a space to write that is neither poetry not fiction, that has no constraints on length or content, that is not automatically viewed by everyone whose aunt's cat I have ever met and yet can be accessed by anyone, known or unknown to me.<br /><br />Welcome to the blogosphere.lb404http://www.blogger.com/profile/09352054001045985562noreply@blogger.com0