Ulysses

I haven't been keeping very good track of the books I've been reading, but thought it worth recording (for the sake of my own bad memory) that I finished Ulysses about a month ago. I had tried it once before, as required reading, got about 150 pages into it, and thought that since I could understand absolutely nothing, there was no difference between reading it and not reading it. So I gave up. This time, I kept feeling some kind of dismay at my former reading self who couldn't understand: it gets hazy, but never so much that you actually lose the general flow of what's happening, if you're paying attention. Perhaps I didn't really know how to pay attention before -- or, which seems more likely, couldn't differentiate between when I was paying attention and when I wasn't. In a sense, it's like poetry that way -- which is fitting because, although Ulysses is not written in verse, its source book, The Odyssey, is a poem. If you don't focus on the individual words, it turns into a blur around you. As an aside, this is why I've become such a convert of memorizing poetry -- when I start memorizing, I feel like I'm only then beginning to properly read.
I won't bother with any exposition on Ulysses for now, it's been done enough by people who actually know what they're talking about. I will say: somewhere in the middle I felt like I was kind of reading just to get to the end, but around the second to last chapter I started to get a feeling from it, like there was a general wavy, whelming ambiance that I was finally getting. It had to build up sufficiently before I started to feel it, but then I felt it backwards through the book, redeeming the middle parts. Then it feels big and real, and worthwhile.

To her let us garlands bring

Tonight was music night in Balliol's Middle Common Room, which is Oxford's way of saying graduate students' lounge (though the Room can also be metaphorical, at which point it's the student union, sorta). Oxford only likes to say things in ways that are confusing to anyone unindoctrinated. 
I arrived a few minutes late and could hear a loud tenor voice from outside the door. So as not to do that thing where you make a lot of noise and walk right into the stage (there are two doors to the MCR and I wasn't sure where they'd set up), I waited till the end of the song, and snuck in on the clapping. All the seats were taken. As I took up a post standing near the side wall, a guy (who I know but not well) stood up and started reciting, "Who is Silvia, what is she?". It was slightly disorienting. Several people turned to look at me, knowing exactly where I was since I had just walked in late. Anyhow, I suppose it was good timing, would have been sad to miss the poem about me. Then the singing struck up again, a German song to the translated words of the Shakespeare poem.

Proust's letters

Despite a cold and general lousy feeling, I went out into the dark, dark 5:15 last Wednesday to walk a half hour to Wolfson College in order to hear Michael Wood speak on Proust's letters to his mother. It was the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson. I was pretty neutral on the introduction until after it had passed when I figured out that it must have been Hermione Lee giving it. Then I was really excited -- I've read her wonderful biography of Virginia Woolf and a book on doing biography that I wrote about somewhere in this blog. The talk itself was about ways of reading, looking at letters in general and Proust's letters more specifically. There wasn't too much on Proust, at least there wasn't much I didn't know already, though some of it was funny: Proust's mum used to send him a questionnaire to fill in about how many hours he'd slept, what time he'd gotten up, whether he'd had headaches the day before, etc. Wood's thesis was that there are three modes of reading: just reading (little interpretation, straight absorption of face-value textual meaning), letting the reading sink in (the kind of interpretation that we do when for instance we have an unreliable narrator) and overreading -- where only a considerable stretch beyond our ordinary idiom will allow us to feel we're getting what is written. Psychoanalysis does a lot of this. Maybe (this isn't what Wood said, I'm interpreting) it's that in this overreading what we're doing is bringing separate knowledge of our own (beyond the very general) to interpret what is going on -- that's what psychoanalysis does, it uses its own theories to bring extra meaning to a dream or a story, fleshing it out beyond what a reader could extrapolate from the text itself.
Wood says that Barthes has a similar theory, of three levels of seeing -- communication (straight face-value understanding of the image), signification (bringing in understanding of whatever symbolism is at hand), and the third he calls signifying, though only out of alack of a better term. It's when you feel that there's some meaning beyond the first two, and it's sort of intangible. Maybe my eye is just wandering or maybe there really is something there. I am put in mind of Rembrandt, whose portraits always look curious and alive, and apparently it's because the eyes are always pointing in slightly different directions, giving our brains an impression of movement (I guess there's cognitive dissonance in which the brain assumes movement rather than dealing with the unlikeliness of eyes looking two places at once [speaking of which, it would be cool if someone could train themselves to use their eyes separately -- but I guess there's reasons why that's not possible, but the fact that some people can cross their eyes makes me feel like there's some willful control over eye coordination]).
After the talk there was a reception. I was alone, which made it more awkward to stay, but I went in and had a glass of champagne and ate a few hors d'oeuvres before taking off. After the man next to me and I both waived off a waiter carrying a tray of smoked salmon on circles of brown bread, the man said to me, "It helps when you like the canapes." Unfortunately, I didn't engage him in conversation. Instead I walked home.
But the next day, my friend Jane told me that she's just been elected (if that's the word) to be a fellow at Wolfson, and she invited me to a guest-night dinner there next week. So maybe I'll meet Hermione Lee (turns out she's the president of the college). But I would probably be too shy to go up and talk to her even if she was at the dinner.

A Thursday: Mary Warnock; jurisprudence discussion group; turf tavern

On Thursday, Balliol's weekly lunch seminar, called Doug's lunches for Dean Doug Dupree who nominally hosts, though two second-year undergrads organize it, brought in Baroness Mary Warnock, philosopher and member of the House of Lords (the Baroness is non-hereditary, it's for achievements). I first heard of her two weeks ago when I went to a panel discussion on moral issues surrounding human embryos in research. Her name was used a lot because of a committee she chaired in the early 1980s which set government policy on embryo use for in-vitro fertilization.

I fairly regularly go to these talks as part of my generalized quest for free sandwiches. Usually they are held in Doug's fairly tiny sitting room, which is quite hilarious: it consists of a couch, a chaise longue, three sofa chairs and one or two straight-backed chairs brought in from the other room, a coffee table and a side table with sandwiches. In the first week, they brought in Julian Barbour, a physicist who's just written a book called The End of Time, in which he argues that time does not exist, based on some trying to make sense of the numbers, as physicists do. The room was packed, with people fitting into tiny little corners on the floor right up to the tips of the man's shoes. I had arrived five minutes early and so had one of the comfy sofa chairs. Usually, the talks attract undergrads; even Barbour had maybe one or two other graduate students.

But Mary Warnock's talk was held in the Old Common Room. About 55 students showed up, a little less than half of them grad students. The OCR also doesn't have a lot of tables, so people again sat on the floor, but at least 20 people would have had to leave if it had been held in Doug's rooms.

She's 87 years old and very small with a cap of wispy white hair, and totally charming. She spoke to us about existentialism and its cultural role in 1960s France, and about reading Sartre on a windy beach after having been asked to include him in a book on moral philosophy she was commissioned to write. She then explained that she completely disagrees with the existentialist position that all that matters is authenticity, and stated her view that without morality, society would disintegrate. Her interest is in disentangling morality from religion (which aren't entangled in the first place as far as I'm concerned but I guess for a great many people they are, and people get stressed out about the impossibility of maintaining moral fabric if religion is left behind), and she argued that rather than coming from religion, morality in fact comes first, and informs later religious tenets. The students gave her a pretty hard time, some of them apparently being quite up on Sartre, and others seemingly religious. I was a little worried, which is silly, that they were giving her an old time, because she is fantastically elderly and couldn't really hear some of the questions, and didn't have that quickness that I'm sure she had twenty years ago. Anyhow, she didn't necessarily fully answer all the questions as vociferously as someone else might have, but she didn't duck them either, responding instead with, yes, that's a difficult question right at the centre of the problem, and then speaking around it a little bit.

In the afternoon, the jurisprudence discussion group met to discuss a paper by a youngish member of faculty named Noam G (I'm using the initial to avoid him finding this post if he googles his name; Warnock would have to wade through a lot of sites before she ever found this blog). His paper was on whether legal rules are content-independent reasons, which sounds complicated and technical, and involved diagrams and lots of abstraction, but which sort of boils down to whether people obey rules just because they are the law, rather than because it's a good idea based on the content of the rule (that's in the case of them being content-independent reasons for action). I go to the JDG most weeks because I like the general idea of it, but this paper didn't interest me much. He got a lot of very hard questions afterwards, the hardest of which came from Leslie Green (who grew up five blocks from where I grew up, on Fairmount). Noam mostly had no answers for the hard questions, and said thanks for that, I'll have to think about it, which I thought was good on the level of composure but maybe not great on the level of having command of the subject, though it is a hard subject and one which probably admits many views.

Between these two summaries it's starting to look like I should be writing an analysis of question-answering in special seminars. After the talk, a bunch of the JDG-goers went out for drinks to the Turf Tavern, which is a bar that's only accessible through a winding alley and has coal fires out on its patio, where we talked of many things including the blindness of members of majoritarian cultural groups, corporate moral agency and Wittgenstein (these were not all part of one conversation). Tom, another law dphil and a convenor of the JDG, recommended that I ask the professor of the seminar on Wittgenstein to sit in on his classes, which Tom has done himself. I somehow decided this was a good idea and the next morning, perfectly sober, actually went through with it. I got back a friendly reply and a syllabus. Now I am contemplating the massive reading list they have for each week, and wondering at the wisdom of my choices. I'm also reading Machiavelli for a seminar this week on classics of political thought (which meets once or twice a term). Still, I'm excited about getting back into Wittgenstein, even though it (and all these endless interesting talks) cut into the time I spend working out sentencing principles for corporations.

What I did yesterday (October 26 2011)

I have these strange and eventful days since arriving at Oxford.

I woke up a little late (9 AM) because I hadn’t slept well in the night, after drinking some champagne and wine the night before. My first activity of the day was to attend a sentencing seminar that I audit, which is co-taught by Professor Andrew Ashworth, who seems to have written or co-written almost all of the really influential texts in sentencing law in Britain; and by Professor Julian Roberts, also an eminent sentencing expert who’s written a bunch of books and sits on the Sentencing Commission, and incidentally is my D.Phil supervisor. Each professor brought a friend along to class — Prof. Ashworth brought Andrew von Hirsch, who is an emeritus honorary professor at Cambridge and at Goethe-University Frankfurt and who co-wrote a bunch of books with Ashworth, Julian brought Allan Manson, a professor from Queen’s University, in Ontario, who is also a criminal lawyer and sometime judge. The four of them asked the master’s students (and me) questions about the relative merits of sentencing guidelines (which allow for greater consistency of results and also ensure that a more unified and therefore fairer philosophy of sentencing is in place) or judicial discretion (which give the process more flexibility to respond to individual circumstances and which also — this is just me speaking — have the advantage of giving us some room from scary evil governments; but then you’re in the hands of judges, some of whom will also be scary and into harsh punishment). And they listened attentively to the students’ answers, and then asked them follow-up questions.

From there, I went to the year’s first meeting of the Criminal Law Discussion Group. The meetings are held in the charming Hovenden Room of All Souls College, which has an ornately carved wooden fireplace and we had tea in china cups and saucers. All Souls is the place that originally prompted the coining of the term “ivory tower.” It’s this college where there are no students — as far as I know this basically means that for anybody whose appointment comes straight from All Souls and not from a university department, they have no actual obligation to teach, and could spend their whole lives reading and writing and eating good food. Of course they don’t — Professor Ashworth is at All Souls but he still teaches the sentencing seminar, as well as other stuff. This year’s convenor of the criminal law group, Nicola Lacey, is also at All Souls. Professor Lacey, who is possibly the most charming academic I’ve ever met (she’s really warm, friendly and funny and seems genuine but also commanding), had us go around the room and introduce ourselves. The talk, by two youngish academics, was about addiction and its effect on a possible defence of intoxication, and looked at sources like the AA manual to try and formulate a notion of responsibility for an addict’s behaviour while intoxicated that might be in line with how addicts themselves understand their level of moral responsibility (the answer was, they see it as very high, but we still think there should be some partial defence; it was in retrospect a little unfortunate that their conclusion didn’t have all that much to do with the bulk of the paper). A long discussion followed, and the two seemed really happy after to have had so much criticism, and said they would use it to improve the paper.

It was a few minutes too late to run back to the Centre for Criminology and go to a D.Phil student’s lunchtime seminar on the death penalty in China, so I ran some errands and ate lunch on my own. Overheard cell-phone conversation on High Street: "But my friends are, like, all secret geniuses, and, like, when I ask them if they've read a book...."

Then I went to my desk and finally did about two hours’ worth of work, mainly finding articles on police abuse and the effects that might have on sentencing for the person abused (and then convicted of a crime during the investigation of which they were abused). This isn’t my main D.Phil topic, I’m writing a separate article.

In the afternoon, I met up with two friends and went to the experimental psychology building to participate in a group study on hypnosis. There was no reason for this, we all just thought it might be fun. I wasn’t sure whether I would be more interested in being hypnotized or being someone who wasn’t subject to hypnotic suggestion, but either way I was interested. The experiment was in an auditorium, and there were about 20 of us there and the post-doc psychologist hypnotized all of us in a group. Anyhow, it seems like I’m fairly prone to hypnosis, though I felt like I was in control and could have snapped out of it at any time. Afterwards I felt intensely intensely drowsy, and the guy rehypnotized me and got me to feel more awake. That actually worked, and is probably the clearest effect where I didn’t feel like it was kind of me making it happen. In any case, I really enjoyed it. Hard to say why. Also, before the experiment I was not so impressed with the post-doc, but by the time the hypnosis was over I felt like I trusted him a lot. Weird.  

More of the same, somewhere else

I'm cross-blogging!: http://www.indyish.com/fringe-review-acte/

Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005)

There's such a focus on anxiety in contemporary novels. The Corrections comes to mind, and Infinite Jest - which is about a lot of other things too, but man, is there some anxiety in that book, especially in the first chapter. Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk is pretty anxious. Another common theme of recent novels is satire of a caricaturish kind: The Russian Debutante's Handbook comes to mind, The Corrections again, Zadie Smith's On Beauty or White Teeth and lots and lots of New Yorker short stories (some of them by the authors of the books just mentioned, which might seem like it doesn't count, but it adds to the subjective feeling of the pervasiveness of this kind of writing, which I grow tired of). None of these are among my favourite books (actually I haven't finished The Corrections and don't want to pre-judge, but so far it's given me a similar feeling to the others: interesting enough to go on with, but not moving). For the first hundred or two pages of Infinite Jest, I was feeling emotionally connected, but in the subsequent 800 pages flagged a little.

Transmission shares both of these contemporary preoccupations, and, as with the others, I thought at first that it might be great, then thought good. It is good, and readable, and interesting. It's about computer hacking and virus creation, ramifications of the economics of globalization, adult virgins and Bollywood.

From the first, it put me on guard that the anxiety might be coming. We meet Arjun Mehta, an innocent whose glasses are "blurred with fingerprints." He is going for a job interview, and is brought to "a waiting room filled with nervous young people sitting on orange plastic chairs with the peculiar, self-isolating stiffness interview candidates share with criminal defendants and people in STD-clinic reception areas." I was slightly hopeful that he might turn out to be an agent, and not a painful victim of circumstance, by this detail:

Above [the receptionist] a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away.

And he is a bit of an agent, but not generally enough to get out of the clutches of the big bad world (is that saying too much? I try not to reveal anything, but that's a bit difficult). But at the same time, it's nice writing. I think it gets a bit rushed and slightly less artful later on, but no, it's technically pretty good throughout -- all those other aforementioned books also show good technique, resolving for me a question I had as a teenager about whether great craft was enough to make great literature.

This is an example of the slightly overdone satire that makes me wince:

Guy had known even before he moved in that this was a living space that would require something extraordinary. Feeling both time- and knowledge-challenged, he had (at the suggestion of the attractive brunette property consultant) employed an agency to help him buy furniture. That way, he reasoned, he could be certain everything about his personal environment was in the best possible taste. And so the white-leather table with the cut-out airport city code motif [...] and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony; all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all--every sandlblasted bathroom faucet of it--him.

It's predictable. Mostly the plot is not so predictable and is nicely paced. It disappointed me a little though, I was expecting more from the twin storylines of Arjun and Guy, based on some clues dropped in middle chapters.

Midnight in Paris, Montreal

Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, is a super fun dream of a film, reminded me of some of his older movies even though Allen's character played by Owen Wilson rather than himself. Wilson is a successful Hollywood screen writer who wants to give it up to be a novelist and live in Paris. Most of the movie is his time travel back to 1920s Paris where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso and various others (I'd mention Dali and Bunuel, but I never figured out how to get keyboard accents on a mac). It's pure fantasy but funnily scripted and well acted and it transported me, I let myself think I was talking to Hemingway and listening to Cole Porter sing at the piano in the bar. What could be better, really? I liked that it's a fantasy that doesn't revolve around male ideals, and even the women (some of them) are allowed personalities and individual desires, and even the fulfillment of those desires. After the movie, to keep the feeling going, we went to L'Express on St. Denis, which was packed at 10 PM, and which perfectly rounded out a lovely francophile evening. I don't go there often enough, so I don't know whether it's always so full of stylish people or if it's because this is Grand Prix weekend. I'm staying in Little Italy this week, and there are sports cars (and cinquecentas) everywhere.