Definition I liked

"life experience" — i.e., "time spent in involuntary biological persistence"

This from blog "The War on Mediocrity" at http://colinmarshall.livejournal.com/.

Funny, Life

So I have rehearsal every night this week, occasionally two at once, and my assessment starts being due at the end of the week. Feel relatively good about my "All environmental issues are political: discuss". I waffle on about Foucault which is great fun, but I still need to get examples and for examples I need to do more research. I wrote a serviceable introduction today for the essay on why geographers should read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a book about the gentrification of Times Square/how the author likes to suck homeless people off in porn theatres. I really disliked the author and writing style, but it was certainly the most unusal book I've been assigned here. The third essay, on AIDS, I've yet to start. It just feels too broad: we have a few pages of obvious, non-related statistics, and using them and outside research are meant to link poverty, prostitution, education, and orphanhood in the context of AIDS to sustainable development in Nigeria.

Rehearsals have been going *okay*. I am feeling really disillusioned with acting, as if it was some sort of training or skill-building that was incredibly relevant for my high school life but whose importance lessens with every year that goes by. I don't know if I want to audition for stuff next semester, but have a fear that if I don't I will be casting about aimlessly with ways to fill my non-academic time.

This all sounds terribly mopey, but it isn't really. I am enjoying this time, learning and just thinking a lot. Have started thinking about the future a wee bit, weird as that is. Want to do more with Spanish, I suppose as its one of the few practical real-world 'skills' that 14 years of education has given me. I realise that I think a lot about/in terms of the summer between first and second year in Costa Rica because of language development and manual labour. I'm interested in exploring the WWOOF-ing network, which is sort of like couchsurfing but is specifically for farms. The idea is that you join the site for a small fee (for a year), and then travel around approved farms wherever you like, doing work in exchange for a bed and food. If I want to be back in Scotland for the Fringe, WWOOF-ing around England/Spain could be a cool way to spend a month of summer. All just thoughts though.

Like, regular updates? OMG

Saved! Discovered I hadn't been looking at the first week of December when seeing what I need to do for essays, so I have a full week more than I thought I did! I can use this time to do stuff like actually doing research and writing credible academic essays rather than waffling soggily. So that's fun. I have actually regained a lot of my drive and am doing lots of reading, which is cool. I do think I have a chip on my shoulder in the stuff that St Andrews asks us to do, and it's this: we are asked to produce academic material.

That's all. Now, Brian, you say, this is great! This is what you should be doing in university! Universities in the US would kill to have every sentence properly cited and referenced, this is why British universities seem competitive for students, the standard of work that they put out is often academically better because of research and reproduction. Here's the problem with this model: it is just reproduction. A focus on brevity is fantastic, a focus on correct research is great. But put the two together and you end up producing a lot of well-cited parroting of everything that has come before. Even this is not a bad thing, except for the fact that it encourages students to read and unquestioningly accept arguments--or, if they don't accept them, to argue them *in the terms* already laid out for them. US institutions maybe focus too much on the touchy-feely "how does this relate to you and make you feel" of their subjects (I wouldn't know), but here I am beginning to feel that the lack of discussion in classrooms is partly from a lack of critical engagement with the material, 'engagement' and not 'critical' being the operative word. Only in Urban Cultural Geography do people really speak up in lectures, and that's because the professor makes words his statements in incendiary ways so that students *have* to react, saying things like 'women come to university to find eligible mates' and 'walking down the street with a child is a heteronormative sexual act'. I guess what I'm saying is that I think this is kind of cool. I want to have opinions and take stances, whether they appear in academic publications or not. I was thinking about this when reading an article on the preference for formal science over 'local knowledge' or 'experience' or 'wisdom' or whatever you want to call it and the problems that this can create. It led me to think, "all of us have local knowledge, being inhabitants of the world, and this ought to count for something". I hear about people doing literature reviews for their dissertations and it makes me really sad--it's not productive or active, it's reactive. Though maybe that is all of academia. And it's probably not a bad thing, per se. I say this all without having done my research, of course--I'd appreciate thoughts and feedback.

The rest of life, yennow, goes on. I have been focused mainly on academics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though still thinking about my devised piece, the second rehearsal for which is this coming Wednesday. I am feeling the end of the semester coming on and the idea that there is not enough time to do ANYTHING, let alone everything. I think I need to start picking my battles, but it's hard when you just want to fight everyone.

A blog? Oh dear, what's this?

Hmmm. So it's been a while. I was out of a bloggy stage. I may be back into it...though probably not, let's be honest. For today, at least, I am.

Working with mixed success (mixed meaning, 'mixed with watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer') on 3 projects: A statistical analysis of AIDS vs education vs opinion in Africa as it relates to sustainability (yes, whatever that may mean), a fairly staightforward-if-a-bit-broad essay for Political Ecology: "All environmental issues are political issues--discuss", and an academic book review of a book about porn theatres in Times Square. Because why not!

I've cast my new show, a devised piece we will workshop into existence from the sentence, "this is the story of a small girl pursued by a strange wind", with one of the best casts I've had so far, all girls, half with dancing or acrobatic training and at least half hardcore intellectuals. It's kinda intimidating, but I am very much looking forward to it. We have our first rehearsal tonight.

On the social side, last week was Raisin weekend, and as a third year this year I had academic kids and threw a fuck-off party for them, which is the first big party-party I've had or really gone all-out for this year. Last night was more pleasant, if anything--I went to a friend's thanksgiving bash, which a very calm and insanely delicious dinner-party sort of thing, with the freedom of movement and size of a party-party.

I have been in an odd place this week and so haven't been productive in any way or particularly in any area, but with the realisation of my 3 deadlines fast approaching I am starting to crack down and get to work. Or I would be if I wasn't blogging!

Thoughts are taken up by a range of things. My Urban Cultural Geography class is fantastic, and reading Foucoult and thinking about poststructuralism is giving me a good overlay of academic thought about life etc, thinking about systems, agency and power in everyday life. I've been spending a lot of time and having good chats with Ben...and realizing, I think, the categories of 'best friends' that I need. This is just occurring to me, so bear with me. I need the quasi-intellectual, the person who analyses and intellectualizes every situation (though usually without a formal academic framework) and with whom I can trade impressions of people and behaviour. Then I need a theatre/art friend (or a few) to bounce ideas off of and to magnify creative thought. Next, I need a 'fun' friend, someone that I just *like* and have fun spending time with, regardless of context or content. Finally, I need a 'confidant' friend, whose definition is pretty self-explanatory. I think this is roughly the structure of friendship I had in high school, and it is starting to repeat here, though of course in a somewhat different form--multiple people for one role, a single for others.

I have been horribly disconnected from the outside world at large, both news and friends and family. Part of this has been inconsistent computer/internet access, though most has just been me. I feel the need to have a few hermit days where I just read followed by re-connecting with the outside world with fresh eyes coming on.

I have my laptop back, after its third breakdown in which physical parts had to be replaced. Not getting a mac again. Posts may be more frequent (ie may happen at all) now. May.

Thoreau excerpts ripped off from another blog:

An update, even a plagiarized update, is better than nothing!


"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

(What is interesting in this account of what it is to "live deep" is that it seems to advocate narrowing and simplifying life in order to truly experience it rather than attempting to live a broad and varied life (though cutting a "broad swath" is just this, it goes on to "shave close"). The fullest life, therefore, is one of simplicity and discipline. The idea of reducing something to its "lowest terms" is something I'm thinking a lot right now, especially in art and theatre but also in life.)


"We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war."

(Okay, I really just like the old musty cheese metaphor! But really, the idea that we meet at short intervals sticks out to me and I think this is why I find living with people so fascinating--they become perhaps less interesting, but more honest in a fundamental way. The wittiest, most charming lives full of adventure are still things of monotony 99% of the time. The idea that lengthy time apart allows us to "acquire...new value for each other" is something I feel like I'm a test subject for. Certainly a lengthy time apart from my old friends has changed my relationship with them, although I think that since we are all of an age when we are changing daily my interactions may be changing because of this rather than because of time apart to ferment new value. Certainly I have become closer to some and drifted from others. In the end I guess, like all pithy statements, this one captures the human condition better than most: imperfectly.)

post-Korea

Just a quick update. Not much is going on in my life right now, the most exciting thing being workshops (Cheolseung style) with Clare, Holly, Conner Murphy (last time), and this time Louie and a friend of Holly's observing and taking pictures. We've been playing with adapting poetry from Mirabai, a 16th century Indian ecstatic poet. More to come