lathophobic aphasia

Interior Spaces

2012-01-24T08:58:00.004Z

I’ve grumbled a bit here and there about the slipping production values in my dreams of late. I know it’s free entertainment, but even so, whoever lays mine on used to do some pretty good stuff: there’d be temples, stained glass and incense, therioform mountain ranges, dark and sooty mediaeval cities, spirit people and what-not, but it seems over the last few years the dream-works have given up trying. If I remember my dreams at all, they are usually washed-out grey or sepia tinted fragments, banal as Tuesday morning, a load o summat an nowt, as my grandma would say, scanning the listings for a dull evening’s telly. Last night’s was a good one, though.

I have taken a job in Crete, λέει, where I am living in a vast house. To cross the open-plan rooms requires several minutes, and depending on which floor I’m occupying, answering the door could be quite an expedition. It’s as if I’m the sole occupant of a major branch of John Lewis. So, as I’m exploring the levels and expanses of contemporary furniture, showroom after showroom of it, I come across a naked young man asleep on one of my umpteen billion sofas. I approach him with commingled curiosity, apprehension and lust, and as I do so he awakes and stands up. The lust doesn’t last long; deucedly plain lad, unfortunately, and as you do in dreams, I note with disappointment but no particular surprise that although he has balls, he has no cock.

The boy has some connection with the previous tenant of the mega-house and their business is clearly unresolved, as now another young man shows up, leading a posse of dangerous-looking local lads. Boys one and two hold a brief colloquy before the gang contrive to draw curtains between me and the first boy, and behind them set about him with clubs. The curtains are blown dramatically upwards and apart just as the lad’s head is smashed like a coconut.

A group of local women arrives. One of them rouses me as I am dozing on one of my day-beds - I have trillions - and tells me I am welcome to visit anyone in the town. I should call on Kyría [= Mrs] So-and-So, whose speciality is some delicious confection made with cherries. I am given to understand that everyone is hospitable and generous, but to use that irritating cliché, there’s the Elephant in the Room. It is left unspoken, but it seems that getting shut of the corpse of that that poor, broken, dickless boy is to be entirely my affair.

So how about that?

*****

“Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.” – H. L. Mencken

Jesus-jacked

2012-01-17T10:10:00.008Z

Maybe someone more computer literate than me (i.e., almost everybody) can explain this. Yesterday a friend asked for the address of this blog, and so I e-mailed her the link. When you click on it, though, you are um... delivered from my Godless pushing of the Gay Agenda and soul-threatening links to sites where the Gospel is mocked and young men play with each others' boy-bits, and find yourself instead here, a dense, multiply-hyperlinked page of fundie Xtian twaddle, with all the familiar piles of nauseating shite I have attacked and sent up so frequently on L.A. How came this about, think ye? Well, either it was pure fluke, or some deluded God-botherer has attempted to intercept what traffic to my blog he can, in order to save souls. If this is the case, may I politely ask you to desist? I'm being very restrained here, but won't be for long if you don't get the hell off my blog.

I had a look at some of the links and from one of them culled the following inspirational lyric, which I reproduce for your upliftment. The poem is catchily entitled 'Me, Myself and I, Plus You' Take it away!

Me, Myself, and I, which includes you—
one was born in the city; one was born in the country;
one was born somewhere under the sky.

And we grew up in the city; we grew up in the country;
we grew up somewhere—we knew not why.

We three, became the center of our surroundings,
of our world, of our universe.
Nothing was more important than “I”.

Our children came first; in our job, we were immersed;
and for fun and food, we did thirst.
We followed the ways of the world.

No, our possessions came first; yet for pleasures, we did thirst;
to be blunt, “in Myself” was I immersed.
Seems like all came before God, including “I”.

I loved to talk, but Myself was shy;
Me just loved to find things to buy.
We followed the ways of the world.

There. Nothing was more important than I, and in the very next line, our children came first. Makes McGonagall look... competent. These people think thay have something the rest of us lack, and that their God has delegated them to communicate this to us. His chosen ministers are sin-obsessed, sex-loathing, guilt-ridden, hell-haunted semi-literates - and they wonder why I'm not keen. Now, before you read the conclusion of the poem (it's a very long one, so I'm sparing you a lot of tedium here) here's an EFL-type reading task:

i) Guess what happens to the narrator in the end, and discuss your ideas with the person next to you, in English, please.
ii) Read and confirm or reject your anticipations.
iii) Were you surprised... really?

To the fire, we went—to eternal torment.
It is for all that follow the ways of this world.

There is no pride here.
Can’t you see? can’t you hear?
the weeping and gnashing of teeth?

The worms cover us; my tongue, it burns.
Oh, for a sip of cool water, my tongue does yearn!

The darkness is thick, my flesh is so sick.
Don’t follow the ways of the world.

So stupid was I, to reject God’s Son,
to reject His Word, so I could have fun.
I followed the ways of the world.

Well, don't pretend nobody warned you.

Multiple Messages

2012-01-17T08:59:00.003Z

De nada 'you're welcome'.

Reblogged from Language Log

Mama Africa

2012-01-05T21:11:00.008Z

Two songs here from Sangoma, the best album of the late Miriam Makeba. Sangoma is a collection of Xhosa and Zulu folk songs that covers the lot: delight in children, loneliness and ostracism, fear of illness and deliverance from same, celebration at release from captivity, bereavement, intimations of immortality, warnings to horny and impetuous youth: if that's not getting your money's worth, I don't know what is. Totally marvellous stuff that you should investigate at once.

The first one is Baxabene Oxamu, a nonsense song to help kids master Xhosa clicks. The 'x' here represents the 'gee up' lateral tongue-click you use to get your horse moving. The line that follows is:

Beliqhata baba bgeqothyo leqhude

...where 'q' is a sound made by letting your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth and pulling the air in suddenly with a champagne-cork pop. I bought the CD in Piraeus at the tail-end of the nineties when I lived in a basement flat in Kolonaki, Athens. I had an echoing hallway to myself in which I practised my clicks, and I think I'm like, sordov, pretty click-literate by now, yeah? I have a colleague who is a native speaker of Zulu, and I once listened to her talking on her mobile to her husband. Those resonant pops are absent from everyday speech, unfortunately. I heard the clicks because I knew Reine speaks Zulu - otherwise I would probably have missed them.

Baxabene Oxamu by Miriam heard the clicks only because I knew Makeba on Grooveshark

The second song is Angilalanka, meaning 'I do not sleep'. Insomnia is taken as a sign that one is chosen by the spirit people to be a 'sangoma' or healer. If you are having trouble getting off, this might be why.

Angilalanga by Miriam Makeba on Grooveshark

There you go. A change for those of us normally in thrall to Middle Eastern wailing.

Why art thou amazed?

2012-01-05T11:21:00.011Z

Tried to post this yesterday, but ad trouble wiv me widget. We have passed the point in the Christian calendar at which this piece would be appropriate, but since I don't believe a word of it anyway, let's not worry about that. It's not Twelfth Night until tomorrow so we can still have Christmas songs until then, and this is light years away from Noddy Sodding Holder or frigging bloody Wizzard. Here, Soeur Marie Keyrouz performs the song Li-madha ta'jabina ya Mariam? 'Why art thou Amazed, O Mary?' i.e., that thou hast not known man, but art yet up the duff, and art like, 'why me?', yeah? It does strain the credulity a bit, let's admit it.

However... Soeur Marie sings the Kathisma of the Office of the Nativity from the Byzantine Melkite tradition with such heart-stopping intensity and technical accomplishment that we can forget the crassness of commercialised Christmas, the absurdity of the story and the horrors perpetrated in its name, and ride the thermals of her astonishing voice.

Kathisme de l'Office de la Nativité (Byzantine Melkite tradition): Li-mâdhâ ta'jabina yâ Mariamu? by Soeur Marie Keyrouz/Ensemble de la Paix on Grooveshark

Babelfish Strikes (Yet) Again

2012-01-03T10:16:00.010Z

Is Babelfish really any bloody use to anybody? I clicked 'translate this page' whilst skimming through the blog, and the posts were swiftly rendered into pidgin Greek. In my 'auto interview' post, I answered the question 'what would paradise be like if you were in charge?' like this:

'The food and wine would be first rate, free, contain no calories and be served by naked, ithyphallic twinks.' The translator came up with:

Τι would ουρανό είναι σαν να ήσασταν στο τέλος;
Το φαγητό και το κρασί θα είναι η πρώτη τιμή, δωρεάν, δεν περιέχουν θερμίδες και να εξυπηρετείται από γυμνό, ιθυφαλλικός Ηλικιωμένες.

If we ignore the scrambled noun-adjective agreement and capricious use of singular and plural verbs, we could turn this back into English something like this - emphasis added:

What would sky is as though you were at the end?
The food and the wine will be the first price, free, they don't contain calories, and will be served by naked, ithyphallic elderly ladies.

Which is about as far from my idea of paradise as it's possible to get. Can you sue Babelfish for misrepresentation?

Reasons to be Cheerful?

2011-12-31T11:01:00.027Z

It is early morning and although we are our fifty-something teacher selves, my sister and I are required to get up and go to school as pupils. Given our understandable reluctance to comply, The Authorities have felt it necessary to send a social worker* to jolly us along in a cheerily firm, no-nonsense manner. She's a youngish woman who looks like a vicar's daughter and primary school teacher from the fifties, an ex-Head Girl who's now a spinsterish frump in a tweedy coat, her skirt, blouse and cardie a palette of mud, snot green and corpse-skin yellow. She thinks prayers at assembly of the greatest importance and has a long list of stuff she'd like to see banned. Come along, time you were dressed. I pull on a pair of trousers of that hue kids produce when they mix up every colour in the paint-box, and team them with a shirt of bluish, greyish, greenish wretchedness. Are we ready to go? Chop chop! No dawdling!

Then, of course, I wake up. Why, it was all a dream! A dream in which a cheerfully bossy schoolma’am, her mind as conventional as the white lines in the middle of the road, orders me around, forcing me back to my dull old school, wearing an outfit the colour of goose shit and gravy. At no point did I say, ‘look love, leave us out with your weeny little brain, will you? I want colour, warmth and wit, perfumes and spice, santurs, neys, dastgas and ragas. So fuck off.’ No. I meekly acquiesced. The message from the old dream-maker is pretty obvious, I reckon. ‘Brighten up, man, will you? Look what you are letting yourself get pushed into! ’ It makes me feel like responding ‘give me one good reason to brighten up - the dull, washed-out colours are all I can see at the moment, and their dullness seems like to persist.’ A neighbour up here in’t North where I now am said to my mum the other day: ‘it doesn’t get better, Shirley, does it?’ meaning life, aging, losing your mind as this neighbour now is, afraid to go to town alone as she will get lost in streets she’s known for seventy-five years.

So here’s something to meditate upon in 2012. All my Zen books are at home, so I had to make my own addition to the Mumonkan:

''The monk Bing, styled Fang, nicknamed Dong, came to Feng, keeper of the pass at Wong.

‘My mind is troubled,’ Bing Fang Dong said, ‘for I see nought save loss and poverty and weakness and annihilation ahead of me, and I contemplate it with foreboding, and my days are soured, and I am oppressed by the myriad things. How have the patriarchs remarked upon this?’

Master Feng rose gravely from his meditation cushion and throwing off his robe, let forth a great cry:

'Hold it! Flash, bang, wallop, what a picture!
Click, what a picture, what a photograph!
Poor old soul, blimey, what a joke,
Hat blown off in a cloud of smoke!
Clap hands, stamp your feet, bang it on the big bass drum.
What a picture, what a picture,
rum-tiddly-um-pum-pum-pum-pum,
Stick it in your family album!
Stick it in your family,
Stick it in your family,
Stick it in your family,
AL-BUM!!!! '

On hearing this, Bing Fang Dong was fully awakened.''

Commentary:

What does it mean, that the Zen masters of old were always so fiercely joyful? They were not exempt from the ills that flesh is heir to, no more than anyone else. Indeed they must have suffered in physical terms more than we do, living as they did before aspirin, penicillin, dentistry, vaccines or anaesthesia. Yet they thought existence a fine joke. How can this be? You must answer at once, or it is disgraceful!

Happy New Year.

---------------

*I reckon she's the mother of the announcer at Peterborough station who almost always says 'the train at platte-form four is the sixteen twenty five...' probably in obedience to a memory of the parental admonition: 'talk properly; there's a tee in 'platform', Beverley!'

God Giue Ye Merrie Christmastide

2011-12-21T16:36:00.016Z

This was a rather beautiful gif, so why isn't it giffing?

Over at Logodaedalus, Deiniol welcomes the season of peace on Earth, joy and good will to all men with 'Christmas can suck my balls.' Yes, and mine. It's an unkind thought, I know, but if time travel were possible, I'd be tempted to go back to 1946 Walsall and smother Noddy Holder in his cradle. I would also seek out the person or persons responsible for choosing the Christmas decorations now slung across Stamford High Street, and have them humanely put down. Humanely-ish, anyway. Look, Christmas decorations needn't be naff. In Athens in the nineties, Syntagma Square and Vasilissis Sophia Avenue, which was my route home, would be made magical on December nights by thousands of little white lights in the trees, and nothing more. No coloured bulbs, no Santas and snowmen suspended from the lamp posts like gibbeted felons. Stamford High Street's Victorian buildings are already rendered banal enough by the predictable frontages of Boots, Marks and Sparks, Gregg's and all the rest of them. Why disfigure them further by tarting the place up with with rejects from Blackpool illuminations?

I've always had the feeling around this time of year that something extraordinarily...um, extraordinary is about to happen. Fuck knows why: it never has up to now. It's like the inevitability-feeling you get when you know you are about to sneeze or cum, but then it just sort of... wears off, peters out, sort of thing, you know... anyway, I court the feeling while I can. I'm lying here in candlelight listening to my new CD of the wonderful Soeur Marie Keyrouz (thanks, Bo for introducing me to her) performing Maronite Chants for Nativity as darkness gathers on the year's shortest day. The candlelight softens everything, makes the leaves of the plants darker and the tangerines on the table next to me glow as if lit from within. It's a far cry from bloody Slade and sodding Wizzard and all the nauseating cheap tat we get thrust upon us annually even before Hallowe'en's over. I have this odd feeling again of some mysterious and marvellous event being prepared on the Inner Planes, but am resigned to the usual last-minute cancellation. Also, I would like to assure the Saudi student who sent me this e-mail this morning:

Hello how are you like to dedicate to you this link [to a Muslim site] because I would love to know us more
You are a good man there is in you all the qualities of a Muslim man
Humility, respect, good
These are all your morals if you will read about Islam, you are close to it, I hope to be a Muslim until I see you in heaven
I hope if you read my message tell me
Greetings

...that the putative event on the Inner Planes does NOT involve my conversion to Islam or either of the other Abrahamic faiths. Παπαπαπαπα. Αυτό έλειπε. The presumption of this e-mail reminds me of a Claire Bretécher cartoon in which a straight couple are chatting at the post-coital cigarette stage. After telling the woman how much at ease he feels with her, the man says: 'deep down, you're a bloke.'

This will be the last post before I sod off to my sister's in Suffolk for Christmas, so have a good one, καλές γιορτές, and hasta luego.

Christopher Hitchens on the Festive Season:

I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. "Come on," I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events…. "Come on," yourself. How wrong am I?

We value your feedback III

2011-12-13T12:58:00.008Z

Today was the final session of my MA module in Intercultural Communication, and I was curious and slightly apprehensive about the coming feedback. Would I finally be exposed as a fraud?

LECTURER BOOTLEG MODULE PORKER COVER-UP SHOCK PROBE

I have never taught 'intercultural communication' before, and for the past twelve weeks have been hoping that my newness to the field did not show. Today on their feedback forms, thirteen out of fourteen students declared themselves satisfied:

It was very interesting.
Teacher is very kind and with humour.
It was very my favourite course!
Teacher used personal experience to show cultural difference - very practical.
Everything was perfect.
He is very nice man.

Well, absolutely. I entirely concur. The purpose of feedback for me is largely to confirm yet again that the state of paranoia I work myself into about teaching (and so much else) is not a reaction to any external, observable fact, but wholly endogenous. Along with the encomia were some sensible suggestions for improvement, with reasonable acknowledgement that the course was short and timing tight. Of course, it isn't the thirteen satisfied punters that now occupy my thoughts, but the one malcontent.

What do you think were the strengths and weaknesses of the course?

1) Easy to understand. 2) No communication / no teamwork

Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

Put interesting stuff.

The form is unsigned but I would lay odds it is the work of the only male on the course, Kong. (Not his real name. I chose it because it means 'empty'.) He spent most of the time looking pissed off or passing what I took to be snide remarks to his girlfriend. Anyway, no point second-guessing an unsigned feedback form. Forget it. One moaner, everyone else happy. Doesn't matter.

End of.

...yet give me leave to wonder, Kong (?), how a course centred on discussion, problem-solving and roleplay lacked 'communication' or 'teamwork', and why, if it was not interesting, you didn't make suggestions for spicing it up, or get the fuck out and do something else. Why, if it is communication and teamwork you value so much, did you remain dourly silent for twelve weeks? Fuck's sake, the 'no communication or teamwork' bit bugs me: it's almost as if you attended somebody else's course and got the feedback mixed up, although having distributed the forms and waited while they were completed, I know that it's my efforts you are disparaging. I mean, if you said you didn't like discussion and problem-solving, fair enough, but...

...aw, fuck it. There's always one.

After the feedback forms had been collected, I said I would be available for tutorials on the assignment, but there were no takers, and everyone except Kong and his moll left in high spirits. I sat and looked at the outline for the next module, 'Intercultural Business Communication', God bless and save us. I suspect that the coming thin years will see me delivering modules by the seat of my pants in a wide range of disciplines - Renal Dialysis Unit Management, 17th Century Dutch Thimbles, Intermediate Akkadian, Papuan Necromancy. The paranoia is unlikely to abate.

Actually, come to think of it, Papuan Necromancy would be a hell of a lot more interesting than intercultural sodding business communication. I might suggest it.

A Day in the Life III

2011-12-10T09:00:00.015Z

The left lens – the one that serves the more efficient of my partnership of eyes – popped out of my specs on Thursday evening, the screw that held it in place having disintegrated, dematerialised, or whatever - I was not prepared to spend ages trying with my fingertips to locate an item no bigger than a Times New Roman size twelve bold lower-case ‘i’. My heart sinks when something happens to put my reading-glasses out of commission, so utterly do I depend on them. I am long-sighted, and if unspectacled, peer into an aqueous blur that extends some eight feet in front of me. Reading from a page or screen is impossible. On the train Friday morning I squinted miserably at a book through a magnifying glass, the font size appearing at eight in the periphery of my vision, veering up to eighteen in the centre, dwindling back to eight at the opposite end. It was very uncomfortable and I hated everybody around me for talking, chewing and having silly faces - even more than I usual do.

The girl at Boots Opticians in Leicester asked ‘did you get them from ourselves here?’ and when I said no, I got them elseways from otherselves, told me she could not repair them and I would have to go to Stamford where I bought them, because they had a lab and would be able to fix them. By the time I got to work I was thoroughly pissed off – couldn’t read anything, operate the photocopier, use a computer or be sure which tea-bags were mine. A colleague printed and photocopied stuff for me as if I were disabled. It’s extraordinary how frustrating it is and how ratty it can make one to have the eyesight one takes for granted temporarily suspended. I wasn’t in the best of moods for teaching.

We had the penultimate session of a twelve-week module on intercultural communication, in which we’ve been looking at what features of human communication are valued or de-emphasised by different cultures, and how, when representatives of different cultures meet on shop-floors and in boardrooms, they can seriously misconstrue each others’ intentions. Here’s an example of the kind of thing we’ve been analysing. Jennifer of Chicago-based Rapacity Technologies is calling Sanjay in India. Sanjay is the manager of one of Rapacity’s vendors for customer service outsourcing.

Jennifer:	We really need to get all of the customer service representatives trained on the new process in the next two weeks. Can you get this done?
Sanjay:	That timeline is pretty aggressive. Do you think it’s possible?
Jennifer:	Well, I think it’ll need some creativity and hard work, but I reckon we can get it done with two or three days to spare
Sanjay:	OK.
Jennifer:	OK, great, let’s get going on that, then. How is everything with you guys?
Sanjay:	All’s well, but the monsoons this year are causing a lot of delays. It’s hard getting around the city.

When Jennifer calls back ten days later, she is pissed off to learn that the retraining is less than half complete, while Sanjay is surprised that she is not pleased to hear how many reps have been trained. The problem is that Jennifer is convinced that he agreed to complete the training in the time specified, and Sanjay is just as convinced that he made it quite clear that this was impossible. Jennifer is from a ‘low context’ communication culture where you say what you mean and mean what you say: everything is in the words. When Sanjay said ‘OK’, she assumed she had a done deal, and only then moved on to the chit-chat bit. Sanjay is from a ‘high context’ communication culture. A direct ‘no’ is impolite in India, and so refusal must be communicated via hints dropped throughout an exchange. The hedging about the aggressive timeline and the mention of transport problems because of the monsoon are the hints, and they bypass Jennifer completely. The result is probably that she thinks he’s a lazy bastard and not to be trusted, and he thinks she has the subtlety of a gloved pugilist picking daisies.

So, we looked at yet another cultural train-wreck in which a US company in a joint venture with a Mexican firm succeeded in antagonising the people of a whole region of Mexico without having a clue how they did it. After a reasonable time for cerebration, I asked the students what they thought had gone wrong.

‘Different cultures’, one of them said. I waited for elaboration, but that was the sum of her contribution and she obviously thought she’d nailed it.

Listen, love, I once had to use a text about yawning with a bunch of teenagers in Kalamata. I asked if they knew why we yawn.

‘Be-caws we are tye-red!’ they said.

OK, I admit I asked for that. They were kids, used to being asked dumb display questions by teachers and were not to know that I was asking if they knew why tiredness should provoke yawning rather than erection, blushing, sneezing or breaking wind. But for fuck’s sake, woman, this is a module for an MA, you’re a graduate student, how can you possibly suppose that that is anywhere near an adequate response to the bloody question? The entire bloody course has been about different bloody cultures, so what a-bloody-bout them?

I know many a Chinese student is unwilling to put herself forward for fear of being thought a show-off, but after so long amongst us, you would think… I dunno. Maybe I’m doing my share of misconstrual here. We were joined for the session by an older lady who introduced herself to me as a visiting academic from the University of Beijing and colleague of Professor Jiaying Feng, the woman who is in charge of the MA. She would like to attend my lecture, she said, as she had heard they were ‘very excellent’. Like most teachers of adult classes, I’m used to assuming that everyone is happy if they are not whinging. Positive feedback is relatively rare, so I was flattered. Then I wondered if the new Chinese lady was merely offering polite, high-context style formulas. Perhaps she was Jiaying’s spy. No, too paranoid. Still, I hadn’t expected the management to be such slime-bags, had I?

I arranged cover and got the 12.18 back to Stamford, hoping my specs would be repaired in situ and not, as I feared from the Boots girl’s reaction, have to be sent away, leaving me blind as a mole for a week. In fact, the repair took approximately three minutes, and this was a huge relief until I realised that by skipping the afternoon’s teaching I had effectively paid fifty-six quid for a screw the size of a Times New Roman size twelve bold lower-case ‘i’.

Yesterday will be snowy

2011-12-05T17:55:00.006Z

A colleague reported to me a conversation she had had with Talal, one of the Algerian airmen, whose progress in English has been rather like mine was in maths: negligible.

‘How’s the weather in your town in Algeria?’ she asked him.

‘Same, Algeria. Algeria, same. Tomorrow snow.’

Well, it was a comprehensible reply in the context, as he was able to nod towards the window and the bitter cold day outside. Not what you might hope for after a five month stay with us, though: no subject pronouns, no auxiliary verbs, none of the grammatical nuts and bolts that allow language to range beyond the immediate. Oh, and by ‘tomorrow’, he meant ‘yesterday’.

‘Is he a winch-man?’ I asked, because my only all-winch class two years ago had been up-hill work and I suppose I'm prejudiced.

‘No – a radar operator. You know, absolutely pivotal between the pilot and the winch.’

Shit. If on a Search and Rescue mission Talal transposes, say, 125 degrees and 152 degrees, the result could be messy indeed. I suggested the best we can do at this late stage is teach him to say ‘Oops, sorry…’ He may only need it the once.

I know I'm being churlish...

2011-12-04T08:34:00.010Z

... but this pisses me off. I found it on Tumblr a minute or two ago. It pissed me off first of all because understanding the 'joke' depends on your knowledge of spelling and (missing) punctuation, not of grammar, and secondly because some knuckle-dragger had added the comment:

'THIS hahahahahaha is where being a nerd comes in handy! :b'

There's someone out there who is confident that others will have to skim that seventeen-word text more than once to interpret the message, and at least one other who who thinks that the ability to distinguish 'then' from than' makes you a nerd. 286 people 'liked' the damn thing. Oy, Gott.

Auto interview

2011-11-30T17:41:00.031Z

On his blog, EFL luminary Jeremy Harmer interviews Professor Deborah Cameron. Some of her answers (and books, of course) made me think she and I ought to get together for a few drinks sometime - how about it, Debs? I'll let you know when I can fit you in. I have absolutely nothing to write about at the moment, so I used Harmer's questions to Deborah C. to interview myself.

What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

Angry, fraught sensualist. OK, that’s two adjectives and a noun. It's my interview, after all.

What is your greatest achievement?

Having made it to 52, I suppose, given that I have lived hand-to-mouth all my adult life. I sometimes have days - and more often three-in-the-mornings - of self-recrimination for not having been more focussed in my younger days, for having so little money sense, for never having realised an an ambition, as opposed to merely day-dreaming about them. Regret is useless but sticks to the soul like gum to a classroom carpet. A.A. Gill said of his life in 2008: 'I still have that feeling that everyone else got given a script and I didn't.' Yes, exactly.

What’s your favourite smell?

Garlic and herbs wafting from the oven and the aroma of charred red peppers.

What is your favourite taste?

Alcoholic drink in almost all its manifestations except ouzo or crème de menthe. A sharp, fresh gin and tonic smelling of lemon and new-cut Christmas tree; honey and wood-smoke whisky; fruit and cool steel of white wine; berries, plums, cedar and cigars of red wine; almonds and new bread of manzanilla sherry. Yep, alcohol.

To be fair to ouzo, I do occasionally have one in the right circumstances, those being a hot night by the Aegean with the smell of the sea and octopus cooking over coals. Anywhere else, it tastes like Dettol.

What’s your favourite piece of music?

I’m a musical klutz, but I reckon the Sibelius symphony no 7 comes somewhere near to being my favourite. It’s a complete symphony collapsed into a single movement, perfectly controlled whilst seeming organic, and one of the few pieces of 20th century orchestral music whose development I can follow.

What book would you like everyone to read? Why?

Not for me to dictate what anyone should read or not read...

What website would you like everyone to visit? Why?

...or what websites they should visit, apart from mine.

What is your favourite sound?

Rain. I find it enormously comforting.

If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?

A cat who loves being cuddled and cosseted and fed on fresh meat, then withdraws. I’d also be the only alcoholic feline known to zoology.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I don’t think of ‘spare time’, just time. What I’m doing’s what I’m doing.

How many languages do you speak and why?

I speak French and Greek fairly confidently, having started the former at the age of ten and been in a love-hate relationship with Greece since I was 25. I can read Spanish and Italian but don't speak either well. I can read Albanian newspapers with moderate success, although I'm out of practice now. I can pick out the odd item of vocabulary in Japanese films, and know when someone's used a past tense even if I couldn't tell you what the verb (or adjective - they also have tenses in Japanese) means. My big failure is German. I started it at twelve and stayed with it to part one of my degree, but could never get to like it, despite knowing some lovely native speakers of the tongue of Goethe and Schiller, including the saintly Dr Gertraud Herbert at Cambridge, who tried harder on my behalf than I ever did at the time. I still sympathise with Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘…I don’t like German. It isn’t at all a becoming language. I know perfectly well that I look quite plain after my German lesson.’

What do you like most/least about your job?

I love to see the ingenuity with which a group of people who have only a little English in common can communicate with one another once they drop the fear of grammatical errors instilled in the past. I like that I have access to loads of books on linguistics. I hate meetings and I’ve never been to one that was not a complete waste of time. I also hate admin, but have belatedly come to the understanding that it is essentially covering your arse.

What would heaven be like if you were in charge?

The food and wine would be first rate, free, contain no calories and be served by naked, ithyphallic twinks.

When and where are you happiest?

In a warm bed on a cold morning when I needn’t get up.

Something you are never without.

Wax earplugs to shut out the world and his iPod.

What is your most appealing habit?

Someone told me (ages ago) it was my inability to pass a dog or cat in the street without petting it.

And your least appealing habit?

Probably making it clear by my tone of voice when I don’t want to talk to you.

What is the trait you most dislike in others?

Making it clear by their tone of voice that they don’t want to talk to me.

What is your most treasured possession?

I don’t think I have one, unless I can count my cock as a 'possession'. Like Deborah Cameron, I’d be irritated rather than heart-broken if a fire gutted my flat. It would certainly bother the landlord more than it would bother me.

If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?

Teleportation so I’d never need to use a train again. Think of the saving.

What words or phrases do you overuse?

The old limbic system and basal ganglia throw up ‘fuck’, 'shit' and ‘bollocks’ rather a lot, and in class I have to make a conscious effort not to say ‘OK’ every few seconds.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

An extra room in this bloody flat – I’m pig-sick of falling over things. And a tumble-dryer had I but room to accommodate one.

How would you like to be remembered?

Couldn’t care less.

What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?

I don’t play an instrument, something I really regret never having learned. My favourite styles of music are Indian and Persian, plainsong and music from the Cancionero de Palacio.

What did you dream of being when you were younger?

First an actor, then in my teens a theatre director. I was going to be the new Peter Brook. I didn’t realise then that you need to be far more interested than I have ever been in what makes other people tick.

What were you like as a student at school?

Probably infuriating, being something of a prima donna. I was exceptionally good at languages and outstandingly bad at maths, physics and chemistry, but couldn’t be persuaded to care. I worked at what I liked and didn’t give a monkey’s about the stuff I didn’t like. I was constantly being warned that one day I would regret this attitude, but that day has yet to dawn. I thought school was brain-curdlingly boring 99% of the time.

How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?

I listen to the 'Hymn to the Sun' from Akhnaten or pour myself a whisky and soda, or both.

If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...

Absolutely no idea. Really. I think I was born with the sickness to teach.

Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?

It sounds conceited but the answer is ‘myself’. I’ve always made up my own mind what I wanted to know – other people’s agendas concerning what I ought to know have never interested me. I’m a pain in the arse when in statu pupillari.

Something that few people know about you.

I loathe milk and butter. Do not invite me to dinner if you have used either of these in the food.

If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?

I’d like to be an invisible visitor to Akhetaten and be the first modern man to know whether Akhenaten was a visionary or a nutter. I strongly suspect the latter: pharaohs had to put up a fair bit of front, naturally, but Akhenaten really did seem to think he was the sole intermediary between men and the God, suggesting a greater degree of megalomania than was customarily permitted. I'd come back and tell the world what happened to Nefertiti - disgraced? Dead of the plague? Elevated to co-regent? - and put paid to speculation about who Smenkhare really was: Akhnaten's incestuous bum-boy or Nefertiti under a new name?

What’s your best learning memory from school?

I don’t have one. I was bored out of my skull from the age of 11 to the age of 18. Odd how often one dreams of being back there, and thinking 'but I'm old now, I've moved on - dammit, I can LEAVE!'

Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?

Dreadfully messy, although it's usually hidden mess as I tend to shove my books and papers out of sight and out of mind. I’m disgracefully unsystematic about pretty much everything. The only rule I consciously observe is ‘never throw any papers away’, as you never know when someone is going to come urgently needing them.

What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?

Wrap myself in a blanket on the bed by an open window, with a good book.

A poem you know by heart.

Jabberwocky.

What would you like to learn to do next?

Speak Mandarin, but I suspect the tones would defeat me. I have tried, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to make them stick and to associate changes in pitch with lexical meaning. Some of my Chinese students have been helpfully demonstrating tones for me. I can repeat a phrase almost perfectly immediately after it's been modelled, but only the once. My one pitch-perfect phrase is 'wŏ bù hē kafé' (= I don't drink coffee) but it's useless to me as I do in fact drink thick black sugarless coffee by the gallon.

What question would you have liked me to ask you?

‘What are you having?’

What would have been your answer?

A very large scotch with a smidge of soda, please.

Triumphans, exultans

2011-11-22T20:31:00.018Z

I mentioned earlier that our little department in our big university, the Little CHEF (Centre for Hammering English into Foreigners) was threatened with becoming a joint venture with the property speculator known as UpYours University Partnerships, an Education-for-Certain-People's-Profit organisation that would take over the running of our English language programmes and foundation courses whilst reducing rates of pay, increasing workloads, denying teachers union rights and not paying into the teachers' pension scheme. They would have to hire underqualified and under-experienced staff who'd be prepared to work for about a tenner an hour. In addition to this, they would go for bums on seats by hyping the 'product', promising success, and accepting onto the programmes kids who really ought not to be on them, alongside other kids who deserve not to be held back by huge classes of very mixed level and teachers who are not always up to the task. They would then be forced to assess these kids over-generously at the end of the courses, lest the product be revealed as a pig in a poke; if you make promises in exchange for money and fail to deliver, people tell their mates and you are totally screwed. Why risk that, when you can introduce your own assessment system in which everyone's a winner?

All that aside, I'm sure they have everyone's best interests at heart.

However, let joy be unconfined, for UpYours was defeated bei uns just as they were at Essex, Oxford Brookes, Reading, Goldsmith's College and Westminster University. An hour ago I got this e-mail:

Thanks to strong resistance from Little CHEF staff, and thanks to the excellent backing from the UCU union at branch, regional and national level, together we've managed to see off the UpYours privateers. Additionally, we've given a firm message to the likes of Professor Grabbie and Dr Slymebagge-Hogg that if they wish to muck about with us again, then it will be at their peril.

While management will undoubtedly claim that their reversal over UpYours was purely a business decision that had nothing to do with the activities of UCU members here,* make no mistake, if we had not stood up and fought them over this, then the UpYours deal would have gone through and we'd soon be working for the educational version of Macdonalds, with those teachers intending to come back for courses later in the year being offered less than half the pay rate and much worse terms and conditions. So well done to everyone for sticking together!

This is a huge relief at a time when huge reliefs are rare as teddy-bear turds. I suspect there will be celebratory post-lesson drinkies in the Little CHEF tomorrow, for Christmas has come early. Note to our regular burglars: if you are planning to abstract another monitor from our classrooms (there are still seven up for grabs, as no doubt you know) I suggest you make burgling time a tad later than usual tomorrow evening, OK?

*****

* The claim made by the same crew after the serious butt-kicking administered by UCU and staff at Essex University in 2008: 'it was felt in the end that the joint venture was not appropriate in that context'. Too bloody right it wasn't.

*****

From the union today, 26th November, emphasis triumphantly added:

In case you haven't seen already the news on UCU's website, 90% of the voters in our poll have said that a partnership with INTO* would damage the university's reputation. The Branch Committee would like to thank everyone who took part in our online poll. INTO has now been rejected by staff at every UK university that has been polled on whether or not their institution should get involved with the company.

*The real name of 'UpYours' - who did I imagine I was protecting?

Being dogmetic about things

2011-11-15T16:38:00.040Z

No, no, not that dogme...

In the nineties in Athens I worked at a small, privately-owned centre for teacher training and business English. I stayed with teacher training, because business English holds little appeal for me – scares me a bit, actually. Colleagues used to try to tempt me over to the business side, and I was invited to observe some lessons at the Bank of Greece. Our business teachers’ house-style was to lead their classes from behind, allowing the students to dictate the pace of the lesson and the choice of subject matter, and as bankers, they had plenty to go at. (Probably even more nowadays.) The students carried the lesson for the most part, with the teacher on hand to supply vocabulary, correct impeding errors and occasionally intervene to give a brief grammar explanation or presentation. Everything came from the students: they asked for the language they needed at the moment they needed it, they asked for grammar rules occasionally, but mostly they talked, debated, agreed, disagreed, misunderstood, requested clarification, paraphrased and recapped, all in English. There would be some discussion of the interaction and some analysis and correction of errors at the end. This leading from behind, or something like it, has more recently been called ‘teaching unplugged’ or ‘dogme’ after the approach to film-making advocated by Lars Von Trier, et al., an approach you might term ‘materials light’, focussing on narrative and character rather than special effects and the emotional manipulation provided by music and carefully contrived lighting. In teaching terms, it means using the learners themselves as a resource instead of commercially produced coursebooks, skills books, grammar books and all the CDs and software that compete for your students' money these days. As with any other approach to teaching, you can adopt dogme whole-heartedly and ditch your coursebooks and materials completely, or you can just take from it what you want and apply its principles some of the time. The only criterion for your decision will be the students' response to the way you teach them.

In the EFL teacher's box of tricks, there isn't a single foolproof method, approach, technique, text, task or game, and the possibility of muffing it is always with us. Teachers’ reactions to screwing up a lesson or part of a lesson while I was observing have varied from dropping the lesson like a hot brick, bursting into tears, losing their rag with the students or worse, ploughing on oblivious. What is more useful than any of these is sitting down after the students have left (unscathed and usually unaware of the agonies of self-reproach their teacher is now enduring) and reflecting on the proceedings in tranquillity. Gradually teachers learn to pinpoint errors of judgement and consider how a different decision at that point might have rescued things. They develop intuitions about how the students felt in the lesson and why, based on their personality, language level and cultural background. They realise that any approach must be adapted to fit specific students in a specific class, and if any method, technique or task died horribly, it was not appropriate at that time or was in some way misapplied.

In the light of these rather obvious considerations, it was something of a surprise to read here a hatchet job by Luan Hanratty on the dogme approach, denouncing it as ‘a vacuous, anti-educational and bourgeois approach to language teaching’. I say, steady on, old boy. All those adult learners at the Bank of Greece in the nineties might disagree there: bourgeois they might have been, but a vacuous and anti-educational approach would not have brought them to the levels of confidence and fluency they routinely attained. ‘The amount of thinking on your feet makes it just too difficult for most people to do well without any direction or structure.’ Well, this might be true, but there need not be a lack of direction or structure – if you think there is none, make one: was dogme made for students or students for dogme? What teacher applies a technique in its most purist form if it’s obviously not working for her class? Only an insensitive, insecure or inexperienced one. And how is it a valid criticism of any approach to say that it is difficult? Teaching effectively is always demanding and requires a lot of practice and reflection. Luan goes on:

‘Dogme classes inevitably descend into a lame string of stilted and repetitive teacher-led Q&As and a lot of awkward silences, resulting in an unsure performance by the teacher and sheer boredom on the part of the students.’

My problem is with the use of inevitably here. If we replace it with can:

‘Dogme classes can descend into a lame string of stilted and repetitive teacher-led Q&As and a lot of awkward silences, resulting in an unsure performance by the teacher.

...I’d agree. I’ve seen loads of classes where this has happened, taught by teachers who wouldn’t know dogme from dog meat. As I said earlier, the possibility of muffing it is always with us. I put in my two cents' worth on the blog:

If students are not stretched and don’t participate, whose fault is that? I’ve been teaching and observing trainee teachers for 30 years and believe me, you can underchallenge and bore the pants off students with PPP, Silent Way, Suggestopedia, CLL, take your pick. Success depends on the teacher’s sensitivity to what’s going on in the students’ minds.

Now, the reference to my thirty years experience was intended to imply how often I have fucked up and observed others fuck up, but it was interpreted as something along the lines of ‘I've-been-sniffing-board-markers-since-before-you-was-thought-of-sonny’, and an appeal to authority:

It seems the main opposition to this is coming in the form of ad hominem and appeal to age fallacies. Sorry Steve, but as much as your experience matters to you, it doesn’t have any relevance in this discussion. In fact, you could say that experience is a hindrance because it makes you hidebound and closed to new ways of doing things.

Now, to construe mention of someone's experience as an ad hominem attack, and later term it 'bragging' is, umm, ...slightly touchy, I think. It's odd that Luan takes as another ad hominem Dale Coulter's quite reasonable request that evidence be adduced for his claims, and blusters that he is under no obligation to provide any. What is really quite extraordinary from a teacher, though, is the suggestion that anyone’s experience of classroom teaching, whether it be of thirty years or thirty minutes, is ‘irrelevant’ to a discussion of teaching methodology. It's extraordinary that he should dismiss my own and others' experience as irrelevant whilst implying throughout the article and responses to comments that his own is entirely germane. It’s extraordinary because there is nothing other than reflection on direct teacher-to-student experience that will develop your skill as a teacher, and no evidence outside the interaction of teachers and students. This is why, after your first ever teaching practice, the trainer’s first question after 'are you still standing?' is ‘how do you feel about the lesson?’ She hopes you will start to ask this of yourself after all your lessons from then on. That last sentence of Luan’s, by the way, is something of a landmark in my life, rather like the first DRE for the prostate. It’s the first time to my knowledge that someone younger than me has patronised me as an old dog no longer receptive to new tricks.

To the objection that dogme is elitist because it might prove too challenging to non-native speaker teachers, I would say that this is to underestimate many non-native speaker teachers. If someone's level of English is such that he has not the confidence to use dogme, there are plenty of other ways to approach teaching, and he needn't feel disadvantaged. I have never been able to make effective use of the Silent Way, but I do not imagine that because it didn't work for me with my students, it is therefore not really working for anyone else's, whatever they might believe about what goes on in their own classes, which I've never seen, in parts of the world I've never visited. Actually, I've known teachers who are brilliant at Silent Way teaching. I doubt if they consider themselves a snotty elite who wouldn't let me into their classrooms to hoover the carpet.

For dogme, I’m neither a passionate advocate nor a detractor. I don’t use it exclusively. I don’t use any approach exclusively, but teaching ‘unplugged’ is definitely a part of how I do things. I resent the few occasions when I have to produce a lesson plan of the kind favoured by the British Council, which details procedure and rationale for every stage of the lesson:

Teacher activity: Teacher inhales.
Aim: To draw oxygen into the alveoli.To stay alive.
Timing: 7-10 seconds
Materials: Ambient air, lungs, intercostal muscles.

I think these are good for trainee teachers, like practising scales on the piano. Having that degree of preparedness can boost your confidence hugely, but you must learn to sit light to lesson plans eventually. The British Council recognition scheme requires teachers where I work to be observed periodically and so I bash out such plans on those occasions, then usually ignore them in practice. I tell the trainee teachers I observe that although they are required to produce a plan, they are free to deviate from it if they see good reason, and we will discuss how good the reasons were after the lesson, in the light of experience - there's that word again.

When I watch a class descend into a string of stilted and repetitive teacher-led Q&A, I usually get the teacher to conclude that she could have put the students in groups to discuss the topic instead of attempting to drag it out of them herself. She could have listened to what they came up with, noted a few ideas that could be used to extend the discussion and then held a plenary. During this she could note errors in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, listen for ways in which students interrupted one another or prevented interruptions, noted how they dealt with misunderstandings and changes of subject, and worked on these afterwards. Is this dogme in its purest form? I don’t care. The subject matter and the language work would have come from the people involved and therefore been directly relevant to them, and provided the teacher with data she could use for remedial work, revision and extension. It certainly would have gone beyond a pleasant but aimless hour of Kaffeeklatsch, another charge often brought against dogme.

So there you go. Treat dogme as you would any other approach. Experiment with it. Adopt it wholeheartedly and make it your own. Use it occasionally. Combine it with other approaches. Ignore it completely. But don’t imply that teachers who use it and defend it are just well-heeled dilettantes who merely fool themselves that their teaching is effective whilst ripping off students who have more money than discernment. That ain't nice to your fellow teachers, nor is it particularly intelligent.

'Language, language, please...!'

2011-11-10T18:48:00.014Z

A colleague is covering the lectures of another colleague who is recovering from an operation. ‘They’re awful’ he moaned about the students. ‘So confrontational.’ Were they, I asked flippantly, lively young minds, countering the ideas he was presenting with ideas of their own? They were not. In fact they were remonstrating with him for asking too many questions.

‘What you askin us again for, man?’ a group representative asked. ‘We answered last time. Ask vem lot.’

This is not year ten. It’s part of a BA (Hons) Journalism course, an unpopular but compulsory module on discourse analysis. How utterly depressing; the problem should not, surely, be getting students to contribute in a seminar, but deciding when to bring students’ discussions to a close so as to cover all the areas you want to bring to their attention. I’m not sure what aspect of discourse it was hoped would be addressed, but on the train this morning I spun a little fantasy of the session as I might have conducted it myself, prior to getting the sack.

‘What you askin us again for, man? We answered last time. Ask vem lot.’

‘Listen, you little shits, I ask who I bloody well want to bloody ask and if you don’t want to stay, you needn’t. No fucking skin off my nose, piss off.’

At this juncture we might expect a brief silence full of wide eyes. Then:

‘You cart like talk to us like vat, man, yeah?’

‘Why the bleeding hell not, if you’re such frigging lazy cunts?’

‘I’m reportin vis to the…’

‘Bet you don’t know who to report me to, son, you’re that fucking thick…’

‘We do not expeck a lecturah, yeah, a lecturah, right, to fuckin’ address paying stew-durnts in vem terms, in vem fuckin terms, yeah? Vis is not ve proper relationshurp? Vis is not appropriurt?’

‘Appropriate my arse, and don’t you bloody swear at me, darling! Me lecturer, you student, have some respect and keep a fucking civil tongue in your otherwise empty head, or…’

By now the room has become a din of indignant threat and disbelieving laughter, over which I shout:

‘STOP! CUT! Appropriacy! Cultural norms! Content meaning! Relational meaning! Identity meaning! This, folks, is discourse analysis! This interactional sociolinguistics! Anyone want to stay?’

There is a sound like that of a million cockroaches fleeing before the beam of a torch - it is scales falling from eyes, as students return to their seats thinking: ‘like fuck me, man, yeah? Linguistics is like for real after all, innit?’

Yeah, well, as I said, it was only a fantasy, and saving the bad language, far too close to the twaddle that is ‘Dead Poets’ Society’, where the Robin Williams character wows students with his defiance of authority and convention by dint of standing on the desks. It isn’t going to happen. The regular lecturer is back next week, apparently resigned to the ghastly little shits snickering at the scar the operation has left on her face.

*****

The module in intercultural communication that I’m currently teaching by the seat of my pants has equipped me with some new vocabulary and clarified a few concepts, enabling me to come up with an analysis of a trivial incident from about 1995 in which an Athenian neighbour and I parted forever on less than friendly terms. At the time, I thought he was just a miserable git and he probably thought I was a patronising arse, and that is how we left it.

I had moved from my first flat in Pangrati to a grotty basement in Kolonaki, and one day soon after went back to Pangrati to see if there were any letters for me there. The front door of the flats was locked, but across the road the neighbour in question, Evangelos, was just about to climb onto his scooter. I went to ask if he could open the door for me. This he did, without speaking and without turning from me a glare of purest contempt. The silence was ominous - if a Greek is shouting and screaming at you, no problem, but silence is a sure sign that you have pissed him off. What with that and the psychic death-ray trained on me as we crossed the road, it was clear that I had pissed him off big time and I hadn’t a clue why. Now my Chinese students (whose sympathy lies entirely with him) and I have come up with the following analysis, which we diffidently advance for your consideration.

Steven is from a culture that typically goes for the business of an encounter before the personal relationship, and communicates in a ‘mean what you say and say what you mean’ kind of way – a ‘low-context culture’ is what we have learned to call it in the last couple of weeks. Here is his script:

Content meaning – the facts of what I want to communicate:

I want to check if there are any letters for me. Please open the door.

Relational meaning – how I perceive the relationship between Evangelos and me:

I don’t know you well. You are older than me. I’m delaying you on your way to somewhere, so you will be doing me a favour if you do what I ask.

Identity meaning – how I perceive myself and wish to be perceived:

I’m a foreigner here. I need to be polite. I choose polite Greek to reflect this. Oh, what a good boy am I.

As do many other languages, Greek enshrines social closeness and distance in its pronouns and verb endings, and so you have no choice but to make your perception of the relationship explicit the minute you open your mouth.

Evangelos, meanwhile, is from a culture that favours a ‘high-context’ approach, where relationships are established before business is broached, and greater emphasis is placed on ritual exchanges before getting to the point. We reckoned his script went like this:

Content meaning:

He wants to check if there are any letters. He’s asking me to open the door. (So far, so good.)

Relational meaning:

He’s lived in the same block for five years. I once offered him a whisky when he came to pay the service charges and he played ‘pull the slipper’ with my dog. I helped him rescue his cat from a first floor veranda. He’s talking to me as if we have never met before. What a twat.

Identity meaning:

He’s a bloody foreigner. Figures: English, snobs to a man, think they own the place. He is treating me like a servant. Therefore I shall glare at him, and not speak.

It took a few goes before I got the hang of the 'high context' stuff, and it still does not come easily to me. On another occasion I was sitting in the office of a school I visited periodically, clattering away on the computer to get a seminar together. The school owner's brother-in-law came in and greeted me. Some six months earlier he, the owner and I had been out for dinner and drinks. He said 'hi, Steve!' and I said 'hi!' and went on typing. The brother-in-law, I later heard, had been deeply wounded at my coldness. I was impatient with this, thinking 'who the hell does he think he is, expecting me to be all over him just because we met once before?' But, that's the way they do it. I wanted to get my seminar together, had limited time to do so, and did not want distracting with a torrent of phatic gush. In Greek eyes, this made me a robot. When I returned to England, I arranged to meet a friend in Cambridge whom I had not seen for sixteen years. I entered his office and he said 'oh, hi', as if I had simply nipped out to the corner shop ten minutes earlier. 'Whoa, steady on, man, restrain yourself, why don't you!' I thought, and felt just a little of what Ilias must have felt that day in the school office.

Losin' my Religion

2011-11-05T19:22:00.030Z

I was not brought up religious. My dad dismissed religion as rubbish probably because he saw it as being told what to do, and my mum if asked would say ‘well, I think there’s something’ and see no need to elaborate. At primary school we endured the usual morning assembly with its prayers and dull Bible stories interlarded with hymns - 'bombastic nursery rhymes' as Alan Watts called them. One hymn for six year-olds had the following syrupy lyrics:

Summer has come from the sunny land,
Summer is here again;
Bringing the birdies to sing their songs
In e-ver-ee wood and lane.

But I should very much like to know
How did you learn to sing?
Who was it taught you the way to fly
And gave you each tiny wing?

"We have a Father," the birdies said,
"Loving and kind and true;
He who has taught us to sing and fly
Will think of the children too."

The tune was in waltz time and the little girls would sway gently to and fro as they sang. This was the daily God Slot, however, and they were required to desist. ‘I know it’s nice to sway in time to the music,’ the headmistress said, ‘but…’

But what, you miserable old trout?

‘…but really we shouldn’t, in assembly.’

Sez who? Why not? Why should little kids not enjoy the music and show it? Nobody asked, of course, or challenged the saccharine sentiments of the hymn.

''We die of starvation'', the birdies said,
''From cold and predation too;
Our livers are toothsome on toasted bread,
Our bones make sustaining stew.''

On Fridays we were usually gathered in the school hall, a room of modest proportions that seemed to me then the size of a cathedral. Here the motherly Mrs Shaw would read us a story and this was all very cosy on a dark winter afternoon. On occasion her place would be taken by the Reverend Sausby with his sodding Bible. Sausby was forced every few minutes to intermit whatever gruesome God yarn he was spieling in order to deal with the discipline problems that will arise when you bore small children comatose. We had longer attention spans then than kids have now, I’m pretty sure of it, and less sense of our entitlement to be constantly entertained, but Sausby did not have sufficient understanding of his audience or his own want of charisma to see that he had no chance of making the story of Ananias and Sapphira engaging to six year olds. I always thought the God Bits of the school week were as dull as watching the test-card.

How then did I come to be saved, heaven bound, showered in the blood of the lamb, my sins blotted out?

In our milieu, kids called their mother’s female friends ‘auntie + first name’. Auntie was pronounced to rhyme with ‘panty’ or it would have sounded too posh. (‘Aunt’ was way out of our league.) Thus Auntie Joan was and is my real aunt, and Auntie Audrey, Auntie Marlene, Auntie Madge and Auntie Glenys were honorary aunties by virtue of the fact that my mum regularly did their hair, the room reeking of the vile mixture of air-freshener, ammonia and diarrhoea they must have used to do perms. Auntie Glenys had lived in Galveston, Texas, and there she had got religion. We’re talking born-again, Jesus-saves, hell-is-real, all-else-is-heresy balls-out Christerism. As I now see it, Glenys was by far the superior of the God she worshipped, being a woman of great good humour, generosity and patience. How she found it in her to revere God as she construed him is still inexplicable to me, but she did, deeply. Her kids could rattle off great chunks of the Bible, (KJV, natch) complete with punctuation: ‘And Ruth said comma Intreat me not to leave thee comma or to return from following after thee colon for whither thou goest comma I will go semi-colon and where thou lodgest comma I will lodge colon…’

Glenys, her son and daughter and I attended ‘Huddersfield For Christ’ meetings on Saturday evenings at the YMCA. The organisers greeted everyone enthusiastically with pumping handshakes and before the event proper, you could browse trestle tables set out with Christian books, Jack Chick tracts and - my particular favourite - Jesus badges and stickers to adorn your person, your school satchel and the books you kept in it. Chick tracts are fundamentalist, pin-headed, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-evolution, anti-mind, anti-pleasure, anti-humanity arse-wipe, but nobody objected because everyone was too nice. The books tended to conform to a genre. The author would have been a drug addict or alcoholic or gang leader or preferably all three. He had gravitated towards Wicca and/or Satanism, burgled, mugged, swindled and prostituted himself homosexually to maintain his heroin habit. Then a street preacher had challenged him to acknowledge his sin and bow down to Jesus and he had not wanted to do it! He had not wanted to humble himself! He had fled in terror, but that ol’ Hound of Heaven had pursued him, and he had capitulated, and behold! He’s now clean and dry, a pastor, a dad, a regular guy who reads bible stories to his kids at bed time. Praise the Lord!

Minatory Jack Chick story about 'evilution'and how its followers raise their children for Satan. Naturally, Tyler winds up in the Lake of Fire for not listening to his born-again girlfriend. 'Depart form me, ye cursèd'. No good pretending you weren't warned.

The meeting would typically start with a hymn and a prayer, and then continue with an address from a guest speaker, or a film. From our fellow god-botherers across the Atlantic, committed then as now to bothering God with a zeal that made us British look like dilettantes, we were sent a movie about missionaries in the Amazon, where these warriors for Jesus were engaged in claiming yet another tribe for the Lord. The Arowana (or whatever) lived in fear and incomprehension, holding fast to unreasonable superstitions to make sense of their wild, chaotic world. How unlike us, serene in our knowledge that our tripartite, death-defying God-man had, by dint of sacrificing Himself to Himself, saved us from the hell we thoroughly deserved for His having created us in the first place. Pity the Arowana, then, vainly believing they could make sense of this life without Jesus. We knew that you can't. How did we know? The film presented us with a visual analogy. A clean-cut, smiling young man with lovely teeth was blindfolded by a handsome grey-haired man in a suit, his teeth no less lovely, and seated in a swivel chair, which was spun.

‘Say Bud, now which way you spinning?’

‘Well, Hank, I’m spinning to the right… getting faster… getting faster….’

How we chuckled, for the blindfolded Bud was in fact stationary! The chair had stopped spinning and he was simply dizzy. Here behold the state of Man: blindfolded and dizzy, but still confident we know which way is up. What we need is Jesus. Ay-men! Anyone in the audience here tonight who knows they need Jesus? Come Forward! I went. A big deal was made of those who Went Forward – they were welcomed and counselled and prayed over, and felt very special, or at least I did. I certainly didn’t feel profound humility in acknowledging that Jesus had suffered in my place – in fact I don’t think I ever really gave Jesus a thought in my entire brief time as a Christer, despite the stickers that I plastered over all my books. As a kid I was all about show, convinced I was destined for a career in the theatre, and I had picked a very showy branch of Christerism here.

HFC and the local Baptist church were becoming too confining for Glenys. She was lately the recipient of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and the gifts, the charismata, that this confers. These included the discernment of spirits, healing, speaking in tongues and other stuff I don’t remember – signs, miracles and wonders of one sort or another, anyway. We began to attend meetings held in someone’s living room where speaking in tongues and prophesies were regular occurrences before the Nescafe and digestives. Speaking in tongues is not difficult once you push past the initial reluctance to do it out loud. Although I say it myself, I was shit-hot at glossolalia as a fourteen-year old. I had Latin, French and German from school, and Italian, Spanish and smatterings of Russian, Urdu and Punjabi pursued privately, so I could really let rip, palatalising and clustering consonants and laying on the velar fricatives, while my fellow Charismatics were confined to praising the Lord with more modest efforts: shabala abala alabasha shabla halamashabla balashabala. These days I can do you Xhosa clicks as well – pity I didn’t get into Miriam Makeba thirty-odd years earlier than I did.

At a Charismatic meeting, if you delivered yourself of a message in tongues, you had to wait for the Holy Spirit to prompt someone else to interpret it. Interpretation was a matter of mastering another genre. You thanked the Lord that these were the last days, that we were His chosen people, and that He would soon be returning to the Earth to judge nations in righteousness. There: you soon picked it up. I still sing in tongues when I’m hoovering the living room or walking along a noisy road. There’s something at once calming and liberating about it, but of course it’s no more miraculous than scat singing. Indeed I don’t think I ever really felt it to be miraculous: it’s quite amazing to me now how unmoved I was by the whole business. What everyone around me regarded as proof of Divine intervention in the world simply didn’t register on my wonderment meter.

A place of miracles and wonders, Wednesday evenings, fortnightly. Refreshments served afterwards.

At one non-charismatic meeting at Glenys’s we listened to a tape-recorded sermon from some plummy, fairly establishment clergy-person whose identity I have forgotten. This was a tongues-free evening for the unbaptised and thus a bit of a bore, but my ears pricked up when the Bishop of Wherever said: ‘…and I pity anyone who is homosexual.’

‘Is there anything wrong with being homosexual?’ I asked afterwards, as if I didn’t know.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the unofficial chair of the meeting. He had been of the Plymouth Brethren and he was the first exemplar I had met of a type that can still make me incoherent with rage: the biblical inerrantist (read 'I'm never wrong') who knows the Bible inside out, sees everything through its lens and treats every dissenter like a presumptuous child that needs to be put in his place. You should have heard the certainty in that ‘oh, yes.’

At the local Baptist church, Glenys made arrangements for a ‘Come Together’, not an evening of sex counselling, but a musical event composed by US Jesus People Jimmy and Carol Owens, aimed at making Jesus cool to a wider audience. It was very professionally done, but I stayed about ten minutes before feeling repelled by the hand-holding intimacy it required of the audience. We may well be members of one another, but go and be one of my members somewhere else. This might have been the first adumbration of my coming apostasy. Or if the person fishing for my hand had been a gorgeous lad instead of a middle aged lady, I might have stayed and become another screwed-up, self-loathing pouf like Haydn here.

The Local Baptist's. We don't hold with splendour of design or opulence of appointments, and it shows. Conveniently situated next to bus stop. Sandwich shop on the left, laundrette on the right.

The Christianity I knew made people profess knowledge none has any right to claim, and condemn behaviour in others that harmed nobody. It was literal-minded, theatrical, outwardly kind and hearty but based on hate and suspicion, of the body, of sexuality, of other belief systems, of life itself, which is after all only a prelude to the glory of eternity with the Lord. Let’s hope North America never elects a Pentecostalist president – s/he’d be delighted to help bring on the End of Days.

I stopped taking interest in the meetings and ‘ministry’ when I was about sixteen. I read Alan Watts’s popularising of Zen in ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ and Christianity fell away from me like snow from a gable end. Glenys and I didn’t communicate after that, probably because, with characteristic generosity, she respected my withdrawal rather than for any sense of betrayal. She died suddenly in her mid-fifties about twenty years ago. She and another woman who was given license by all about her to be a frail physical vessel for Divine Energy had spent some years doing Christian healing services which were identical to the ones performed by a local spiritualist healing sanctuary that Glenys had always opposed - except of course that Glenys and Eileen had God working for them, and the spiritualists were deceived by Satan.

You who dismiss Satan as a fairy story are his favourite people, you know that? He knows he is going to Hell when this world passes away, and he wants to take as many humans there as he can, therefore he counterfeits the gifts of the spirit to fool the unwary, and that's you! You who will heal and prophesy, and cast out demons, but go to hell merely for not suspecting a trick. Thinking of all this petty, convoluted, infantile spitefulness calls to mind Alexander Portnoy's exasperated (and racist) exclamation: 'I was brought up by Hottentots and Zulus!' But I wasn't - my early exposure to my dad's dismissal of religion on the grounds that it posited some authority that he was not prepared to bow to, and my mum's vague 'something out there' belief seem to have shielded me from the battier tennets of the faith I visited briefly as a teenager.

*****

Little Shard of Glass

2011-10-28T18:25:00.031+01:00

The last post but one rather took the piss out of spiritualists without actually coming out and declaring spiritualism a total crock of shit. Nevertheless, almost any spiritualist gathering you attend will compel the conclusion that this is a thin and platitudinous non-religion for the credulous, a weekly hour of reassurance for the cosy-minded that while the body dies and decays, the soul goes on strolling, chatting and having lunch at the pub with friends in a sunshiny place every bit as nice as Harrogate. Presumably this desire that post-mortem life be Life As We Know It only rather nicer is what prompted Rudolf Steiner’s remark that ‘the spiritualist is the worst materialist of all.’ There doesn’t seem to be much point in dying if it simply means that you go on living with no bills in a house you no longer need to repair, dust or hoover, nor is it clear why a soul would choose to incarnate in the first place if there is so little difference between the physical and spiritual realms. If something does live on, and it's simply me as I was in physical life, then life and the hereafter seem equally pointless.

Like most people who attend spiritualist churches, I first went after the shock of a death, in my case that of a potential boyfriend after a very brief holiday romance. Pretty much all I knew of Nicholas was his handsome face and gorgeous body, as most of the time we’d spent together had been naked in each other’s arms. A car crash in the Athenian suburb of Nea Smyrni killed him, whilst I got away with some spectacular but transient bruising and trivial cuts from broken glass. I don’t remember the impact. I do remember waking up thinking I was in bed, and then as the mental murk cleared, noting as from a distance the tiny Citroen 2CV oddly elongated around me, the windscreen shattered and opaque so that it looked incongruously like a pane of ice at four o’ clock of a warm May morning. Nicholas in his pale blue shirt was slumped over the steering wheel, blood running down his cheek. I observed with detachment that my legs were shaking like terrified dogs. Roof-lights of ambulances appeared, and then there were people gathering around the car, neighbours who had been awoken by the noise of the crash and the paramedics they had summoned. They took Nicholas away. A kind lady climbed into the vacated driver’s seat and held my hand and talked to me in English until the paramedics helped me out of the car and into another ambulance. A puddle of blood as from a beheading lay beside the car. It didn’t inspire confidence in the insistence of paramedics, nurses and doctors over the ensuing two hours that Nicholas was OK, just a bit concussed. He died soon after we got to the Asklipeio hospital in Voula. He was twenty-five.

At my parents’ in England two days later I knew that by then Nicholas would have been buried, and that his beautiful body was starting to putrefy, and the persistent image was unbearable. I thought of his family and their massive, unencompassable loss, the fact hitting them over and over, waking to it each morning for years to come. I think this was the first irreversible, irremediable brute fact I had ever consciously faced. Every adverse circumstance I had known up to that point had been fluid and negotiable, with choices and reasonable hope of a favourable settlement. This one held no such hope, and I urgently needed to believe I could bargain with it. That’s how I ended up at Slaithwaite spiritualist church to see Una (q.v.) do her thing, among people who had long since negotiated terms with the Reaper and decided he was more like a commissionaire.

During the tea break at that first meeting, a lady who said she was a medium talked to me. We had never met before. ‘There’s studying and learning around you’ she said. Stupidly, I didn’t know what she meant. Why didn't I? Wasn’t I a bloody teacher? ‘My gatekeeper (i.e., spirit guide – a nun, apparently) is telling me that you could become really involved in this’ she continued. I think I laughed out loud at the suggestion. Where did she get the information about studying and learning? Maybe I talked a bit posh for Slaithwaite? Maybe the aloofness I’m often taxed with strikes some as a sign of pointy-headedness? I don’t know. At least my denial didn’t cause her to retract and embark on a series of guesses. I still can’t imagine why I never connected the remark about studying with the fact that I had been a teacher for eight years. Several months later another medium made the same remark to me and I reacted in the same puzzled manner. Weird.

Back in Cambridge I went to the university library and cycled home with the pannier stuffed with books about psychic research – serious stuff, mind, not the New Age twaddle that filled gondolas at Dillons: ‘Thirty Days to an Out of Body Experience’ was one example of the woo-woo on offer. This proposed a regime of meditation to CDs of squealing cetaceans, gallons of herbal infusions, a diet of tofu and on day thirty, the injunction to ‘allow yourself to leave your body’. Most people I knew lumped all ‘supernatural’ stuff together, though, and during the time I was off work recovering from the aches, bruises and depression a colleague rang me and asked me what I was doing to keep myself occupied. I told her what I was reading. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I do wish you were reading cook books instead.’

The volume and quality of psychical research carried out over the last hundred years by scientifically qualified minds is not yet generally recognised. It is too easily assumed that material which relates to posthumous communications is largely confined to the ramblings of uneducated mediums, and to listeners whose minds have been disturbed and made credulous by grief, with a consequent loss of all critical faculty. This is an erroneous and unrealistic view. The actual situation is otherwise. (Beard, 1980)

A more sympathetic colleague suggested that in the spiritualist church I had begun to attend on Sunday evenings there would be several ‘strands’, people with different motives for attending, not simply grief but curiosity and scepticism. She was right. One regular was a Ph.D. student from one of the university science departments, and he got a great deal more flak from colleagues than I ever did. I fancied myself as a researcher, and every Sunday I endured the hymn-singing and the sphincter-puckering ‘philosophy’ that stands in for a sermon, and then watched the guest medium and the sitters she was addressing, noting the extent to which they conformed to or departed from the usual discourse of fishing for leads and swallowing the bait. One medium down from Newcastle told an over-eager sitter 'you've fed me that detail, love, so it's not valid as evidence'. She correctly identified a lady behind me as a first timer, then said that the communicator was a leather-jacketed young man of sixteen or so, killed in a motorbike accident no more than two days earlier.

‘It’s my grandson,’ said the woman, amazed, dazed and tearful. The lad was barely cold, it seemed. This caused several people in our bit of the room to brim up, and even I, an ass, was onion-eyed. I suppose it’s possible that the medium and the woman were a double act, mimes who spent their weekends travelling round the country performing this and other little set-pieces. Indeed many would maintain that complicity of some sort was the only explanation. It doesn’t satisfy me, though. First, why bother? They only got travel expenses for these these gigs, no fee. Secondly, it would not be hard to rumble such a scam: you need only witness the same trick twice in separate venues. Thirdly, it seems unlikely to me that these mediums, who were mostly motherly ladies you might otherwise see scanning your purchases at Waitrose, were illusionists and mentalists as skilled in suggestion and showmanship as Derren Brown. But maybe I’m just being a naïf snob.

This post is getting way too long, so anyone who is curious as to what the ‘serious stuff’ I mentioned earlier might be could have a look at ‘Living On’* for a starter. In the thirty years since it was published, neuroscience has kicked the soul’s butt pretty hard, and the book might well be no more than an elegantly-written unconscious exposition of human self-delusion.

If Spiritualism in some of its manifestations is rather vulgar and sentimental, it remains, I think, pretty harmless. The people who attend services regularly are united in having experienced grief and in establishing a modus vivendi with it, and such an experience has the possibility of making one compassionate and hopeful rather than crushed and embittered at the loss of those one loves. Spiritualists have no belief in a final judgement or eternal hell, and consequently no need to worry about how they and others stack up in the obedience-to-God stakes, leading to a lack of judgmentalism. So however soft in the head it may often be, spiritualism has its heart in the right place.

Twenty years ago, the thought of infinite realms beyond the physical world and eternity at my disposal to explore them seemed an extraordinarily exciting prospect. Now my possibly over-valued reason has all but knocked that stuff out of me, and I miss it. A tiny sliver of hope remains in my brain, just as there’s still a little shard of glass from Nicholas’s windscreen stuck in my forehead.

‘There’s summat just ‘ere,’ Una said the first time I saw her, touching her own forehead in the place where my invisible bit of glass resides. ‘A bit of broken bone or summat, but it won’t do no arm.’

*Beard, P., 1980. Living On. Norwich: Pilgrim Books

Believe it because it makes you feel better...? Not a good enough reason, Carl.

Why these bitter words of the dying, o brethren,
which they utter as they go hence?
I am parted from my brethren.
All my friends do I abandon and go hence.
But whither I go, that understand I not,
neither what shall become of me yonder;
only God who hath summoned me knoweth.
But make commemoration of me with the song:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

But whither now go the souls?
How dwell they now together there?
This mystery have I desired to learn; but none can impart aright.
Do they call to mind their own people, as we do them?
Or have they forgotten all those who mourn them and make the song:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

We go forth on the path eternal, and as condemned,
with downcast faces, present ourselves before the only God eternal.
Where then is comeliness? Where then is wealth?
Where then is the glory of this world?
There shall none of these things aid us, but only to say oft the psalm:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

If thou hast shown mercy unto man, o man,
that same mercy shall be shown thee there;
and if on an orphan thou hast shown compassion,
the same shall there deliver thee from want.
If in this life the naked thou hast clothed,
the same shall give thee shelter there, and sing the psalm:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Youth and the beauty of the body fade at the hour of death,
and the tongue then burneth fiercely, and the parched throat is inflamed.
The beauty of the eyes is quenched then, the comeliness of the face all altered,
the shapeliness of the neck destroyed; and the other parts have become numb,
nor often say: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

With ecstasy are we inflamed if we but hear that there is light eternal yonder?
That there is Paradise, wherein every soul of Righteous Ones rejoiceth.
Let us all, also, enter into Christ that we may cry aloud thus unto God:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Text From The Order for the Burial of Dead Priests, translated from Greek by Isabel Hapgood

No Comment

2011-10-26T12:11:00.006+01:00

There seems to be a problem with comments at the moment - I'm not being ignored after all! So while Blogger sorts this out, your trenchant remarks will not be appearing, unfortunately. What a bugger.

*****

Within seconds of posting this I got two comments, making this post completely pointless. Go read another one, and comment on it. Keep them coming, I am like totally a comment whore.

Blackpool Disappoints

2011-10-24T18:35:00.024+01:00

Over at The Expvlsion of The Blatant Beast, (invitation only, I’m afraid – you’ll get challenged at the door) Bo describes his first ever trip to Blackpool the other week, where he attended a Spiritualist gathering:

‘…we headed upstairs, paid our fivers, and sat down expectantly awaiting our messages from the Beyond. As a religious ceremony, I found a Spiritualist service to be an event of such arse-aching vacuity that it made even the most cack-handed druid ritual I ever attended seem like the Liturgy of St John Chrystostom in comparison. A stout, pleasant young woman who looked like the regional director of an upholstery firm introduced the five mediums and announced the opening 'worship song', which turned out to Boyzone's hit ditty, 'No Matter What', sung by the assembled people as it were in choro. My eyes glazed.’

The Boyzone lyric in question is:

No matter what they tell us
No matter what they do
No matter what they teach us
What we believe is true.

An anthem for closed minds if ever there was one.

What a let-down. Things are obviously slipping in Blackpool and northern necrophilia is not what it was. The Em Cee should have been a heavily rouged and pinkly-powdered matron of black-sequined embonpoint, her voice tempered by sixty Rothmans a day over as many years, and a cough like somebody shoveling clinker. What’s all this nonsense about Boyzone? The proceedings should properly have opened with a rendition of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, heavy on the vibrato, to the accompaniment of a theatre organ. Did plastic foliage, illuminated by barely-concealed green bulbs, adorn the stage? If not, why not?

‘The actual messages- of which there were two hours' worth- were manifest examples of cold-reading and self-delusion.’

Fair enough, this is as it should be. I do hope, though, that the messages demonstrated what they are expected to: the continuing concern of the departed for the sitters’ tumors, sciatica, marital infidelity, nasty rashes and all those little things that are so important, don’t you think?

‘Now, ‘ow many pairs o’ shoes did you try on wi that outfit before you come out tonight, love?’

‘Ooo, well, I don't…’

‘Umpteen, your usband’s telling me now! ‘She cunt never mek ‘er mind up about shoes', ‘e sez!'

‘Oh, aye, e’d ave a laugh at me for that, I suppose…’

For about seven months in 1990 I regularly attended Spiritualist churches in Cambridge and up North, hoping to find someone who really did have a direct line to the Next World, into which on May 19th of that year a car accident had catapulted a beautiful young man I had hoped to form a relationship with. The first medium I saw was Una Pierce, who died earlier this month, and she is the lady I called Mona in this post from a while ago. Una was different from almost every medium I saw over that period, because she did not fish for leads or deliver vacuous messages about spirit people sending you blessings, roses and rainbows. Instead, she moved around the crowded function room with her eyes shut, never falling over a chair or bumping into a sitter, and appeared to be relaying messages from an invisible cell phone.

‘Are you Lisa’s sister?’ she asked one flabbergasted young woman, who was indeed the dead Lisa's sister. ‘She give you them earrings, din’t she?’

‘You’ve a right rash come out on that knee, am’t yer?’ she said to a bloke who was attending for the first time, and unsure what to make of all this. Una stayed with him quite a while, talking about his departed father.

‘Can I speak, love?’ Pause. ‘E were a bit… a bit of a…’

‘E were a bugger,’ the sitter said.

‘E were doin a bit too much o this, love, weren’t ‘e? Una said, miming draughts from a pint glass.

‘You can say that again.’

The spirits could never get so personal at the Cambridge Spiritualist Church, which had a much more formal style, chairs set out in rows facing a stage from which the medium scanned the audience for the recipient of the message. One lady was the image of Dame Hylda Bracket. ‘Yes… yes, there is someone here’ she promised us, as she waited for the apparition to emerge from the mists. ‘Now, who is it? Ah, yes!’ she said delightedly. ‘It’s Leonard Sachs, from ‘The Good Old Days’!’

I saw a lot of deluded people, both mediums and sitters, but there was no deliberate fraud, an open, accepting and undogmatic atmosphere, and no money ever changed hands. What you need in order to go down well at such a gathering is a talent for cold reading, the ability to assess the sitter’s age and hence most likely candidate for her departed loved one, her social class and likely concerns about health, children, offspring and money, astute interpretation of body language, and above all the sincere belief that these insights are conferred on you from the Beyond. Then, of course, you need a receptive and uncritical audience, unhinged by grief.

But… but… If you spend a fair chunk of time observing mediums in action, you will see just a few little incidents that really do make you think 'how the hell did she come up with that one, if it’s all just cold reading?' Una was particularly talented in that direction, and the fact that I saw her first spoiled me. Nor are all audiences composed of uncritical people whose grief predisposes them to clutch at any straw. Far from it. Spiritualists in my experience are a remarkably cheerful bunch, and most services elicit a good deal of of laughter, unlike those of many other persuasions. I have seen several naff mediums die on their feet when none of their leads was taken up by a disgruntled and embarrassed crowd, for Una’s regulars did not impress easily.

I no longer go to spiritualist meetings, but I still entertain a very faint hope that death will be an adventure, a transition to a new state rather than to oblivion. Once I was utterly convinced of it, but I’m no longer utterly convinced of anything, except that Blackpool doesn’t seem to be doing glorious trashiness with anything like the style it used to.

A good teacher is...

2011-10-19T08:20:00.014+01:00

A colleague told me yesterday that she had attended a seminar on the use of metaphor, and how metaphors are arrived at and interpreted by different cultures. The presenter had asked a group of mixed nationality students to invent a metaphor by completing the phrase 'a good teacher is ...' For the Chinese students, a good teacher was one who has patiently nourished and nurtured several generations of tender young. The metaphor they came up with was 'a good teacher is an old cow.'

Lathophobia Once Again

2011-10-12T13:10:00.006+01:00

'Just checking through the bleeding obvious, dear.'*

A couple of weeks ago the centre director called me on my mobile as I was leaving the building. There was a business English course starting soon, the appointed teacher had given back-word, how did I fancy it? Business English is far from my favourite branch of English Language Teaching but what the hell, there is little enough work at the moment, so I said yes. I went back into the building to pick up some books and peruse the course outline.

Session 1:
Embracing the differences: High power versus low-power distance relationships. Polychronic cultures versus monochronic cultures: relationship based cultures versus pure business cultures. We will scrutinise the language and paralinguistic features embedded in each of these phenomena.

Seeing my eyebrows rise, M. le Directeur hastened to be reassuring lest I turn the thing down. ‘Don’t worry about all that,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Just do stuff from these,’ indicating a pile of bog-standard business English coursebooks, none less than five years old, which in English language teaching terms makes them really rather quaint. Unconvinced, I dragged them all home with me.

Session 2
Communication in collectivist versus individualist cultures. An examination of associated issues and linguistic features associated with individualistic and collectivist cultures.

Session 8
The history, principles and linguistic features of intercultural mediation and conflict resolution. The language of unionism.

Fuckinelle, I thought. I am vaguely familiar with some of this intercultural stuff, but nowhere near conversant enough just yet to put together a course that can deliver what’s promised in the course outline. Who promised it, and why am I being told I can pretty much ignore it anyway?

Yesterday, having already blundered and busked my way through the first two sessions, I went to see the very sweet and helpful Professor Jiaying Feng, the woman who’s really in charge of the whole thing, to find out what the bloody hell I am really supposed to be doing. Incidentally, it is an indication of the 'low power-distance' ethos of our humanities faculty that my initial e-mail to Professor Feng started ‘Hi Jiaying’, a degree of familiarity that would shock the ten or so Chinese ladies on the course. 'Low power distance culture' is one of the things us cross-cultural communication types talk about a lot, along with 'high context cultures' and um, stuff like that. Anyway, Jiaying was as dismissive as I had expected her to be of Joe’s stack of business English books, which I had not used. She seemed satisfied with what I have done so far, or at least she didn’t scream, 'shit and corruption, you really have blown it, haven’t you?' and order me out of her presence. She outlined her own vision for the course with the intensity of one who really, really loves, nay, adores discourse analysis and pragmatics, and I sat and nodded, feeling more and more like a hospital porter who, surreally, is being briefed on how to remove a waiting patient's appendix. I know what discourse and pragmatics are, but they do not fire me up, and here was Jiaying describing them in the rapt manner I might adopt after a few drinks to convey to someone the joy of a piece of music or the excellent Lebanese meal I had the other evening. I felt such a dull dog, and was overcome, once again, with lathophobic aphasia, reminding me, once again, that my choice of blog title was not the casual decision I initially thought it was. It also explains why Jiaying is a professor and I'm just a part-time lecturer.**

‘You’ve been involved in teacher training’ Jiaying said as she courteously accompanied me to the lift after our meeting. ‘I’m thinking of getting some teacher training courses together later in the year, if you’re interested.’

‘It was pretty basic stuff,’ I said, modestly.

‘Well, this won’t be basic. They’ll be Chinese teachers, very knowledgeable but no idea how to put it into practice.’

Working with knowledgeable people who have no clue how to implement their knowledge in a classroom – that’s what I did in Greece for fifteen years. ‘It was pretty basic stuff.’ Why did I say that? Why the bloody hell did I fucking say that? It was anything but basic stuff, but I never feel that what I do is quite good enough, never quite compares with what everybody else can do, and I live with the perpetual fear of being unmasked as a fraud.

Calm down, dear. I have loads of time to prepare the present course, since I’m down to ten hours a week, and I can borrow books from the library and keep them for the entire academic year. I have hopes that Jiaying’s training courses will happen, and that I will be involved. This is quite an opportunity. I need a slight change of direction, something to restore my sagging self-confidence, and of course, as always, the bloody money.

-------
*Basil to Sybil in Fawlty Towers 'Basil the Rat'
* * In the UK a professor is a senior academic. Lecturers are just the cannon-fodder.

Joint Ventured, Nothing Gained?

2011-10-02T14:40:00.012+01:00

I mentioned the other day the intention of management to allow the courses of our little department to be taken over by UpYours, the Ryan Air of education, a private company that offers a ‘world class learning experience’ to overseas students who do not meet the English language requirements for direct entry to university. This is something we at the Little CHEF (Centre for Hammering English into Foreigners) have been offering for some years already without the intervention of UpYours, so here I’m just wondering aloud why we apparently need their, umm, help, especially the sole owner of UpYours is not an educator but a property speculator.

I got my present job four years ago because I sent my CV on spec at a time when the Little CHEF was preparing to undergo the white-glove inspection that leads to British Council accreditation, and as a qualified teacher who’d been round the block a few times in ELT terms, I fitted in with everyone else there. After a couple of years’ preparation that involved some very hard work, the accreditation was awarded. That our last two pre-sessional courses had over 500 students each may be largely attributable to that accreditation.

Now, if UpYours goes into partnership with the university, full-time staff and hourly-paid staff with length of service will be given the option of remaining with our present pay and conditions and being seconded to the joint venture for such hours as they might see fit to grant us, or under Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (TUPE), going over to the joint venture with our university conditions preserved for ‘up to two years’. Two years, that is, unless UpYours decide they have ‘good reason’ to change conditions. This means you could sign a contract and have your university conditions terminated a month later, should UpYours come up with ‘good reason’ to do so: 'why should we pay you forty quid an hour when we could pay you fourteen?' being a possible one. Any new staff taken on by the joint venture will not receive university levels of pay, will not be able to contribute to the teachers’ pension scheme, and will not have their union membership recognised. Thus a two-tier system will be created in which a university teacher and a joint venture teacher could share the same class, with the JV teacher receiving considerably less than half the pay of her colleague.

If this happened, we would certainly lose those teachers who join us each summer for the mad months of July to September. Since they are as experienced and qualified as the regulars, they would be barmy to sell themselves so cheap. Who would we get instead? Perhaps they’d be rookies just off basic training courses. These may well be bright and competent people, but they won’t be teachers of English for Academic Purposes, not yet, and will need to be mentored by the regulars. Meanwhile the quality of the teaching would suffer and the fact that the JV employed under-qualified people would lead to the withdrawal of the British Council approval - and if it didn't, that would in itself be a scandal. If the quality of the teaching goes down, many of the students will not meet their required grades. Large numbers of failures would redound very badly on a commercial enterprise that promises ‘dynamic teaching’ and a ‘world-class learning experience’, so the grades would no doubt have to be massaged, just as Greek language schools terrified of losing custom whack up the grades of kids who underperform. Students with a less than adequate grasp of English would then be bundled into their chosen departments, which would have no choice but to accept them and attempt to make silk purses from a bunch of sow’s ears.

I'm no business man, no politician, just a teacher. Am I being naïf? Unreasonably pessimistic? Somebody has to gain from the joint venture, after all, but it doesn’t look to me as if it will be teachers or students. And since students are not stupid, will they not eventually cotton on, and go elsewhere?

Like de man say, if it ain't bust, don't fix it.

Give ye them to eat.

2011-09-24T16:14:00.020+01:00

'... I'll read you something that's not mentioned in the canonical gospels, so you can see the ingratitude* of people: '...then Jesus caused the bread and the fish to multiply, and all did eat, and were filled: and after turned they their gaze upon Jesus, and cried unto him, saying: 'isn't there any fruit?'

*****

Πλεονεξία means 'greed' but that seems inadequate here because it can refer simply to a desire for more grub. Can anyone suggest a noun meaning 'ungrateful lack of recognition of a miracle performed for one's benefit'??? I'm not suggesting that πλεονεξία carries anything like that load, but the casual φρούτο δεν έχει; does add this idea. The English 'isn't there any fruit?' doesn't, simply because the British wouldn't necessarily expect a meal to conclude with fruit. Maybe the last line should be 'OK, so what's for afters, then?'

Arkas, Η Ζωή Μετά. (The Hereafter)

Porno II

2011-09-21T18:15:00.028+01:00

Those of a sensitive disposition are advised not to follow the links below. Pussies.

Not a student in sight until Monday. I had been looking forward to a few days without work and especially without trains, but in the event I am going stir-crazy after only a day and a half, so naturally I decided to have a look at some Russian gay porn sites on your behalf. This is porn to turn you off, anti-erotica, Bonjela for the phallus. Think of Lady Chatterley's Liver, Vicks-scented massage oil and inflatable Joseph Ratzinger dolls. The photos on these sites are unstimulating affairs in which anorexic-looking gay-for-pay young men play with each others’ bums and willies with all the enthusiasm of prisoners slopping out. These anaphrodisiac proceedings are shot in rooms of surpassing drabness, usually done out with grubby flock wallpaper that recalls damp provincial Indian restaurants, and sofas in fecal brown and beige. Some dismal examples of the genre may be viewed here, and you are warned that they are not suitable for work, persons of tender age, prudes or men who delight in man-to-man sex. Epic fail, therefore, for this is weeny-shrinking stuff from people whose primary concern should be NOT shrinking weenies. To find any entertainment value on these pages, you have to ignore the photos and read the texts that try to seduce you into parting with money to join the site. Addled memories of words, misuse of dictionaries, confusion of registers, ignorance of connotation: it’s almost like being back at work.

In the sad, twilight world of homosexuals, middle-aged men meet in secret locations to gratify their urges on innocent Boy Scouts with cute nipples and treasure trails. As is plain from this repugnant photograph, so intent are these men upon satisfying their lusts that no thought is given to the choice of carpet, furnishings or light fittings.

‘Just tell me, have you ever wanted to watching really raw medically checkup pictures featuring fuckable carnivore doctor explore his male patients purple katana?’* Not personally, no, but if your answer is yes, this site is for you, because ‘sultry really degrading doctor is going to tickle next male patient of his.’ Tickle him? That sounds a bit tame for a sultry degrading fuckable doctor, but things promise to hot up, as ‘defiling doctor lines with twink and shag them.' That's OK, then. 'Come and see nude boys and males get coarse together!’ God, it sounds like a rugby club dinner. All this tickling, defiling and coarseness appears to be taking place in the bedroom of a Morecambe boarding house about forty years ago. You can just smell the Colgate toothpaste, Palmolive soap and that inexplicable odour of breadcrumbs. Nothing to stiffen the, um, resolve here: click another link.

Here are Jirik and Milos, two boys who fancy one another and spend all day having it away. 'Lascivious boys have men's copulation together. Smooching boys start bare and pet their phalluses.' They have the odd break for a bite to eat and then get back to ‘kissing, hummer and bump uglies every another.’ This won't do. Gay men are united in their esteem for the noble cock, so 'bump uglies' is a truly wretched choice of idiom, given such an audience. The naff décor of the boys' quarters is probably rendered even more objectionable by the end of the day because ‘Milos pounded the shit out of Jirik`s fine anus. The apartment was in shambles from this all day ride the baloney-pony heavily built orgy’. Dear, dear. Never mind, though, because ‘the guys were happily spent’ as who would not be, after such exertions as ‘having their butts turned into lumps of red, seductive, swollen penial seasoning rocket.’

Penial seasoning is obviously a translation of a phrase for ‘a load’ as we may deduce from this description of Raphael and Eric’s couplings: ‘when Raphael gets to the point of no return he shoots a very big penial seasoning all over Eric's face.’ It really doesn't capture the masculine joy of ejaculation, though, does it, that bathetic characterisation of Raphael's load as ‘very big’? It sounds more like congratulating a toddler for something he's done in his potty. A slightly better attempt perhaps is: ‘once Raphael gets to the point of no return he shoots a very big jizz-o-frizz all over Eric's pretty face.’ That sounds a bit jollier, even if ‘Jizz-o-Frizz’ could be something you spray from a can at parties, or on classroom windows at Christmas. Other attempts to gain verbal purchase on the intensity of male jouissance are rather regrettable: ‘he just lovers to bust a semen’? Sounds uncomfortable, and ‘he can't wait to squirt a warmed-up cum’ sounds as erotic as flicking bogies.

Raphael, incidentally, sounds like a bit of a cretin, because his mate Eric ‘starts off by giving him a brain to get his juices droplet.’

I have remained unmoved, therefore, by these Russian overtures to my libido and I really must find more productive things to do with this time of enforced leisure. Like look for a job… move house yet again... back to teaching for peanuts. For the moment I can’t face it.

*****

*Katana: Japanese longsword with single edge and slight curvature. Used here as a metaphor for the penis. You must picture the lad with a flat, shiny dick that's two feet long. A katana is silver, but here we must see it as purple. I personally cannot call to mind a cock or a sword after all this.

Now what?

2011-09-19T19:09:00.012+01:00

For the last ten weeks, the university department where I teach has been heaving with 550 students and 20-odd teachers. We’ve been hammering listening skills, reading skills, note-taking skills and presentation skills, and assessing and marking like mad. The teachers’ room was a hot stew of people, chatter, banter, moaning, papers, overflowing tables, overflowing bins, overheated machinery, scattered stationery, scattered coffee mugs and slewed piles of photocopies and books. On Friday a Saudi lady, the tempestuous Muminah, who has long been convinced that her teachers were in league to bring about her downfall, received her report and threw a fit, and a book, and assorted odds and ends, because she had not been awarded the grades she wanted, but merely those she had actually earned. Now it’s all over. I went in this morning, unlocked the door and sat at my usual computer in cold and silence.

In the building there were two other teachers and four students, whose writing test I invigilated. After marking the scripts, we decided it was pointless for three of us to watch four students do a reading test. I therefore selflessly volunteered to go home, and here I am. I have no more lessons until Monday the 26th, and the way things are at the moment, only 54 hours between now and Christmas. I seem to be the only regular teacher there who has an inner conviction that things will pick up pretty soon. Everyone else is looking for work in other places.

Where does my inner conviction stem from? I suppose it’s really no conviction at all - merely a disinclination to apply to language schools or F.E. colleges that pay £18.00 an hour when I have been used to more than twice that amount for the last four years. F.E. colleges, under the yoke of Ofsted, further burden you with absurd amounts of paperwork, the message of which is, we do not trust you to teach without an overseer. I cannot muster a shred of enthusiasm for interviews in such places, or the acting ability necessary to pretend I want to teach in one. There is a very nasty rumour going round that our department will be taken over by a study chain, one of those educational Tesco Metros that so many university English Language centres have been forced to sell out to. I looked at their website. Predictably, it has photos of teachers with smiles like floodlights, teaching mostly oriental students who are revelling in the beams, soaking up learning in paroxysms of delight. As indeed they do! The teaching is dynamic, of course, the learning experience first class, the centre naturally dedicated to excellence, with a wide range of courses: that our copy-writer’s style is free of cliché is no idle boast! This is more wish-list than prospectus. The teachers will be netting around a tenner an hour for delivering their caring, smiling, dynamic, first-class learning experiences, so I wouldn’t place too much faith in that advertising copy if I were you. For that kind of money you are unlikely to find people with the qualifications and experience required to deliver on all those promises.

If this happens, I shall not stay around to have my hourly rate slashed and admin load doubled, so I am probably going to be available. I can teach students and train teachers. I’m not interested in administrational positions, I have scant patience with management speak, little time for meetings and a short way with time wasters. Snap me up…

Here is Gillian Rose on meetings:

'... I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting, in which, as usual, I carried no presence whatsoever. As drivers insist that the blaring radio aids their concentration on the road, so I always found that a volume open on my lap enabled me to pay the small amount of attention needed to navigate these shallows. When asked with withering detection by the impassive secretary whether the book I was blatantly perusing was good, I nonchalantly replied, 'I only read good books.' I responded similarly to her policing my failure to send a note of apology for a meeting that I actually managed to miss, 'But I'm not sorry.'

Rose, G., 1995. Love's Work. Chatto & Windus

That's the way to do it, but make sure you are indispensable before you take this tone.

Cheap Chow

2011-09-15T19:49:00.020+01:00

The uncertainty of the times compels dedicated drinkers to ponder what food should accompany the wine these days, or indeed whether to forgo eating completely. If reduced circumstances force you to buy your plonk from the bottom shelves of a Tesco Metro now instead of the eye-level displays at Adnams, you'll want to know how to make this swiggable but uninspiring, one-dimensional stuff feel right. Don’t worry, I’ve got this sorted. I have a hearty Greek dish here for the non-Greeks among you to try. Cheap, slightly sour wine goes well with this large dose of carbohydrate and olive oil. If any Greek reader feels I am a foreign interloper traducing traditional recipes, tough: έτσι το φτιάχνω εγώ, ρε, και δεν είμαι η μαμά σου, εντάξει;*

Get some runner beans, some waxy potatoes and a fat red onion. Top and tail the beans, peel the spuds and cut them into fat chunks, and slice the onion thinly. Fry the onion gently in olive oil until it is soft and savoury-sweet, and chuck in as much garlic as you fancy - in my case, a positively anti-social amount. Then throw in your beans and potatoes and half a can or so of chopped tomatoes. Add a little water if you think it necessary, but you don’t want too much liquid as the vegetables will give off their own. Season with salt or Aromat or Marigold bouillon, and add a pinch of cinnamon or two or three crushed allspice berries (my preference is very much for the latter) a generous amount of chopped open-leaf parsley and if you fancy it, a little chopped fresh mint. The mint I tend to leave out, as its taste when cooked reminds me of chewing gum, but that's me. Let the assemblage cook gently until the potatoes are tender. Eat this at room temperature with lots of fresh bread and a side dish of feta cheese slathered with olive oil and some dried oregano crumbled over it. There you go: dead easy, muck cheap, very tasty and at least seven of your five a day. You can add chunks of pork or veal to it if meatless meals leave you feeling deprived. It’s at its best the day after you cook it.

Variations on this theme of cooking vegetables in olive oil with herbs and garlic and a little stock or white wine are numerous and lend themselves to improvisation. You can make a hispanic-y version of the above recipe by adding chunks of chorizo and flavouring it with smoked paprika and a bayleaf, and sloshing in some dry sherry or red wine. Potatoes, carrots and artichokes go well together, or artichokes and broad beans. Peas can replace the beans, if you like, but not for me. I understand that some even like okra, a vegetable of which I have a horror for its slithery, mucoid juice. A plate of okra is like the pullover sleeve of a kid with a bad cold. Forget I said that. These simple dishes, served with bread and feta, are a godsend, and they just love rough red wine.

Not a steaming splat of boiled pond life, but okra (bámies), a dish that calls to mind the old playground song: 'nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm going down the garden to eat worms.'

*****

A nice way with feta cheese: finely chop some red or green chillis, put them in a bowl with feta and olive oil, and mash coarsely: 'fuckin' bastard feta sodding cheese...' Some recipes for this τυροκαυτερή (tyrokafterí 'hot cheesy stuff') call for the inclusion of yogurt, vinegar and God knows what else besides, but I like it basic. The owner of a taverna in Kalamata used to make his tyrokafterí in a blender; shun his example unless cheesy Instant Whip appeals to you. A few seconds' work with a fork will make a pleasingly nubbly, salty, creamy, fiery dip to scoop up with bread or pitta or crackers. As my grandma used to say, 'cheese is binding', meaning it slows the passage of food through the alimentary canal. Well, maybe. Perhaps the Greek custom of taking some cheese with such a dish as that above has the effect of putting the brakes on the bolus of beans that's plummeting through the system.

*****

* I decided to see what my old mate the babelfish would make of this. It came up with:

'thus I make him I, [re], and I amn't your mum, all right?'

for 'this is how I make it, and I'm not your mum, OK?'

I amn't is very old Yorkshire dialect that even my grandparents found quaintly amusing - how did that get in there? The appellative ρε [re] is left untranslated as it has no real English equivalent, nor has its fellow appellative παιδί μου [pe'ði mu] literally 'my child'. You can translate them as 'oi!' 'hey, you!' 'mate', etc. but they're probably best left out. Παιδί μου is such a common feature of colloquial Greek, such a contributor to the flavour and character of everyday speech, it's a great pity you cannot capture it in English translation. Translated literally, it has a benign, ecclesiastical ring, uttered by superior to subordinate, and this is utterly the wrong note to strike. I have a translation of Kazantzakis's Zorba where these appellatives are variously rendered as 'you know' 'I say' 'my boy' and 'old fellow', making Zorbas come across as a Home Counties vicar circa WWI.

Chőd and Woo

2011-09-12T19:28:00.025+01:00

Perhaps everything terrible in us is, in it's deepest being, something helpless needing our help.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I first read about the Tibetan Buddhist practice of ‘chőd’ in Alexandra David-Neel’s ‘Magic and Mystery in Tibet’. Some time in the early nineteen twenties, David-Neel was travelling in Tibet and camped near the cave of a lama and his two emaciated disciples. She waited some days for the lama to grant her an interview, but he played hard to get. She was about to move on when one of a group of herdsmen camped nearby died, and so she decided to stay around to observe the rustic funeral. This was an affair of much chanting, much reading of religious texts to the deceased, days of copious eating and drinking, all culminating with the feeding of the corpse to the vultures on a plateau in the mountains.

David-Neel set out to the sky-burial ground at night, intending to meditate there, but one of the lama’s disciples had beaten her to it. He was not, however, sitting in serene detachment, meditating on emptiness being only form and form being nothing but emptiness. Wielding a drum and blowing into a thigh-bone trumpet, the young man danced and chanted in the moonlight among the pieces of corpse, howling at an invisible assembly of demons:

‘I pay my debts!’ shouted the naljorpa. ‘As I have been feeding on you so feed upon me in your turn! Come, ye hungry ones, and you that ungratified desires torment! In this banquet offered by my compassion, my flesh will transform itself into the very object of your craving. Here, I give you fertile fields, green forests, flowery gardens, both white and red food, clothes, healing medicines! . . . eat! Eat!’

The excited ascetic blew furiously his kangling, [trumpet] uttered an awful cry and jumped on his feet so hastily that his head knocked against the low roof of the tent and the latter fell in on him. He struggled a while under the cloth, and emerged with the grim, distorted face of a madman, howling convulsively with gestures betokening intense physical pain.

Chőd is a ritual and metaphorical feeding of oneself to hungry demons, another Buddhist way of cutting through the ego; chőd in fact means ‘to cut’. Burial grounds and villages infected with smallpox were apparently favourite venues for the ceremony, as they were places where the fear of death could not only be faced, but faced down. David-Neel felt this lad was working at chőd so hard that he was endangering his sanity, so she went to see the lama to persuade him to get the boy to ease off a bit:

Rabjoms Gyatso was seated cross-legged, in meditation. Without moving, he only lifted his eyes, when I opened the curtain and addressed him. In a few words, I told him in what condition I had left his disciple. He smiled faintly.

‘You appear to know chöd, Jetsunma. [Reverend Lady] Do you really? . . .’ he inquired calmly.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have practised it too. Rimpoche, […] I warn you seriously. I have some medical knowledge; your disciple may gravely injure his health and be driven to madness by the terror he experiences. He really appeared to feel himself being eaten alive.

‘No doubt he is,’ answered the lama, with the same calm, ‘but he does not understand that he is himself the eater. May be that he will learn it later on.’

The other week I bought ‘Feeding your Demons’ by Tsultrim Allione, an American Buddhist teacher who has adapted chőd for Westerners. You don’t need to visit a cemetery or a plague-ravaged mountain village (I mean, like, thank goodness, right?) because Allione has turned this fearsome confrontation with the reality of death and decay into a very American five-step program. You keep a Demon-Feeding Diary so that you don’t forget to feed your demons on a regular basis, and so that none of them gets left out. You can also work with a partner and compare hang-ups. Like so many American self-help books, this one is packed with anecdotes about comfortably-off Sharons and Barbaras and Peggys and Kates who have their low self-esteem demons and their over-eating demons, their alcohol-abuse demons, their blame-demons and their loving-too-much demons, and much of it I found pretty unreadable. You want to say to the Sharons and Barbies, look love, get a life or get a thigh-bone trumpet and sod off to the mountains, but fucking leave us out with massaging your complexes. It is with some reluctance, therefore, that I have to admit this stuff has actually worked for me, after a fashion.

'... he does not understand that he is himself the eater.' This morning I knew I was in for a few hours of insomnia when I woke at about two. This wakefulness, a weekly occurence, invariably involves a wearying bombardment from my subconscious of old guilts, old humiliations, memories of sins of omission and sins of commission, scenes of hideous executions, visions of foul creatures from the ocean abyss, oh, it goes on and bloody on. So I got to thinking about Allione’s watered-down chőd, and as she suggests, I began to imagine my Guilt and Humiliation demon, to give it a shape. It was an elephant-sized cross between a squid and a giant weta, its legs and tentacles visible on the floor, its amorphous bulk off in the darkness. I had to ask what it wanted of me. ‘Warmth,’ it said. And then I had to feed it what it wanted. Dutifully I imagined gold liquid running out of me, and the Guilt Monster Weta thingy plonked a proboscis into the liquid and drank. And then fuck me if I didn’t begin to experience, unbidden, a warm sense of gratitude for my cosy bed, my family, my brains such as they are, my health, everything I ought to be grateful for but hardly ever think about in those terms. The squid-weta-guilt demon shrank. The monster is, of course, myself tormenting myself. By treating it kindly, I broke the usual pattern of angry, weary resistance. Such resistance has the same effect as scratching mosquito bites; the itching just intensifies. I fell asleep at four or so. The alarm woke me at six, the only time I have ever actually needed it. After so little sleep I felt like a half-baked soufflé from the oven untimely ripp’d, but still marvelling at the ease with which Allione’s chőd for softies had short-circuited that horrible guilt-ridden insomnia that I get so often.

Night demons: treat em nice.

So there you go. I don't feel so cynical and superior to the Sharons and Katies now, and realise there are many other night-flying demons I might feed, chief among them the Demon of Aging, followed by the Demon of Poverty, the two things I suppose I fear the most. Since this is Western Europe, I have to start by recognising that the second demon would more accurately be termed the Demon of Having Rather Less Money To Spend On Creature Comforts For A While Than One Might Have Preferred - I'm on severely reduced hours as from next week unless a huge number of students turns up unexpectedly.

*****

Confess all your hidden faults!
Approach that which you find repulsive!
Whoever you think you cannot help, help them!
Anything you are attached to, let go of it!
Go to places that scare you, like cemeteries!
Sentient beings are as limitless as the sky,
Be aware!

-Dampa Sangye, (1045-1117)

Chőying Drolma performs the chőd meditation without benefit of dismembered corpses.

Opus 4

2011-09-04T10:22:00.036+01:00

'Opus 4'. I found this a minute or two ago on You Tube, after googling 'art of noise no sun november' and so heard it again for the first time in 23 years. It's a pretty little aural kaleidoscope by Art of Noise. Opening this page in two or three tabs and then setting the video off in each one with a couple of seconds delay produces an interesting effect, like listening under a bell-jar. You might have more pressing things to do, of course. Anyway, it soooo reminds me of my first visit to Athens in 1988, where I first heard it, and when I decided I would definitely live there eventually.

I stayed with a friend, Artemis, who had recently moved to Athens from Kavala where we first met. I was in my first full-time, permanent job at a language school in Cambridge and despite the regular pay and generous holidays, was climbing the walls with boredom and the predictability of the days. Artemis invited me to stay, and I was off like a shot.

She was working at the time as an apokleistkí, meaning ‘exclusive’, which is to say a private nurse in a public hospital. If you are hospitalized in Greece and have insufficient private health insurance, your family will have to undertake all the feeding, bed-bathing, shit-shovelling and arse-wiping necessary for the duration of your indisposition, unless you hire an apokleistkí from an agency to relieve them of some of the messier jobs. Artemis worked nights, ministering to the ever-dwindling needs of the moribund. She wrote to me; ‘I clean bums and willies by the cartload,* and send as many as I can to the Next World’. This was a joke in 1988, hand-written on a post card, Twitter as yet undreamed of. No 'Inappropriate Remarks from Healthcare Personnel' watchdog was ever charged with investigating the source of the communication. Greeks are always convinced that other people will cut corners wherever possible and one of Artemis's charges, when she had laved his member, would palpate the glans then pass his fingers under his nose to ensure he was getting his money's worth.

Artemis lived in a 'δώμα' dhóma, which is a tiny room perched on the top of a block of flats, like a paper-clip box on a filing cabinet. The block was on Doxa Patri, the topmost street on the side of Lycavittos that faces the Acropolis, and from the enormous terrace she commanded a magnificent view over Athens all the way to Piraeus and the sea, the receding white buildings way below like a plane of smashed, sun-bleached bones radiating back the afternoon heat. The dóma had a cupboard-like bathroom where you had no option but to sit on the loo to have a shower, and I rendered at least one bog-roll a day useless by accidentally drenching it. We cooked dinner outside on a calor gas ring under an awning, and with it drank cheap wine by the vat before Artemis went off to work around ten o'clock on Epaminondas, her elderly motorbike. Nobody seemed to mind her showing up squiffy, probably because most of the people she had dealings with were hanging on to this life by a thread, aware by now that all is vanity and, ε, so what if she's half-cut? In fact it was only by the sheerest luck that she showed up at all, given the traffic, the retsina and the fact that Greeks in those days thought crash-helmets were for pussies.

After she had left, I would play ‘Opus 4’ a few times, then Glass’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ up to around the mid-point where it starts to drive you insane, then set forth about midnight to a gay bar in Kolonaki, where the lads were up-front and horny in a way utterly unexampled in Cambridge’s lone gay club at the time. Nobody did the pussyfooting 'do you come here often/can I buy you a drink?' bit that I was used to and so hated. On the first evening I was approached within fifteen minutes by a gorgeous young man called Michalis. He observed strict protocol:

1) 'What's your name?' 'Steve'
2) 'What's your zodiac sign?' 'Pisces.' Eh? 'Fish!'
3) 'Have you got a place?' 'Certainly have.'

And we were away to the dóma for erotic fireworks, no messing. ‘Fucky Nell,’ I thought, ‘Sod Cambridge, I’m moving here as soon as I possibly can.’ I kept his underpants as a souvenir.

The following evening Michalis said ‘I have a friend who likes you’ and introduced me to Yannis, with whom I went back to the old dóma for another night of raging lust. Wine, men and song: this was the life. Yet truly in the midst of life we are in death, for fifteen minutes after I had tipped Yannis out into the night, Artemis returned early. While the lad and I had been at one another like starving men attacking a roast, she had been stuffing cotton wool up the arsehole of her newly deceased patient. I should explain for those unfamiliar with postmortem care that packing the back passage with cotton wool is standard procedure, not just a desperate way to pass the time on your shift. Every apokleistikí got a day off when her patient slipped off the perch, and later we hurtled round Athens on Epaminondas and went to buy meat and fish at the central market, a stinking hall of skinned corpses swinging on hooks, their guts piled red, white and blue, their shiny, chocolate-coloured livers and kidneys dribbling juice on bloody marble slabs. Slithery scraps of fat and flesh were squashed into the dust on the floor. It was like a mass execution of traitors.

Well, anyway, that quaint little piece of music heard once again this morning reminded me that I committed myself to living in Greece because the 29 year-old me wanted wine, chaos and cock, all more readily and cheaply available in Athens than in Cambridge, above job security, a bank account and a pension scheme, God help us.

I mentioned our boozy dinners of September 1988 to Artemis last time I saw her. Now retired and serious and teetotal, she shook her head ruefully at the irresponsibility of belting through Athens on Epaminondas, sozzled. I feel a pang of nostalgia for those nights, though, on hearing that odd little song: the smell of frying squid, the grassy olive oil on the salad, the sluicing down of ice-cold retsina, the tangled necklaces of lights spread out below us all the way to the sea, the thought of horny, handsome lads and the waiting for midnight when I would set out to see if I might get off with one. Them were t'days.

*****

* 'με το κιλό' = 'by the kilo' but that sounds wrong in English.

'Why, Jester...

2011-08-30T08:08:00.011+01:00

...you shouldn't have!'

*****

Advert from 1940. I think the artist knew a few things that the target audience of bonnet and bootee knitting housewives did not supect. That jester makes Liberace look butch.

A Littelle Prique

2011-08-26T17:43:00.013+01:00

I went down with a bug on Tuesday, a matter of mild fever, aching head, aching eyes and aching joints. I took two days off. I got up at five or so on Wednesday morning for a pee, and between bed and bathroom shivered as if it were January. I felt wretched but then thought 'I can go back to bed!!!' and gratefully did so. Sweats and aches and batty-winged fever-dreams notwithstanding, it was a voluptuous delight to sleep in until seven, and not to have to get the train, and not to have to stand in front of a class. People talk contemptuously of those who 'enjoy ill-health' but sometimes, fuck it, you might as well.

I went in early today, feeling fragile but stir-crazy after 48 hours in the house. I was not in a mood to be messed with, and Cédric, mon pauvre, you ave pique ze rongue faquinne day to play ze smarte-asse.

Now, most students at this stage are unaware that nouns or noun phrases are frequently found at the heads of sentences in academic writing as a way to avoid personal pronouns:

Lots of us think graffiti is a big problem in our city centres.

Graffiti is widely seen as a problem in city centres.

The second sounds more appropriate than the first, and highlighting the use of the passive is especially useful for Chinese students, who tend to come up with stuff like:

Graffiti, it's be big problem in city centre's people.

So the students were given a few sentences to reformulate, and applied themselves with diligence, except for Cédric, who pushed his paper to the edge of the table and flicked through his French-English grammar and phrase book.
'We're doing this now,' I said, pushing the paper back under his nose.

'Do we ave to?'

Do we ave to? Do we chuffin rotten ave to? What do you think this is, sunshine, bleedin Summerhill? Would you perhaps prefer to be throwing a pot or feeding the fucking gerbils? OF COURSE YOU...

'Why not?'

'I sink is not useful.'

I got him to admit that he was currently engaged in the writing of an academic essay in English, which is not his native tongue, and rested my case. If, during the reporting back, he felt picked on for every minor error, however smilingly, well, that was because I was smilingly rubbing his pointy gallic nose in it.

Later, he showed me notes from yesterday. Miss Clare ave said that in their introductions to the essay, they could use sequencing words such as first-leigh, zegond-leigh, sird-leigh and so on. Was this in fact the case?

'Yes,' I said. Why would Clare have taken the trouble to impart this information otherwise?

'In French, it is not beautiful.'

'Mais on n'est pas en France,' I said, and explained yet again that the essay is not meant to be a thing of beauty but a bog-standard advantages-disadvantages thing with ideas set out as clearly as possible.

Later, when we turned out to be one task sheet short, I saw him ostentatiously giving away his copy to the young Chinese lady who didn't have one, since he so clearly had no need of it.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid. Scrub that 'maybe' - I'm just being paranoid. If there's a cocky little twerp in a class, I always allow him to make me feel I'm wasting everybody's time.

'Can I ask you a question in Greek?' Voula asked me.

She wanted to know if rhetorial questions were OK in an academic essay. Personally I wouldn't have any problem, but everyone else in our place seems to discourage them, though not with the irrational vigour that some North Americans bring to persecuting the passive, whether or not they actually know what it is. So I said no, avoid them, despite being unconvinced. Then with Hellenic mock-querrulousness, which I do rather well when I'm not actually in Greece, I pointed out that two of the sentences we had fixed up on the board earlier had displayed precisely that defect, if defect it be. She seemed to take me seriously and my mock anger appeared to crush her somewhat.

Shit.

'You sounded quite ill. I'm surprised you're back,' said the administrative assistant.

Yeah - I really should have made it a very long weekend.

One day down...

2011-08-17T18:31:00.010+01:00

...nineteen to go.

The 420 new students were convened this morning in the same lecture theatre where they were welcomed yesterday. (See below) Today they were divided into groups, and shepherded off to classrooms for the first lesson, being fifty minutes of japesome ice-breakers.

This is how it works. The centre director puts a class-list on the projector and attempts to read out the names. Most of us now know something of the pronunciation of Chinese names: ‘x’ is pronounced ‘sh’, ‘q’ is pronounced ‘ch’, ‘si’ sounds like ‘shirr’ (don’t quote me on any of this) and ‘zh’ sounds like the ‘s’ in ‘pleasure’. What we are totally ignorant of is how misapplied tone might alter the meaning of somebody’s name. If English speakers read out a list, their voice tends to rise in pitch on each item and fall on the last. So as the director reads off the names, he occasions the odd burst of giggles. Maybe to Chinese ears it sounds like:

'Jing Wei Chen
Ring Piece Lai
Wei Wei Li
Sick-Bag Wu
Hao Yang Tan
Ching Wei Poop...'

…and so on.

Students gathered in large numbers like this have the unsettling habit of reacting with very obvious approval or disappointment when they see who is going to be their teacher. A group is called out and then told ‘..and your teacher is X’, and if X is young, female and blonde, an undisguised ‘ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ of appreciation goes up. On the other hand quite a few of our teachers are Asian or black, and sometimes elicit an irritating volley of titters from kids who have been brought up to think foreigners are funny. Oh, well. They’ll learn. There’ll be no surviving in a city like Leicester if they don’t. I wasn’t aware of any particular reaction to my good self, although I have been told in the past that my appearance leads some to expect a teacher of iron strictness. It must come as a relief to know that I’m incapable of taking teaching too seriously.

*****

After the ice-breaking shit, I gave my lot a questionnaire to complete about their academic skills in English and the degree of confidence they felt in each area. Then they had to write a short paragraph outlining their goals for the course and how they proposed to attain them. The aim of this in part was to show them that while we kick ass, we don’t wipe it, but mainly to give me half an hour’s peace. I have been suffering from pedagogue’s aphasia. I explained to the group that for the assessment, they would be writing an essay and a report and giving a presentation. I elicited what an essay is, then tried to get them to tell me how it differed from a report. Nobody knew, and suddenly I didn’t either. My brain froze like an infuriating laptop. If you’d asked me my name, I’d have had to get back to you. One student finally offered an answer, which I didn’t hear but allowed notwithstanding, and passed swiftly on. Stop me if I’ve told you this before, but I reminded myself of a trainee, Angela from Scotland, in Athens in 1992. Angela was far from the sharpest tool in the shed. One day she taught a reading lesson using a text about Einstein, and kicked off reasonably well by asking the students if they knew anything about him. A Bulgarian bloke then gave a succinct and highly informed account of the Theory of Relativity. Angela stood silently for a second as the neurone on duty at the time took this in, then said ‘aye, that’s right.’

I glanced through the students’ self assessments and paragraphs outlining their determination to succeed at all costs. I wonder, do the Chinese have a version of seppuku? It doesn't seem like a notion that so pragmatic a race would entertain, but one young lady wrote ‘last course, I got IELTS 6.0. On this course, I hope to top myself’.

Testing, testing...

2011-08-16T18:44:00.008+01:00

'If you'll just come this way...'

After a day of invigilating and marking tests yesterday, I had hoped to have a few howlers to report to you. Well, sorry – there was nothing worth passing on. My hopes were raised on seeing ‘over the decade, figures rose shittily’, but the student had handwriting like the tracks of a sprayed cockroach in its final throes and I had to accept the word was actually ‘steadily’. Great pity, that.

Today was the testing and marking marathon of the year. Four hundred and twenty new students did placement tests for the pre-sessional, which is five weeks of academic square-bashing that overseas students are required to do as a condition of entering their chosen departments in October. The whole bunch of them was corralled into a lecture theatre for an assortment of prefatory and exhortatory speeches, and then they had to come out in groups to have their visas checked by the admin staff. For this a post-office queuing system – one queue, five desks – had been set up, differing from the post office in that all five desks were actually manned. The lady in charge had originally put a sign at the head of the queue reading ‘Please wait for a vacant administrator’ but – great pity again, sorry – thought better of it and amended it to ‘Please wait here’. This took bloody ages and meanwhile the centre director diverted the waiting multitudes with games of hangman. I really do wonder what they make of us sometimes.

At length large groups were carted off for testing, leaving three colleagues and me with fifty kids (for so they seem to me now) in the lecture theatre for the listening and grammar tests. The listening test is a bugger. On the CD you hear a hundred rapidly spoken sentences, and on your question paper you have this sort of thing:

1) Let’s go have a SIT / SHIT in the garden.

You listen to the CD and tick the word you think you hear. The sentences on the test paper are not so broadly drawn or as susceptible to a top-down interpretation as my example, but you get the idea. The whole hundred sentences are rattled off in nine minutes flat, as expressions first of horror then amused resignation pass across students’ faces. The four tutors looked at one another with raised eyebrows, and certainly none of us would have scored 100%.

As we were distributing the grammar test, the centre director showed in a late arrival from the Middle Kingdom.

‘He’s missed the listening, has he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Roit… well, maybe you can calculate his score based on his grammar test,’ he suggested enigmatically.

Calculate his listening score based on a grammar test... Maybe we could do it based on his shoe size? Or the remaining units on his mobile phone? I think not. We decided he could have his own private test after the rest of the group had gone for lunch. So the lad listened with the usual reactions as the nine-minute recording hurtled by like a very long goods train. Then he asked ‘I can examine my test?’

He sat for a good five minutes, poring over the paper, making emendations here and there, then amending the emendations.

‘What the bloody hell’s he doing?’ I communicated by eye-movements over his head to my colleague.

‘No bloody idea,’ she telepathised back.

I mean, it’s gone now, over, how do you expect to check your answers with any degree of conviction? Maybe he’s a Memory Man and can mentally play back what he’s just heard? Buggered if I can explain it otherwise.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with marking the 840 papers. The tedium of this was mitigated by the provision of a buffet lunch, and the absurdity of matching up each listening paper with the same student’s grammar papers, a kind of ‘Happy Families’ that requires people to enquire: ‘Have you got a Dong?’ ‘Anybody got a Wang?’

So the course proper starts tomorrow. Fifty more students are expected, and classrooms will be jammed. It’s gonna be a long five weeks, possibly followed by very thin times indeed, so I’m hoping for some howlers and tittersome incidents to relate, as these could be very few and far between in the next academic year.

Your Opinion Counts

2011-08-04T18:11:00.010+01:00

Sorry. Couldn't find a relevant picture.

At the end of some (not all) courses, management at our place issues students with a questionnaire eliciting their feedback on our efforts over the preceding five weeks. These are collected and briefly snickered over before being consigned to a cardboard box in some cupboard and forgotten about. Some students regard such forms as an invitation to whinge, others as an opportunity to butter us up and thus, in their mistaken view, gain preferment. Most, of course, are perfectly happy with what they get and say so. Today someone wrote:

I learn many useful thing, for example how to book ticket online.

Not what you might hope would stay with someone after a course in academic English, but nice to know that it wasn’t a total waste of his time. One little madam in my group ticked all the boxes in the ‘satisfactory‘column then appended woundingly:

The teachers are irresponsible.

‘Perhaps she meant ‘irresistible’?’ said a colleague, helpfully.

No, it was definitely a put-down, but then responses to these questionnaires are often internally contradictory. Why chuck in that comment, after pronouncing herself satisfied with everything? Could she not have elaborated a bit? Come on, love, did we come in late after playtime? Did we laugh at your accents? Did we unapologetically spill students’ pop, pinch their sweeties, dip their plaits in the inkwell, say ‘bums’ and ‘willies’ a lot and generally display indifference to their welfare and learning? Of course we bloody didn’t. Well, no point second guessing her. I don’t want to be like one Greek school owner I knew who issued a questionnaire to his teachers requesting their totally honest feedback, anonymity guaranteed, and then spent ages worriedly trying to work out who’d written the negative comments by matching up samples of handwriting. I suspect Chini thinks Alison and I were irresponsible because we didn’t tell them exactly what to do, what to write, what to think, and generally refused to do the arse-wiping she expects from her previous learning experience. It will, in her eyes, be my fault when she discovers that she has failed on her oral presentation with its powerpoint slides nicked from some online source, and on her essay, an impenetrable verbal thicket produced by writing the thing in Chinese, then whacking it through babelfish.

*****

On feedback forms for our 'ELT Starter' course for neophyte teachers in Athens, we had the question ‘what aspects of the course could we improve?’ Several trainees over the years answered this with:

General things.

Right. We’ll get cracking on that. In the ‘anything else you would like to say?’ section, one young lady wrote:

I’ve learned that ELT is a magic world with lots of people in it.

‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ I said, imitating Vincent Price, ‘you see them too, do you?’

A few years ago at Essex university a young man from Thailand told me in a tutorial that he liked my lessons ‘because you are not serious’. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Did he mean I was entertaining, or just a push-over in comparison with the rigorous approach of the other teachers? Teaching can make such a paranoiac of you if you let it. Today as she was leaving the classroom a young Chinese lady said ‘it was honour to be in your class’. I could put a cynical interpretation on that, especially as the results are not out and she knew we had a standardisation meeting to come this afternoon, but I won’t. I’ll accept the complement gracefully as a counterbalance to the ‘irresponsible’ bit, which has been irritating me all day like a bit of grit in my shoe.

Remembrance of Things Past

2011-07-27T14:59:00.025+01:00

An e-mail this morning informed me that my nephew had posted a photo of me on Facebook. Fuck, I thought. I dislike posing for photos and it shows. I either look like Judge Jeffreys presiding at the Bloody Assizes, or worse, I wear a patently unfelt smile, like someone unaccustomed to the effort involved. There is also these days the repeated shock caused by the fact that the self-image I carry in my mind has not been updated since I was 35, while the external image has obviously moved on. ‘I luke int mirror,’ my maternal grandma once said, ‘and lukin back, thiz an owd woman!’ She said this with a kind of fascinated horror, as if it were the last thing she had expected to see. She had been a beauty in her time. I could have pointed out that the shock might be cushioned somewhat if she put her dentures in before consulting the mirror, but forbore.

Anyway, the photo James has dug out was taken long before I developed my present self-consciousness. It's the Christmas of perhaps 1965, and shows the approximately six-year old me on the left, my three-year old sister Tonie in the middle and my second cousin Jonathan on the right. I am holding a ventriloquist’s dummy, my top favourite among the year’s haul of prezzies, and visible on the right is a three-storey toy garage. I wonder about the garage. I know for sure it wouldn’t have figured on my wish list, whereas the ventriloquist’s dummy most certainly did. Were my parents hoping to balance the dummy with something a tad more butch? Quite possibly.

There’s a photo from an earlier Christmas Day in which I sit miserably on a new tricycle, the picture of resentfulness and disappointment. There might be poignancy in such ungrateful repudiation of a loving gift long saved for, had I not been at pains to point out repeatedly in the run-up to Christmas that I really, really didn’t want a bloody bike. I didn’t know then that the damn thing had already been bought and my parents were trying hard to bring me round to liking the idea. As a small boy I had a tendency to live in my head, invent stories which I told myself out loud, and was forever pretending that my toys and other objects around me were something other than what they actually were. This tendency to want to be alone and my active dislike and avoidance of other boys probably inspired the decision to get me ‘mucking in with the other lads’ on a fucking bike. Some hope. My favourite bit of the mockumentary ‘The Big Tease’ has the mother of the gay hairdresser protagonist proudly showing off the chess set her son had received as a boy. He had dressed all the pawns in grass skirts to represent the chorus of ‘South Pacific’. I actually think the desire for the ventriloquist’s doll was a symptom of emerging control-freakery ('I'm making him call me 'sire' ') rather than any – what do they call it these days? – ‘gender atypical’ behaviour. Still, something must have been nagging at my parents’ minds, minds shaped up to that point largely by the rigid gender roles of the fifties.

Eventually both trike and garage came into their own. The garage had a battery operated elevator, which fascinated me even if the cars never did. My sister and I collected frogspawn, and when the tadpoles emerged and grew to early froghood, she would divert them with rides in the garage lift. The battery compartment on top of the lift shaft had a removable lid and inside, an intriguing mechanism of cogs and wires and whatnots. Some of the day-tripping frogs got caught up in this and were tragically minced even as their fellows were riding happily up and down. I think this gumming up of the works with frog parts probably wrecked the elevator once and for all, and Tonie had to resort instead to feeding up the goldfish. She’d give them entire packets of digestive biscuits at a sitting ('din-dins!') and once tipped a large bag of rabbit oats into their bowl. This might have choked a small shark, but the goldfish lived.

The good, clean, healthy fun my parents had envisioned with their present of a bike materialised eventually. Sort of. A friend, Christine, and I invented the game ‘Death Hospital’. We would hurtle up and down the street on our trikes, transporting imaginary patients to a make-believe hospital at the far end, staffed by doctors and nurses trained in the most implacable sadism. Here patients were extravagantly maltreated before we dropped by to deliver a new batch of victims and cart off the cadavres for interment. I'm pretty sure that other boys would merely have ridden their bikes, no doubt competing to see who could reach the far end of the street first. That would have struck us as brain-curdlingly boring and pointless.

These days, parents would probably take kids who devised such pastimes as 'Death Hospital' to be gently talked to by deeply concerned health care professionals, and get them playing violent computer games instead. Our parents never even knew. We grew tired of ‘Death Hospital’ soon enough, and grew up as normal as the rest of you.

Honest.

Christine (left) survived 'Death Hospital' in a sense that has far more resonance now than we ever suspected then, and my sister (right) has given up entertaining frogs.

From more innocent times...

2011-07-21T19:23:00.006+01:00

..before they knew that this:

...can lead to this:

Chinoiserie

2011-07-09T10:40:00.010+01:00

A bunch of students from the People's Republic of China arrived last week, and for the first time in four years I don't have a single Arabic speaker in my classes. I have seventeen PRC kids in my main group, all of them very cheerful and willing but utterly bemused at what I’ve been asking them to do all week. I'm trying to see my lessons from their point of view: why does he keep asking us questions when he's supposed to be here to tell us stuff? Why is he interested in our opinions? Moreover, how do we know if our opinions are the ones he wants to hear? Why does he keep telling us to discuss our answers to reading tasks together, instead of just reading out the correct ones? Why all this bloody cat and mouse, for god’s sake?

On Friday, they were all completely knackered after a muggy week of being bombarded with a foreign language and a strange culture. Every overture I made to them was greeted with sphincter-twitching silence until I asked them about lectures in China. It seems that they expect to sit and listen, and write notes when told to do so. A coursebook will accompany and reinforce the lectures, and no other reading will be required. Questions are not welcomed during the session, but braver students will occasionally venture one or two after the lecture.

‘How does the lecturer know the students understand if they don’t ask questions?’ I asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘Cos there is test at the end of the course!’

‘Isn’t that leaving it a bit late?’

‘Test is very easy!’

Boy, are you lot in for a shock, I thought. So I spelled out the rationale for all the discussion and collaborative learning I’d been trying to encourage all week. And they got it. Immediately! They started to argue about their answers, referring back to the reading passage. They offered answers even if they were unsure. The silence was replaced with a buzz, and my fear that they thought I was wasting their time evaporated, although I suppose they may merely have decided to humour me. What a waste of everyone’s curiosity Chinese lectures must be.

We ended the session with the game ‘backs to the board’. The students in teams sit in small circles, with one member facing away from the board. The teacher puts a word from the day’s lesson on the projector and the teams have to try to communicate the word to the ‘blind’ member, using synonyms, definitions and paraphrases. The first ‘blind’ member of the teams to call out the correct word earns the team a point. There was much whooping and self-congratulatory applause as the game progressed and thus the week ended on a high note. This is always a good ploy – leave ‘em laughing when you go, and they’ll forget that the day was mostly just slog.

Now, what you really want to know is what those things in the photo are. Some Chinese students left us a pile of these on the staffroom table. Imagining them to be dried fruit or some kind of toffee, I opened one. The content of the sealed plastic bubble looks like sun-dried dog-shite or the hacked-off knob of a mummy, calling into question the assertion frequently met in cook books that eye-appeal is of paramount importance when presenting Chinese comestibles. The mutt-poop mummy-dong is a gobbet of gristle that has no flavour save, faintly, those of lard and dust. I brought a couple of the laminated mucky-pup mummy-todger thingies home to show you, and to see if anyone can tell me what they really are, and in what spirit - gratitude or revenge – they were probably given.

*****

7th Dec 2011. It is in fact dried beef, as my present bunch of PRC students confirmed last week. It is still dried beef that tastes like candle wax.

Still here...

2011-07-06T19:49:00.020+01:00

...but life is pretty dull right now, so there isn't much to say. We're on course 4 of the year, the five-week extended chimps' tea-party that every year I vow I will not do, but can never avoid because I need the bloody money. There's too much material, too little time and too many teachers competing for the photocopier which frequently packs up as a result. Five minutes before you have to be in another building to teach business English or Academic Culture or English for Computing, the rhythmic ftthhht-ftthhht-ftthhht of your copies being churned out is replaced by the hysterical weee-wahhhweee-wahhhweee-wahhh siren and a flashing red light, and the hot urge to smash the contraption to atoms courses through you. Or me. I suffer from acute lack of serenity and chronic want of sense of proportion, and I should therefore be allowed July off (on full pay) on doctor's orders.

It's muggy and noisy in the building where I'm teaching this year. We overlook a building site in full hammering and drilling swing, and a main road near a hospital with ambulances screeching past every few minutes. The city council could pass a ruling resticting heart attacks to evening hours, but of course they bloody won't, useless sods. My classroom is the size of a tennis court, so everyone has to holler to be heard two tables away, and shy Chinese girls do not like to holler. Yesterday I felt like everybody's stone-deaf grandad, cupping my ears and requesting endless repetition from shrinking violets with atrocious pronunciation. Brits tend not to do air conditioning, much as the Greeks tend not to bother with insulation. If I close the windows, the temperature goes tropical and everyone nods off.

We get a week off at the end of Course 4, for good behaviour.

Thanks to Bo, last week I discovered the excellent Pema Chődrőn, an American Buddhist nun whose serene bearing, good humour and utter lack of pretention made me realise yet again how easily I let my head become a sackful of snarling, scratching wild cats, and how I actually feed the buggers by reading things I know will incense me. Just what masochistic urge makes me enter into correspondence with homophobic Young Earth Creationist Jesus-botherering Bible Belt bone-heads on You Tube? If someone's mental furniture consists exclusively of aumbries, credence tables and hassocks, no point in trying to altar any of it, arf arf. Here's a sample or two, all from a young man who specialises in the dodgy analogy:

'So, since gay people are the minority, I should simply accept and tolerate this and do nothing about it? So, since the minority of people are starving, I guess I should just accept this and do nothing about it?'

'Science recognizes that opposites attract. Take two magnets for example. Only the North end attaches to the South end normally and vice-versa. The North end and the other North end push away from one another; the same thing happens when you try to put the South end with the South end. It's harder to put N with N or S with S, than it is to respect the fact that N goes with S and S goes with N no matter how hard you try to naturally put N with N or S with S. This is exactly what homosexuality does. It tries to put North with North and South with South, then it tries to pass it off as being completely normal in the same sense that North with South is normal.'

Imagine it: you meet a bloke, you like each other, you agree to get it on, but as soon as the pair of you get your kits off and hit the sack, one of you is catapulted off the bed into the wardrobe and the other lobbed into the en suite. Eventually you decide this isn't working and go to the pub instead. You decide thereafter to be straight. Aye, right.

'So you're promoting homosexuality because it "feels" right? So if it "feels" right for me to murder everyone in sight, I guess that's something to be tolerated and welcomed, right?'

What need is this serving? I'm bridling even now at his use of caps there, as if he were quoting me, when he isn't, the bloody cretin. I never fucking said... Anyway, I sent off immediately for one of Pema Chődrőn's books, I devote some of my daily commute to za-zen (not in the lotus posture - can't do that any more) and eventually I may bloody calm down a bit, dammit.

*****

With thanks once again to the ever-inspiring Bo, here's Ani Chőying Drolma, of whom I first heard about fifteen minutes ago. She is the perfect antidote to the saccharine frumpiness of the god-botherers in the last post; a cool stream versus a cloying ice-cream soda. Try to ignore the painting behind her.

By their fruits ye shall know them. Interview with Ani Chőying here. Compare the way her religion resonates in her character with the sunny sweetness of the lovely Margie here.

That Settles it for Me

2011-06-23T18:22:00.029+01:00

Dedicated to those You-Tube fundies who put to me such questions as:

@vilgessuola: explain to me how two men or two women can create a child. That's one of the natural functions of sexual intercourse. So explain to me how it's possible for any child to be produced as a result of gay sex.

You make a pact with the Devil, as you knew all along. Simples. Then, of course, you eat the baby.

Gay adoption agency

I asked the same young man why Christians are so exercised about what other people do in bed. He protests:

It's more natural at some point in your life to have the strong urge to assault or murder someone than it is to want to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender. Murder and assault are illegal and are not tolerated in any circumstances, so why should homosexuality be accepted, let alone tolerated?

Christians aren't obsessed with other people's sex lives at all. Christians don't care about what goes on during sex as long as it's done within marriage between a husband (man) and a wife (woman). Then, anything goes. The couple gets to decide what positions to have sex in, whether or not to have oral sex, sex toys, etc. It's up to them.'

I've given up on him. When people think the urge to murder is 'more natural' and by implication less reprehensible than the urge to lust, then start refering you to 'Answers in Genesis' and articles by Ken Ham, you know the gulf between you is just too bloody wide to shout across.

*****

Ah serve the Lawd

Guess I felt enspired by the Lord to share with you folks some uplifment I found on You Tube, oh my, you’re just gonna love it! There’s been a whole bunch of stuff around lately from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchinson and Sam Harry and Daniel Bennet and all the so-called self-stiled New Athiest’s about how God is not great and the Lord's people are plain dumb. Well, you know what, I for one am getting pretty darn sick and tarred of Darwinist homasexuals and those lesbians being all like butch and liberal and telling us that? We aren’t dumb, no sir! We know what side our bread's buttered. Once we accept Jesus into our lifes, we just better not think any more about stuff is all, in case we have forbidden thoughts without realizing it. I sure do hope you’ll join me in praying that God will reveal His love to all these deeply misguided folks before He’s forced to hurl them into the Lake of Fire for bamboozling other good folks who God’ll have to throw into the Lake of Fire as well for letting there selves get bamboozled unbeknownst, when all they need to of done was humble there selves before the Lord greatly. Really, it is soooo simple, you guys! Is it so much to ask, to escape the roth to come? For me, it’s a .... now, what do the young people call these days... a de-brainer! I guess Sir Dawkins and Dr Hitchinson had real traumactic afflicted childhoods touched by neglect, abuse, free thinking and alcoholism like so many others outside of the fold, and this made them hate God, which is such a pity when He loves them enough to die for there sins. Now, that's real ungratitude, so no wonder He’s gonna roast ‘em like chickens, LOL!* God doesn't want anyone to go to hell and so He through you a lifeline by getting His Self killed while He was living down here as His own son, and that means He took yours and my sins on Hisself, that who so beleiveth in Him might get eternal life and not be cast into the lake of fire where the worm is not quenched. That's why He's called the Saviour, guys! Stands to reason if you don't grab onto that lifeline, you go to hell! That's God's justice. That's the way God rolls weather you like it or weather you don't.

Well anyhow, about the video. Here’s a real profound and comforting song from way back before all that evil talk of gay jeans and same-sex marriage sung by a bunch of nice smiley God-feering hetrosectual folks in a real nice place kinda like a wood with a farm and a waterfall and all green and all I like to think, this is a four taste of that Blessered Place where all us true beleivers are headed. Its’ real soon, folks!

And finelly, Oh-My-Goodness, I pray in Jesus'es name that we will see Sir Dawkins and Dr Christopher Hitchinson smiling and singing right along, before it’s too late. Can you guy's just pitcher how wonnerful that would be? I sure can! What a triumph for God! Praise the Lord!

*This is a abrevviation meaning 'Laughing Out Loud' and my daughter whose in college uses it in reply to all my texts. The Lord gave us a sence of humor!

I just know he'd look a hole lot happier
if he'd let Lord Jesus into his heart!

'But my teacher have said me...'

2011-06-21T18:04:00.002+01:00

The young lady with whom I share responsibility for Group 4 accosted me yesterday lunchtime. ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ she said, ‘but…’

You are going to anyway.

‘Well, you know group 4, right? They think all they have to do is paraphrase the sources.’

Oh, fuck.

Let me explain. For the writing component on the present course the students must produce a thousand words on emotional stress and three specific methods to combat it, all based on a pack of info from a variety of books, journals and web pages provided for their reference. From these they may cull direct quotes and paraphrases to back up their own ideas on the topic. Somewhere along the line the scary bit about their own ideas has got lost, and now they’ve formulated the comforting notion that they need only excerpt and reword odds and sods from the source material to sew together into a thousand-word Frankenstein’s Monster. There’s never enough time to devote to all the strands of any course, and this time round I have hammered writing at the expense of reading because writing just bloody baffles everybody so much. After loads of discussion of the source material aimed at helping them to own the ideas, it seems I have only succeeded in baffling them the more.

My ten days off the rails has given me some insight into how they probably feel about writing. Every lesson I taught for two weeks felt like the first lesson of my career, as if I were a rookie who kept forgetting things and couldn’t think straight for sheer bloody funk. Many of the students won’t write a second sentence until I have checked their first one, or a third until I’ve checked the second, and so on. ‘Just bloody write it, for Christ’s sake’ I say, politely, ‘then we can tidy it up. For is it not written, no point wiping your arse before you’ve shat?’

Well, honestly.

Student - me exchanges such as the following are common around this time of year:

‘Introduction, how long should be?’

Piece of string, how long should be?

‘How many word can be in a paraphrase?’

As many as you need to back up your own view, bearing in mind there’s a thousand word limit and most of the language needs to be from you. Measure by eye, not weight.

‘Fifferty? Sickersty? Seffenty?’

Please refer to my previous response.

‘I can say about my obinion in the introduction?’

Yes.

‘My other teacher have said me, to don’t say about my obinion in the introduction.’

She was right, I’m lying.

‘I can say about my obinion or no?’

So long as you can back it up.

‘I can say ‘I think’ for my obinion in a issay?’

Yes, if you want.

‘My other teacher have said me, to don’t say ‘I think’ for my obinion in a issay.’

So don’t say it, then.

‘Who right?’

Me. I've got the dick. Settled.

Actually that last part of this kind of exchange is never necessary – it’s simply assumed that being a man, I’m right, even if I’m not.

Look, folks, I try to tell them, I really wish there was a formula I could give you instead of what sound to you just now like arbitrary and contradictory rules, but there ain’t. If there were, you’d never find your own voice. Yes, you need to find your own voice. You exercise critical thinking skills in so many areas of your life, and here, we expect you to do that in class, in contrast with certain cultures represented here where they really, really don’t want that kind of thing going on. Resign yourselves to not making a terribly good job of this essay, then learn from the feedback.

‘I don’t want to worry you, but…’

You bloody well have! I’ve only got two teaching days to clear all this up, and as always, I feel it’s my fault that they’ve all got the wrong end of the bloody stick. I’ll just have to count on the strong likelihood that they will all be thinking it’s theirs.

Call off the Dogs

2011-06-17T07:17:00.002+01:00

D'you know, it's a funny thing, but all that black doggery has diminished somewhat. I got up at four yesterday morning because I couldn't sleep for nasty thoughts, and started the day feeling like a man awaiting execution. I went into my class with the aim of introducing my charges to the idea that attention to the considerations of theme and rheme would make their paragraphs more highway than scrapyard. My hands were trembling - not because I have not done this before, as I have, loads of times, but because it was as if I had forgotten it all and was bluffing my way through it, as well as being the only one aware of some imminent disaster of an unspecified nature. Well, we got on with things and nobody died, bloodshed was minimal, and I wasn't marched off to the cry 'deyde mayne wawken! We gad us a deyde mayne wawken heeya!' and by lunchtime I felt easier. After lunch, we did a reading passage. I made sure I had the teacher's book to hand as I didn't trust myself not to get snagged up in the pointless complexity of IELTS texts. The students did, of course, but that's what they pay for, so I suppose they were happy... or maybe that's not why they were there... like I say, I was a bit vague. Anyway, standing on platform two waiting for the 15.18 home, I realised my hands were not trembling, my guts were not rolling, circumstances were no brighter, but, you know, who cares? Even fantasies of smacking people's heads in for open-mouth gum chewing had left my mind. After ten days when paranoid, four-in-the-morning insomniac thoughts had occupied my mind all day and all night, they finally fell into some perspective. Some mental rubbish I had swallowed had been digested and shat out. Not a pretty image, I know, but one that feels apt.

I'm always surprised how suddenly a period of gloom starts and fizzles out, and how, once it's fizzled out, it seems so strange that one could have felt it so real. I'm tired from so little sleep and so much bloody pointless worrit for ten days, so nobody's in for a scintillating lesson today, but normal service is expected to resume after the weekend.

Many thanks to those who offered kind comments and kicks up the arse here, on facebook and by e-mail.

I come no more to make you laugh: ...

2011-06-13T19:21:00.003+01:00

...things now that bear a weighty and a serious brow. For me at least. I'm subject now and then to periods of the gloomies, black dog days, and the present black mutt is a vicious bastard. At work I do my usual passable imitation of a calm, unflappable sort of bloke, although I might not be doing it quite as well as I think this time, and showing signs of curmudgeonliness. In my inner world, I feel like the blindfold prisoner of unknown captors with unknown intentions, and I alternate periods of gloom with spells of wall-climbing paranoia, guts rolling, heart speeding. For ten days, pretty much the only emotions I have known are anxiety and anger. I attacked an averagely dumb US You Tube christer with almost undergraduate viciousness the other day, deservedly eliciting an angry, hurt response that made me feel quite a heel. The poor sod had no idea he was being beaten up on by one mildly, temporarily unhinged. (However, 'Voice of God', you really are a fucking whack job and I feel no contrition for cremating you. So there.) Concentration is nigh impossible as my head is clogged and dusty as a hoover bag and oddly, worryingly, I feel as though I know nothing: can't implement basic teaching skills, can't remember what I read or assemble my thoughts: everything I attempt just confuses me.

It really is a right pain in the arse.

It's more than twenty years since I last had medication for depression, which was probably caused by a long bout of glandular fever. In those days, Happy Pills did little other than dehydrate you, causing unquenchable thirst and the sort of constipation the Victorians thought led to depression in the first place - nothing a day on the Syrup of Figs and a good brimstone and carbolic enema wouldn't sort out. So, tired of spitting feathers and passing shrapnel, I slung them down the bog and sat out the depression until it blew over. I understand the modern generation of Happy Pills actually work in the short term, and am pondering whether to petition my GP for some. I dunno. There are immutable, real world reasons for my feeling like this, although I'm over-reacting to them absurdly. The irritating thing is that I know this, but that doesn't alter the feeling that I'm being stalked by a maniac.

Anyway, this explains the lack of blogs recently, and may explain a lack of blogs to come for a while. I've discovered that whenever I predict a lull in blogging, it never happens, so making this public might well disperse the gloom.

The Demise of Group C (Of Three)

2011-06-02T18:39:00.008+01:00

If you see me more jovial and genial than of late, if I offer you a bite of my matutinal cheese scone from the campus caff or if, Lord love us, I even smile at you before mid-morning, this is because Group C (of three) is disbanded and its less talented denizens cast to the winds, with a fol-lol-lol and hey-nonny-nonny. Nobody could say they hadn’t been warned, although that is indeed what some of them did say. The course director had given them the hard word several weeks ago, but they saw it as bollockings and rumours of bollockings, and were not troubled, thinking the time was not yet. Which goes to show how wrong you can be.

Tests were administered and marked last week, and six out of ten Group C types dive-bombed spectacularly. No surprises there. A week before, we did a practice listening test, one of many. One part of this featured two women discussing local health centres, and questions such as the following were to be answered:

1. No. of doctors at Letsby Avenue Centre: ………………….
2. No of doctors at Upper Knocker-Down St. Centre: ………………….

Like a good IELTS exam prep teacher, I elicited that the answer would be a number. A number. So we listened to the dreary twaddle on the C.D., actors doing their Two Cunts in a Kitchen dialogue with anus-winking stage accents:

Mrs A: (Antipodean, sort of.) Will, these the Letsby Avenue cintre, that’s ILL-EE-TEA, ISS-BEE-WOY. Plus Avenue, as in Shaaaaftesbury. It’s aunlie tin minnets a-why. They have farve doctors thee.

Mrs B: (Writing this down, in R.P.) Lets…be…a…ven…you. Ten minutes away, you said? Goodness, that’s really convenient, isn’t it? And there are six doctors there, you say?

Mrs A: Now, now, now, not six! I said farve. Farve! Thit's the number that comes efter fore.

Mrs B: Oh, five! Gosh. (Chucklesomely at such silly-me-ishness) Sorry! Golly, I really will have to get used to a variety of regional accents, won’t I?

Everyone completed question 1. with ‘ten minutes’. Is number, no? You say us is number - why it's wrong?

There was a review board this morning where the fails could put their case if they thought they still had a leg to stand on. Amazingly, after failing pretty much every test since last October and showing every sign of regression rather than progress, all six showed up defiantly.

‘Did Hassan go without a fight?’ I asked the course director after lunch.

‘None of them went without a fight,’ she said.

Predictably, their failure was entirely our fault. Five teachers over eight months had been of no help to them. Our teaching is ineffective and our testing inequitable: that we had allowed them extra time for the reading test and a second hearing of the listening had served merely to confuse them. The question then is, why the fuck do you want to come back, if you have decided we are such a bunch of klutzes? Gotcha!

So now the four remaining Group C students are in a new class with a few new Saudi blokes, four new Chinese ladies and a cute Thai lad with a name as long as your arm, obligingly abbreviated to Tom. Today was pretty hard work, but there was none of the feeling of pissing into the wind or pushing a heavy truck up a hill that I’ve had every Thursday and Friday for the last eight months. This explains the unwonted sunniness of my disposition.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

2011-05-26T11:02:00.006+01:00

I get about five spam comments a day. There are usually a few cheery little messages along the lines of ‘Hey, what up’s, Dude! I’m too happy than I’m find you blog! It was great post to read it!’ plus link to some tacky bum-and-tit site. There is a daily string of Japanese characters linking to a page in dolly-mixture colours with images of Hello Kitty and teen-girl idols, possibly a site for sex-groomers. This morning I received a snippet of hetero porn that looks as if it has been written by one of my students with the 'help' of babelfish and a pocket dictionary. David is getting sweatily tumescent at the prospect of fetching Betty a damn good leathering:

‘David narrowed his eyes, wiping the sweat mad his face with the forsake of possibly man hand.’

I’ve been puzzling over the meaning of ‘the forsake of possibly man hand’. Is David perhaps wiping his sweaty countenance ‘with abandon’? Dunno. And why is his hand only possibly a man-hand? Anyway, if he’s wavering about his butchness, he’s pretty sure of his purpose:

"Squire, she's gonna be gettin' more 'n she bargained as a service to when I get through with 'er."

And it is indeed quite a ‘service to’ that Betty gets:

He started beating her thighs savagely, hushed keeping the leather away from her pussy. Betty threw her head privately again and again, feeling that tantalizing piping hot amuse newest thing in the course her pussy. Fuck essence flowed from her pussy, wetting down her blonde cuntal curls, plastering them against her swollen pussy meat. Her thighs tightened, easygoing, then tightened in days gone by more.

‘Fuck Essence’ is a good one, I thought; must be the Boots No. 17 edition of ‘fanny batter’. The ‘swollen pussy meat’ sounds appallingly anaphrodisiac, making me think of the bowls of mince that someone near my flat in Athens used to put out for strays in the forty-degree July heat - you could smell and see them roiling with maggots at fifty paces. I must bear in mind that I am not part of the target audience for the genre exemplified here, and that ‘swollen man meat’, which appeals to me far more as an image, might equally be a turn off for men who enjoy using riding crops to thrash the bejesus out of ladies’ spam wallets - for days on end, it seems.

Occasionally, when correcting students’ writing, I have recourse to a correction code. Instead of correcting the errors, you highlight the bloopers and write above them such abbreviations as T for ‘tense’ or WO for ‘word order’ if you think the perpetrator might, after a little reflection, be able to self-correct. The most frequently used abbreviation in my experience is WW for ‘wrong word’. A touching degree of trust in bilingual dictionaries and a reluctance to edit a ‘finished’ essay leads many students to reach for the next word along rather than the most deserving candidate. I often wished I could have done this with the WWs in Greek subtitles on English language films. I understand that subtitlers work under great pressure of time, and their mishearings and misinterpretations were the best source of entertainment that dreadful nineties Greek TV could provide. In the TV movie ‘Jack the Ripper’, Michael Caine as Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline is brusquely apprising his coppers of the urgency of their mission:

‘Roit. I want you aht on them streets, door to door. Wear your boots out.’

This last phrase got into the subtitles as ‘φορέστε τις μπότες σας όταν βγείτε’ ‘put your boots on when you go out’, as though the Chief were expressing avuncular concern for his boys’ tootsies. In 'Ken Park' a lad asks his older girlfriend 'can I eat you out?' The innocent subtitler translated this as 'πάμε να φάμε;' 'shall we go for something to eat?' envisaging perhaps a shared Big Mac, in fact the last thing on anyone's mind in that movie.

In the early evenings, the cat and I would often watch nature documentaries. William was an afficionado, sitting in his sphynx pose at the foot of the bed, transfixed by flamingoes and chameleons. In one of these, peasants in some unforgiving, arid shit-hole somewhere were toiling in the fields, pouring water over the crops. ‘The peasants irrigate the field,’ said the narrator, redundantly. The subtitles read ‘the peasants irritate the fields’, which made me snort unattractively. 'Here we see a field on which peasants are pouring water,' I said to the cat. 'They are not standing about thumbing their noses at it and snickering ‘nyah nyah, nyah nyah, silly old field!’, so how could that possibly be the right translation? Eh? Chuh!' He agreed.

‘We are about to see something never before captured on film,’ the narrator told us on another occasion, piquing our curiosity with news of relatives. ‘A pride of lions stalking and killing a buck.’ The subtitle read: ‘stalking and killing a duck.’ We had a bit of a snigger at that, thinking what a bunch of drippy, effete lions it would be that needed the safety of numbers when hunting ducks. Then I wondered if the subtitlers could actually see the footage that accompanied the soundtrack. Given the nature of these last two errors, maybe they couldn’t. After all, I am pretty sure I have seen dozens of documentaries in which teams of lions stalk and kill bucks. If you could not see the image, might it not seem far more likely that a World First would indeed reveal a bunch of leonine milquetoasts, steeling themselves to pounce on a knackered, broken-winged duck? This could have been an excellent example of the sort of top-down processing I have failed to elicit from Group C any time this six months, so I will suspend judgement.

*****

I would love to know what a Japanese speaker might make of the subtitles to the video above. In the mid-nineties ERT, the Greek state TV channel, ran a series of Monty Python episodes from the early seventies. Dragged out of its time and context, with subtitles by someone whose language level was at best upper intermediate and acquaintance with British culture non-existent, it was an typical example of the insensitivity to audience that characterises so much of Greek broadcasting, beaurocracy and teaching. Yes, I know, this sounds like an introduction rather than an afterthought. Άλλη φορά.

Rapture Postponed

2011-05-21T18:58:00.014+01:00

The Rapture did not happen after all, then, this time. Just like 1994 - we were all prayered up with nowhere to go. All those people who returned their library books, stopped the milk, cancelled the papers and gave away their life savings in expectation of being swept aloft to meet the Lord in the air by 1800 hours local time today, have remained on Earth with the ungodly - bookless, milkless, paperless, broke. This, I suppose, renders all the more unlikely the End of the World on October 21st. Ah, it all seemed so assured, Mr Camping's formula so elegant! See, the Flood was 6023 years from the Creation, and Jesus was born 11,006 years from the Creation, and since a year is as a thousand years for the Lord, it was a foregone conclusion that being 7000 years from the Flood, the Last day would be October 21st 2011. Mr Camping pointed out that none of this would make sense to anyone who did not have faith. We, though, are strong in faith! It stood to reason! Watertight, we thought! We were wrong.

So, it is with regret that we must own that somewhere in that calculation, there's a tiny glitch that we must prayerfully seek to iron out. I prayed my way into this, and the Lord inspired me. Maybe Satan skewed things somewhat when he made gay marriage legal in Iceland on June 11, 2010? After all, June 11 is 6/11, and when you think about it, that's only three digits off the fateful date of 9/11, and three is the number of the Trinity, and May 21st is 5/21, if you read it as five divided by twenty-one, makes 0.23809524, which you have to admit looks on the face of it like a dead give-away for an ETA of 15th February 2013. The Lord is teaching us humility here, though. Our thoughts are not His thoughts. He is reminding us of our sin nature, admonishing us for our presumption. The campaign We Can Know ought to have been more modestly titled: 'We Are A Bunch Of Credulous, Fuck-Witted Numpties', perhaps. Lord, look favourably upon us: it's really quite cool how humble we're being.

Below is a blasphemous video that mocks the End Time prophets. Listen with prayer and try not to laugh, for though the Lord has tarried yet again, we are revising our calculations for The Day of His Inevitable Return.*

*****

* Camping has admitted that he misinterpreted the Bible and that May 21 was not really the end of the world but the 'spiritual beginning of the physical end.' The physical end still comes on October 21st, so if you gave away your life savings, sold your house or knifed your kids in expectation of the Rapture and the Tribulation, you only have to live with the consequences for less than half a year. 'Were not changing a date at all; we're just learning that we have to be a little more spiritual about this,' he says, meaning don't consider claiming any earthly damages from the rotten old scumbag. In The Daily Mail article I linked to, Camping's followers come up with all the post hoc rationalisations I took the piss out of in the above post, so perhaps I have a future as a prophet.

Some of the fallout from the whole lunatic business is really not so funny.

Tist Eyelets

2011-05-16T17:50:00.007+01:00

IELTS (International English Language Testing System) is a test of English popular with universities and colleges of further education for assessing the language level of overseas applicants for their courses. The name is pronounced by teachers as ‘the Eye-elts Test’ and by many of my Saudi students as ‘Tist Eyelets’. Anyone who sits the Tist Eyelets will be required to write a couple of essays. Themes beloved of those who set the writing paper are:

The effects of technology on society
The effects of television on society
The influence of Pelagianism on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints
The effects of globalisation on society
The effects of pollution on society

(I made one of these titles up. Answers on a postcard, please.)

The rationale informing the choice of these brain-curdling topics is obviously to make sure that even the dullest of numpties can cobble a few platitudes together. This is not to imply that every IELTS candidate is a dullard, of course. We are assessing language here, not originality and wit, which is why we never get any of either.

I marked a pile of Tist Eyelets essays this morning. Today’s title was a variation on the first theme above:

Nowadays [they invariably start with ‘nowadays’] the way people interact has changed because of technology. In what ways has technology affected the types of relationships people make?

The IELTS essay as a genre is characterised by a cobbling together of a bunch of threadbare received ideas. As any fule kno, the birth of the internet put paid to face-to-face interaction, and nobody communicates any more except by Skype and SMS, to the detriment of everyone’s social skills. Children spend their evening watching porn instead of doing their homework or playing football, so they get fat and groomed online by paedophiles. Their parents are oblivious to this because they are too busy ordering gadgetry from Amazon. Students churn this bilge out by the bucket load. Providing it is reasonably accurate and reasonably well organised, they’ll get a good grade. Nobody is going to take a red pen to their essay and write ‘evidence?’ ‘When were you last groomed by a kiddie-fiddler?’ or ‘your last face-to-face conversation was in class this very morning.’

In his introduction, Mohammed is at pains to define his terms:

‘There is no doubt that since the mankind (human beings) existed on this planet (Earth) there was an interaction between its components and there was a relationship between people (who compose the human race.)’

Go on, argue with that if you can. The aim (purpose) of the essay is then introduced (set out):

‘This essay will browse the effects of technology on the people’s interact.’

So, why is technology such a big issue? Hassan?

‘In the last 20 years, technologie has become widdly.’

This is true. Technology has become so widdly available that everyone is affected by it in widdly divergent ways, some beneficial, some malign. You can keep in touch with your family with MSN, Hussam tells us, but:

‘There are more lie and bad things people can make, such as sex.’

Did people have sex before the advent of the internet? Reading IELTS essays, you could be excused for thinking they probably didn’t.

‘Some people use technology to lie with other people, and sometimes can get other people in the wrong way.’

Technology for lying with other people…? Are we speaking here of the Fleshlight, or those ingenious vibrating contrivances you can insert into the male urethra to have, as it were, an inside-out wank? Unfortunately not. At first I interpreted this as meaning that people seduced one another by various electronic means, and then got them up the duff. Rereading the sentence I realised that Adnan had simply chosen the wrong preposition in that first clause. It should read ‘to lie to other people’ and cheat them. Pity.

'It can tear our families apart if one parent give more attention to his gadget than to his children'

Just put the plural 's' on gadget and it will all sound perfectly innocent.

The other essay on the paper requires candidates to describe information presented as a graph or bar chart. Since all these blokes are pilots, this is actually useful to them. We have been unable to persuade the RAF that putting them through the hoop of a discursive essay on top of this is pretty much a waste of their time and ours, but orders are orders, I suppose, and we plough on.

Soothe your Savage Breast

2011-05-09T19:41:00.034+01:00

For your listening pleasure – or horror – I have slung together a few of my current favourite pieces of music, and courtesy of Grooveshark embedded them in the side bar. Better that than music that strikes up as soon as you load the page; utterly naff, if you ask me. It’s quite a mixed bag to my ears, although to some it might, I allow, sound like little more than a compilation of minor-mode wailing and funereal ululation. I'll be adding and subtracting songs as the fancy takes me.

We kick off with two excerpts from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten. Do not listen to these if you are prone to music-on-the-brain: I swear they have been on an unending loop in my head, night and day, since I bought the CD around this time last year. The Prelude, with its shifting rhythms, undulating arpeggios and sense of swift forward propulsion, produces the exhilarating sensation of rafting on a sparkling river. It's mesmerising and extraordinarily persistent: impossible to get out of one's head. Akhnaten’s Hymn to The Aten I find equally hypnotic in its Handelian beauty, and the choral setting of Psalm 104 in Hebrew that ends it, suggesting an influence of Akhnaten's religious views on Jewish monotheism, is pure bliss. I sometimes think of Akhnaten in the Next World, still heaping his thousand offering-tables with grub for the Sun Disc, having pigs tortured, working the malnourished poor literally to death and listening with satisfaction to his words being sung 3,500 years after he wrote them. How chuffed the megalomaniac whack-job must be that he still has quite a public, despite Horemheb’s assiduous efforts to obliterate all trace of the froot-loop's reign after Akhnaten, to general relief, slipped off the perch. (Or was he pushed?)

Countertenor Paul Esswood as Akhnaten, already required to wear a foil emergency blanket, exasperatedly asks the director if a geezer in a stripy body-sock striking attitudes behind him really helps all that much. Stuttgart National Opera premier, 1984.

Next we have Dumisani Maraire with the Kronos Quartet, performing ‘Kutambarara’, meaning ‘spreading’. I have no idea what it’s about but it has a beautiful spacious sound and is wonderfully uplifting to sagging spirits. There's Mari Boine singing the angry Vilges Suola ('white thief') which gave me my nom de bloggeur and then Jan Garbarek, with Evening Land, which incorporates two more Boine songs. Tavener’s Song for Athene is next. They sang this Diana’s coffin was borne out of out of Westminster Abbey, but I didn’t watch that, so the pellucid beauty of the piece has not been spoiled for me, even though this performance is not the one I wanted to include. Some more Kronos Quartet to follow, first with Azerbaijani father and daughter duo Alim and Fargana Qasimov, then with a marvellous performance of the raga Mishra Bhairavi. The Qasimovs are responsible for most of the minor-mode wailing on offer here, so if such music gets on your wick, skip them, but it will be your loss, I reckon. The riveting intensity of this performance of the Azeri song Getme, Getme (Don't Leave) can be seen as well as heard here. I find Fargana in particular rich and warm as a good single malt. This is the highest complement I can pay anyone, although as a Muslima, she might not be especially flattered. Bhairavi is a morning raga, appropriate between six and ten o'clock, apparently. Listen to it outside those hours at your own risk.

Fargana Qasimova

Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass then give us Prashanti, which features a Sanskrit prayer sung by Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam. He does a lot of vocals for Indian films. Possibly as well he doesn’t take leading roles, as it would cost a fortune to put that name in lights.

S.P. Balasubrahmanyam

What next? Bit of Azam Ali singing first in tongues and then in Ladino, followed by a sensuous performance by Hesperion XXI of the Ladino song Las Estrellas en los Cielos, beautifully played on the sarod. These Ladino pieces once proved very popular with a group of Saudi students, who borrowed my CDs to burn onto their laptops. Your teacher is a wine-bibbing atheist pouf, I thought, and he’s seducing you with Jewish music. If you only knew.

My musically and academically talented nephew (smart-arse) sent me two CDs of the Black Ox Orkestar, who perform in the other Jewish language of Yiddish, which in place of the vowels and open syllables of Ladino has a gentle, clanking, consonantal sound. Not that you’d know from this one song, as it has no words. Still, it clanks gently enough. There are three songs from Belgian lovelies Lais, and I was dead chuffed to find a couple of songs from the Greek album Sappho, sung by Aleka Kanellidou. This little gem of a CD is a collection of poems by Sappho rendered into Modern Greek and exquisitely set to music by Spyros Vlassopoulos, and now available nowhere.

I can't find any information about Vlassopoulos, and no other album by Kanellidou has ever appealed to me in the least. If anyone has Sappho and can burn it for me, though, they will make a middle-aged grump reasonably happy for a short time.

Azam Ali

We have Mari Boine again, singing 'Give me a Break' in the voice of a little girl. This is a song for anyone who has been trivialised or demonised just for being what they are, and at an early stage in their lives taken that mistreatment to heart as if it were their own fault. In Boine's case, a Sámi. In my case, a gay teen in the seventies. Fill in your own blank.

Mun hálidivččen ealliman

Mun hálidivččen eallit

De váldet dáid muittuid

Ja vuodjudehket meara bodnái

Vai mun in dárbbaš guoddit šat

Daid maid in galgga guoddit

I'd like to have my I own life

I want to be alive

So take these memories

And carry them to the bottom of the sea

So I need no longer carry

What is not mine to carry.

Mari Boine

Then for a big finish, the beautiful Mamak Khadem from the USA via Iran with Restless Yearning. It's cheery stuff:

The pain of loneliness is mine

The sorrow of disgrace is mine

Passion and lovesickness, all mine!

Restless my sleep, beyond words my grief

Alone I lie at night

In the embrace of your apparition.

Mamak Khadem

*****

Akhnaten's Hymn to the Aten

Thou dost appear beautiful

On the horizon of heaven

Oh, living Aten

He who was the first to live

When thou hast risen on the Eastern Horizon

Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty

Thou art fair, great, dazzling,

High above every land

Thy rays encompass the land

To the very end of all thou hast made

All the beasts are satisfied with their pasture

Trees and plants are verdant

Birds fly from their nests, wings spread

Flocks skip with their feet

All that fly and alight

Live when thou hast arisen

How manifold is that which thou hast made

Thou sole God

There is no other like thee

Thou didst create the earth

According to thy will

Being alone, everything on earth

Which walks and flies on high

Thy rays nourish the fields

When thou dost rise

They live and thrive for thee

Thou makest the seasons to nourish

All thou hast made

The winter to cool

The heat that they may taste thee

There is no other that knows thee

Save thy son, Akhnaten

For thou hast made him skilled

In thy plans and thy might

Thou dost raise him up for thy son

Who comes forth from thyself

At the close of the Hymn, Akhnaten leaves the stage deserted, and the act ends with distant voices singing.

Text: Sung in Hebrew by Offstage Chorus (from Psalm 104, Hebrew Bible, Masoretic text)

Ma rab-bu ma-a-se-kha ha-shem

Ku-lam be-khokh-ma a-sita

Ma-le-a ha-a-rets kin-ya-ne-kha

O-te or ka-sal-ma

No-te sha-ma-yim ka-yi-ri-a

Ta-shet kho-shekh vi-hi lay-la

Bo tir-mis kol khay-to ya-ar

Oh Lord, how manifold are Thy works
In wisdom hast Thou made them all
The earth is full of Thy riches
Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment
Who stretchest out the Heavens like a curtain

Thou makest darkness and it is night
Wherin all the beasts of the forest do creep forth

A Day in the Life II

2011-05-06T19:49:00.006+01:00

‘We’ve addled us brass today’ people up in Yorkshire say (or used to) if they had had a particularly hard day at work. By this they mean ‘we have earned our money today’, with the implication that the day's wages have been especially well-deserved. Now, A’ve addled me brass today, me, and shall reward myself with a drink or three tonight after two ineffably dull evenings on the wagon.

Group C (of three) have occupied my Thursdays and Fridays since October, and they have made but scant progress. Attendance is patchy, and the excuses they come up with for lateness or absence wear ever thinner with frequent use. Never has a group of overseas students been so beset with visa problems, landlord problems, council tax problems, digestive problems, sick child problems, you-bloody-name-it problems. I have tried every approach known to pedagogy over the last seven months and got hardly anywhere, so I accept no blame for this: I’m sowing stony ground, leading hydrophobic horses to water, charged with educating people who have neither aptitude for, nor very great interest in, what I have to teach them. It happens sometimes.

After the Easter break only four students have returned, and today only three showed up. The course director decided to come in and upbraid them for this general lack of spunk, grit and house-spirit. She has at her disposal a headmistressy, Widdicomesque persona for use on such occasions, one which can reduce any susceptible adult to a tongue-tied ten-year old. I nearly said ‘any susceptible Arab’ then, but checked myself just in time not to appear racist. In my experience it is the case that Arab men, while they can be intolerably patronising to younger women, are easily brought to heel by women of maternal generation. Sarah’s little performance in W.I. / Oxfam Volunteer / Barbara Woodhouse mode left the two blokes and one woman feeling well and truly told off: a pity really, when you think about it, because it was aimed at the students who weren’t there, rather than those who had braved a sunny Spring morning to struggle in.

'You weren't here on Tuesday, Shaden, now why was that?'

'My husband was have headache.'

Sarah shook her head and tut-tutted over that one, but later in the morning Shaden's husband turned up to ask me about her progress, and I felt some sympathy for her. He was in smart casual and she, seated between us, a pair of doe eyes peering from a slit in a dome of heavy black cloth. While recommending ways to improve her English outside class, I deliberately broke eye-contact with him to address Shaden directly, otherwise we would have been discussing her literally over her head, as if assessing the prognosis of an anaesthetised patient.

'She's got lots of responsibilities,' the husband said. 'House, two kids, me.'

I bet his headaches occupy all Shaden's time while they last.

If you teach English, it is your job to get people communicating. Obviously, this is hard work with people who have very limited vocabulary. You can bottle out and just give them grammar exercises, which in many cases is what the students expect you to do, but these are of very limited value, like painting by numbers. So I spent all day feeding in vocabulary about travel and tourism, engaging the students in conversation that would encourage them to use that vocabulary, guiding them through a text on the topic, encouraging them to deduce the meaning of vocabulary items from the text and elicting their opinions and experiences, over and over. And over.

The text was about the difference between tourists and travellers, and I managed a fairly good start with some photos of flabby tourists in silly hats and loud aloha shirts, and some lean, studenty types with backpacks and boots, and elicited possible differences in destination and outlook between the two types. The text contained the term ‘tourist trap’. To encourage the students to deduce its meaning, I drew a mousetrap and a cartoon mouse on the whiteboard, elicited how the thing operated, then referred them back to the text and asked what they thought a tourist trap might be. I have no idea what images flashed through their minds – volcanic ash, tsunamis, terrorist outrages, a meteorite flattening Benidorm – but my mousetrap cartoon did not set up anything approaching the right vibrations, so I had to resort to asking why a cup of coffee is so much more expensive in Brighton than in Leicester. We got there in the end. Similar problems arose with ‘armchair traveller’, which they interpreted to mean someone who never travelled without his armchair. I began to wonder if they really imagined that the traveller type, whom we had already profiled, would have some sort of E-Z-Karry La-Z Boy recliner in his backpack… we are still processing everything bottom-up here, it seems, despite the combined efforts of five teachers over seven months to encourage a smidge of top-down to go with it.

‘Steve!’ I am summoned to the side of Mustafa, the marvellous boy, lustrous of hair, angelic Twink of Tripoli, he of the eye-lashes, rubious of lip, he who shakes his head in perplexity. ‘Ferry deffackelt, this teckest. Deffackelt, ferry.’

So I sat with him and talked through the task for a few minutes until he felt more confident. ‘Is that OK now?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Cheers, mate,’ he replied, most unexpectedly.

The text mentioned Thomas Cook:

Travel is an age-old phenomenon, but tourism is a relatively recent invention. Thomas Cook is often described as the first travel agent because he arranged the first ‘package tour’; a 19-kilometre trip for 500 people, in 1841.

‘What ‘Thomas’?’ Mustafa wanted to know, then, gesturing vaguely downwards, ‘this, for eat, no?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s stomach.’ Despite my best efforts, it’s obvious once again that top-down processing and logical deduction are not running the show here. Stomach Cook, the well-known tripe chain.

I mentioned that Cook had begun operations in Leicester and that a statue of him stands outside the railway station. Mustafa has seen this statue.

‘Yeah! Is died now, huh?’

Well spotted, son – he’d have to be over 170 years old if he were still with us. Still, Cook is indeed dead, and while Mustafa had obviously failed to spot the capital letters on the proper noun ‘Thomas Cook’, at least he didn’t suppose that Cook’s package tour left Leicester at just turned twenty to seven yesterday evening.

*****

Right! Khalas! (Arabic: ‘enough!’) I want a shower and then a sherry. There’s a nice Fino in the fridge and some green olives that are dying to accompany it. No more ELT for the next 48 hours.

A Non-Epithalamium for What's-His-Name and So-and-So

2011-04-27T16:31:00.006+01:00

Sky News trumpets the following assemblage of clichés: ‘With Prince William and Kate Middleton's big day just around the corner, New York City, like the rest of America, has Royal Wedding fever.’ Meanwhile according to the Guardian ‘America resists royal wedding fever’ this week, as opposed to last, when ‘the build-up in the United States to the royal wedding on 29 April has been every bit as frenzied and frenetic as it has in Britain. The details of Kate's sartorial choices have dominated fashion blogs and daytime TV shows. The wedding ceremony will be covered live on American television.’

You may be adjusting the netting and feathers your best hat and laying in pukable quantities of guacamole, tortilla chips and Kestrel, but me, I couldn’t care less. I can’t even retain the lass’s name or remember which prince she’s getting spliced to from one day to the next, let alone rejoice in their union. My telly will remain schtumm throughout Friday.

Many an overseas student has assumed that because I am English, I must therefore be an ardent football fan and a fanatical royalist. I am neither. I know little about football and care even less. I accept that some distinction is to be drawn between Manchester Rovers and Everton Thistle, Huddersfield Wanderers and Arsenal Wednesday, but I don’t know what it is or why anyone thinks it matters. Same sort of thing with the Royals. For my family, they were all southern nobs whose lives did not noticeably impinge on ours and for whom we felt little but benign indifference. ‘I don’t wish em any harm,’ my mum would say, ‘but I wun’t crost street to see any of em.’

Once at Cambridge I was eligible by virtue of being an exhibitioner* to be presented to the Duke of Edinburgh when he visited the college. (I had to google him just then to remember exactly what he is the Duke of.) I did not accept the invite, but sat instead with a few others in my college room, all of us observing the big event with proletarian scorn, not so much for Phil himself but for the antics of those college members invited or watching from the sidelines. Cambridge maintained at the time a hierarchy of pointless privileges concerning which rooms in college you might enter, what length and colour of academic gown you were entitled to wear and which of the college lawns you could walk on with / without gown of specified length and hue. On the day of the Royal Visit, the Chosen were convened on the Fellows’ Lawn, the only occasion for some of them when their feet might know of lawful tread thereon. The Elect wore lounge suits and gowns of authorised length and shade. Trestle tables were set out, covered with dazzling white cloths and bearing silver trays of glasses and bottles. College servants in black jackets and bow ties stood at either end of each one. I imagine some of the younger ones quietly smouldering with contempt for their lounge-suited coevals, and others, older, longer in the service, smiling at the rightness of the occasion, where each one present - from bow tie to lounge suit to gown up to crown - knew his place in the chain of command. Phil perambulated, hands clasped behind back, except when extended to be shaken. The non-invited ones of the college crowded at the concrete edge of the lawn with cameras, jostling and snapping. ‘That’s me in 1978, look, you can just see His Royal Highness’s nose poking out from my left ear. The lad whose hand he’s shaking lived next door to me.’

God bless and save us. I can’t be doing with any pretence that we are other than creatures of flesh with holes at each end, and desires and needs associated with these holes. This is not to deny differences or intelligence or virtue, or to suggest that we should not refine our pleasures and cultivate our responses, but this expectation that one should feel privileged to be invited to meet a fellow primate who has done nothing whatever to merit one’s respect strikes me as insane. We could have nice boozy parties without gowns and lounge suits and ties - desperately uncomfortable on a summer afternoon – and without being encouraged to imagine that shaking hands with your co-mammal Phil Windsor meant you had really rather got somewhere in life, surely the message of the entire event. I dunno. Maybe they all had a good time and it’s just me that’s a miserable sod.

Anyway, as I said, I will not be watching, cheering or weeping over the hitching of what’s-his-name and what’s-her-face, and I expect they’ll be spitting up in due course like so many others. I’m grateful for the day off now that I know we will be making up the lost hours and that the wedding is not going to cost me a day’s pay.

*****

*An exhibition was a prize awarded to candidates who reached a certain level in the now defunct Oxbridge entrance exam. It was, I think, forty quid a year for two years, to be spent on books, except I probably spent it on College Sherry and Abbott ale. My only academic achievement, modest as it was. (The exhibition, I mean.)

For Christ's Sake

2011-04-20T17:23:00.025+01:00

On the Depravity of Inverts

It has long been recognised by men of character that the invert, embittered by his lack both of progeny and the wherewithal to create any, bears nothing save the keenest of jealousy and hatred towards the sexually whole for their enjoyment of those blesséd and inseparable estates of matrimony, parenthood and normalcy that he has perversely elected to deny himself. Homosexuals, though called to celibacy and repentance, yet revel in their perversion, professing pride in their want of maturity, manliness and moral fibre. In their books and films and blogs, they are much given to portraying heterosexuals and Christians as clods and numpties, their purpose to sow thereby seeds of self-doubt in the bosom of the righteous and turn them over to sin, collagen cream and bench-presses. We applaud the masculine vigour of those who expose the sodomites’ wiles. Pastor Steven L Anderson was interviewed by a self-confessed invert, one so lost to shame as to deny to a preacher that he raped children; whereupon Pastor Anderson, girt about with righteousness, termed the man liar to his face and expressed hope for the interviewer's imminent demise from brain cancer. Thank God for devout Men of Pastor Anderson’s stripe, unafraid to stand up for hatred and the inviolacy of their Christian man-parts!

Let Christian men beware: experience teaches that there is no depth to which the invert will not stoop. Earlier this month, the Pink News, a ‘gay’ male organ, published an article extolling a new Mobile Telephone Application archly named ‘Kroozr’, which it envisaged would render less toilsome the sodomites’ task of propagating their perversion:

'A new iPhone app is threatening to knock Grindr off its perch as the number one app for gay men. Kroozr claims to use smartphone technology to determine whether men in the user’s vicinity are gay and can even filter out undesirables, such as those wearing sandals with socks. According to creator Peter Kelly, the app takes the guesswork out of gaydar, cuts down on valuable ‘sussing out’ time and weeds out weirdos.

'All users need to do is turn on their smartphone and wait for Kroozr to assess nearby men with its inbuilt Kinsey Scale,’ Mr Kelly said. “Kroozr is the new future of gay dating that will turn every trip to M&S, every queue for the cashpoint, every Boris bike trip into a hot party full of your type of guy. Just fill in the details of your ideal man, turn on the app and go about your business. When you get within eyeshot of a hot guy, you can check him out on Kroozr.”

This invitation to carnal impropriety reached the desk of Mr. Stephen Green of Christian Voice. ('I came to faith in God through seeing the ducks on a pond in People’s Park, Grimsby.') Mr. Green is a man of righteousness, of late unjustly pilloried for allegedly disciplining his wife and children with a ‘witch’s broom’. (Dare one ask of those who object to this, what should he have used?) From Mr. Green, the sodomites encounter deservèd check:

You really couldn’t make it up … Everything about the depravity, the sadness, the lack of normality, even of humanity, the promiscuity driven by the pathology of homosexuality is distilled into this story.

But now the Uranians have revealed that they had indeed 'made it up', and that the article in Pink News was published on the 1st of April, when it is traditional for those rendered gullible by their self-righteousness to be entertainingly duped by people with a sense of humour – and it is a fact that no spectacle moves the inverts to mirth more than that of a member of God’s elect skidding on the embrowned KY jelly of their ‘wit’. Notwithstanding, Mr. Green arose, wiped off the skid-marks, adjusted his attire and maintained his dignity as best he could:

Although I was initially taken in by Pink News's April Fool, that is only because it made so much sense to anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge of the 'gay scene' and of recent technological advances.

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, guide Thy servants, that they make not tits of themselves exceedingly before the unrighteous, at least no more than usual. Sufficient unto the day be the prudery, gullibility, nescience and conceit thereof, without gratuitous occasion for more, for Christ’s sake.

Amen

Un Ami de Famille

2011-04-12T21:19:00.009+01:00

Warning: Generalisations and subjective opinions ahead.

I’m in Greece this week, my sixth visit since January 2010. People ask if I am considering coming back to live here permanently. A fair chunk of my adult life so far was spent here, after all, so it’s very familiar. There is much that is stressful about living in Athens: the pollution, the oppressive summer heat, the omnipresent racket, the petty-minded and obstructive bureaucracy. There is also much to compensate: people value humour, friendship and family above work, and although Greeks rarely have anything appreciative to say about their countrymen, if you are part of someone’s in-group, they’ll die for you. Nearly everyone I know here is generous, quick-witted and funny, but then of course I don’t mix with the mean, the dull and the literal in England either. In my job at least, I was free for fifteen years of the dreadful treadmill that goes:

Thank-god-it’s-Friday / Shit-is-it-Monday-already? / Ah-well-that’s-Monday-out-the-way...

Here, there are lots of feasts and celebrations throughout the year for which special food is prepared, and in our teacher training sessions the table is always covered with little boxes of savoury pastries and moreish biscuits that the course participants bring in to share. The Saudi ladies in my classes in England sometimes bring cardamom-scented coffee and dates to pass round on Fridays, and it seems to me highly desirable and civilising to have special days with special foods and little interludes to bring people together to relax and talk. Pity I’m not Jewish – what an event to look forward to every Friday. The British are such miseries in this regard. ‘A yaw the tutor? Aw’ve said to tutors a mil-yon tawms students en’t supposed to eat in classrooms and use the graduate kitchen. Thy kin always go to the cafeteria.’

Yeah, but that en’t the syme, izzit, rye-leigh? The point is what you bring to hand round, the space you create and the people you invite to share it for a while. Fuck the cafeteria.

Ok, so am I considering returning to Hellas for good? No, I’m not, not any more.

Last Saturday I was lugging my suitcase and laptop down onto the tube at Kings Cross and stopped at a ticket barrier to ask the young Afro-Caribbean attendant the best way to Paddington. The ticket barrier kept opening and shutting as I dithered, clamping onto my suitcase, jacket and bag like some moronic, hungry mutt. ‘Come frue, darling,’ the girl said, ‘an’ I’ll show you where to go.’ I was struck by her kindness, and the phrase ‘come frue, darling’ kept sounding in my head all morning like a sweet little peal of bells. People in England are so patient in comparison with the Greeks, I thought. A helpful official in Greece is as rare as piggy-bank poop. He is at work, he is there under sufferance, and you must never forget that. He might be paid to assist you, but I don’t suggest you remind him. A group of French tourists on the bus to Sounion discovered they had boarded the wrong vehicle and the conductor threw a fit, as if he had been personally affronted. A Greek lady remonstrated with him, but was hollered at to mind her own business. The French party alighted at the next stop, with exaggerated bows and waves and mock-cheery cries of ‘merci, monsieur!’ while the conductor huffed and pshawed at them. British, that sort of thing, they’d have set up a committee.

Late one Friday night in March I climbed into a taxi at the Fix metro station in Athens and told the driver to take me to Palio Faliro. The driver let rip with a furious tirade that at first I took to be directed at me. Had I got into his taxi when a colleague was in the queue ahead of him? (Do not do this.) Had I slammed the door too hard? (This is never appreciated.) The diatribe continue as we bombed down the dual carriageway to the coast, but I had failed the number one listening task, ‘identify the topic’ and I had no idea what the bloke was on about. At one point he turned to me with the appeal ‘etsi den einai?’ ‘isn’t that so?’ and I realised I had once again forgotten that in Greece, you persuade your interlocutor of the sincerity of your feelings by acting them out as you relate an anecdote. Some political event had pissed my driver off, and he was hoping to have me share his indignation. He dropped me off by the blessèd, cool, sighing night-time sea and his farewell was affable. As I wandered up the road to the friend’s where I stay, I felt gloomy. Twenty five years after I first came to Greece, I had not managed to decode A WORD of the taxi man’s verbal avalanche. At dinner, the young man of the house shrugged and said the bloke probably had a strong regional accent, don’t worry about it. This may well have been true, but I felt excluded even so. I decided I could take some comfort in the fact that what little I did say during the driver's diatribe did not give him pause to reflect that he was haranguing a foreigner - but then I had to acknowledge that the bugger wasn't listening anyway.

I tend to think of the Greeks as one huge, argumentative family. This may be a simplistic outsider's view, but it seems to me that people here treat everyone, known or stranger, with a mixture of familiarity and contempt that in Britain we reserve only for close relatives. I'm English and it has taken me a long time to accept the fact, because for years I thought English was what I absolutely did not want to be. That was only because I have a strong tendency to fall for the old psychological trick of the grass being greener elsewhere. I sometimes felt in my fifteen years in Greece rather as a nun might feel at a rugby club dinner, and regretted my reluctance to open up to people. Now after a visit, I am increasingly happy to return to the muted tones of England. I don't know my neighbours' names there, hardly ever see any of them anyway, and that's OK with me. I find this polite indifference perfectly amenable, and quite restful after ten cheek-by-jowl days in Athens. I'm not part of this, really, and will always be just an ami de famille who likes to visit.

Promenade at Palio Faliro

I Have Fretated A Plog Boast

2011-04-06T17:26:00.008+01:00

It’s testing time again and I have before me a pile of reports written by Group C. I learned too late that the reports would be based on data provided by bar charts and pie diagrams – we had been practising evaluations of places and proposals up to the week before the announcement that these would not form any part of the test; bloody Jungle Telegraph again instead of hard information. So last week I crammed in some bar charts and graphs, and we spent the whole of last Friday cobbling together reports based on the damn things. Graphs, bar charts and the like are real weenie-shrinkers, if you ask me. Numbers and I do not get on, and I find their graphic representations about as interesting as bus timetables. Group C were (was?) pissed off and complained that they had had insufficient preparation for the test. In fact, they had twenty-four hours on reports of various kinds, and as university students, they ought to have been able to shift gears smoothly enough, but they are not Group C (of three) for no reason. I’ve been asked to mark generously…

Mabruka has a misspelled introduction and a misspelled conclusion separated by three inches of blank paper. Naturally, neither introduction nor conclusion relate to anything. Well, there’s nothing there to relate them to, obviously, so do I give her points for some kind of logic?

Karim has an introduction:

Sabjecat: International Students.

As requested I have fretated a report on facin for international student of the Academic English course.

An angelic kid called Mustafa, he of the Fayum portrait eyes and luscious lips, provides us with this indispensable snippet of information:

The most propontlon of nationalities is majortly is Saud, follweed by Chines big increase.

Actually, I do understand what these two are saying, mostly: ‘to fretate a report’ is the collocation ‘to prepare a report', half-remembered. What ‘facin’ is I do not know, and it isn’t what you think it is, either. Anyway, I can award points here for some, well, intelligible garbling. I am going to have to spend a bit of time puzzling over this contribution from Hamza, though:

In a. 1. there were a slightly decrease in some number of students such as pronunciation colur red, vocabulary conversation, academic writing about 2% not very slightly but conversation from 1 to 7 coulour red high increase and followed vocabulary and very slightly from 0 to 1 by colur red.

The ‘pai shart’, you may have gathered, is colour coded. It shows the numbers and nationalities of students following the university's 'Academic English Curse', in Hassan's words.

So there we are. This class is a sort of academic ‘excused boots’ group, meaning they are not expected to achieve output anywhere near output time and so may bumble along, flopping out this bott-rot indefinitely. I have them for another five weeks, after which I will probably have to admit defeat and request a transfer.

Smokers' Section

2011-04-04T23:00:00.009+01:00

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHY 'SMOKE' IS SUCH A POPULAR SEARCH WORD ALL OVER THE WORLD LATELY? THE IMAGE HERE GETS DOZENS OF HITS A DAY - WTF?

I drink a fair bit but I do not smoke. This is not because I object to smoking, merely that I have never derived any pleasure from the practice. I have tried. When at fifteen I gave the world my Mr Toad in A.A.Milne's 'Toad of Toad Hall', I was required to smoke a cigar, a big fat Havana job that my dad had nicked from his boss's office. (Which dates me - how many schools would allow a fifteen year old to smoke on stage these days? What-kind-of-message-would-that-be-sending- out, etc., etc.) I didn't get to light it until the dress rehearsal, mind, and I had been looking forward to this: it was fascinatingly phallic, and its woody, spicy aroma, unlit, was to me the essence of masculine privilege and contentment. I imagined that smoking it would be like filling the mouth with a caramel-coloured, scotch, sandal and vanilla scented cream. Phallus, cream , masculine contentment... I had high expectations.

Booze delights first the eye and then the nose, and imbibing alcohol creates the cerebrocortical equivalent of having one's balls fondled. Smoking, for me, was a big let-down. My first on-stage puff of vanilla cigar smoke was OK, but I did not realise that it would get stronger after it had been stubbed out, and in subsequent performances of 'Turd of Turd Hall' as we had inevitably dubbed the bloody piece, I had to ditch the thing as it induced coughing fits not sorting with Toad's dégagé air, but entirely to be expected from a fifteen year-old boy piddling about with a cigar for the first time.

So I don't smoke. I have tried since those teenage days, but without ever getting the point, which is a bloody good job when you consider how expensive it would be to smoke and drink at the rate I'd smoke and drink if I enjoyed both practices equally.

I'd like to ask smokers what the pleasure of smoking is. I do not question that there is one, but it is denied me. Can you set it out as I set out above the pleasure I get from drinking?

The Results are Out...

2011-03-26T08:43:00.007Z

.... and the first correct answer to be opened was Cat's, (see previous post) 'teachers understand the students' areas of weakness'. As the kids I taught in Kavala in 1985 always said to the one who got top marks in a test: 'κέρδισες ενα μανταλάκι', 'you've won a clothes peg'.

Yours to download and keep.

When I asked why they always exclaimed this to the victor, they explained that a clothes peg was the most trivial, useless object they could think of as a prize.

Most of you got it faster than I did, but you weren't chasing round a bloody classroom untangling a whole series of such attempts, were you, eh?

Report writing continues to occupy much of our classroom time. Yesterday we had this task:

You have a part-time job in a museum. The director has asked you to submit a report with recommendations for making the museum more appealing to children.

Sometimes you look at a task and think, yeah, well.... this requires imagination. Call me all the racist, stereotyping bastards you like, but imagination is not a quality I associate with Saudi Arabian students in an educational context - they seem to have been trained to deposit their creativity at the reception desk prior to entering the classroom, and it takes a while to persuade them to bring it in with them instead. So before getting stuck into the writing task, we spent the morning looking round a very kid-friendly local museum. Here, in place of what the students were expecting - a succession of echoing rooms, hoary odds and sods in glass cabinets, timidly susurating conversation - there were imaginatively themed sections with atmospheric lighting, buttons to press, images projected onto the walls, microscopes to squint down, stuff to handle, tasksheets to complete, humongous cockroaches in tanks, tarantulas, meteorites and a room full of tables heaped with crayons and pictures to colour in. About thirty ten year-olds in school uniform were running purposefully about, filling in questionnaires. I spent a fair while looking around the Ancient Egypt section, and suddenly realised I was standing alone in a dimly lit alcove in the presence of two open coffins and their dun-bandaged occupants. It creeped me out. Great stuff.

After lunch, we got down to the writing task. OK, I said, so how can we make museums more interesting for kids? Silence. What did you see this morning? How can we make it interesting for kids? For kids? Interesting? Yeah?

'Put sign,' Mohammed said. 'Put sign, 'No Touch'.'

Brilliant, Mo, that's the way to pack 'em in. I tried again.

'Teacher,' Zara suggested.

They see teachers every bloody day - for most kids, teachers fall decisively into the 'not interesting' category. So any advance on teachers and don't touch for spicing up museums?

Well, eventually we got started, but as usual it took some prompting, and as so often, I think they missed the point I had been at such pains to underline. I've decided that they probably did not connect what they saw in the museum with education, and so were wondering what the hell I was on about. The kids were milling about and crayoning, not sitting at desks and pretending to listen to a teacher, so where was the learning? I suspect now that some of them actually disapproved, and supposed that the idea was to propose ways of stopping all that laxity and license. In fact, I now see it was pretty dumb of me not to have anticipated that reaction. Ah, well. I liked the museum, and at least I got paid for a morning off.

An Invitation

2011-03-24T14:54:00.004Z

On my return to England in 2005 I saw for the first time how very attached overseas students have become to those little electronic dictionaries. Up to then, I had been used to trying to stop students rifling through matchbox-size 'Little Gem' dictionaries in the vain hope of finding the likes of 'flocculent' or 'indigitate' or 'prognathous', and then pronouncing the word non-existent. Nowadays you can get dictionaries with 24,000 headwords on a ghizmo no bigger than a quaint old pocket dictionary, and since it has a keypad and screen, it exerts the same fascination over users as do computers and mobile phones. Students place their e-dictionaries open in front of them on the desk as an earnest of their earnestness, and are forever stabbing at the bloody things. In my lessons they are now strengst verboten, unless I give express permission for their principled use.

Even though colleagues and I spend ages instructing students on the correct use of the dictionary, when they go home they revert to type and, lacking an English word they need for an essay, they key the Arabic equivalent into their electronic dictionary, come up with ten or so English words and go for the one at the head of the list. This might be the right word, or - fuck it - might not, but the teacher gets paid to alter it if necessary, so why sweat?

Group C, whose company I enjoy twice weekly, are practising writing reports. These are trifling 200 word affairs, but with an introduction, conclusion and three or so intervening sections with headings. The students are organising written language for the first time, and you would think I was requiring them to plait sawdust, such is the helplessness many of them evince when faced with the task. Today they had to imagine that they had been requested... ('it means asked politely, put the dictionary away, I'm explaining the word, dammit, and you aren't listening') ...been requested to write a report for a school in another country on the teaching and facilities in our centre. With the...um, help of his dictionary, Abdulgader came up with this pronouncement on the teaching:

'Teachers felt lacks student'

No matter how I tried to lasso the words together, I couldn't parse it. I don't feel I lack students (not until after Easter, anyway) nor do I possess any studentless thing made of felt: an untenanted yurt, perhaps. So I had to ask Abdulgader to paraphrase, and it turned out this was a valiant effort to convey his meaning. So I am going to leave it open for the interpretation of ye who read this. Post your suggestion below, and a winning entry will earn you the warm glow of knowing you were right.

Come Again?

2011-03-15T16:30:00.004Z

Language teachers spend a lot of time persuading accuracy-obsessed students that it is not only OK, but very important, to resort to paraphrase when the exact English word for their purpose is unknown or temporarily eluding them. Many students, used to being slapped down for the slightest inaccuracy, need some persuasion that a little circumlocution is perfectly acceptable. A friend from Cambridge has just e-mailed me a brave attempt:

Here is a nice paraphrase from one of my oriental ladies: unable to recall the word “vacuum-cleaner”, she said “She has a machine in her house for sucking dirty things.”

Do please contribute any more such valiant efforts you have heard.

*****

From my nephew, who's about to start a Ph.D. in Hard Sums & Joined-Up Writing , comes this report written by a group of Chinese scientists who have developed the copper nanotube, for which no doubt we should all be grateful. Scan the pdf and see by what unfortunate term they have elected to designate (repeatedly) their copper (Cu) nanotubes (NTs) . To be fair, in the name of scientific objectivity, a spade a spade and all, I think they are stuck with it.

Communication Breakdown III

2011-03-09T18:37:00.007Z

I'm in Athens until Saturday.

I went to see an old friend yesterday evening. Artemis is intensely verbal and intensely intense, with strong opinions on absolutely everything. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival, she had given me a précis of all the books she has on the go, some observations on Mahler’s 4th Symphony which was playing on Mezzo TV, and brought me up to date on her daughter in Holland and her ex-husband in Colombia. It was like being confined in a box-room with a hurricane, and the language circuits of my brain were blown to buggery in no time. Damn it, I'm always going to need thinking time in Greek. If only everyone here communicated exclusively by Yahoo messenger, I'd have no problems. However, that would kill the Greek conversational habit, which has rubbed off on me to a certain extent, of reliving in front of one’s interlocutor those events one is relating, one’s tone of voice, intensity of delivery and choice of language reflecting their hilarity, tragedy or capacity to infuriate. Righteous indignation is especially apt to inspire the full range of Hellenic gesture and invective. By the time Artemis had got onto the subject of immigrants, her delivery was at gale force and anyone within earshot (most of the residents of the building) who saw me enter her flat must have been thinking, Christ, she’s not half tearing strips off that poor sod. In fact, she was entertaining me most decorously to tea and excellent home-made cake and preserves.

*****

There has always been a shortage of public information in Greece: you have to ask. Street signs, house numbers, bus timetables, announcements – they are frequently absent, out of date or otherwise not to be trusted. The new train station at Corinth has electronic departure boards and signs asking us to listen out for station announcements, but none of the boards works, there are no anouncements ever, and the clocks are permanently at 12.00. Years ago I had to go to Koropi, a small town outside Athens. After a suspiciously long ride, the bus reached a terminus by the sea. Everybody got off except me.

‘Is this Koropi?’ I asked the driver, not holding out much hope.

‘Popopopopopo!’ he said, making a circular motion with an upright palm. This is Greek for ‘you what? You’re bloody miles out.’

‘It does say Koropi on the side of the bus,’ I pointed out.

‘So it does,’ he allowed, leaning out of the window. ‘But you should always ask.’

So yesterday at the Aegaleo metro station I asked a bloke if the train now standing went to Syntagma. He seemed offended by my ignorance.

‘Can’t you read? We’re here,’ he sneered, indicating a map I couldn’t see because I was wearing the wrong specs. ‘So ‘course it goes to Syntagma.’ Then ‘you’re not Greek are you?’

‘English.’

‘Are you sure?”

Of course I’m fucking sure, you stupid twat.

‘You’ve got the best metro system in the world in London and you can’t work out…’

By now I’d walked to the other end of the carriage to get away from the pillock. You should always ask, indeed.

*****

I was once asked by OUP Greece to do a seminar at a big private school in Athens. The teachers were convened in a large room when I arrived but it turned out that none of them had been informed about why they were there, or that I was coming, or who I was or what I had been invited to rabbit on about. The director of studies simply hadn’t thought it necessary to fill them in, so they had no questions prepared, no issues to discuss, no reason they could see to be present at all, and I was initially perceived as nothing more than a time-waster. The last question on our end of course questionnaires in the nineties was ‘is there anything that you think we should change?’ Course participants would frequently answer this with ‘general things’ and leave it at that. It’s not so much suspiciousness and costiveness with information as an inability to see why it is being solicited or, solicited, how it might be of use. A colleague from Athens is leaving this Friday for a near- eastern country where she is doing a seminar about… well, there’s the thing. She had compiled and sent to the convener of the group of teachers a very detailed questionnaire to ascertain the level of awareness, needs and interests of the participants:

‘What kind of training have participants had? Please tick: Introductory methodology, publishers' seminars, TKT, CELTA, ICELT, DELTA, Trinity Certificate, Trinity Diploma, MA Applied Linguistics, MA TEFL...’

It should be obvious to someone experienced in the business of teaching communication that some pretty detailed info is being requested here, but the convener replied simply, uselessly, ‘mixed.’ To the question as to what content the teachers would most like in the seminar, the answer was ‘something about English language teaching methodology.’ It’s as if a chef had been invited to present ‘something to do with cooking.’

Why? Why this infuriating vagueness? Why did my Saudi and Libyan MA in TEFL teachers present me with lesson plans so non-committal and vague that they were completely opaque as to what the teacher was proposing to teach, and how or why? I suspect that it’s because people in this part of the world (Greece, Turkey, Near East and Middle East) simultaneously revere and ignore teachers. They are seen as, well, august windbags, people with degrees and doctorates in whose presence one is lucky to have dozed, whose signature on a certificate one may show off to one’s employers, and it really doesn’t matter a fart what they actually said. To be fair, many a teacher round these parts entirely lacks a sense of audience - give him (especially if it's a him) a platform, and he won't know when to stop pontificating. Those of us who do not lecture at people, but encourage participation and exchange, get so dispirited by students who expect to creep into the back row and snooze for an hour or so. It’s amazing how seminar participants here can be most deeply impressed by those seminar leaders whose lectures go right over their heads.

Works both ways, though. If you want to get a teaching contract with a company out here, interlard your proposal with abstruse terminology, e-mail your inscrutable attachment to the managing director and wait for the offer. A Greek man can’t admit to anybody that he hasn’t got a bloody clue what you are on about, and he’ll have to conclude that you must be quite the pointy-headed brainiac, so you’re in.

Piss-Head Primates

2011-03-06T17:30:00.005Z

Just found this whilst piddling about on You Tube. Interesting that the booziest monkeys are also the most popular among their peers, a fact that rather reminds me of Fitzwilliam College Cambridge in my first year there, 1978. I am lying on a big bed at a friend's place in Athens with a purring fat cat draped over my feet and a glass of scotch to hand, feeling torch-bearing runners illuminating my inner passages and alleyways with whisky's smoky firelight. The barren touched in this holy chase / shake off their sterile curse, and man, that feels better. I have the toper's genes, no getting away from it. These are monkeys after my own heart, except that they don't write purple prose when tipsy.

'...and Found Wanting.'

2011-02-27T18:51:00.004Z

Testing again last week. Understandably, our Libyan students had more on their minds than piddling end-of-course progress tests, and I was generous with the marks for some, who look wrung out with anxiety about relatives they are unable to contact. No sympathy, though, for Faisal from Saudi Arabia, this term’s wotten cheat, chiz chiz. His teacher observed him glance some thirty-eight times at his neighbour’s paper during the listening test. Since she could not get up and stop him without disturbing the other students, she simply ascertained when marking that Faisal had exactly the same answers and errors as Nuri, and awarded him a zero. Faisal had a fit.

‘I am no shit!’ he said, passionately.

‘Yes, you did. I saw you. And you have all the same answers and mistakes as Nuri,’ she said. Q.E.D.

‘Why you no take away my beiper?’ he wanted to know, implying that the teacher had decided to accuse him of shitting after the event, merely because as an addled, fickle, illogical female, driven by emotion, she felt like it. Since strict protocol had not been observed, he could not be blamed.

‘Wouldn’t have made any difference. You’d still have got a zero.’

‘What I will say to course director?’

‘She knows already.’

‘What I will say to my Embassy???’

You should have bloody thought of that, you dozy pillock, is the answer to that one. Chances are they won’t even notice the zero. You do get full marks, though, for the sheer brass neck of implying that your cheating was the teacher’s fault.

*****

The oral test required students to discuss a topic together, with the examiner kibitzing. I always have to force myself to listen during oral exams, as otherwise my mind wanders. On Thursday I was shaken from reverie when I heard Hussam say:

‘Enternet has make the world felch.’

Dear me. Have we got onto the malign consequences of internet porn whilst I was daydreaming?

‘Yes, yes,’ said Hamid. ‘It’s make of the world global felch.’

OK, right, global village. Go back to sleep.

Tales from the Crypt

2011-02-23T18:45:00.012Z

Our small university department, the little CHEF (Centre for Hammering English into Foreigners) has recently relocated. We now occupy two floors of a tastefully renovated Victorian building, and among appointments hitherto unavailable to us are visualisers and smartboards in every classroom, a large staffroom with lots of computers, our own kitchen, and a poltergeist.

The poltergeist’s first and - as far as I know, only - wholly unexplained action so far has been to bend a key belonging to a member of the full-time staff. He had left it on a desk in the full-timers’ office, a key as other keys are, and returned to find it buckled and useless. Visitors who dropped by to admire the new premises were told about the key and told us in their turn that the building was once a boys’ grammar school, and that it had an underground chapel in which the boys prayed for Old Boys who were fighting in World War One. This snippet has become conflated with the Tale of the Key as if it somehow provided an explanation; the Spirits of the Crypt are disturbed by workmen hammering, drilling and painting, and they bend our keys in protest. So now any mildly puzzling event may be explained by blaming it on the unquiet dead - books that are not where you last put them, pens shifted from drawer A to drawer B, that sort of thing, which of course went unremarked upon before we knew we were perched above a crypt. The presence of discarnate entities has even been adduced to account for the noticeable difference in temperature between the full-timers’ office and the much warmer adjacent rooms. An alternative explanation for this is that Room 101 is on a corner, has therefore two outside walls, and it’s February. There is no doubt some equally logical, spoil-sport explanation for the bent key.

You have no idea how much I want there to be a bloody poltergeist, though: a real, disgruntled Old Boy from the Crypt who might be persuaded that he's actually dead and is free to leave for a better place than Leicester: Matlock springs to mind. I’ve been swapping ghost stories with other teachers over the last few days, all the funny and weird stuff that happens to friends and to friends of friends (I have a lot of this stuff stored up) but rarely to the speaker himself or herself. Even my own experience was in early childhood and cannot strictly speaking count as first hand. It’s only a few years ago that the gods and the spirit world, which I had seen as a matrix from which we all emerge, turned entirely to dust on me, desiccated by a sudden and belated access of rationalism which has left me a universe of clanking gears and rusty cogs, all life running down inexorably to illness, frailty, dependence, dementia and extinction. All you know, all you love, every refinement of your responses over a lifetime, pffffft, gone some day soon, as it had never been.

Jesus, how did we get from key-bending goblins to cheery thoughts like that one? Well, on the train the other evening I was thinking about Father Karras in ‘The Exorcist’, the priest who no longer believes, and feels himself a fraud for maintaining the public pretense that he does. He misses belief, but the cold water of reason has doused the flame, an ignis fatuus after all. I thought how I often feel fraudulent when I say I am an atheist, because in doing so I'm denying a private longing for higher planes interpenetrating this earthly one, and for signs that we are not just bodies, but immortals exploring the plane of matter*. I really used to believe this stuff, for Christ's sake. Towards the end of the novel, Karras and Father Merrin, the exorcist of the title, change into their exorcise gear and get cracking on evicting the Assyrian Demon of the Winds from the body of twelve-year old Regan. Early in the proceedings, the cynical Karras watches gobsmacked as Regan’s bed begins to levitate, in defiance of known laws governing beds:

He stared at it incredulously. Four inches. Half a foot. A foot. The the back legs began to come up [ ....] The bed drifted upward another foot, and then hovered bobbing and listing gently as if it were floating on a stagnant lake.
'Father Karras?'
Karras turned. The exorcist was eyeing him serenely, and now motioned his head towards the copy of the Ritual in Karras' hands. 'The response, please, Damien.' [...]
' ''Let the enemy have no power over her.' '' Merrin repeated gently.
Hastily Karras glanced back at the text and with a pounding heart breathed out the response: '' 'And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.' ''
'' ' Lord, hear my prayer,' '' continued Merrin.
'' 'The Lord be with you. ' ''
'' 'And with your spirit. ' ''
Merrin embarked upon a lengthy prayer and Karras again returned his gaze to the bed, to his hopes of his God and the supernatural hovering low in the empy air. An elation thrilled up through his being. It's there! There it is! Right in front of me! There!

See? That's what I want, evidence I don't have to conclude that the material is all there is. I see no grounds for believing otherwise, though, and it makes me gloomy as all get out.

To be resigned to death and extinction is not always a consolation even to the Stoic – although it does have its satisfactions. Among these…one can include the reasonable certainty that mere wish-thinking did not help to stack one’s intellectual deck.

Ah, well, I suppose so. But still, I really do want to go into work some morning and witness teacups travelling the air, or board markers borne aloft by impalpable hands, and most especially Ridah’s smirk of certainty about everything wiped off his face by an unseen fist. This last would certainly suggest purpose and intelligence on the part of the smiter and go some way to demonstrating the existence of discarnates to us still in our envelope of meat.

Me arriving at a frontistirio to do a TP

* But if you are a soul or a spirit, why would you need a physical body, any more than a fish needs a wet suit or a snorkel?

*****

Blatty, W.P., (1971) The Exorcist, New York, Harper and Row

Hitchens C., (2003) The Future of an Illusion. In C. Hitchens, Love Poverty and War, London, Atlantic Books.

Eats

2011-02-20T22:01:00.005Z

It’s a while since I posted a recipe, so since nothing much is happening around these parts, I thought I’d offer a couple of dishes I like. I’m drawn to the sort of one-pot meal you assemble, chuck into the oven and forget about, then get praised to the skies for having pulled off, and these two just about satisfy the criteria. However, I wouldn’t advise forgetting about either of them for longer than the length of time it takes you (or me) to down, shall we say, three generous gin and tonics. Come to think of it, the first one doesn’t require the oven at all, but you can make it well in advance and thus eat it in tranquillity.

First up, then, is the glorious djej matisha meshla, a Moroccan dish of chicken in a tomato and honey sauce. Last time I cooked this was for a friend in Kalamata, and I screwed up by buying supermarket chicken breast in order to avoid having to bone and skin the chicken myself. Well, it would have been wearisome on a very hot day, what with chopping onions, boiling tomatoes and fighting off a very persistent cat. The breasts were tough and fibrous, and we ended up eating what felt like an aromatically-sauced pullover. (Sorry, Lorna.) I have triumphed on other occasions, though. For a friend’s birthday do at a bar in Athens, the bar owner and I had a nice evening doing the catering. Mersi and I cooked djej matisha meshla for the invited guests and the bar regulars. It was amusing to see that Mersi and her husband each had glasses of scotch hidden from each other in cupboards around their flat above the bar. And it was nice, when we served the assembled multitudes, to see Greeks ('salt and honey in the same dish!?!? ') appreciating a savoury stew generously flavoured with honey, because in so doing they were eating their words along with the chicken.

OK then, select a well brought-up chicken and have the butcher skin and chop it into chunks for you. Take a pile of fat tomatoes likewise skinned and chopped. Remove the seeds if you can be arsed, although personally I can’t. Grate a large onion and chop some garlic. Tip the tomatoes, onion and garlic into a big saucepan along with some salt, a stick of cinnamon and a teaspoon or so of powdered ginger. Bring this to the boil, then add your chicken and cook until the flesh is easily pulled from the bones. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside to cool. Whack up the heat under the tomatoes, pour in a very generous dollop of fragrant honey, and boil the mixture vigorously until you obtain a velvety, slightly caramelised cinnamon-fragrant sauce. This is not the time to get stuck into the Mother’s Ruin – you must constantly stir the sauce lest it burn, which it will readily do. It will also bubble and splash like a mudpot, so take care. Once you are satisfied with the sauce, bandage your scalded arms, remove the chicken flesh from the bones and return it to the sauce. Your hob and surrounds will look as if you have machine-gunned an intruder in their vicinity, so wipe them down, and then you will thoroughly have deserved your first G&T. I usually serve djej matisha meshla with basmati rice, flavoured with orange and lemon juice, turmeric, thyme, bay leaves, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Wonderful.

Next is a Spanish dish which I think I found in a Nigel Slater book. It’s utterly delicious, dead easy, and people love you for it - exactly my kind of thing. Slice a fat onion, some waxy potatoes and a chorizo. In a vessel suitable for both hob and oven, fry your onion, add your sausage, then your potatoes. Throw in a generous glassful of dry sherry, a couple of bay leaves, salt and enough boiling water to barely cover your spuds. Transfer the uncovered pot to the pre-heated oven and cook until the potatoes are done, forty minutes or so. Adorn with chopped parsley or coriander. Delightful with a lettuce salad, lacy bread and a vat of red wine.

I’m afraid I'm terribly vague about quantities and oven temperatures because I tend to ignore figures, judging portions by eye and reckoning that most things are OK in the oven at 200 or so if you keep an eye on them. Anything requiring more precision, dividing between ramekins, straining through muslin etc., I leave to others.

Please Utilise Alternative Facility

2011-02-10T17:49:00.013Z

Notice on loo door at Leicester station this afternoon:

This toilet is not at present in use.

Please use an alternative cubicle.

Thank You

Fifteen words there, when three would've done:

Not in Use

Why do they have to spell it all out so? We would not expect to be told:

This toilet is not at present in use.

Please shit on the floor.

We don't throw a fit and hammer on the locked up lock-up, screaming 'but I wanted to use this one!' We accept that instead of kicking down the door, we really ought to use the adjacent khazi.

I wouldn't be surprised if drafting the notice was entrusted to this announcer, in the belief that he has a way with words. It's him all over.

Similar over-explicit instructions that take their target audience for cretins appear all over the university. A wash basin in the loo is out of order, so we are instructed to use an 'alternative' one, as though we might otherwise stand there with poopy hands, paralysed with indecision. Notices next to the lifts asks us to cede our places to the disabled, pregnant and elderly, rather than elbow such Untermenschen out of the way, as we normally would. We are reassured that 'stairs nearby provide access to upper floors', so that's a relief; ropes and hard hats will not be necessary. All we need now is clarification from management of the hopelessly subjective 'nearby', which will be interpreted differently by the young and fit, those with a leg in plaster, the pregnant and the elderly. Until this is forthcoming, the growing crowds of irresolute students and staff will continue to pose a threat to health and safety on every landing.

Directly above the urinals (these are in the gents, not the lifts, thought I had better make that clear to less agile minds) is a laminated notice, the footer of which is just at my eye-level, and whilst I am 'utilising this facility' the words 'The Power is in Your Hands' confront me.

'You better fuckin' believe it!' I snigger - then I realise it's one of those dumb bird-flu posters telling you how to sneeze.

*****

By the way, these instructions on considerate sneezing must be by-passing quite a few of our international students. Muslims do not use the urinals - modesty requires that they use the cubicles. Chinese boys, on the other hand, rarely pee alone, and they don't merely undo their zips, they all but untruss, undoing belt, button and fly and flopping out the bit and tackle over their Calvins for the others to appraise. Official announcements on approved sternutatory protocol therefore go unnoticed - deservedly, in the face of such competition. I have not yet observed the micturational foibles of other nations, but shall be doing so, and will publish my findings in due course.

An Apport

2011-02-05T11:09:00.006Z

They say you spend something like twenty-five years of your life sleeping, three months shaving, and a month or so queueing at Waitrose. I often wonder how many weeks I will have spent searching for my glasses by the time I set my burden down. Bashing angrily about this tiny flat like a wasp in a matchbox as I try to locate the damn things certainly occupies a fair chunk of each day. Yesterday morning, five minutes before it was time to leave the house, I realised my distance pair were nowhere in evidence and began the usual hunt, getting increasingly ratty as I failed to turn them up. Eventually I had to go to work with my readers on. It was like spending the day under water.

On getting home in the evening I searched anew in obvious places such as the windowsill, the kitchen worktop and on and under the coffee tables, then in silly places like behind the speakers, in the rubbish drawer among the board markers, junk mail, pen tops, candle stubs and loose batteries, then in the bloody fridge. I stripped the bed and shook out the stacks of cushions and pillows that are piled on it. Zilch. This morning I repeated the entire procedure from sills to upholstery and then gave up, deciding they must have fallen down a wormhole to another universe where an alternative Me was now able to see clearly the large object on the roof of the house opposite, which I knew could not be a vulture but which so very closely resembled one. I set my readers on the windowsill, got out the vac and hoovered the living room. On finishing, I turned to put my specs on again and sod me if both pairs were not now side by side on the sill like the two little dicky-birds sat upon a wall.

I stared at them for a moment, gobsmacked. I know the distance pair was not there when I started hoovering, and I also know that they must have been, or how else...? On the phone my mother, a dogged believer in apports and the continued concern of deceased relatives for our well-being in this sublunary world, suggested that one or the other of my grandmas had dropped by to help, to which my reply was brief and blunt. The true explanation will be dull and prosaic but I cannot supply it, given that the windowsill is always the first place I look and I had looked several times in the past twenty-four hours.

There is no vulture on the roof opposite either, unfortunately. It was just a metal flue cowl in the dawn light, looking bigger and fuzzier about the edges than it really is.

*****

I'll accept the apport theory if the fifty euro note I've just discovered is gone from my jacket pocket is restored to me.

Now You're Just Being Silly

2011-01-29T21:29:00.003Z

Over at The Atheist Experience I found the above thoughtfully titled book that details one woman's spiritual journey from Judaism to the Lord Jesus, who obviously lit her fire. I was reminded of the equally well-chosen title Penetrating Wagner's Ring, first brought to my attention twenty five years ago by a friend who was having it away with a music student. A reviewer on Amazon offers this appreciation:

As implied by the title, this collection probes deeply into Wagner's vast Ring piece. Accusations of anti-semitism make Wagner's Ring a sensitive area today, but it continues to offer pleasure to many.

(Look, I've been travelling all day and I'm knackered. )

Tonada de la Luna Llena

2011-01-25T20:06:00.009Z

Caetano Veloso arranges and performs this song beautifully. Video is a bit naff, but you needn't watch it if you are dancing. My translation is pretty clunky as well, but I'm no poet, so anyone who can do better is welcome to suggest amendments.

Yo vide una garza mora dándole combate al río
Así es como se enamora tu corazón con el mío
Yo vide una garza mora dándole combate al río
Así es como se enamora, así es como se enamora
Tu corazón con el mío, tu corazón con el mío

Luna, luna, luna llena menguante
Luna, luna, luna llena menguante

Anda, muchacho, a la casa y me traes la carabina
Pa' matar a este gavilán que no me deja gallina.

La luna me está mirando, yo no sé lo que me ve
Yo tengo la ropa limpia, ayer tarde la lavé
La luna me está mirando, yo no sé lo que me ve
Yo tengo la ropa limpia, yo tengo la ropa limpia
Ayer tarde la lavé, ayer tarde la lavé

Luna, luna, luna llena menguante
Luna, luna, luna llena menguante

¡Póngate!

***

I saw a black heron struggling against the river,
That's the way your your heart came to love mine.

Full moon, full moon waning...

Go home, boy, and fetch me the rifle,
To kill that hawk that won't leave me a single hen.

The moon is looking at me,
I don't know what she thinks,
My clothes are clean,
I washed them last night.

Full moon, full moon waning,

Set!

Teaching Adults?

2011-01-21T20:12:00.002Z

I’m going to Athens again tomorrow. On Sunday morning I am doing a five-hour session on Teaching Adults with a group of teachers who are more used to teaching kiddie-winks and would probably be a bit chary of taking on adult classes. ‘You could tell them about your approach!’ said my friend who is in charge of the show. She thought she was being helpful.

Right.

Yesterday and today, my brief was to introduce the idea of writing a ‘for and against’ type essay to a bunch of people who were not entirely sure what an essay is, let alone refinements on the genre such as ‘for and against’, ‘problem - solution’ and ‘opinion’. It might strike you as worrying that graduate students should be unable to tell you what an essay is, but I’ve learned to take this in my stride. There was even dispute about the number of paragraphs in the model essay I gave them for analysis;

‘One!’ (A one-paragraph essay?)

‘Two!’ (Oh, you’re so close but I’m afraid I can’t give it to you – any advance on two?)

‘Three? Four?’

Layout, then, is the least of their problems with writing. This is par for the course, I reason with myself. I can’t write essays in Arabic, and I’m sure there would be conventions in Arabic writing that might go over my head until someone drew them to my attention. What I would not do, given my ignorance, is devote only half my attention to the person charged with instructing me in essay writing. Bringing the class back together after pair-work discussion always requires three or four calls for their attention, and today I finally lost my rag. Just as silence had fallen and I began my next set of instructions, someone struck up another conversation and with my Domestos glare (Kills-All-Known-Bimbos-Dead) I snapped:

‘Do not talk across me when I am giving instructions!’

Didn't understand the words, all probability, these chappies, respond to tone of voice, though. Then I felt a bit of a heel and had to overdo the smilingly helpful bit until lunchtime.

After lunch I decided to work on a common Arab bronunciation broblem, that of distinguishing /b/ and /p/. Just as I was getting my trousers off on the subject, I heard Alexandros speaking Greek at normal Greek conversational volume (i.e., loud) into his mobile phone.

‘NOT-IN-THE-LESSON!’ I said, in capital letters and hyphens. ‘Turn it off. Now!’

I mean WTF? Like, WTFbloodyFF? I swear it wouldn’t surprise me if one day he got up and took a leak in the corner of the room.

At the end of the session I told them I would be away next week, and that ‘Y’ would be covering for me. Mohamed asked if they might have teacher X in place of teacher Y, because teacher Y ‘don’t tell us no talk.’

‘You are all adults!’ I said. ‘He doesn’t expect to tell you that!’

‘No, today, you speak us, no talking, no talk in mobile phone. Very strict, very good. Y very nice teacher but no enough strict.’

Right, like I said, on Sunday I’m doing a session on teaching adults. I’ve got all this stuff to impart about how adults can be self-starting and self-directing, but if any of the Athens teachers is reading this, remember, it’s bullshit. Just slap ‘em about a bit and show ‘em who’s boss. They’ll lap it up.