Looking at actors

[Sir Michael Gambon as Sir John Falstaff at the National Theatre 2005, Stuart Pearson Wright]

I'm re-working an article at present, in response to some reader's comments, and in doing so I've started reading Aoife Monks' The Actor in Costume (2009). This is rather timely given that I've just been to see Simon Annand's exhibition The Half, which Monks refers to in her opening chapter 'Dressing Rooms: The Actor's Body and Costume'. Discussing Stuart Pearson Wright's portrait of Michael Gambon and Edgar Degas' painting Actress in Her Dressing-Room (1879), Monks indicates the disappointment of such pictures which only seem to offer us an insight into actors and acting:

The problem that always undermines portraits of actors in their dressing rooms is that once actors are looked at - even if they appear not to notice - their activity turns into fictional labour, they still appear to be acting even if their averted gaze and their absorption in the task of dressing suggests otherwise. Dressing room portraits promise to reveal the mysteries of acting, but they end up perpetuating it further, making the private life of the actor all the more secretive and unknowable. The "real" actor is in the end a fantasy of portraits of dressing up. (33)

Backstage space is always implicitly depicted from a spectator's point of view. The portraits that Monks refers to are made for those whose access to backstage spaces is tinged with the thrill of transgression and who seek the real behind the imaginary. But what happens if we assume that the backstage is the normative orientation towards performance and attempt to view it, and the other spaces of theatre, as those who work there do? It's my contention that in the backstage actors (in the company of technicians, stage managers, etc.) produce space that accommodates their onstage performances and counters the uncertainty and transience of their own employment and the wearing, alienating machinery of commodity theatre. This is a tactics of coping, a means of maintaining a sustainable artistic practice by producing recuperative spaces where their needs can be met. And it has nothing to do with how they are perceived by spectators, but how they perceive themselves.

Explaining theatre

What, after all, is there to say? We tell our friend that the theatre is a place where people come and go, obsessively it would seem, through the same exposed rooms and spaces (they have been coming and going across the same exposed space of the Royal Court in London for decades), and where they perform various harmless and inconsequential actions: a bit of wandering around, some waving of the arms, some standing up and sitting down, and playing it all up as they do so, often getting remarkably excited. It is a place too, we tell our friend, where every action that is performed appears planned out or scripted in advance, at least to an extent. This produces a strange effect, we say, in that the people who are coming and going across the space - let's call them the actors - seem to have all the freedom in the world to do whatever they like, even the freedom not to do anything at all. But at the same time they seem constrained, as if all their choices are somehow being made for them somewhere else, and as if every move they make is basically a renewed attempt to deal with this peculiar situation.

Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics, 61-2

Three installations/exhibitions

Over the last weekend I managed - during the course of a visit to London with a hundred theatre and performance students - to get to three very different but equally affecting installations/exhibitions. These were Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, Simon Annand's photographic exhibition The Half in the V & A Museum and Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation at The Curve in the Barbican.

Miroslaw Balka

Balka's How It Is is a huge steel box, welded together and sitting on piles. In shape it reflects the architecture of the Turbine Hall itself, and in size it looms as a hulking presence; viewed from the walkway above the floor of the hall, it dwarfs the figures walking alongside it. Underneath there is just enough clearance for me to walk upright, and as I pass under it I can hear the footsteps of those inside. The entrance is from the far end of the hall, facing the end wall. Here the box presents itself as a large black cavity with a ramp leading up to the opening. Walking in I can make out figures ahead of me in the gloom by the light reflecting off their skin. The details of their faces are indistinguishable. The walls are covered in black felt, absorbing the light. To approach the walls is to experience a dizzying disorientation; just how far is the wall from my outstretched hand? The low level of light - I can feel my eyes working - and the muffled faces of those around me are akin to the experience of Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Purgatorio in the Silk Street Theatre this time last year. Then I faced a figure, half protruding from a wall, struggling to emerge. For one brief second the figure looked at me, making a kind of eye contact, even though his facial features remained veiled in the darkness. Turning around to look back towards the opening of the box, those coming into or leaving appear as silhouettes against the wall of the Turbine Hall beyond. And for all the emphasis on lack of light and the effect of this on sight I am aware of the echoed sounds of activities elsewhere in the hall, beyond what I can see. This reminds me of the Holocaust Tower in Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, where light and the sounds of city traffic enter through the slightest of chinks in the bare angular walls of a concrete silo. For more on Balka's How It Is, see the video here.

Simon Annand

At the V & A Museum later that afternoon I finally got to see Simon Annand's photographic exhibition The Half. The exhibition is comprised of actors photographed during 'the half', the thirty minutes leading up to the call for 'beginners' (made five minutes before a performance is due to commence). I bought Annand's book The Half last year when I first heard about the exhibition, but this is the first time I've been able to see the exhibition and experience the cumulative effect of the photographs placed side by side around the walls of a room. The exhibition was made more interesting because of an introductory video and the presence of more recent colour photographs not included in the book (which is made up of purely black and white shots). In the video Annand is shown photographing actors, and his voice is heard discussing his interest in the process. He states that he isn't interested in the backstage environment itself, or in the ephemera of theatre, but in the relationship of actors "with themselves". And in the course of the video he is shown doing something that I suspected from my viewing of the photographs: he instructs one young actor how to look at his colleague as they sit side by side in the dressing room.

By all accounts the exhibition has been immensely popular, and the room at the V & A was certainly well patronized while I was there. Interestingly, there was a search for recognition amongst the images, and people would point out to their friends the actors they recognised, stating their names and listing the roles or occasions in which they'd seen them. So much of this exhibition is actually about faces and faciality; there are full length and three-quarter shots and some certainly focus on physique, but it is the close-ups of actors' faces that is the key to the images and to the affect nature of the exhibition. The faces display, on the whole, a melancholy, pensiveness and weakness as if the beings displayed here are themselves facing an overwhelming force. The actors here are vulnerable, except when shown enjoying the comforts of sociality. With others present in the image there is laughter and a spatial solidarity. Sometimes this is even enjoyed with the unseen photographer.

In this exhibition actors are made to appear as strangely fragile beings, subjected to the unavoidable necessity of time and action. If, as Alice Rayner has argued, a glimpse into the backstage offers "a sense of privileged access to the secrets of the real thing", then this exhibition, I'd argue, does little to demystify the backstage, but the very attraction of the exhibition relies on maintaining the "seeming difference" of that space from the space of the viewer. The actors depicted seem like creatures not unlike ourselves, but they are presented as somehow more aware, more knowing, of the passing of time and of their own mortality. See images from The Half here.

Celeste Boursier-Mougenot

Finally, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation at the Curve gallery in the Barbican Centre brought me real joy. There was a lengthy queue for the gallery. "It's free," the man behind the information desk mentioned apologetically when I asked about the queue. Joining the line, and listening in on the conversation of the couple next to me, an American woman walked up. "Is this the line for the birdies?" she asked. I presumed that she, like I, couldn't recall the artist's name, but just that this was an artwork featuring small birds and electric guitars.

Twenty-five people are allowed in at a time. Stepping through a curtain of chain metal links, a strobe light flashes. Inside is dark with wooden steps leading down. "No food or drink, no flash photography and stay on the wooden floorboards", the attendant had instructed me before I entered. The floorboards are untreated pine, of the type one might find marking a path through a nature reserve. It's a boardwalk really, running through the curved space. On either side are patches of sand with clumps of spinifex grass, so it really does seem to be a boardwalk through a darkened landscape of sand, except that large across the dark walls are projections of rapid fingers working the fret boards of guitars. The projections are in white outline, the guitars are Gibson Les Pauls. Occasionally the body of a guitar is visible. Small speakers line the path, sparsely placed, with the sound emitted being unusually high pitched, insect-like.

As I walk along, the curved space lightens, until I see the fully lit space at the end. Here the gallery broadens out and its here that my fellow spectators are gathered. Four small, open nesting boxes are high up on the wall; one has pieces of dried spinifex grass emerging from it. The wooden boardwalk covers nearly the whole space, except for patches of sand and spinifex. Depending on the size each of these has either a cymbal on a stand, an upturned guitar or bass, or a microphone stand without a microphone. The cymbals are attached upside down, with the concave surface filled with bird seed or water.

In and amongst this are the finches, apparently an equal number of males and females. Some cluster on an amplifier, while other pairs perch on guitars, preening each other. One female chases a male off a guitar; he lands at the other end only to be chased off again, then again. In doing this the female bounces down the strings, with the attached amplifier emitting heavy plosive bursts of sound. One of the other preening couples picks at the strings creating a light rhythm. Two guitars have dried spinifex strands woven in amongst their strings while a nest of sorts is under construction behind a fire extinguisher. A bass growls while the birds themselves emit slight peeps and cheeps. They fly close past my legs, from one perch to another, a whirr of wings. I stand, observing, and the sudden bursts of sound or the quick flight of birds from one spot to the next attract my attention and that of my fellow spectators, turning us around and around in the space. The gallery is a walk in aviary, part nature park, but also part band room. The instruments make audible the birds' presence and movements. It feels like I'm intruding on the birds' space as they feed, preen and build nests. But their actions are also mediated by the guitars. Perhaps what I experience here is a strange ecology of action and harmonics where the very sensitivity of these birds to my presence and that of others is made more apparent by the sensitivity of the instruments.

Soundscapes and Guitars

Last year at the Living Landscapes Conference I was privileged to witness Simon Whitehead and Barnaby Oliver's performance PINGS, in which Whitehead and Oliver explored the space between them, linked by sound echoing down a scratchy and distorted mobile phone connection between Whitehead, in a small rehearsal studio in Aberystwyth accompanied by around thirty onlookers, and Oliver, walking with his guitar by the banks of the Maribyrnong river in Melbourne. One of the things that has remained with me from that morning performance was the resonant soundscape that Whitehead created. While the phone connection became increasingly fragile and problematic, Whitehead calmly built up a rumbling storm of noise - an atmospheric condition - balancing a rocking metal bar across the fretboard of an electric guitar, positioning headphones against the pickups, handing out blades of grass for audience members to place between their lips and blow through, and carrying a large piece of sheet-metal on his head which emitted a low ominous growl as he shifted positions, from floor to standing. As I recall we finished by all slowly circling the room; the audience as slow moving cyclonic depression.

I remembered Whitehead's performance again this week when I watched the following video trailer on YouTube for Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's installation at The Curve in the Barbican Centre, London.



There's something brilliant about the interaction between the finch, the twig and the guitar and the sensitivity of the guitar to the slight twitches and fidgets of these almost weightless birds.

Another memorable piece of sound art involving electric guitars is Christian Marclay's Guitar Drag, a piece that evokes the harmonic and destructive exuberance of a rock concert with the threat and dread of an amateur video recording of a crime.

Haruki Murakami on Running

One runner told of a mantra his older brother, also a runner, had told him which he's pondered ever since he began running. Here it is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you're running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, vii

Flexibility in Theatre Architecture

Drawing on Jeremy Till’s argument that “time, and not space, should be seen as the primary context in which architecture is conceived,” (2009: 95) and in the light of increasing interest in performative architecture, I'm interested in critically examining notions of ‘flexibility’ in the history of modern theatre. While the much-acknowledged failure of modernism’s desire for empty, neutral, infinitely versatile theatre spaces has in some ways tainted the term ‘flexible’ with negative connotations, other softer, less technologically determined notions of flexibility and adaptability seem to be offering new directions in architecture, as well as serving a “desire to create theatre in places rather than containers.” (Wiles 2003: 266) So, over the next couple of months I'm planning to trace a history of flexibility from the functionalist and technologically driven ideas of the modernist movement, via the perspectives of environmental theatre, to the more allusive sense of temporal fluidity achieved through the adaptive re-use of buildings with prior histories and the increasing popularity of temporary, impermanent structures and ‘lo-fi’ architecture. I'll examine how the term ‘flexibility’ has been used in relation to theatre architecture, what sorts of flexibility have been advocated or explored, and what the connections might be between flexibility in terms of space, physical arrangement and social usage. My intention is to shed light on how past notions of flexibility continue to influence the design of new theatres as well as to consider the relationship between flexibility, adaptability and performativity in the design of theatres.

Oskar Schlemmer on Play and Scepticism

This semester I'm teaching a module called Improvisation: Spontaneous Performance. This is the second time I've taught it and this year I've asked students to create weekly blog entries as a way of writing drafts for the Reflective Journal they need to submit at the end of the semester. The first entries are starting to roll in and there's the beginnings of some interesting material. Already I'm feeling like I want to put some of my own thoughts up, which I've started to do. Here's my second entry, written today (the actual blog the students write isn't publicly accessible):

I'm sitting in the National Library today reading The Theater of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius. The final chapter, by Oskar Schlemmer has some interesting material that seems relevant to our investigations into improvisation. Schlemmer writes that from the early days of the Bauhaus the artists involved sensed that the impulse for creative theatre was "the play instinct" (der Spieltraub). (82) This, he explains is "the un-self-conscious and naive pleasure in shaping and producing, without asking questions about use or uselessness, sense or nonsense, good or bad." (82) That strikes me as a good description of what I hope we will be doing in many of the workshops in this module: 'shaping' and 'producing' without worrying about the usefulness or the sense of what we are doing, but taking pleasure in the playfulness. However, Schlemmer goes on to describe how this developed at the Bauhaus:

"We might say that during the course of its development, this state of naivete, which is the womb of the play instinct, is generally followed by a period of reflection, doubt and criticism, something that in turn can easily bring about the destruction of the original state, unless a second and, as it were, skeptical kind of naivete tempers this critical phase. Today we have become much more aware of ourselves. A sense for standards and constants has arisen out of the unconscious and the chaotic." (82)

I think Schlemmer's idea of a 'skeptical kind of naivete' is helpful here when thinking about how, in this module, we can maintain a sense of naive playfulness but also engage in reflection and criticism about that playfulness without destroying it. The hope then is, that a sense of constants (which in our case would be the development of techniques, habits and understandings) would emerge.

Just some ideas. If you have the time or inclination, let me know what you think.

Walter Gropius (ed) The Theater of the Bauhaus. Trans. Arthur S. Wensinger. London: Eyre Methuen, 1979.

The Girls of Llanbadarn

Watching the BBC programme My Life in Verse I was introduced to the following poem by the fourteenth century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It struck me because of its very contemporary expression of feeling and because Llanbadarn church is only a few minutes walk from where we're living. Tomorrow Anthea and I will be visiting Strata Florida Abbey where, according to tradition, Dafydd ap Gwilym is buried.

The Girls of Llanbadarn

I am bent with wrath,
a plague upon all the women of this parish!
for I've never had (cruel, oppressive longing)
a single one of them,
neither a virgin (a pleasant desire)
nor a little girl nor hag nor wife.
What hindrance, what wickedness,
what failing prevents them from wanting me?
What harm could it do to a fine–browed maiden
to have me in a dark, dense wood?
It would not be shameful for her
to see me in a bed of leaves.

There was never a time when I did not love —
never was any charm so persistent —
even more than men of Garwy's ilk,
one or two in a single day,
and yet I've come no closer to winning one of these
than if she'd been my foe.
There was never a Sunday in Llanbadarn church
(and others will condemn it)
that my face was not turned towards the splendid girl
and my nape towards the resplendent, holy Lord.
And after I'd been staring long
over my feathers across my fellow parishioners,
the sweet radiant girl would hiss
to her campanion, so wise, so fair:

'He has an adulterous look —
his eyes are adept at disguising his wickedness —
that pallid lad with the face of a coquette
and his sister's hair upon his head.'

'Is that what he has in mind?'
says the other girl by her side,
'While the world endures he'll get no response,
to hell with him, the imbecile!'

I was stunned by the bright girl's curse,
meagre payment for my stupefied love.
I might have to renounce
this way of life, terrifying dreams.
Indeed, I'd better become
a hermit, a calling fit for scoundrels.
Through constant staring (a sure lesson)
over my shoulder (a pitiful sight),
it has befallen me, who loves the power of verse,
to become wry–necked without a mate.

Text: www.dafyddapgwilym.net

I think there's something growing in there ...

[This is our laundry]

Performance Theology

[Salat - Wikipedia]

I've just read an article by Peter Civetta in the Spring 2008 edition of Performance Research entitled 'Body/Space/Worship: Performance Theology and Liturgical Expressions of Belief'. In it Civetta explores the relationship between performance and theology through two case studies: the first being the practice of Jum'ah Prayer in the Al-Nur Mosque in New York and the second looking at the impact of spatial layout on liturgical experience at Grace Episcopal Church in Chicago.

Discussing the first, Civetta observes that the possible meanings of the physical actions in salat (prayers) are rarely (if ever) speculated upon by Muslim believers; the actions are simply learnt and then reproduced. Civetta suggests that a result of this is that Muslims remain open to the experience of the actions: "Without recourse to definitive judgements as [to] what the movements represent, they must sit and experience them for what they are." (9) Reflecting further on this Civetta explains,

From this experience, I gain increased recognition of belief as not wholly thought, not a solely conscious and intellectualized process of discernment and acceptance (or rejection). Performance theology lives as a bodily function; how these people choose to live their lives is in part dictated by what they learn from their bodies (not their minds) in the act of prayer [...] Belief not only gets expressed by the body - an aftereffect of previously determined ideas - but comes from the body as well. (10-11)

With the example of Grace Episcopal Church Civetta comments on the restrictive nature of the building's spatial layout. Built in an English Gothic Revival style between 1898 and 1905 the church is a large and imposing structure that attempts in some way to reproduce the grandeur of European cathedrals. According to Civetta, the physical dimensions of the church - the sheer distances between floor and ceiling and from end to end - suggest "an epic God and a distant God", circumscribing the notion of God as Abba (Daddy). After discussing the positions and features of the high altar, pulpit and baptismal font Civetta turns to briefly discuss the lived experience of the space, commenting that in the weekly life of the congregation the space itself mitigates against intimacy and communality and instead "puts the emphasis for worship on individuality and visuality." (16) He summarises:

In this way, spatiality at Grace Church possesses its own performance theology, and that performance theology has determined to a large extent the possible performance theology of the worshiping congregation. (17)

It's an interesting article and does outline approaches for other performance scholars to take when exploring religious experience; the suggestion to avoid simply theatricalizing liturgy but to take into account its status as worship is a helpful one. At the same time I'm also uncomfortable with the way Civetta uses the term 'determined' in the sentence I've quoted above; can spatiality or architecture actually determine anything? In his analysis he places a great deal of importance on spatiality without, perhaps, taking into account wider sociocultural, historical and theological contexts that might also reinforce the influence of space on the lived experience of the congregation.

Finally, reading this article through my own particular 'binocular' view - as a Christian and a performance scholar - I also take it as a challenge to re-examine my own 'performance theology', considering how what I do necessarily impacts upon what I believe and how, in the knowledge of this, I might instead seek to enact a more 'faithful' performance.

Meta-thinking

From "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School":

The most effective, most creative problem solvers engage in a process of meta-thinking, or "thing about the thinking." Meta-thinking means that you are aware of how you are thinking as you are doing the thinking. Meta-thinkers engage in continual dialogue of testing, stretching, criticizing, and redirecting their thought processes.

Plynlimon

[On top of Plynlimon (725m) highest mountain in mid Wales]

3 Conferences: 3 Abstracts

Here's three conferences I'll be attending over the (northern hemisphere) summer, with the abstracts for the papers I'll be giving:

1. Living Landscapes (18th-21st June, Aberystwyth)

Terrains of Power: Performing Parliamentary Architecture

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964) Murray Edelman notes that, “The appropriateness of act to setting is normally so carefully plotted in the political realm that we are rarely conscious of the importance or ramifications of the tie between the two.” (99) This statement is nowhere more relevant than when considering the design, construction, and use of parliamentary buildings and precincts.

Such buildings and precincts perform various symbolic functions: they help to construct a sense of national identity, to represent the processes of government, and to assert the authority and legitimacy of the state. More immediately however, at the level of spatial program and built form, they also promote and entrench certain possibilities for movement and interaction whilst discouraging others. In this respect they exert a material influence on the way in which government operates and the way in which the public interacts with it.

In this paper I apply interpretive strategies drawn from Performance Studies to examine two recently constructed precincts: the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood (2004) and the Welsh Senedd on the shore of Cardiff Bay (2006). By focussing on the performative relationship between bodies and the environment I seek to build on existing studies of civic space and capital city design and, in doing so, to assess the extent to which the design of these new precincts might remain “closely tied to political forces that reinforce existing patterns of dominance and submission.” (Lawrence J. Vale 1992:10)

2. Performance Studies International: "Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading" (24th-28th June, Zagreb)

Duplicitous Sites: Misperforming Parliament

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964) Murray Edelman notes that, “The appropriateness of act to setting is normally so carefully plotted in the political realm that we are rarely conscious of the importance or ramifications of the tie between the two.” (99) This statement is nowhere more relevant than when considering the design and use of parliamentary buildings and precincts.

In this paper I investigate how the ostensive signification of modern parliamentary buildings can be undercut or exposed by practices that naively or deliberately misperform them. Viewed against a variety of protest actions, this paper focuses on the impromptu performance of the choral piece Lament in the foyer of Australia’s New Parliament House on the 18th March 2003. Performed by a choir of one hundred and fifty women who simply walked into the building unnoticed, Lament was timed to coincide with the then Prime Minister’s announcement of Australia’s commitment of troops to the imminent war in Iraq. Through a close examination of performers’ experiences of Lament I will consider the productiveness of this action in exposing how modern parliamentary architecture remains “closely tied to political forces that reinforce existing patterns of dominance and submission.” (Vale 1992:10)

3. International Federation for Theatre Research: Theatre Architecture Working Group (12th-18th July, Lisbon)

Architecture, Audience and Desire

This paper will argue that audiences are not only constructed through their interaction with theatre auditoriums and stages, but also through the relations between an auditorium and the other spaces known or presumed to exist. The popularity of ‘behind-the-scenes’ tours, ‘backstage’ musicals and plays and actors’ memoirs are all evidence of a western cultural fascination with the actual and imagined realms that lie hidden beyond the stage. Such a fascination derives in part from the spatial delineations that mark out theatre space from everyday social space, backstage from front-of-house, and auditorium from stage. The delineations that separate out the spaces used by spectators and practitioners in more traditional theatres are significant because they create what Alice Rayner has described as “a geometry of seeming difference.” This geometry, Rayner suggests, “carries a powerful affect that connects actual spaces to a more general form of aggression and desire.” (2002: 539)

In this paper I will examine how the geometry that Rayner describes is negotiated in the design and use of a number of more modern theatres in Australia and the United Kingdom. Through this I seek to map out dimensions of the relationship between theatre audiences and theatre architecture and suggest how being an audience to theatre involves a tension between a desire for access to the more hidden realms and operations that sustain a performance and a desire to be denied that access.

Autumn comes to Aber.

Today, walking home along the Plas Crug, it dawned on me that autumn had arrived. Like spring earlier in the year I'd noticed it coming - the green of the leaves on Penglais hill has been slowly draining away - but suddenly I'm aware that it is here, now; leaves are blowing about the streets, the flags on the prom have been taken down, and the light is increasingly slipping from each day.

So much is happening back home at the moment - engagements and weddings, babies, sickness - that Anth and I are feeling curiously unsettled here. It is good to be here and out of the innumerable places we could be we do feel that it is the right place to be. But we don't have any roots in this place with its strange rhythms and practices. For me it is all too easy to throw myself into work and into the immediacy of teaching and administrative tasks. But then anything concerned with the longer term gets pushed to the periphery. This is a concern.

[Plas Crug]

[Plas Crug]

Anthea by the Sea

Dancing with Strangers

I've finally started reading Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen, almost five years after it was first published (in other words, five years too late). I've come to it having just read Kate Grenville's The Secret River, which tells a fictional historical tale of the clash between the British and the aboriginal people of the Hawkesbury River in the late 18th century. There is something about the histories and narratives of early colonial Australia that I find I'm drawn to, even though the sense of loss in these tellings and re-tellings can be unbearable; perhaps it is an interest in origins or an attraction to the tragic. I think it is also a curiosity of wanting to know what it was like to live then in such a strangely different (to British eyes) place.

Clendinnen's writing is so strikingly clear and her interest in the ethnographic, as well as the historic, engages with the confusions and the fog of life as it is lived. This follows in the vein of Greg Dening's account of the mutiny - and aftermath - on the Bounty in Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (1992). Clendinnen writes in her 'Introduction' (p.3):

Historians' main occupational hazard is being culture-insensitive, anthropologists' is insensitivity to temporal change. Both can be insensitive to the reciprocating dynamic between action and context. Together, however, they are formidable, and in my view offer the best chance of explaining what we humans do in any particular circumstance, and why we do it.

I'll post a few more choice quotes over the coming week ...

I have joined facebook

I have finally succumbed to the cult of facebook.

Down by the sea

[Anth's photo of the Old College, taken from the tower of St Michael's.]

Where have my summer holidays gone? It was such a perfectly clear day today and the waters of Cardigan Bay were like a lake. I was down at the seafront waiting for a staff meeting in the 'High Victorian' Old College, an elaborate (and idiosyncratic) pile that was originally built as a hotel. It was so quiet at around 10.30 that I could hear the engines of small boats way out in the bay. The weather was so good today you could almost be fooled into thinking that it was actually summer and not the beginning of autumn. But the students are coming ... and there are classes to plan.

TV Licensing

Anth and I don't have a television. We were recently offered one by some neighbours who are 'upgrading' and this tempted us for a little while, but we said no. We do watch DVDs and stream programmes via BBC iPlayer and whatever is available from the ABC (iView is blocked internationally).

If we were to get a television then we would have to get a TV License, which costs £139.50. Even if we didn't have a TV but watched programmes "as they are being shown" then we would need to pay for the license. This does seem an especially retrograde method of funding the BBC, especially when you realise how appallingly inefficient the whole system is and how laughable some of the license 'discounts' are.

When we stayed in student accommodation the post boxes were literally overflowing with a constant stream of letters from TV Licensing demanding that 'The Occupier' of each unlicensed flat pay for a license or risk being fined. Now most of the flats were genuinely unoccupied, so the letters just accumulated.

At our current address we have already received a couple of letters, each demanding an immediate response. Despite the fact that I've already been in contact to state that we don't have a TV, TV Licensing are unable to record this, or to stop the letters arriving until an inspector has been here to check. In fact, they can't even take down my name. And when might the inspector arrive? "Maybe in six weeks, maybe in six months" replied my helpful telephone operator, "it's an automated system" he added, doubtfully. So the wastage of paper and money goes on!

The thing I find really funny is that if I only own a black and white TV then I only need to pay a percentage of the cost, £47.00. Furthermore, if I am sight impaired or blind then I receive a 50% discount! Apparently, if you make it to the age of 75 then you don't need to pay for a license at all - a worthy reward for years of service to the nation.

Things to do, things to do

[Plas Tan y Bwlch]

It is almost the end of the week, a week that seems like one long scramble to get everything ready before the start of the new semester. Of course if I wasn't so finicky about formatting all my unit outlines and course readers then everything would take a quarter of the time it does. But then I wouldn't have such beautiful documents, right? And students really appreciate that, don't they?

I suspect it is all just a new form of procrastination. I've noticed that I really enjoy doing paperwork and administration - answering emails, entering marks - because you can easily complete a task and then tick it off. Done. This is the opposite of doing research, or writing an article which drags on forever and involves actual thinking. Its a real pity the latter are such a vital part of my job.

Today, just when I thought I everything settled and ready to roll, I had a conversation in which it became apparent that in fact there was something else to do that I didn't know was mine to do. 'Yes,' I stated, 'I'll get on to that right away'. I then asked a few questions that cleverly disguised how little I actually knew, whilst still delving for an answer. This is rather easy to do as an Australian. It feels natural to make statements which conclude in an upward inflection, thereby mysteriously morphing them into questions.

This reminds me of the habit everyone has here of greeting each other with the question, 'Alright?', to which you are meant to answer 'alright'. I haven't got the hang of this yet, so when people look at me and ask 'alright?' (often with a look of genuine concern on their faces) I immediately freeze, thinking, 'Do I look upset? Is there something wrong with my clothing/hair/facial expression?' This especially catches me first thing in the morning when I arrive sweaty from a brisk walk up the hill, inspired (and slightly deafened) by Bon Jovi screaming into my head that 'It's my life/it's now or never' and come face to face with a well-meaning colleague who stumps me with 'alright?' Yes, yes ... I'm fine really, I am.

And what does the picture of Plas Tan y Bwlch (in Snowdonia National Park) have to do with any of this? On Monday and Tuesday I'll be staying there as part of the induction to my Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PGCTHE).