My life according to Morrissey…

Time for another meme, since further inspiration eludes me currently. This one came to me via the proprietor of http://www.nerdpress.de via Facebook.

Pick an artist, and using ONLY SONG TITLES from only that artist, cleverly (preferably) answer these questions. This is harder than it seems! ADDITIONAL RULE: You cannot use the same artist I did, or duplicate song titles even if they were performed by another artist.

Artist: Morrissey

I chose Morrissey as he struck me as having had some really good and unusual song titles over the years. I don’t like all of them, but there are plenty I do like. I wish I could have used my favourite one, which is “Every Day Is Like Sunday”.

1. Are you a male or female: Tomorrow

2. Describe yourself: The more you ignore me, the closer I get

3. How do you feel about yourself: Something is squeezing my skull

4. Describe your EX boyfriend/girlfriend: [sorry, going to chicken out of this one for reasons of tact & sensitivity to third parties]

5. Describe your CURRENT boy/girl situation: Last of the famous international playboys 

6. Describe your current location: In the future when all’s well

7. Describe where you want to be: Redondo Beach

8. Your best friend: Our Frank

9. Your favorite color is: Irish blood, English heart

10. You know that: Alma matters

11. What’s the weather like: Sunny

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: Sing your life

13. What is life to you: Piccadilly Palare

14. What is the best advice you have to give: Hold on to your friends

15. If you could change your name what would it be: Dagenham Dave

P.S. If you missed out on my last post, which was password protected, please ask me about accessing it. If you’re someone I know and trust, I’ll be happy to give you the password

Protected: Me and my CV

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Five more things…

My friend Kavey suggested a new Five Things meme in which you tell someone else what you associate with them, and ask them to elaborate. So, here are the things she came up with for me.

1. (Foreign) Language and Literature

I’ve always loved language in general, and especially the way that the systems of different languages relate to one another. It makes for a complex puzzle of logic, with a degree of illogicality thrown in to keep it interesting. I have done languages not so much to increase my chance of communicating around the world, but more for this systematic / systemic approach and the window it gives you into different thought systems in different cultures.

Doing foreign literature was initially a necessary evil rather than a choice, but I did enjoy aspects of it. Favourite sorts of literature experienced include the Expressionist poetry and drama I did a course on during my BA, and the wonderfully named MA module “Sex, Lies and Manuscripts” in which we looked at medieval antifeminist (and protofeminist) literature from France, Italy and England.

I ended up doing a PhD on medieval German poetry. I’m not too sure how I feel about that at the moment – let’s say that it sometimes has something  albatross-like about it in both conversational and vocational terms – though the title “Dr” comes in handy occasionally.

The best move ever was to do A-level English literature. I cursed it at the time, but it taught me a lot more about my cultural heritage than anything else I have done (with the exception of O-level history).

2. Germany

Germany is where I have lived for the last almost 12 years.

Why? OK, I studied German, but that is only part of the story. There were family connections and school / orchestra exchanges that also influenced me positively when I was growing up, plus we had an excellent German teacher at school, ergo German outlasted French in my education.

Actually moving to Germany was not an entirely conscious choice. In 1997 my PhD scholarship was running out, and my supervisor suggested I go for a teaching job at one of our partner universities, Tübingen. Got the job, breathed a sigh of relief in financial terms, swallowed hard in emotional terms and told myself it was only for two years and that it might look good on my CV…

I’m not going to go into a “what I like / don’t like about Germany” excursus at this point. If anyone wants to know anything specific, you can ask me

3. Photography

I had very, very little interest in photography until May 2006. I was recovering from an icky bout of depression at the time and looking for new impetus creatively and socially, plus my then partner was into photography. I tagged along (I choose that expression deliberately) to one of the get-togethers organized by Kavey in London, armed with a point-and-shoot that my Dad had given me, to try to disguise the fact that I was a hanger-on. It was a daunting experience in the sense that I was still somewhat nervous around strangers and the technical talk went over my head at a million miles an hour, but everyone was so lovely and I suddenly found myself on an exciting treasure hunt, looking around for things to take pictures of and takng time to compose my shots. To cut a long story short, I was soon hooked. Here is one of the shots I took that day.

I pursue colour, detail and form in my photography, very much aesthetic goals rather than photojournalistic or purely technical ones. I like my pictures to look like the kind of paintings I like – abstract, expressionist, colourful. Occasionally purists will rail at me for boosting the colours beyond what looks natural. But hey, they are my pictures and they portray what I want to see / be seen.

4. Wales

I guess I’m one of those people who feels a greater attachment to where they are from if they are further away from it. I never felt particularly Welsh when I was living in Wales, but these days I sometimes feel very Welsh, depending on what is going on (be it a rugby match, exposure to some annoying Little Englanders, hearing a particular piece of music or whatever). Don’t ask me to define how this feels – it is neither static nor entirely definable.

It can be tough being a Welsh person in Germany. You find yourself sounding like a broken record when you tell someone for the nth time that no, Wales is not in England. Likely outcomes of this is that they think you are some nutty insular equivalent of a Bavarian separatist, you are a pedant, or you are indelibly marked down in their memory as That Exotic Welsh Person who is wheeled out on social occasions to provide quaint Celtic charm and required to give the Welsh angle on everything under the sun.

I wish I could speak Welsh better, as I said in a recent post here. For the first few years at school, we were subjected to a trendy, apparently antiauthoritarian approach to language teaching that omitted the grammar bit. Disastrous for me, as it meant I couldn’t extrapolate anything and didn’t have my beloved linguistic system to lean upon. The upshot of this was that I was far more resistent to speaking Welsh than to other languages.

5. Teaching

This is going to sound boastful, but I am proud to be a part of the fourth generation of teachers on both sides of my family, and the second generation of university teachers.

Having said that, until I was 26 the one thing I could say with any certainty that I most definitely did NOT want to do for a living was… guess what! The thought of having to be authoritative, knowledgeable and command people’s respect and attention was something I thought I simply didn’t have in me.

And then I ended up in a full-time teaching job in Tübingen, as mentioned above, and to my great surprise loved it from day one. It was a combination of things: the students were around my age so there was a peer-group atmosphere that we all enjoyed rather than a scary hierarchical relationship. They seemed dedicated on the whole, and to my great surprise they seemed largely to appreciate what I did for them, even expressing enjoyment at times. I, meanwhile, was on a very steep learning curve in terms of both subject matter and teaching methods, but I loved the challenge and the feeling that I was imparting knowledge and skills in a subject area that really mattered.

Nowadays, of course, the students are younger (!) and the atmosphere in class perhaps not quite so matey, but I value the fact that students tend to comment on the positive, motivating atmosphere in my classes, and they seem to continue to enjoy what I do (within reason – there are boring bits that I still need to work on). It’s a hugely rewarding job for me.

What about you?

If you’d like to leave a comment on this post, I’ll be happy to nominate five things that I associate with you, which you can then expound upon in your own blog (or we can find some other solution, if you don’t have a blog ). Also, if there are other things you associate with me more strongly than these things, I’d be intrigued to know and would be happy to comment on those.

Do please provide a link to your blog if you do your own version of these five things.

The colour purple*

* I am thinking of this or this, not this.

Hands up who remembers the 80s, when so-called jewel colours were all the rage and teenage would-be fashion victims (viz.: me) would clad themselves from top to toe in said hues, sometimes wisely tempered with a liberal element of black or white, though more than occasionally resulting in wardrobe malfunction, judging by the photos.

Magenta, jade green, royal blue, mustard, purple – these are the kind of colours we mixed, matched and accessorized. Jade green and royal blue I wasn’t keen on and was pleased to see the back of; likewise mustard, which makes my skin look sallow or jaundiced. Magenta was alright, it satisfying a fondness for pink that has never gone away, but it was purple that remained the colour of choice for me.

The colour purple, rich, regal and exotic. I was fascinated by the existence of the Land of Purple with its tiny molluscs; this was the colour that Nero decreed was to be worn by the Emperor alone, with Henry VIII enacting a similar kind of dress code later in history. You can trace important developments in social, economic and art history through purple-tinted glasses…

I spent a lot of the 90s wearing purple: it combined well with the slightly Gothic-inspired look I favoured and with my penchant for things Victorian, medieval and Celtic. I had scarves, pullovers, jeans, socks, dresses, tights, underwear, nail varnish, jewellery, Doc Martens in varying shades of it. I even made purple silk roses to decorate a hat which I wore to a wedding (together with a purple dress, shoes and handbag, of course).

Anyway, to cut this long excursus short, I must have reached saturation point eventually, and I’ve been wearing less and less purple the last few years. The old garments have worn out, don’t fit any more or are passé in style, and I obviously haven’t found new ones that appeal.

But the odd thing, and the direction this pre(r)amble (purple prose?) has been heading in, is this: purple, it seems, is de rigeur for Spring 2009, and the shops are chock-full of it; but it leaves me totally cold.

I feel all purpled out – I have only to look at one of these garments and I immediately feel uncomfortable. Why? It can’t be just that my hair is now more brown than black and thus a bit more likely to clash, and it certainly isn’t the case that my skintone has changed significantly. Nor do I honestly believe that I am being subliminally affected by the poem that begins with the line “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”.

Has anyone else found that their taste in colours has changed in a weird way like this, and do you have an explanation?

Five things…

So… here we are, almost two months into 2009, and this is the first blog post I’ve managed. Pathetic, I know. I’ve either been too busy to write about the things I wanted to say (and forgot about them as a result), or I’ve been (overly?) critical about whether anyone would want to read them.

Anyway, today I admitted that I was suffering from “blogger’s block”, asked around for some suggestions to kickstart me, and coolcat came up with the “Five Things” meme. So here we go…

Five things in my bag

• Purse: a great brick of a thing, unfortunately not because it contains wads of banknotes but because I am a great hoarder of receipts, cards and small change
• Passport: I wish I could say this was because I like to go abroad on a whim, but actually it’s just so that I have valid ID on me
• Mobile phone
• At least two lipsticks, variety being the spice of life and all that
• Pen: there is nothing more annoying than being on a train with a crossword and no pen!

Five favourite things in my flat

• Pandig, my bear, who has been my almost lifelong companion
• My dining table and chairs, which not everyone likes but I love (the chairs are a classic Chippendale design and the whole set belonged to my grandparents)
• Prints of my own photos hanging on the wall
• The spiral staircase and gallery (great for supporting topheavy trees and trailing plants)
• The dishwasher: my life would be a mess without it!

Five things I really like at the moment

• This genealogy site: every month it feels as if Christmas has come when they update their parish record transcripts
• Inspector Lynley: I have just read Elizabeth George’s latest crime thriller, Careless in Red, which I thought was better than the last two. I hope I get to see more of the televised versions with Nathaniel Parker soon, too…
• Ham, cream cheese and beetroot sandwiches on dark rye bread
• Jeremy Paxman’s TV series The Victorians: I’ve always been fascinated by that period and Paxman is always riveting, I find
• Black tights with zig-zag patterns on them

Five things I have always wanted to do

I thought this section would be very hard as I am a person of few ambitions, but hey presto, I could have found more than five. Here are five relatively non-cheesy ambitions…

• Study Art History (had I enough world and time, and, these days, money to boot): I did tangential bits at university under the auspices of courses on music, German and history, and now that I am also fascinated by photography and fashions within that, I’d love to have something that tied it all together
• Renovate an old house (within reason)
• Find a photo of a family member that shows a true resemblance to me (only once or twice have I been told that I look anything like a relative)
• Paint a picture that I would be proud to hang on the wall (I have not painted a picture since I was a child)
• Be able to speak Welsh properly

Books

I was an avid reader as a child and teenager, but my eight years spent as a student and having to read stuff constantly for university largely – and sadly – put paid to the idea of reading for pleasure. However, a couple of years ago I was invited to join an English-language reading group here in Freiburg, set up by a friend together with a colleague of hers, and I’ve grown to love it.

We meet monthly to discuss a book, and the suggestions for books to read come from within the group. We’re fairly international, with three Americans, two Brits (one Scottish, one Welsh), a South African and three Germans (all with absolutely excellent English), and I think all of us come from a background where we have studied, taught and/or been engaged professionally in some other way with English literature.

Here are some brief comments on my six favourites out of the books we have read. NO spoilers here:

What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt

A wonderful tale about two families in New York. The head of one is an art historian, while the other father is an artist whose work has become a source of fascination for the former. The reader explores the interaction between these families over a period of 25 years, which covers triumphs and losses, struggles and success, and it is a wonderful intermingling of personal fate and ways of looking at and living with art.

The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd

This book explores the complex relationship between the famous literary siblings Charles and Mary Lamb and the well-known forger (of Shakespeare, among other things) William Henry Ireland. It is wonderfully evocative of 19th-century London and contains elements of a love story, deceit, social pressures derived from a factual background.

Headlong – Michael Frayn

Art history and criticism form the main basis for this book, too. A philosopher married to an art historian discovers some paintings in an old house and becomes convinced that he has discovered lost work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s a wonderful detective story about determination, red herrings and someone who is willing to risk everything to prove the discovery of the century. A cast of amusing characters completes the picture.

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

I read Smith’s White Teeth a few years ago and remain convinced that it is the best portrayal of multicultural life in late 20th century Britain that I have read. On Beauty didn’t quite measure up in this sense, but it is a wonderful variant on the campus novel, focusing on a British academic and his American rival. Art history, literary and cultural theory provide the academic strand here (again!), but the interactions and (mis)understandings between the two families are the main source of interest. Since then I have read David Lodge’s Small World, which I found similar in some ways (academic milieu / rivalry, trans-Atlantic differences), though Smith’s take is more serious and intricate, while Lodge’s is more flippant.

Possession - A. S. Byatt

This has to be one of the best books I have ever read. It has an awful lot in common with the other books already mentioned, in that it is a literary mystery, this time spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, intertwining the story of Victorian poets and their 20th century scholars and biographers.  Social mores, academic rivalry and the notion of “possession” in the sense of relationships and academic criticism are explored in an extremely intricate work that I found utterly convincing.

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

I have always loved Victorian novels, and this is a modern novel set in the Victorian age. The fate of a poor girl who has grown up among thieves and diverse other “dishonest” types becomes indelibly linked with that of a “poor little rich girl” who has ostensibly been shielded from all of the above. Needless to say, many things are not as they seem initially, and the narrative takes the form of an unusual love story that spans social gulfs, cruelty, fetishism and madness, and which takes numerous unexpected turns in the process. It really makes you wonder about the saying “be cruel to be kind” and its opposite.

In January we will be discussing Kazuo Ishiguru’s When We Were Orphans, which was my suggestion for our next book. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes down…

In the meantime, if any of you have read any of the books discussed here, or books by the same authors, I’d love to receive some feedback on whether you liked them.

My current to-do list

Various friends have been putting their to-do lists on their blogs, generally with the line of thought that some public scrutiny might spur them on better to get things done. Well, let’s see if it works…

As of this morning, I had the following list put together

• Correct and grade 22 translations
• Correct 25 phonetic transcriptions
• Make a start on Christmas shopping (I only have 3 freeish weekends left)
• Send snailmail to 3 family members
• Post teabags to someone who commissioned me to bring them from the UK
• Catch up on clothes laundry
• Exchange the summer duvets for the winter ones & wash the summer ones
• Make a salad or bake some finger food for a party tomorrow
• Get some job-related paperwork done and submitted
• Send some genealogy data I’d promised someone
• Take some new self-portraits
• Sort the pile of post and magazines on the dining table (Got this done in the end, though it took a while!)
• Go through bathroom cupboards and throw out any “obsolete” items
• Tidy up my photo library
• Spend less time online

Right, watch this space to see whether I actually get all of this done – it looks like a LOT now that I have it all listed. Given that I’m off out to a party tomorrow night and hoping to see the new Bond film on Sunday, I’d best get a move on…

How Twitter replies work

I’m not a geek, nor do I have aspirations to become one. The issue of how Twitter @replies (which Twitter defines as “tweets that start with an @ and then a username”) work has simply been bothering me today, and I have failed to find a good explanation in a single source available online. There is a fairly useful guide on the Twitter blog here, but it doesn’t actually address the issue that was bugging me, namely the way that specifically directed replies cannot be filtered adequately when the @username element is not positioned right at the beginning of the message, indeed they are not @replies according to Twitter’s own definition.

Anyway, here is an attempt to explain how this all works. All of my observations are based on the web Twitter interface – I have never used any of the many alternative clients / interfaces that are available (Twhirl, twitterrific, Hahlo, TweetDeck et al), so I’d certainly be interested to receive feedback if you find that they handle any of the following issues differently.

Note: I have consistently used the term @replies in the narrow way it is defined by Twitter above.

1. General Twitter settings

In your Twitter settings, under the tab Notices, you have three options for displaying or suppressing @replies:

a. Show me all @replies: This will include in your feed ALL @replies issued by the people you are following, whoever they are directed at.

b. Show me @replies to the people I’m following: This will show in your feed those @replies that the people you are following send to other people that you are following. This is the default setting and, according to Twitter, the setting that 98% of users use (myself included).

c. Show me no @replies: This should apparently mean that you don’t see any @replies in your feed whatsoever (though this didn’t work when I tried changing it as an experiment).

I can imagine opting for “a” if all my Twitter contacts were interlinked somehow, if I had all the time in the world to read all my followers’ tweets and filter them for relevance myself, if I was trying to find more people to follow of if I was generally a nosier so-and-so than I actually am. Option “c” might in many cases make Twitter seem like a room full of communicationally challenged egocentrics spouting random thoughts (critics will say that is what it is in any case!), so I don’t really see the point of it.

Note: if you visit a person’s profile, you can see all the tweets they have written, including all @replies they have sent, regardless of what setting you have chosen (I think…).

2. The @replies tab

This tab functions as a collection point for all @replies directed at you, and it shows these and nothing else. It’s a quick way of catching up on direct questions or comments you might want to respond to after you’ve been offline for a while. It also differs slightly in content in that it also includes @replies from people who are following you but who you are not following back (and thus whose @replies do not appear in your timeline / feed).

3. But here’s the rub…

If you embed the @username directive inside your tweet, i.e. not having it as the initial element, then the following will happen.

a. The Twitter database will not interpret it as a directed @reply. Thus it will appear in the feeds of all the people who are following you, regardless of whether they are also following said @username, which means it will not be filtered out for those who have selected “b” or “c” above. This is fair enough if you want to talk publicly about or address a comment to @username while having everyone else see it, e.g.

I hereby declare to the world my undying love for @Romeo

Waiting for @godot

or, in an attempt to help a new Twitterer find more contacts,

Welcome to Twitter, @birdbrain

but it can lead to your “filtering” followers catching just part of a conversation out of context. OK, this is no big deal in general, but it might occasionally cause annoyance to someone who wants nothing to do with said @username (e.g. Romeo’s ex, or your ex, for that matter, assuming he/she and Romeo are not on the best terms) or who sees this as a form of “junk tweet” / spamming, especially if you do it too often.

b. As it is not interpreted as an @reply, it will not appear on the @replies tab of the addressee. If this person has a large amount of traffic / people they follow or is not on Twitter very often, this might mean that they fail to see it entirely, unless they use an “external” search client such as Summize (which is now at http://search.twitter.com/), which will scan the entirety of the message for their username (or any other keyword searched for).

A further problem is that Twitter is currently unable to deal adequately with @replies directed at multiple recipients. Let’s say that benjamin wants to ask his contacts flopsy, mopsy and cottontail out for a drink and writes the following tweet:

@flopsy @mopsy @cottontail Fancy a quick carrot juice tonight?

If all three are mutually following each other, then each will receive this tweet in their feed. However, only flopsy will see it on the @replies tab. If they are not following each other and have the default setting “b” enabled, only flopsy will see it in the feed (AND on the replies tab), while the others will miss it entirely, unless they do an external search on their usernames.

So anyway, those are my explanations and grumbles about what I failed to explain in tweets of 140 characters today. As I said above, I’d be interested to find out whether other clients have any better ways of filtering messages and dealing with @username responses that Twitter does not treat as true @replies.

Six months on… OR: Footpath to the future

Hampshire footpath

Sorry I haven’t updated recently. I guess I’ve been doing more living and less navel-gazing, so I hope that’s a good sign.

It’s now precisely six months since the event that prompted me originally to start this blog occurred. Not that I am someone who puts such black days in their diary and dwells on them, or not any longer at least, but the fact that I have been going through exactly the same pre-semester routine in the last few days as I was back then has meant that it has been only natural to think back and compare then and now, and it happens that this routine marks exactly the six-month point.

Almost everything has been different this time round, but I shan’t bore people with an exhaustive comparative survey; rather, I’ll just pick out the most salient points of the changes that have occurred over the whole period.

Back then, I was scared that I would lose my point of contact to so many people. However, not only has this not happened (well, apart from one obvious case, which is really not so surprising), but I’ve actually strengthened friendship, contact and understanding with so many of those people. Old friends and members of my extended family have also taken on a new, closer role, and I have loved watching those tried-and-tested links develop further and in new directions. And additionally, what started as the kindness of (almost) strangers has led to a number of other new friendships. It’s taught me finally that people see me (and, it seems, value me) for who I am, and not by association with someone else.

Back then, I had become stuck in a routine that I had nevertheless clung to like dear life, as it seemed to be the only option I had. Change was not something I was prepared to contemplate in many areas of life, and progress was something I had ceased to expect. And dreams? I had virtually erased the word from my vocabulary. Now I’m much more willing to face, initiate and realize all of these. Of course it remains scary – in weak moments I ask why I can’t just sit back and let life happen – but now I can see how my choices, actions and willingness to change my situation in the direction I want are the only way forward, albeit in many cases in combination with the choices, actions and willingness of a second person who has chosen to accompany me on this route.

Now, I’d like to say a huge thank you to all those people who have helped the last six months become better and better for me. I hope the main players know who they are, as I am not going to give an Oscar-type litany here, but every little bit of support, encouragement, friendship and interest shown has helped.

And the future? Well, I am not going to divulge my “best laid plans” here and now, but as regards this blog, I think it’s time it returned to being more of a general repository for “stuff” that I am up to and feel like giving my tuppence worth on…

From the pens of students

Students are full of lovely surprises with their interpretations of British culture. Here is a compilation of some of the choicest recent offerings (obviously without attribution, and condensed in a few places).

On British opposition to the idea of a channel tunnel:

“It would be an opportunity for ’strange creatures’ to enter Britain.”

On political affiliation:

“The Labour Party is not particularly Communist-orientated these days.”

“The Tories get their votes from people who have an interest in the consistency of the actual order of things.”

On the changing profile of the Welsh language:

“Until the 1960s Welsh was only spoken by older people because it had been forbidden to speak.”

On Cornish pasties (as a possible early form of crossover cuisine?):

“[...] the calzone-like wraps that were eaten in the North by the miners”.

On the red rose as the symbol of Labour:

“Be careful: roses have crumbs and can hurt you (make sure you wear thick gloves if you are fuzzy).”

I do love this job…