Gentle readers,
When I started this blog, you may recall, I wasn't sure if my life in the UK would be interesting enough to support a regular blogging habit. Eleven months and 47,000 words later, I'm happy that this worry was unfounded. Some thanks are due for the non-boringness of my year. In particular I'd like to thank the University of Cambridge with its endless oddities; Ryanair and easyJet with their cheap European air travel; and my former employer (frequent flier miles), the U.S. Treasury (2008 tax refund), and my favorite Peace Corps volunteer for facilitating my Cameroon trip.
But now, as I turn my sights to the Garden State, I feel a change in the air. While I always reserve the right to change my mind, I'm not planning on keeping up a regular blog at Princeton. I like the idea of keeping this site as a sporadic travel blog, as I did with my Israel trip-- though I may be grounded for quite some time. (I realized, as I deplaned at Logan, that for the first time since college I don't know when my next flight will be.) There's also the possibility that I will be somewhere very interesting next summer, as my MPA program at Princeton requires all of us to complete a summer internship. Those who followed my Philippines blog may recall a certain Congressman's daughter; she just graduated from the program I will soon start, and last summer she did her internship in Sudan. I can't say that blog-worthiness will be a major factor in my internship search process, but if I do end up someplace sexy, you will certainly hear lots about it.
So I will sign off, for now, and say thanks to all of my readers and commenters for making all of this writing worthwhile. And in the unlikely event that this leaves a blog-shaped hole in your heart, let me know- I have a few others I can recommend!
27 July 2009
19 July 2009
graduation weekend dispatches
Grantchester revisited. Among the items on the Cambridge tourist to-do list that we missed when my family visited in January is the walk to Grantchester. This may sound familiar to longtime readers with sharp memories. Grantchester is a tiny village a few miles up the River Cam where the poet Rupert Brooke once hosted future members of the Bloomsbury Group—including John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Bertrand Russell—for tea and civilized conversation. Today Brooke’s old home and orchard are a teahouse that preserves some of the memory of that group.
After my parents and I arrived back in Cambridge for graduation weekend, the Grantchester walk was first on the agenda, but unfortunately the appointed day did not turn out quite the way I might have hoped. Contradicting an observation I had made earlier in the trip that thunder and lightning are rare in Britain, the afternoon was spotted with thunderstorms and pouring rain, with spells of cold drizzle in between. Dispirited by the weather and feeling a touch of pre-departure depression, I felt like calling off the walk, but my parents were game to face the storms, mud, and cows. The teahouse and surrounding orchard would usually be jammed with people on a summer afternoon, but for at least part of the time we were the only people sitting outside. In the end I was glad we went—the hot tea, conversation, and visiting a fun old place helped to restore my mojo for the festivities to come that evening.
Latin lessons. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed to Emma, where I had organized a graduation-eve formal dinner for Development Studies classmates and their families. The countries represented included China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Germany, and Greece. We had pre-dinner drinks in the cloisters by the college chapel and then moved on to a cozy upstairs room with lots of portraits of dead white men in wigs. I was incredibly grateful that Dave, a member of the catering staff who we always prayed would be the one quarterbacking our MCR dinners, was overseeing things. Dave did throw me one surprise, though: shortly after we were all seated, he came over to me and asked if I wanted to recite the College grace. I think my initial response was on the lines of, “uhhhh… I don’t speak Latin, Dave.” He showed me where both pre- and post-dinner graces were printed in the program and we had a 30-second dress rehearsal. I remember exactly two things from the third of a year of Latin I had in seventh grade (and any Latin scholars in the audience are welcome to correct me on this). First, the letters more or less always make the same sounds, unlike in English; second, it’s pronounced more or less the way a native English speaker would expect. With that slender bit of background knowledge and Dave’s confidence, I read out the grace without any obvious stumbles. I don’t know if the same could be said for my pronunciation, but I doubt anyone in the room had the slightest idea what I was saying. If you're curious you can check out the graces, with translations, here.
Pull my finger. Graduation, like so many other things in Cambridge, is steeped in formality and 800 years of tradition and takes little note of the way the rest of the world prefers to do things. There are lots of graduation ceremonies on different throughout the year, and the timing of any particular student’s graduation depends a lot on the idiosyncrasies of his or her course. There are no go-out-and-get-‘em speeches. Graduates shuffle through their small piece of the all-day ceremony by college, so I wasn’t even with my Development Studies classmates. My required outfit included a tuxedo, a white bow tie and bands (which made me feel like I should be trying somebody for witchcraft in 1690s Salem), a black gown, and a big black hood lined with blue silk draped over my back. I knew little about the ceremony going in and warned my parents not to expect much.
What I did know was that I was going to have to hold some guy’s finger. (Eight hundred years of solemn tradition, building up to… a fart joke?) Each college appoints one of its fellows as Praelector, and from what I can tell that role involves presenting the graduating students and enforcing the dress code. Rumor has it that if one of us students commits a wardrobe infraction, our college Praelector is fined… in bottles of port. Anyway, the graduates from each College march into a fancy old building known as the Senate House, and their Praelector extends a hand to the first four graduates in the phalanx. As each graduate holds onto one of those fingers, the Praelector leads the group forward and gives a brief testimonial, in Latin, to their learning and morals and their fitness to proceed to the degrees which they are to be awarded.
Now comes the really weird part. Picture, at the center of this grand assembly, a fairly senior man or woman sitting in a fancy chair and dressed in a bright red cape lined with white fur. This is (rarely) the Chancellor, Prince Philip; or (less rarely) the Vice Chancellor; or (usually) a deputy of hers, often the Master or President of a college. Our caped MC was the Master of Magdalene College, and the outfit combined with his kind face and round glasses gave him the appearance of a clean-shaven Santa Claus. After the Praelector’s testimonial, each individual graduate’s name is called, and each in turn kneels on a cushion in front of the big chair and extends his or her joined hands as if in prayer. It looked a bit like we were being knighted, minus the part with the sword. The presiding officer then clasps the graduate’s hands and formally confers the degree, in Latin. The new graduate rises, taking extreme care not to trip over the gown in the process, and gives a bow before exiting stage right.
Amazingly, the least ceremonious part was the paper diploma. After all of these traditional flourishes, I was expecting a huge piece of parchment with Latin calligraphy and perhaps a wax seal. Instead, what I got was a piece of 7x10 paper that looks like something I could have easily printed out on a home laser printer. It certifies, in English, that I attended the Congregation of 18 July 2009 and only later gets around to mentioning that I was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. The mode of presentation was no more dramatic: we received our diplomas inside a plastic sleeve from an usher as we exited the Senate House. Like most of my friends, I opted to get a wooden University of Cambridge frame—partly because I fear that no one will believe it’s a diploma otherwise, and partly because I fear that one day I might accidentally toss it out with some old bank statements.
This has probably sounded a bit snarky, and there certainly was plenty of joking all around about the sillier aspects of the ceremony. But like many other things here, I think Cambridge’s odd approach to graduation is best approached with an open mind, a sense of humor, and a healthy dose of respect for eight centuries of history. And most importantly, after the red capes and Latin incantations we all get to walk away as Cambridge alumni—which is really, really cool in any language.
After my parents and I arrived back in Cambridge for graduation weekend, the Grantchester walk was first on the agenda, but unfortunately the appointed day did not turn out quite the way I might have hoped. Contradicting an observation I had made earlier in the trip that thunder and lightning are rare in Britain, the afternoon was spotted with thunderstorms and pouring rain, with spells of cold drizzle in between. Dispirited by the weather and feeling a touch of pre-departure depression, I felt like calling off the walk, but my parents were game to face the storms, mud, and cows. The teahouse and surrounding orchard would usually be jammed with people on a summer afternoon, but for at least part of the time we were the only people sitting outside. In the end I was glad we went—the hot tea, conversation, and visiting a fun old place helped to restore my mojo for the festivities to come that evening.
Latin lessons. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed to Emma, where I had organized a graduation-eve formal dinner for Development Studies classmates and their families. The countries represented included China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Germany, and Greece. We had pre-dinner drinks in the cloisters by the college chapel and then moved on to a cozy upstairs room with lots of portraits of dead white men in wigs. I was incredibly grateful that Dave, a member of the catering staff who we always prayed would be the one quarterbacking our MCR dinners, was overseeing things. Dave did throw me one surprise, though: shortly after we were all seated, he came over to me and asked if I wanted to recite the College grace. I think my initial response was on the lines of, “uhhhh… I don’t speak Latin, Dave.” He showed me where both pre- and post-dinner graces were printed in the program and we had a 30-second dress rehearsal. I remember exactly two things from the third of a year of Latin I had in seventh grade (and any Latin scholars in the audience are welcome to correct me on this). First, the letters more or less always make the same sounds, unlike in English; second, it’s pronounced more or less the way a native English speaker would expect. With that slender bit of background knowledge and Dave’s confidence, I read out the grace without any obvious stumbles. I don’t know if the same could be said for my pronunciation, but I doubt anyone in the room had the slightest idea what I was saying. If you're curious you can check out the graces, with translations, here.
Pull my finger. Graduation, like so many other things in Cambridge, is steeped in formality and 800 years of tradition and takes little note of the way the rest of the world prefers to do things. There are lots of graduation ceremonies on different throughout the year, and the timing of any particular student’s graduation depends a lot on the idiosyncrasies of his or her course. There are no go-out-and-get-‘em speeches. Graduates shuffle through their small piece of the all-day ceremony by college, so I wasn’t even with my Development Studies classmates. My required outfit included a tuxedo, a white bow tie and bands (which made me feel like I should be trying somebody for witchcraft in 1690s Salem), a black gown, and a big black hood lined with blue silk draped over my back. I knew little about the ceremony going in and warned my parents not to expect much.
What I did know was that I was going to have to hold some guy’s finger. (Eight hundred years of solemn tradition, building up to… a fart joke?) Each college appoints one of its fellows as Praelector, and from what I can tell that role involves presenting the graduating students and enforcing the dress code. Rumor has it that if one of us students commits a wardrobe infraction, our college Praelector is fined… in bottles of port. Anyway, the graduates from each College march into a fancy old building known as the Senate House, and their Praelector extends a hand to the first four graduates in the phalanx. As each graduate holds onto one of those fingers, the Praelector leads the group forward and gives a brief testimonial, in Latin, to their learning and morals and their fitness to proceed to the degrees which they are to be awarded.
Now comes the really weird part. Picture, at the center of this grand assembly, a fairly senior man or woman sitting in a fancy chair and dressed in a bright red cape lined with white fur. This is (rarely) the Chancellor, Prince Philip; or (less rarely) the Vice Chancellor; or (usually) a deputy of hers, often the Master or President of a college. Our caped MC was the Master of Magdalene College, and the outfit combined with his kind face and round glasses gave him the appearance of a clean-shaven Santa Claus. After the Praelector’s testimonial, each individual graduate’s name is called, and each in turn kneels on a cushion in front of the big chair and extends his or her joined hands as if in prayer. It looked a bit like we were being knighted, minus the part with the sword. The presiding officer then clasps the graduate’s hands and formally confers the degree, in Latin. The new graduate rises, taking extreme care not to trip over the gown in the process, and gives a bow before exiting stage right.
Amazingly, the least ceremonious part was the paper diploma. After all of these traditional flourishes, I was expecting a huge piece of parchment with Latin calligraphy and perhaps a wax seal. Instead, what I got was a piece of 7x10 paper that looks like something I could have easily printed out on a home laser printer. It certifies, in English, that I attended the Congregation of 18 July 2009 and only later gets around to mentioning that I was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. The mode of presentation was no more dramatic: we received our diplomas inside a plastic sleeve from an usher as we exited the Senate House. Like most of my friends, I opted to get a wooden University of Cambridge frame—partly because I fear that no one will believe it’s a diploma otherwise, and partly because I fear that one day I might accidentally toss it out with some old bank statements.
This has probably sounded a bit snarky, and there certainly was plenty of joking all around about the sillier aspects of the ceremony. But like many other things here, I think Cambridge’s odd approach to graduation is best approached with an open mind, a sense of humor, and a healthy dose of respect for eight centuries of history. And most importantly, after the red capes and Latin incantations we all get to walk away as Cambridge alumni—which is really, really cool in any language.
10 July 2009
“we have not become more concerned with men than profit”
Edinburgh – I’ve left the farm, but I suspect it will be days before I can close my eyes without seeing kale or beetroot leaves. On my last day, Uwe took me on a walk to the far corner of the property that they are renting. At 80 acres, the entire farm is far bigger than the area under active cultivation, and I had not even seen most of it prior to this eleventh-hour tour. Uwe told me that before they moved here, their landlord kept a herd of sheep. Their dream is one day to buy the land from him, in partnership with ten or so other families, and divide it into a series of small family crofts. This sort of thing is happening in small pockets all over Scotland, Morven later told me.
If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.
The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.
Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."
There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.
Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.
Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.
On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.
If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.
The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.
Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."
There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.
Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.
Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.
On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.
05 July 2009
dispatches from the farm
Ross-shire, Scotland – In my first 72 hours as a WWOOFer I have harvested potatoes, built trellises for peas, picked strawberries, collected and packed eggs, fed hogs, pulled weeds, and witnessed the beheading of two hens. I am here for a little over a week on a family farm in a moderately isolated patch of the Scottish highlands with Morven, my super-energetic hostess, her builder partner Uwe, their two adorable children, a fellow WWOOFer from Germany named Katrin, and a massive complement of four-legged and winged friends. Somewhere in my head a treatise tying my observations here with the history of the Scottish highlands is simmering—would you expect anything different from me?—but for now, here are a few tidbits from my first days of WWOOFing.
Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.
Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.
How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.
Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.
Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.
Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.
How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.
Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.
29 June 2009
dispatches from the british road
The Wild Wild West. It always impresses me how the most fun and memorable travel experiences seem to pop out of the less glamorous aspects of a trip. After spending our Sunday at an eccentric environmental boondoggle known as the the Eden Project and then on a gorgeous hike along the coastline, we headed toward the hostel Stella had booked for the night. They had a firm check-in deadline of 9 pm, but we had plenty of time. I drove, Stella navigated. As the roads narrowed and other cars grew fewer and farther between, Stella's instructions became equally sparse. After a very long spell on the same winding road without a word from my copilot, I asked for an update on our progress, and Stella informed me that she was no longer sure we were going the right way. I pulled over and looked at the GoogleMaps printout with the directions to our hostel, and any doubts about Stella's navigational abilities quickly went away. I gazed in disbelief: almost a full page of instructions with no route numbers or street names at all, just turns and distances. The map portion was equally unhelpful: our route meandered through a cobweb of unnamed back roads. Only the occasional intersection was labeled with what I could only assume were the names of some very, very small villages. Where there are no street names or numbers, I quickly realized, Google is of little help.
There was only one way to connect the directions with real life. Each intersection we came upon had a signpost with the mileage to various villages, and some of the names matched up with places on the map. Thus, at the next junction, we picked the name of a village we knew was in the right direction and headed toward it. (I should stress that I'm using the word "village" only for want of a better term- often there was no sign of a church or pub, just a handful of country homes around a junction.) Many of the roads were only inches wider than our tiny rental car, and the overgrown brush on either side whipped the doors and side view mirrors. At times we encountered bogglingly steep grades and curves that had me praying no cars were coming in the other direction. Other stretches had tree cover dense enough virtually to block out the light of the late-evening sun. Eventually we came to a place called Portloe, with stunning views of the ocean far below. An elderly man with a hairy neck and long, caramelized fingernails was having a smoke outside of the local inn. The "No Vacancy" sign left me scratching my head as to who the hell takes their vacations out here. We asked him for directions, and within a minute I could tell he hadn't even heard of where we were going and was just interpreting our map for us. ("Take this road and follow your nose until you get to Portholland," he intoned in a vaguely Irish-sounding accent.) By this point it was past 8:30, so I extricated myself from the conversation as politely as possible, rolled up the window and continued on.
I don't know when it happened, but sometime before Portloe, we started having fun. It was a ridiculous, completely unexpected challenge. The scenery was amazing, and we laughed at our predicament and at the ludicrousness of tourism in this kind of place. We rolled into the Boswinger YHA hostel at 8:52 pm. "I was wondering if you were going to make it," said the teenager working the late shift at reception. I asked him if there was a pub around, and his smile told me that I was silly even to have entertained the idea. We did have a lovely walk, though, among some cows and the distant sound of surf and the fading light of a long summer evening:
Fun with Placenames. One of the fun little bonuses of being a Bay Stater in England is seeing the places that many of the towns in Massachusetts are named for. Up until now I hadn't noticed any underlying relationships within the names, except for the one-off correspondence between the two university towns named Cambridge. In Southwest England, though, I got a whiff of a pattern: I found Dartmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Truro, Barnstaple (yes, that's a "p"), and St. Dennis. If you're not from Massachusetts, or if you share my home state but aren't particularly observant, these are all the names of (or are close to the names of) towns on or near Cape Cod. Given the geographic similarities, I can certainly see the Cape reminding the early British colonists of Cornwall, so I doubt it's a coincidence.
And on an entirely random note, here's my nominee for the most deprived-sounding region of England: junction 14 on the M4 motorway leads to the towns of Hungerford and Wantage.
Wales. I had never been to Wales before, so Stella agreed to add it on at the end so that I could get my card punched. The Welsh language is alive and apparently much more viable than Cornish; the road signs turn bilingual as soon as you cross the border, and at least one radio station was utterly incomprehensible. Though the capital city of Cardiff is close to the border, we decided to pass on it due to concerns about traffic and testimonials to its relative unWelshness.
Instead, we headed for Caerphilly Castle, which is now right in the middle of a Cardiff suburb of the same name. When it was built in the 1200s, the castle was not only one of the world's largest, it was also at the cutting edge of castle technology, with a "concentric" design featuring multiple moats, walls, and battlements. The castle was built to defend Gilbert de Clare, an English lord, against Llewelyn the Last, the last Welshman to rule Wales. (Incidentally, Clare College in Cambridge is named for one of Gilbert's daughters, who saved the college from an early financial ruin.) Shifting alliance quickly destroyed the rationale for the castle's existence; it was left to rot and pillaged for stone until an early-twentieth-century restoration project. Here's a shot of the castle, with its very own leaning tower on the right side:
A Special Mention. I will conclude the tale of our road trip to the Wild West of Britain with an acknowledgement of another very special companion: Michael Jackson. The UK is also mourning the King of Pop (as is Vietnam, I'm sure), and it was a nostalgic treat to hear his old hits on the radio mixed in with the trashy dance music that generally fills the airwaves here. RIP, Jacko.
There was only one way to connect the directions with real life. Each intersection we came upon had a signpost with the mileage to various villages, and some of the names matched up with places on the map. Thus, at the next junction, we picked the name of a village we knew was in the right direction and headed toward it. (I should stress that I'm using the word "village" only for want of a better term- often there was no sign of a church or pub, just a handful of country homes around a junction.) Many of the roads were only inches wider than our tiny rental car, and the overgrown brush on either side whipped the doors and side view mirrors. At times we encountered bogglingly steep grades and curves that had me praying no cars were coming in the other direction. Other stretches had tree cover dense enough virtually to block out the light of the late-evening sun. Eventually we came to a place called Portloe, with stunning views of the ocean far below. An elderly man with a hairy neck and long, caramelized fingernails was having a smoke outside of the local inn. The "No Vacancy" sign left me scratching my head as to who the hell takes their vacations out here. We asked him for directions, and within a minute I could tell he hadn't even heard of where we were going and was just interpreting our map for us. ("Take this road and follow your nose until you get to Portholland," he intoned in a vaguely Irish-sounding accent.) By this point it was past 8:30, so I extricated myself from the conversation as politely as possible, rolled up the window and continued on.
I don't know when it happened, but sometime before Portloe, we started having fun. It was a ridiculous, completely unexpected challenge. The scenery was amazing, and we laughed at our predicament and at the ludicrousness of tourism in this kind of place. We rolled into the Boswinger YHA hostel at 8:52 pm. "I was wondering if you were going to make it," said the teenager working the late shift at reception. I asked him if there was a pub around, and his smile told me that I was silly even to have entertained the idea. We did have a lovely walk, though, among some cows and the distant sound of surf and the fading light of a long summer evening:
Fun with Placenames. One of the fun little bonuses of being a Bay Stater in England is seeing the places that many of the towns in Massachusetts are named for. Up until now I hadn't noticed any underlying relationships within the names, except for the one-off correspondence between the two university towns named Cambridge. In Southwest England, though, I got a whiff of a pattern: I found Dartmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Truro, Barnstaple (yes, that's a "p"), and St. Dennis. If you're not from Massachusetts, or if you share my home state but aren't particularly observant, these are all the names of (or are close to the names of) towns on or near Cape Cod. Given the geographic similarities, I can certainly see the Cape reminding the early British colonists of Cornwall, so I doubt it's a coincidence.
And on an entirely random note, here's my nominee for the most deprived-sounding region of England: junction 14 on the M4 motorway leads to the towns of Hungerford and Wantage.
Wales. I had never been to Wales before, so Stella agreed to add it on at the end so that I could get my card punched. The Welsh language is alive and apparently much more viable than Cornish; the road signs turn bilingual as soon as you cross the border, and at least one radio station was utterly incomprehensible. Though the capital city of Cardiff is close to the border, we decided to pass on it due to concerns about traffic and testimonials to its relative unWelshness.
Instead, we headed for Caerphilly Castle, which is now right in the middle of a Cardiff suburb of the same name. When it was built in the 1200s, the castle was not only one of the world's largest, it was also at the cutting edge of castle technology, with a "concentric" design featuring multiple moats, walls, and battlements. The castle was built to defend Gilbert de Clare, an English lord, against Llewelyn the Last, the last Welshman to rule Wales. (Incidentally, Clare College in Cambridge is named for one of Gilbert's daughters, who saved the college from an early financial ruin.) Shifting alliance quickly destroyed the rationale for the castle's existence; it was left to rot and pillaged for stone until an early-twentieth-century restoration project. Here's a shot of the castle, with its very own leaning tower on the right side:
A Special Mention. I will conclude the tale of our road trip to the Wild West of Britain with an acknowledgement of another very special companion: Michael Jackson. The UK is also mourning the King of Pop (as is Vietnam, I'm sure), and it was a nostalgic treat to hear his old hits on the radio mixed in with the trashy dance music that generally fills the airwaves here. RIP, Jacko.
27 June 2009
pirates and palm trees: this is england?
Penzance – I have made it to Penzance, and yes, there are pirates. I am at the end of Cornwall, the long finger of land that is Britain’s southwesternmost extremity, on a road trip with my regular traveling companion (and fellow WWOOfing enthusiast) Stella. We originally had a larger posse, but due to a confluence of events—including an unexpected rash of centipede hatchings that is keeping a biologist friend in lab for the weekend—it’s just the two of us. Cornwall has a reputation as a place apart from the rest of England, and there’s no better testimony to that fact the bizarre and alarming existence of palm trees here. And just as Salem, Massachusetts has embraced and profited from its witches, so has Cornwall’s largest town capitalized on its pirates. We unwittingly timed our arrival here with Mazey Day, Cornwall's traditional midsummer festival, and there are pirate costumes and skull-and-crossbones banners aplenty. The local pop music station goes by the name of Pirate FM.
Pirate antics aside, Cornwall is as serious about its regional identity as anywhere I have seen in the UK except for Scotland. The Cornish flag—a vaguely pirate-like white cross on a black field—is much more popular than the Union Jack, just as I saw far more of St. Andrew’s cross in Edinburgh. At the Mazey Day festival, vendors sell cards featuring doctored photos of Gordon Brown and Barack Obama holding oversized pasties, the region’s culinary gift to the rest of Britain. As we drove in toward Penzance, we heard a Pirate FM DJ interview a representative of the Cornish Language Partnership at its festival booth. The government-funded Partnership tries to preserve the Cornish language by offering courses in it, much like in parts of western Ireland where state subsidies are trying to keep Gaelic from disappearing. We stopped by their booth and picked up their free “Cornish for Beginners” brochure. Despite my enthusiasm for languages, this kind of enterprise strikes me as a fool’s errand. As my Cameroonian friends reminded me not long ago, people will talk the way they want to talk, and one can no more hold back that tide than command the waves to halt.
Speaking of waves, we also took an expedition out to Land’s End, the point where Britain finally surrenders to the Atlantic. Once you get past the tacky and overbuilt tourist facilities, it’s a marvelous landscape of cliffs, blue water, and rolling heath:
20 June 2009
quintessential cambridge experience #4: may week
The pinnacle of the social year at Cambridge is May Week-- which, as you should expect by now, is not in May and lasts considerably longer than a week. I've discussed the Cambridge institution of May Balls before, but here's a quick refresher, which I have lazily copied from my February 15 blog entry and pasted here:
"If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges... and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world."
I attended two May Balls this year, one at my own Emmanuel College and the other at Jesus College, which I chose because lots of my Development Studies classmates are there. The timing was less than ideal, as they fell on back-to-back nights, but I know many May Ball warriors with far more exacting schedules than mine. To get a sense of what's involved in one of these bacchanals, pour yourself a glass of champagne and enjoy this photographic tour of the Emma May Ball, with the appoximate time each picture was taken.
7:45 pm: Dinner. Many balls offer "dining tickets," which allow you to start off your evening with a multi-course meal a la Formal Hall, for about £30 extra. Despite the general consensus that dining tickets are not worth it, given the copious quantities of food at no extra charge for the rest of the night, I decided to indulge just for the Emma ball.
11:oo pm: Texas hold 'em. Casino games are a May Ball staple. There's no real money at stake; instead, everyone gets an allotment of chips at the door, and those who are successful at poker, routlette or blackjack can cash in their chips for chances to win prizes like plasma TVs or plane tickets. Our poker game coincided with a port tasting in the same room, and James (to my right in this picture) was close enough to the port table that he could refill our glasses simply by swiveling around, not even needing to stand up. Needless to say, the decline in my poker performance was steep and severe-- no plasma screen TV for me!
12:30 am: Cornershop. Any May Ball worth its salt has a main stage with bands playing throughout the night, plus performances elsewhere on the college grounds by comedians, hypnotists, a cappella groups, and dancers. As I discovered at Williams and in Anchorage, these smallish venues tend to bring in bands that are either struggling to make it or washed up. Headlining the Emma ball was a British-Indian group called Cornershop, who are well past their prime and still coasting on the strength of their 1997 hit "Brimful of Asha." These one-hit wonders made the mistake of not saving their one hit for the end of their set, so shortly after the "Asha" was empty, the tent where they were playing nearly was too.
1:15 am: Dodge 'ems. Another essential part of the May Ball experience is carnival games and rides, which range from bumper cars (called dodge 'ems in Britain) to strength tests to ferris wheels. I had a car to myself, and after a full-speed collision with a car containing two of my friends, my butt got enough air that even the dodge 'em guy looked impressed. During the round after us, a piece of the ceiling came off and landed on some poor fellow's head, bringing back memories of that awful Boston tunnel accident. Fortunately this guy was fine- he needed some help out of the car, but I'm pretty sure it was because was blotto before he got in, not because of a concussion.
2:30 am: Hookah. The Ball brought in our friendly neighborhood purveyors of hookah and created a magical little space to chill under the branches of an ancient tree. For the uninitiated, a hookah (often used interchangeably with shisha) is a Middle Eastern water pipe used to smoke flavored tobacco. You can't see most of the pipe in this picture, but Ev (on the left) has the stem in his hand, and in the foreground you can see the blocks of charcoal that heat up the tobacco. At this point in the night, having somewhere to sit and relax was crucial, and I think the key to a successful May Ball is having lots of activities for different energy levels.
4:00 am: Silent Disco. I can't say I fully understand the appeal of Silent Disco, but apparently it's all the rage in Europe. Instead of grooving to the tunes supplied by a DJ, you get a personal set of headphones, which provide a small selection of channels with different types of dance music. When a particularly catchy song played on one of the channels, I would lift my headphones for a moment and could hear scattered people singing along amidst the sound of shuffling bodies and shoes.
5:50 am: Assembling for the "Survivors' Picture." Every May Ball has a "Survivors' Picture" for those who make it all the way to the end. There is also usually some modest breakfast food; Emma had gooey chocolate croissants from the Italian cafe across the street. After the picture was taken I walked home, slept for a few hours, and got ready to do it all again the following night at Jesus College's May Ball. What a life!
"If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges... and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world."
I attended two May Balls this year, one at my own Emmanuel College and the other at Jesus College, which I chose because lots of my Development Studies classmates are there. The timing was less than ideal, as they fell on back-to-back nights, but I know many May Ball warriors with far more exacting schedules than mine. To get a sense of what's involved in one of these bacchanals, pour yourself a glass of champagne and enjoy this photographic tour of the Emma May Ball, with the appoximate time each picture was taken.
7:45 pm: Dinner. Many balls offer "dining tickets," which allow you to start off your evening with a multi-course meal a la Formal Hall, for about £30 extra. Despite the general consensus that dining tickets are not worth it, given the copious quantities of food at no extra charge for the rest of the night, I decided to indulge just for the Emma ball.
11:oo pm: Texas hold 'em. Casino games are a May Ball staple. There's no real money at stake; instead, everyone gets an allotment of chips at the door, and those who are successful at poker, routlette or blackjack can cash in their chips for chances to win prizes like plasma TVs or plane tickets. Our poker game coincided with a port tasting in the same room, and James (to my right in this picture) was close enough to the port table that he could refill our glasses simply by swiveling around, not even needing to stand up. Needless to say, the decline in my poker performance was steep and severe-- no plasma screen TV for me!
12:30 am: Cornershop. Any May Ball worth its salt has a main stage with bands playing throughout the night, plus performances elsewhere on the college grounds by comedians, hypnotists, a cappella groups, and dancers. As I discovered at Williams and in Anchorage, these smallish venues tend to bring in bands that are either struggling to make it or washed up. Headlining the Emma ball was a British-Indian group called Cornershop, who are well past their prime and still coasting on the strength of their 1997 hit "Brimful of Asha." These one-hit wonders made the mistake of not saving their one hit for the end of their set, so shortly after the "Asha" was empty, the tent where they were playing nearly was too.
1:15 am: Dodge 'ems. Another essential part of the May Ball experience is carnival games and rides, which range from bumper cars (called dodge 'ems in Britain) to strength tests to ferris wheels. I had a car to myself, and after a full-speed collision with a car containing two of my friends, my butt got enough air that even the dodge 'em guy looked impressed. During the round after us, a piece of the ceiling came off and landed on some poor fellow's head, bringing back memories of that awful Boston tunnel accident. Fortunately this guy was fine- he needed some help out of the car, but I'm pretty sure it was because was blotto before he got in, not because of a concussion.
2:30 am: Hookah. The Ball brought in our friendly neighborhood purveyors of hookah and created a magical little space to chill under the branches of an ancient tree. For the uninitiated, a hookah (often used interchangeably with shisha) is a Middle Eastern water pipe used to smoke flavored tobacco. You can't see most of the pipe in this picture, but Ev (on the left) has the stem in his hand, and in the foreground you can see the blocks of charcoal that heat up the tobacco. At this point in the night, having somewhere to sit and relax was crucial, and I think the key to a successful May Ball is having lots of activities for different energy levels.
4:00 am: Silent Disco. I can't say I fully understand the appeal of Silent Disco, but apparently it's all the rage in Europe. Instead of grooving to the tunes supplied by a DJ, you get a personal set of headphones, which provide a small selection of channels with different types of dance music. When a particularly catchy song played on one of the channels, I would lift my headphones for a moment and could hear scattered people singing along amidst the sound of shuffling bodies and shoes.
5:50 am: Assembling for the "Survivors' Picture." Every May Ball has a "Survivors' Picture" for those who make it all the way to the end. There is also usually some modest breakfast food; Emma had gooey chocolate croissants from the Italian cafe across the street. After the picture was taken I walked home, slept for a few hours, and got ready to do it all again the following night at Jesus College's May Ball. What a life!
15 June 2009
quintessential cambridge experience #3: bumps
This time of year is heavy with ritual in Cambridge, and among the finest of those rituals is May Bumps, a multi-day series of boat races on the River Cam. Every college at the University fields boat crews, as do the medical, veterinary and theological schools and Anglia Ruskin University. Both terms, “May” and “Bumps,” need some clarification. They “May” part is easier to explain: as in the case of May Balls, it’s a relic of an earlier time when the academic year was structured differently.
“Bumps” refers to the way in which boats—each with eight rowers plus a coxswain, who steers and yells out commands—advance in the rankings over other boats. The races are not timed, and as will be explained momentarily, many of the boats in a given division will not even race the entire course. In the Bumps, success is only about rank, and the way you improve your standing is to overtake (“bump”) the boat ahead of you. Roughly 18 boats race at a time, and prior to the starting cannon they line up in the order determined by the previous day’s rankings (or previous year’s, if it’s the first day), with about 1½ boat lengths of space between each one. If one boat bumps another, their race is over; both pull over to the banks to let the rest of their division go by, and on the next day’s race they swap places in the order. It’s also possible to “overbump”—if the 2nd boat bumps the 3rd, and then the 4th boat bumps the 1st, the latter two will swap places during the next go-around. At the end of several days of racing, the top boats in the top men’s and women’s divisions are crowned as “Heads of the River.” However, any boat can earn a bit of glory by winning “oars,” awarded to crews that bump other boats on four consecutive days.
The official May Bumps program claims that 15% of the University participates. It sounded unrealistically high at first blush, but then again it seems plausible that 15% of my friends and classmates are rowers. Though it is a great Cambridge experience, I never felt especially tempted to join a boat crew, perhaps because it’s famously demanding on participants’ schedules and sleep-wake cycles. I really enjoyed watching the races, though—a lot of people come out, and it’s a nice atmosphere. Here are a couple of the Emma boat crews with MCR members:
The Men's II boat- MCR friends Kevin and Pat are the two rowers on the far left.
The 4th-ranked Women's I boat. Fellow Ephs Catherine and Maggie are 2nd and 4th from right.
13 June 2009
i meet bill gates
Bill and Melinda Gates were in Cambridge yesterday to receive honorary degrees, and they generously gave most of their morning to a Q and A session with about 200 Gates Scholars. The whole affair was organized almost down to the minute and had the feel of a protocol-laden diplomatic reception. Prior to the Q and A session, those of us on the Scholars Council were lucky enough to have about 15 minutes of mingling time with the Gates in a separate room. At one point we were standing in two circles, one around each of them, and I was in a position to hear both conversations. Bill was holding forth to me and a few others about the most effective treatments for malaria, while Melinda asked questions about life at Cambridge and whether we identified more with our colleges or as Gates Scholars. I thought it was an interesting testimony to their yin-and-yang approach to the foundation, which would come out in the Q and A session to come. Then there was a group photo, which I'll hopefully be able to post once I get it (we weren't allowed to bring our own cameras to any part of the event).
I joked to one of the Council members that it would probably be the only time in most of our lives when we would cause a hush to fall over a crowded room, but that's exactly what happened as we took our seats at the front of the hall a few minutes before the Gates arrived. They both gave a brief introduction to the work of their foundation, with Melinda expanding on their philosophy that "all lives have equal value" and Bill giving a rather abstract, Buffett-esque reflection on capitalism, wealth, and the failure of the market to account for the interests of the poor in medical research. Then they began taking pre-selected questions from Scholars in the audience. The first had to do with how Bill identifies which new technologies have the most promise. With a hat tip to luck, uncertainty and randomness, he predicted that robotics will be the next big, lifestyle-changing technological frontier.
The most interesting part of the exchange, though, was on the subject of their philanthropic work. Somebody noted that Warren Buffett wants his donation to the Gates foundation to be entirely spent down within 10 years of his death, and asked if the Gates would like their Foundation to live perpetually on an endowment or be spent down in the same way. Melinda was very adamant that they don't want the Foundation to live forever, in part because they don't know if their priorities will still make sense in a hundred years time. She then delivered the zinger of the day: "who knows what the big problems will be in 100 years-- maybe it will be climate change, maybe it'll be something the robots are doing."
Bill Gates strikes me as a hardcore utilitarian, and he said the new initiatives they consider is evaluated against the opportunity cost of their bread-and-butter vaccination work, which saves lives at the rate of about $2,000 per person. Of course, that spurred a lot of later discussion--mostly of the lighthearted-but-with-sober-undertones variety--among the Scholars about the tradeoff between funding our studies and saving children's lives. My living allowance alone, about £9,000, could have saved 6 or 7 kids, to say nothing of my tuition and fees. Of course, this kind of brutal analysis can be applied to just about anything, and you can very quickly destroy the rationale for everything you use money for that's not writing a check to UNICEF. (This is part of the reason I'm not a utilitarian.) I'm not convinced that Bill Gates personally believes the scholarship to be a good tradeoff, and he conceded that it's about the only thing that they do without a quantifiable impact.
It also occurred to me that the Gates Foundation is perhaps the closest thing a large, rich-world institution can get to being a "Searcher" in the Bill Easterly terminology of Planners vs. Searchers. Beyond keeping to their focal areas of global health, development and education, I really don't sense any methodological or ideological commitments. Melinda spoke to the Foundation's willingness to make risky bets, seemingly referencing a remark she made earlier about how Bill "bet the company" on Windows. (She worked for Microsoft before they were married.) One of the lesser-known aspects of their philanthropy is $100,000 micro-grants to scientists pursuing unproven avenues of research, which allow those scientists to see if the research is promising enough to seek bigger funding from other sources. According to Bill, if even one of their reviewers rates a research proposal as his or her favorite it gets funded, no questions asked. I think they are genuinely focused on what works, constantly on the lookout for innovative new ideas, and guided by the evidence. Bill Gates' thought process may sound rather bloodless, but it sure as hell works: the ruthless discipline that made him the world's richest man is now being turned against the problems facing the world's poor. If I were malaria, I'd be scared.
I joked to one of the Council members that it would probably be the only time in most of our lives when we would cause a hush to fall over a crowded room, but that's exactly what happened as we took our seats at the front of the hall a few minutes before the Gates arrived. They both gave a brief introduction to the work of their foundation, with Melinda expanding on their philosophy that "all lives have equal value" and Bill giving a rather abstract, Buffett-esque reflection on capitalism, wealth, and the failure of the market to account for the interests of the poor in medical research. Then they began taking pre-selected questions from Scholars in the audience. The first had to do with how Bill identifies which new technologies have the most promise. With a hat tip to luck, uncertainty and randomness, he predicted that robotics will be the next big, lifestyle-changing technological frontier.
The most interesting part of the exchange, though, was on the subject of their philanthropic work. Somebody noted that Warren Buffett wants his donation to the Gates foundation to be entirely spent down within 10 years of his death, and asked if the Gates would like their Foundation to live perpetually on an endowment or be spent down in the same way. Melinda was very adamant that they don't want the Foundation to live forever, in part because they don't know if their priorities will still make sense in a hundred years time. She then delivered the zinger of the day: "who knows what the big problems will be in 100 years-- maybe it will be climate change, maybe it'll be something the robots are doing."
Bill Gates strikes me as a hardcore utilitarian, and he said the new initiatives they consider is evaluated against the opportunity cost of their bread-and-butter vaccination work, which saves lives at the rate of about $2,000 per person. Of course, that spurred a lot of later discussion--mostly of the lighthearted-but-with-sober-undertones variety--among the Scholars about the tradeoff between funding our studies and saving children's lives. My living allowance alone, about £9,000, could have saved 6 or 7 kids, to say nothing of my tuition and fees. Of course, this kind of brutal analysis can be applied to just about anything, and you can very quickly destroy the rationale for everything you use money for that's not writing a check to UNICEF. (This is part of the reason I'm not a utilitarian.) I'm not convinced that Bill Gates personally believes the scholarship to be a good tradeoff, and he conceded that it's about the only thing that they do without a quantifiable impact.
It also occurred to me that the Gates Foundation is perhaps the closest thing a large, rich-world institution can get to being a "Searcher" in the Bill Easterly terminology of Planners vs. Searchers. Beyond keeping to their focal areas of global health, development and education, I really don't sense any methodological or ideological commitments. Melinda spoke to the Foundation's willingness to make risky bets, seemingly referencing a remark she made earlier about how Bill "bet the company" on Windows. (She worked for Microsoft before they were married.) One of the lesser-known aspects of their philanthropy is $100,000 micro-grants to scientists pursuing unproven avenues of research, which allow those scientists to see if the research is promising enough to seek bigger funding from other sources. According to Bill, if even one of their reviewers rates a research proposal as his or her favorite it gets funded, no questions asked. I think they are genuinely focused on what works, constantly on the lookout for innovative new ideas, and guided by the evidence. Bill Gates' thought process may sound rather bloodless, but it sure as hell works: the ruthless discipline that made him the world's richest man is now being turned against the problems facing the world's poor. If I were malaria, I'd be scared.
04 June 2009
easter term dispatches
I meet Bill Gates Sr. Bill Gates père made his annual trip to Cambridge this week and addressed 140+ Gates Scholars following (surprise!) a big dinner at Wolfson College. He’s on the left in the slightly blurry shot above, along with the president of the Gates Scholars Society and the Vice-Chancellor of the University. (As an aside, the “Vice” part of her title is just a technicality; the official Chancellor is Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, who has little involvement with the day-to-day administration of the University.)
The members of the Scholars Council were also invited to a luncheon with Mr. Gates and the other Trustees, but the seating arrangement and the late arrival of the VIPs conspired to prevent me from actually talking to him. Fortunately, he also attended a symposium in the Gates Room where a few scholars presented their research, and I managed to snag about 45 seconds of conversation during one of the breaks. It was about enough time to thank him for the note he sent me back in November and ask him a question about the Gates Foundation’s advocacy work in DC. We were standing, somewhat awkwardly, near one of the Gates Room’s two Macs. If it ever bothered him, he must be over it by now. He’s a giant of a man—I had to tilt my head upward at a pretty significant angle to make conversation—and at 83, he shows no sign of slowing down his activities with his son’s philanthropies.
The formal hall scoreboard. Following the brouhaha over my post about Cameroonian English, it was nice to see one of my blog entries get picked up in a friendlier environment. I just discovered that my “Ode to Formal Hall” was excerpted several months back on this website, which advocates for greater adoption of Oxbridge-style college systems at universities.
At the time I wrote that ode I had six college formals under my belt, and though I never had a numeral target, I’m proud (??) to report that I now have 18 conquests: Emmanuel, Peterhouse, Churchill, Christ’s, Trinity, Newnham, Homerton, Hughes Hall, Pembroke, Queen’s, Robinson, Magdalene, St. John’s, Gonville and Caius, Jesus, Darwin, Corpus Christi, and Selwyn. An MBA friend of mine is close to hitting up all 31 this year, but I don't know of anyone else who's in the same range.
During the above-mentioned luncheon with Bill Gates Sr., I was seated next to the provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, who is basically the Cambridge-based CEO of the Trust. He also happens to be the president of Wolfson College, where the larger dinner with Bill Gates Sr. was held. He’s retiring next year and told me that “you have no idea how disconcerting it is to see your job advertised in the newspaper.” At one point during lunch the topic of my proclivity for formal halls came up, and I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if the Wolfson dinner should count, as it wasn’t technically a college formal. He told me, with a chuckle, that he didn’t think it should count and that I would have to come back another time. So I guess I have to take a ruling from the president of the college concerned as definitive, and the scoreboard remains at 18.
The members of the Scholars Council were also invited to a luncheon with Mr. Gates and the other Trustees, but the seating arrangement and the late arrival of the VIPs conspired to prevent me from actually talking to him. Fortunately, he also attended a symposium in the Gates Room where a few scholars presented their research, and I managed to snag about 45 seconds of conversation during one of the breaks. It was about enough time to thank him for the note he sent me back in November and ask him a question about the Gates Foundation’s advocacy work in DC. We were standing, somewhat awkwardly, near one of the Gates Room’s two Macs. If it ever bothered him, he must be over it by now. He’s a giant of a man—I had to tilt my head upward at a pretty significant angle to make conversation—and at 83, he shows no sign of slowing down his activities with his son’s philanthropies.
The formal hall scoreboard. Following the brouhaha over my post about Cameroonian English, it was nice to see one of my blog entries get picked up in a friendlier environment. I just discovered that my “Ode to Formal Hall” was excerpted several months back on this website, which advocates for greater adoption of Oxbridge-style college systems at universities.
At the time I wrote that ode I had six college formals under my belt, and though I never had a numeral target, I’m proud (??) to report that I now have 18 conquests: Emmanuel, Peterhouse, Churchill, Christ’s, Trinity, Newnham, Homerton, Hughes Hall, Pembroke, Queen’s, Robinson, Magdalene, St. John’s, Gonville and Caius, Jesus, Darwin, Corpus Christi, and Selwyn. An MBA friend of mine is close to hitting up all 31 this year, but I don't know of anyone else who's in the same range.
During the above-mentioned luncheon with Bill Gates Sr., I was seated next to the provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, who is basically the Cambridge-based CEO of the Trust. He also happens to be the president of Wolfson College, where the larger dinner with Bill Gates Sr. was held. He’s retiring next year and told me that “you have no idea how disconcerting it is to see your job advertised in the newspaper.” At one point during lunch the topic of my proclivity for formal halls came up, and I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if the Wolfson dinner should count, as it wasn’t technically a college formal. He told me, with a chuckle, that he didn’t think it should count and that I would have to come back another time. So I guess I have to take a ruling from the president of the college concerned as definitive, and the scoreboard remains at 18.
28 May 2009
i am a cliché: an essay in two parts
Part 1: WWOOFing. "Man, we are such clichés!" proclaimed an e-mail I received from my friend Stella, who was a member of TeamParis and ¡TeamSevilla! She was referencing this New York Times article about "a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer." She and I are both contemplating spending a few extra weeks in Europe after we leave Cambridge under a program called WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which enables volunteers to work on organic farms in exchange for free room and board. I currently have WWOOFing plans in the works for Scotland and France in July. I'm motivated less by disdain for industrial agriculture than by the opportunity to stay in Europe longer on a small budget, to practice my language skills and experience these countries outside of tourist hubs, and to live out my longstanding Tolstoy-influenced farmer fantasy. "If WWOOFing in America has 'as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe,'" Stella observed, quoting the article, "then we must be getting cachet up the wazoo for doing it in Europe!"
That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.
Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.
Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.
You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?
If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.
That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.
Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.
Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.
You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?
If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.
24 May 2009
proof i was in cameroon!
I'm happy to report that the photographic record of my trip to Cameroon wasn't completely lost in the mugging on that last night in Douala. As I mentioned, Kate didn't really take any pictures (with the exception of a couple post-mugging shots at our guesthouse), but Lisa, a Peace Corps volunteer and one of our Mt. Cameroon hiking companions, did get some group pictures during our trek. I shamelessly copied them from Facebook, so here you go: rare, long-lost photographic evidence of my time in Africa:
Me, Kate, Elyse, and Lisa, pre-climb in the town of Buea. Mt. Cameroon, half covered in clouds, is behind us.
Day 1, partway up, post-rainstorm. Buea is visible in the background, and on a clear day you could see Douala in the distance off the top-left corner of the picture. We did see the city lights from our first cabin.
The team at 4,095 meters! Kate had originally wanted to perform one of her signature cartweels to celebrate at the top, but the small space at the summit, preciptious drops on all sides, high winds, and stupefying lack of oxygen recommended otherwise.
Me, Kate, Elyse, and Lisa, pre-climb in the town of Buea. Mt. Cameroon, half covered in clouds, is behind us.
Day 1, partway up, post-rainstorm. Buea is visible in the background, and on a clear day you could see Douala in the distance off the top-left corner of the picture. We did see the city lights from our first cabin.
The team at 4,095 meters! Kate had originally wanted to perform one of her signature cartweels to celebrate at the top, but the small space at the summit, preciptious drops on all sides, high winds, and stupefying lack of oxygen recommended otherwise.
19 May 2009
here come the agnostics!
Anytime I walk into a bookstore, there are three sections that have a kind of gravitational pull on me: travel, politics, and religion. (Sorry, literature. Sorry, science.) The travel section is always a happy place, but I've found myself increasingly turned off by the shrill debates in the latter two sections. You can tell just from perusing the covers that the politics section consists mainly of two factions of people calling each other stupid--think of the Ann Coulters vs. the Al Frankens. In the religion section, outside of the study Bibles and scores of fluffy spiritual books, you have more of the same. On the one side we have the so-called "new atheists," headlined by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and on the other side, we have a new cottage industry of pro-religion writers proclaiming the stupidity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. There's always been lots of money in God; now there's money in godlessness too.
Nowadays if people ask me about my religious stance, I usually describe myself as "culturally Catholic and metaphysically agnostic," meaning that I still identify with my Catholic upbringing but can't honestly sign onto belief in anything supernatural. Even in my uber-Catholic days, I think it was always the ethical dimension-- the social Gospel, Dorothy Day, St. Francis -- that kept me going. And let's be honest, the politicization of Christianity by the Republican Party has put a real bad taste in my mouth. And I'm the first person to point out that the fact that hypocritical politicians want to legislate sexual morality while approving government-administered torture has no bearing on whether God exists or Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead.
That said, I don't put much stock in the "new atheist" crowd either. The main complaint of Harris and Hitchens, at least, seems to be that religion makes people do awful things to each other: see 9/11, the Inquisition, etc. But I think if human beings had evolved to be irreligious instead of religious, we would still be killing and be doing bad things to each other. We would just find non-religious justifications for doing so. (When I made this point to my brother, he directed me to this awesome South Park segment. Other than some blood & guts there's nothing too offensive...unless you happen to be an atheist who takes him/herself far too seriously.) The real problem, I think, is the human lust for power, property, and control; religion has just served as the most convenient justifying idiom for most of history.
So when I wandered into the Cambridge Borders recently, I was amazed to find a third strand emerging in the debate: the agnostics are in on this book-writing thing too! Books such as In God We Doubt and After Atheism are offering up a fascinating propsect: agnosticism as a defensible position, rather than a refuge for those wishy-washy folks who won't commit one way or the other. I've often felt like religious and irreligious folks alike treat me as if where I am now is just some kind of "phase" or transitional state, and before too long I'm going to come down on one side (theirs, naturally) over the other.
But what if agnosticism can be a home, and not just a hotel room? In this column Mark Vernon, the author of After Atheism, proposes that one can be a "principled agnostic." He makes the distinction between (i) "whatever" agnostics, who don't really care for the debate; (ii)atheistically-inclined agnostics, who tend toward nonbelief but think we can't know for sure that God doesn't exist; and (iii) religiously-inclined agnostics, who don't believe that settling the God question is within our capabilities but see something of value in religiosity. Vernon thinks that "principled agnosticism" makes the most sense for those in camp (iii); personally, I tend to waver between (ii) and (iii). Unlike Vernon, I don't think religion deserves credit for Bach or benevolence any more than it deserves blame for terrorism and war.
I doubt that the "principled agnostics" are going to win lots of converts. But perhaps they can rescue us from this inane debate between the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens camp and their critics? Science only knows.
Nowadays if people ask me about my religious stance, I usually describe myself as "culturally Catholic and metaphysically agnostic," meaning that I still identify with my Catholic upbringing but can't honestly sign onto belief in anything supernatural. Even in my uber-Catholic days, I think it was always the ethical dimension-- the social Gospel, Dorothy Day, St. Francis -- that kept me going. And let's be honest, the politicization of Christianity by the Republican Party has put a real bad taste in my mouth. And I'm the first person to point out that the fact that hypocritical politicians want to legislate sexual morality while approving government-administered torture has no bearing on whether God exists or Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead.
That said, I don't put much stock in the "new atheist" crowd either. The main complaint of Harris and Hitchens, at least, seems to be that religion makes people do awful things to each other: see 9/11, the Inquisition, etc. But I think if human beings had evolved to be irreligious instead of religious, we would still be killing and be doing bad things to each other. We would just find non-religious justifications for doing so. (When I made this point to my brother, he directed me to this awesome South Park segment. Other than some blood & guts there's nothing too offensive...unless you happen to be an atheist who takes him/herself far too seriously.) The real problem, I think, is the human lust for power, property, and control; religion has just served as the most convenient justifying idiom for most of history.
So when I wandered into the Cambridge Borders recently, I was amazed to find a third strand emerging in the debate: the agnostics are in on this book-writing thing too! Books such as In God We Doubt and After Atheism are offering up a fascinating propsect: agnosticism as a defensible position, rather than a refuge for those wishy-washy folks who won't commit one way or the other. I've often felt like religious and irreligious folks alike treat me as if where I am now is just some kind of "phase" or transitional state, and before too long I'm going to come down on one side (theirs, naturally) over the other.
But what if agnosticism can be a home, and not just a hotel room? In this column Mark Vernon, the author of After Atheism, proposes that one can be a "principled agnostic." He makes the distinction between (i) "whatever" agnostics, who don't really care for the debate; (ii)atheistically-inclined agnostics, who tend toward nonbelief but think we can't know for sure that God doesn't exist; and (iii) religiously-inclined agnostics, who don't believe that settling the God question is within our capabilities but see something of value in religiosity. Vernon thinks that "principled agnosticism" makes the most sense for those in camp (iii); personally, I tend to waver between (ii) and (iii). Unlike Vernon, I don't think religion deserves credit for Bach or benevolence any more than it deserves blame for terrorism and war.
I doubt that the "principled agnostics" are going to win lots of converts. But perhaps they can rescue us from this inane debate between the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens camp and their critics? Science only knows.
12 May 2009
how they learn us at cambridge
Way back in early October, 54 bright-eyed Development Studies grad students packed into a seminar room to meet and mingle with our new professors and classmates. I don't remember much of what the profs said during their remarks, but I do distinctly remember an acerbic lecturer warning us not to expect any "spoon-feeding." I doubt anyone was expecting to be spoon-fed, and his comment might put a harsher spin on the teaching system here than it deserves. However, I've come to realize that the spirit of his remark runs through many of the things that make Cambridge different from my experience of higher education in the U.S. It would be an exaggeration to say there's a "sink or swim" mentality, and the atmosphere is collegial, but it's true that you're on your own here to a much larger extent than I've seen back on my side of the pond.
Back-loading. There's tons of variation among courses--as I will discuss later--but in most cases it's possible to go an alarmingly long time in Cambridge without doing any work. Most of the Development Studies classes here are year-long, and I didn't submit a single thing that counted for a grade until January. One of my classes is evaluated solely by means of a 3-hour exam later this month. (No pressure or anything!)
The philosophy seems to be that as a student, you're responsible for disciplining yourself to work even when deadlines are very distant. This has suited me just fine, as I can generally keep my procrastination under control, but for the undisciplined it poses major problems. Largely gone are concepts like midterms or problem sets, which provide incentives to study consistently and, if needed, a signal that one needs to ratchet things up before it's too late. We do have unassessed essays for some classes, with "supervisions" conducted by PhD students, but these do not necessarily resemble the work on which we'll later be evaluated. During a recent round of gathering student opinions in my capacity as student rep, the lack of feedback was the new #1 complaint, especially among non-native English speakers. To be fair, though, I'm not sure how much of this is a function of Cambridge vs. the U.S. and how much is a function of grad school vs. undergrad.
Resources. One of the starkest differences between small, uber-friendly Williams and big, impersonal Cambridge is the availability and ease of access of academic resources. It takes a certain amount of forethought, savvy, and competitive instinct to get the books you need here. At Williams I remember getting reading lists for my classes, buying the appropriate books at the bookstore, and receiving chapter- or article-length readings bundled together in course packets. Nobody seems to buy their books here--it would break the bank if I tried--and we don't get those handily photocopied course packets. You get the reading list, which often contains more readings than any human being could possibly digest in a year, and then it's you and the library.
Or should I say, libraries. This year I have used the Mill Lane library (Development Studies and a few related fields are housed there), my college library, my friends' college libraries (thanks guys!), the economics library, the geography library, the law library, and (cue dread-inspiring music) the University Library. The absurd monstrosity-- or is it a monstrous absurdity?-- that is the UL probably deserves an entry of its own sometime, so I won't get into detail now, but let's just say that any day in which I learn that a needed book is only at the UL and can only be used in the UL reading room is a sad, sad day.
I should probably mention at this point that there is little to no communication between the professors assigning the readings and the librarians selecting, buying, and stocking the books. The Mill Lane Library by now has many copies of the most sought-after Development Studies books, and usually one copy is not allowed to be checked out, so if you come after the stampede you're not completely screwed. Cambridge is huge enough that the risk of a book on a reading list being completely unavailable are practically nil. But you might have to bike across town to an obscure departmental library, or get your bud to check it out from his college.
Of course, there are mitigating factors and coping strategies. Nobody does all the reading, and for essay-based classes you can do well by intensively reading on your essay topics and getting a glancing familiarity with the other pockets of literature. For exam-based classes, any sane person gets in a reading group to benefit from some division of labor.
Anonymity, Accountability, and Feedback. My experience in the U.S. was that professors generally know the identity of the students whose essays and exams they were grading, and professors have a huge amount of discretion in assigning grades. The system could hardly be more different here. We submit all of our work anonymously, marked only with an individual student number; each exam or paper is graded (or "marked" as they say) by the instructor and a second "reader" whose identity we never know. All marking happens at the end of the year, so in many cases several months elapse between submission deadlines and marking. Somewhat irritatingly, we don't even get marks on individual exams or essays--students receive only an average mark for each class. And to top all of that off, all of the exam and essay questions, student responses, and marks for the entire year get shipped off to be scrutinized by an "external examiner" at a peer institution, such as a Development Studies program at Oxford or Sussex.
I can see the merits of this system: more objective evaluation of student work, greater uniformity of standards, external accountability for the department. Because this system severs the link between the professor-student relationship and grading, I imagine there's less grade inflation here, though I've never really been persuaded that grade inflation is such a big problem. Yet I think there's probably too little mercy mixed in with the justice. Sometimes a professor might have knowledge of mitigating circumstances, and I don't know that the occasional bit of accommodation for that is always a bad thing. The system also seems to suffer from a gaping lack of transparency--which is a troubling hallmark of this university at every level.
Variation among courses. There are huge differences in work routine and lifestyle between PhD students (who often have something that approximates a 9-to-5 job) and MPhil students such as yours truly. There is also tremendous variation between MPhil courses. Some require dissertations; some don't. Some treat the dissertation like a year-long class; others block off a few months at the end just for dissertation writing. Some are wrapped up by June; others go to September. Some have year-long classes; others have different modules each term.
The upshot is that there is much less of a shared academic experience across different programs. There have been times when I've been crazed with deadlines and some of my friends have been sitting pretty, and vice versa. On balance, I think this kind of variation is probably a good thing--let a thousand flowers bloom. I do think it militates against a broader community spirit, though. It's one of the reasons why Cambridge occasionally makes me think of the way some of my friends who have lived there describe New York City: vibrant and active, with limitless social activities, but with a strong undertow of isolation.
I don't know how all of this sounds to outsiders, and I'm sure a lot of what I've described seems crazy. Now that I've been here for a while, I realize more and more that in a multilayered, complicated and crusty place like Cambridge, there is often a strange rationality to the absurdity. If you bang your head against the wall enough, you can reach a point of acceptance and even appreciation for the odd ways of Cambridge.
Back-loading. There's tons of variation among courses--as I will discuss later--but in most cases it's possible to go an alarmingly long time in Cambridge without doing any work. Most of the Development Studies classes here are year-long, and I didn't submit a single thing that counted for a grade until January. One of my classes is evaluated solely by means of a 3-hour exam later this month. (No pressure or anything!)
The philosophy seems to be that as a student, you're responsible for disciplining yourself to work even when deadlines are very distant. This has suited me just fine, as I can generally keep my procrastination under control, but for the undisciplined it poses major problems. Largely gone are concepts like midterms or problem sets, which provide incentives to study consistently and, if needed, a signal that one needs to ratchet things up before it's too late. We do have unassessed essays for some classes, with "supervisions" conducted by PhD students, but these do not necessarily resemble the work on which we'll later be evaluated. During a recent round of gathering student opinions in my capacity as student rep, the lack of feedback was the new #1 complaint, especially among non-native English speakers. To be fair, though, I'm not sure how much of this is a function of Cambridge vs. the U.S. and how much is a function of grad school vs. undergrad.
Resources. One of the starkest differences between small, uber-friendly Williams and big, impersonal Cambridge is the availability and ease of access of academic resources. It takes a certain amount of forethought, savvy, and competitive instinct to get the books you need here. At Williams I remember getting reading lists for my classes, buying the appropriate books at the bookstore, and receiving chapter- or article-length readings bundled together in course packets. Nobody seems to buy their books here--it would break the bank if I tried--and we don't get those handily photocopied course packets. You get the reading list, which often contains more readings than any human being could possibly digest in a year, and then it's you and the library.
Or should I say, libraries. This year I have used the Mill Lane library (Development Studies and a few related fields are housed there), my college library, my friends' college libraries (thanks guys!), the economics library, the geography library, the law library, and (cue dread-inspiring music) the University Library. The absurd monstrosity-- or is it a monstrous absurdity?-- that is the UL probably deserves an entry of its own sometime, so I won't get into detail now, but let's just say that any day in which I learn that a needed book is only at the UL and can only be used in the UL reading room is a sad, sad day.
I should probably mention at this point that there is little to no communication between the professors assigning the readings and the librarians selecting, buying, and stocking the books. The Mill Lane Library by now has many copies of the most sought-after Development Studies books, and usually one copy is not allowed to be checked out, so if you come after the stampede you're not completely screwed. Cambridge is huge enough that the risk of a book on a reading list being completely unavailable are practically nil. But you might have to bike across town to an obscure departmental library, or get your bud to check it out from his college.
Of course, there are mitigating factors and coping strategies. Nobody does all the reading, and for essay-based classes you can do well by intensively reading on your essay topics and getting a glancing familiarity with the other pockets of literature. For exam-based classes, any sane person gets in a reading group to benefit from some division of labor.
Anonymity, Accountability, and Feedback. My experience in the U.S. was that professors generally know the identity of the students whose essays and exams they were grading, and professors have a huge amount of discretion in assigning grades. The system could hardly be more different here. We submit all of our work anonymously, marked only with an individual student number; each exam or paper is graded (or "marked" as they say) by the instructor and a second "reader" whose identity we never know. All marking happens at the end of the year, so in many cases several months elapse between submission deadlines and marking. Somewhat irritatingly, we don't even get marks on individual exams or essays--students receive only an average mark for each class. And to top all of that off, all of the exam and essay questions, student responses, and marks for the entire year get shipped off to be scrutinized by an "external examiner" at a peer institution, such as a Development Studies program at Oxford or Sussex.
I can see the merits of this system: more objective evaluation of student work, greater uniformity of standards, external accountability for the department. Because this system severs the link between the professor-student relationship and grading, I imagine there's less grade inflation here, though I've never really been persuaded that grade inflation is such a big problem. Yet I think there's probably too little mercy mixed in with the justice. Sometimes a professor might have knowledge of mitigating circumstances, and I don't know that the occasional bit of accommodation for that is always a bad thing. The system also seems to suffer from a gaping lack of transparency--which is a troubling hallmark of this university at every level.
Variation among courses. There are huge differences in work routine and lifestyle between PhD students (who often have something that approximates a 9-to-5 job) and MPhil students such as yours truly. There is also tremendous variation between MPhil courses. Some require dissertations; some don't. Some treat the dissertation like a year-long class; others block off a few months at the end just for dissertation writing. Some are wrapped up by June; others go to September. Some have year-long classes; others have different modules each term.
The upshot is that there is much less of a shared academic experience across different programs. There have been times when I've been crazed with deadlines and some of my friends have been sitting pretty, and vice versa. On balance, I think this kind of variation is probably a good thing--let a thousand flowers bloom. I do think it militates against a broader community spirit, though. It's one of the reasons why Cambridge occasionally makes me think of the way some of my friends who have lived there describe New York City: vibrant and active, with limitless social activities, but with a strong undertow of isolation.
I don't know how all of this sounds to outsiders, and I'm sure a lot of what I've described seems crazy. Now that I've been here for a while, I realize more and more that in a multilayered, complicated and crusty place like Cambridge, there is often a strange rationality to the absurdity. If you bang your head against the wall enough, you can reach a point of acceptance and even appreciation for the odd ways of Cambridge.
05 May 2009
life, smørrebrød, and the pursuit of happiness in denmark
Some pictures and musings from my time in Denmark with my good Gates friend Talia. It was likely my last weekend jaunt to a new country, sad to say, as I reach the limits of Papa Gates' munificence.
Danish Patriotism. From my limited pre-trip reading about Denmark, I learned about the Danes' remarkable levels of patriotism, marked above all by gratuitous flag-waving. The Danes did not disappoint. As we exited customs and immigration at the Copenhagen airport, there was a throng of people awaiting their friends and relatives, about half of them with Denmark's red and white banner in hand. In one of Copenhagen's spacious city parks, we spotted a group of young adults lounging with an evenly spaced phalanx of Danish flags around their picnic blankets. City buses and street vendors, like the one pictured above, also show their national spirit. (By the way, just to the left of the bushes in the picture you can see Denmark's most undeservedly famous landmark, the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor.)
I tried to figure out what accounts for the Danes' patriotic streak, and I wonder if it has something to do with the country's small size and its tendency to be thrashed around by the broader currents of European history. One of many fascinating episodes was an early and short-lived experiment with Enlightenment-style political liberties, led by King Christian VII's personal physician, who made himself de facto ruler as his boss descended into schizophrenia. During World War II, Denmark folded relatively quickly in the face of a Nazi invasion, but the resistence movement did manage to smuggle 90% of Danish Jews into Sweden. Today the country continues trying to find its voice among the much bigger players of the European Union.
Minor Obsessions. Talia's petty obsession for the weekend was sandwiches (more on those later); mine was spotting Sweden. Copenhagen is at the far eastern end of Denmark, separated from the Swedish city of Malmö by a narrow channel. We got a good long look at Malmö from the air during an aborted landing, a go-around and a successful landing, but I wanted to see it from the ground. This isn't as easy as that map might suggest, but I did spot Sweden from a train station and then from the clock tower of Copenhagen's city hall, pictured above. Sweden now joins Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Jordan among the ranks of countries I haven't actually visited, but have looked into while standing in another country.
Damn Hippies! During our meandering walking tour of Copenhagen, we happened on a ragtag protest proceeding through the streets. Most of the protestors were disaffected-looking young men, and they paraded behind a tractor rigged up with a stage and a sound system. It didn't take us long for us to figure out what they were after–legalization of marijuana–and where they were going–the same place we were headed, the bizarre social experiment known as Christiania.
In 1971, a previous generation of disaffected young adults broke into an abandoned army barracks in Copenhagen and declared it to be the "free state" of Christiania. Politically and culturally, the founders of Christiania were pretty similar to the hippie counterculture in the United States. Christiania continues to exist in a strange quasi-legal limbo: its residents pay no taxes and have created their own currency, but Christiania's streets are regularly patrolled by police, mostly to crack down on drugs. Mainstream Danish attitudes seem to vary from mild resentment to amused acceptance, but it's clear that despite calls to "normalize" Christiania, no government has yet found it to be in its political interest to forcibly dismantle it. Talia and I spent a little bit of time walking around and checking out Christiania's small shops and street art (taking pictures inside is forbidden).
My visceral reaction to Christiania was very negative, and its intensity surprised me. On paper, my politics probably look a lot like those of a Christianian: I'm all for decriminalizing pot (though I won't touch it myself), I'm for peace and environmental protection and all that hippie stuff. Resentment of authority is part of my makeup. However, I found the smug self-righteousness of Christiania to be too much. It made me reflect on what I would have been like if I'd grown up in the '60s. I suspect that I would have hated Nixon and the war, and idolized MLK and RFK, but there's no chance that I would have been a flower child. I also wonder if this is part of what turned me on to Obama- in some ways I see the same combination of liberal politics and conservative temperament in myself that I see in him.
So why are they so happy? I can't say that I discovered the secret to the Danes' remarkable levels of happiness, but I did collect some clues. The pastries can't hurt, and neither can smørrebrød, the popular open-faced sandwich composed of a slice of rye bread and all manner of delicious toppings. (Above, I prepare to chow down on three smørrebrød with curried herring, shrimp and eggs, and bacon with a liver-mushroom paste. The Danes may be known for being happy, but they're not particularly famous for being healthy; Lonely Planet goes so far as to say they "make the Scots look like Jane Fonda!")
On a more serious note, Talia and I both observed a quality of Danish life that is rare in cities of Copenhagen's size: trust. Even in Denmark's largest city, people regularly leave bikes unattended and unlocked. Most restaurants offer outdoor dining, but since it's still a little chilly at this time of year, they also provide all patrons with blankets, as you can see in the picture above. Running off with a blanket or two would be child's play, but there's no indication that anyone does. There is a downside to this kind of social cohesion–consider the Danes' reputation for xenophobia–but I was struck by the realization that, if I lived in Copenhagen, I don't think I would have a whole lot to worry about.
Danish Patriotism. From my limited pre-trip reading about Denmark, I learned about the Danes' remarkable levels of patriotism, marked above all by gratuitous flag-waving. The Danes did not disappoint. As we exited customs and immigration at the Copenhagen airport, there was a throng of people awaiting their friends and relatives, about half of them with Denmark's red and white banner in hand. In one of Copenhagen's spacious city parks, we spotted a group of young adults lounging with an evenly spaced phalanx of Danish flags around their picnic blankets. City buses and street vendors, like the one pictured above, also show their national spirit. (By the way, just to the left of the bushes in the picture you can see Denmark's most undeservedly famous landmark, the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor.)
I tried to figure out what accounts for the Danes' patriotic streak, and I wonder if it has something to do with the country's small size and its tendency to be thrashed around by the broader currents of European history. One of many fascinating episodes was an early and short-lived experiment with Enlightenment-style political liberties, led by King Christian VII's personal physician, who made himself de facto ruler as his boss descended into schizophrenia. During World War II, Denmark folded relatively quickly in the face of a Nazi invasion, but the resistence movement did manage to smuggle 90% of Danish Jews into Sweden. Today the country continues trying to find its voice among the much bigger players of the European Union.
Minor Obsessions. Talia's petty obsession for the weekend was sandwiches (more on those later); mine was spotting Sweden. Copenhagen is at the far eastern end of Denmark, separated from the Swedish city of Malmö by a narrow channel. We got a good long look at Malmö from the air during an aborted landing, a go-around and a successful landing, but I wanted to see it from the ground. This isn't as easy as that map might suggest, but I did spot Sweden from a train station and then from the clock tower of Copenhagen's city hall, pictured above. Sweden now joins Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Jordan among the ranks of countries I haven't actually visited, but have looked into while standing in another country.
Damn Hippies! During our meandering walking tour of Copenhagen, we happened on a ragtag protest proceeding through the streets. Most of the protestors were disaffected-looking young men, and they paraded behind a tractor rigged up with a stage and a sound system. It didn't take us long for us to figure out what they were after–legalization of marijuana–and where they were going–the same place we were headed, the bizarre social experiment known as Christiania.
In 1971, a previous generation of disaffected young adults broke into an abandoned army barracks in Copenhagen and declared it to be the "free state" of Christiania. Politically and culturally, the founders of Christiania were pretty similar to the hippie counterculture in the United States. Christiania continues to exist in a strange quasi-legal limbo: its residents pay no taxes and have created their own currency, but Christiania's streets are regularly patrolled by police, mostly to crack down on drugs. Mainstream Danish attitudes seem to vary from mild resentment to amused acceptance, but it's clear that despite calls to "normalize" Christiania, no government has yet found it to be in its political interest to forcibly dismantle it. Talia and I spent a little bit of time walking around and checking out Christiania's small shops and street art (taking pictures inside is forbidden).
My visceral reaction to Christiania was very negative, and its intensity surprised me. On paper, my politics probably look a lot like those of a Christianian: I'm all for decriminalizing pot (though I won't touch it myself), I'm for peace and environmental protection and all that hippie stuff. Resentment of authority is part of my makeup. However, I found the smug self-righteousness of Christiania to be too much. It made me reflect on what I would have been like if I'd grown up in the '60s. I suspect that I would have hated Nixon and the war, and idolized MLK and RFK, but there's no chance that I would have been a flower child. I also wonder if this is part of what turned me on to Obama- in some ways I see the same combination of liberal politics and conservative temperament in myself that I see in him.
So why are they so happy? I can't say that I discovered the secret to the Danes' remarkable levels of happiness, but I did collect some clues. The pastries can't hurt, and neither can smørrebrød, the popular open-faced sandwich composed of a slice of rye bread and all manner of delicious toppings. (Above, I prepare to chow down on three smørrebrød with curried herring, shrimp and eggs, and bacon with a liver-mushroom paste. The Danes may be known for being happy, but they're not particularly famous for being healthy; Lonely Planet goes so far as to say they "make the Scots look like Jane Fonda!")
On a more serious note, Talia and I both observed a quality of Danish life that is rare in cities of Copenhagen's size: trust. Even in Denmark's largest city, people regularly leave bikes unattended and unlocked. Most restaurants offer outdoor dining, but since it's still a little chilly at this time of year, they also provide all patrons with blankets, as you can see in the picture above. Running off with a blanket or two would be child's play, but there's no indication that anyone does. There is a downside to this kind of social cohesion–consider the Danes' reputation for xenophobia–but I was struck by the realization that, if I lived in Copenhagen, I don't think I would have a whole lot to worry about.
30 April 2009
hi, i'm majoring in water
Earlier this week a professor who taught at Williams while I was there (I never had him) wrote a provocative takedown of graduate education in the New York Times. I've written before about some of the problems he identifies-- hyper-specialization being the main one.
I mostly agree with Taylor's diagnosis of the problems, though I think they're less relevant to the hard sciences and than they are to the humanities and the social sciences, and they don't really apply to professional schools (medicine, law, etc.). However, most of his solutions strike me as wishful thinking. I would love to see tenure go away, but it seems like one of those institutions, like the Electoral College, that only a major crisis with dislodge. I think he also vastly overestimates the potential of teleconferencing and the internet; there are just too many advantages to flesh-and-blood interaction. Solutions 4 and 5, modernizing the dissertation and preparing grad students for something other than academic self-replication, seem like the most realistic ideas and the ones most likely to make an immediate difference.
It also occurred to me that we still need increasing specialization; it just can't be the be-all and end-all. To some extent, creeping hyper-specialization is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of human knowledge. John Maynard Keynes engaged with a much wider swath of economics than contemporary economists (with a few exceptions) partly because there was a lot less economics to know back then. I think what academia needs are better and more creative ways of managing the necessary tension between interdisciplinarity and specialization. Our stodgy system of rigid departments and neglected interdisciplinary programs goes too far in one direction; I suspect Mark Taylor's "complex adaptive network" with "problem-focused programs" goes too far the other way.
Tomorrow I'm off to my weekend in Copenhagen, or as the Danes call it, København. I've read that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth, according to survey data, so maybe I'll learn a thing or two about what makes them so cheery. I bet it's the pastries. Støked!
I mostly agree with Taylor's diagnosis of the problems, though I think they're less relevant to the hard sciences and than they are to the humanities and the social sciences, and they don't really apply to professional schools (medicine, law, etc.). However, most of his solutions strike me as wishful thinking. I would love to see tenure go away, but it seems like one of those institutions, like the Electoral College, that only a major crisis with dislodge. I think he also vastly overestimates the potential of teleconferencing and the internet; there are just too many advantages to flesh-and-blood interaction. Solutions 4 and 5, modernizing the dissertation and preparing grad students for something other than academic self-replication, seem like the most realistic ideas and the ones most likely to make an immediate difference.
It also occurred to me that we still need increasing specialization; it just can't be the be-all and end-all. To some extent, creeping hyper-specialization is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of human knowledge. John Maynard Keynes engaged with a much wider swath of economics than contemporary economists (with a few exceptions) partly because there was a lot less economics to know back then. I think what academia needs are better and more creative ways of managing the necessary tension between interdisciplinarity and specialization. Our stodgy system of rigid departments and neglected interdisciplinary programs goes too far in one direction; I suspect Mark Taylor's "complex adaptive network" with "problem-focused programs" goes too far the other way.
Tomorrow I'm off to my weekend in Copenhagen, or as the Danes call it, København. I've read that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth, according to survey data, so maybe I'll learn a thing or two about what makes them so cheery. I bet it's the pastries. Støked!
25 April 2009
a response to my critics re: "not the queen's english"
I had intended to suspend the blogging and focus on schoolwork for a while, but it's come to my attention that my "not the queen's english" entry was reposted on a Cameroonian website and has generated a lot of pretty heated commentary- including accusations of ignorance/stupidity/idiocy (which I don't really mind) and racism (which I do). Some of the commenters expressed hope that I would respond, so here I am.
First of all, I want to assure my critics that I intended no disrespect toward Cameroonians, and I regret that I have offended some readers. I believe that many of the people who wrote comments have misunderstood the spirit and intent of my post. But taken out of context, I can see how what I wrote in those few paragraphs came across as inflammatory and condescending. There are also parts of the post, the "Special English" paragraph in particular, that in retrospect I should have worded differently.
The reference to the "Queen's English" was obviously the source of a lot of misunderstanding (see posts by Afrika/Unitedstatesofafrica, Samm, oyibbao, and Atanga Belmondo). As commenter Steve Jackson pointed out, I am not British, but American, so I myself do not speak "the Queen's English" either. I meant "Queen's English" as an ironic rhetorical device, not as any kind of statement of how people "should" speak, and certainly not as any kind of statement of a pro-colonial attitude. I do not see language in terms of better or worse, right or wrong. I agree with commenter oyibaao's observation "language is a means of communication that is influenced by time, place, and events." To borrow a phrase from the Bible, language is for people, not people for language.
So why would I write about differences in the way Cameroonians and I use English? As commenters Caitlin, Ras Tuge, Steve Jackson, Le Chiffre, and facter all surmised, the main motivation was humor. I write about this stuff because it’s funny—not in the sense that I am mocking Cameroonians or viewing myself as better than they are, but because language differences are one of the great sources of humor in travel. On this blog, I have written about the differences between British and American English here, here, and here, and about New Zealanders' accents here. In my previous blog, I wrote about differences in the way Americans and Filipinos use English. I was no more trying to insult Cameroonians in the post under discussion than I was trying to insult Brits, New Zealanders, and Filipinos in those other posts. If more Cameroonians had a chance to visit Britain or the U.S.—and I regret that so few have that opportunity—there would be things they would find funny about the way Brits and Americans speak. And I can assure you, Reex Flames, that during 3 weeks in Cameroon I was the subject of plenty of mockery because of my speech, dress, and all of the other things that make us different from each other. But I was a guest in Cameroon, so I don’t think I have any right to complain.
I think a lot of commenters missed that some of the humor was directed at me and at Americans. As commenter Caitlin correctly remarked: “To me it comes across that the author is laughing at himself for his assumption that he'll be able to communicate in an English-speaking country when in fact the type of English may not be anything like his own.” I also made reference to the “ugly American” stereotype: the tendency of Americans who speak only English to assume, absurdly, that if they just speak slowly and over-enunciate enough that non-native speakers of English will understand them. As I said, the “Special English” paragraph was not the best written, but I was merely pointing out the irony that "ugly American" English has some similarities with the version of English spoken in Anglophone Cameroon. I emphatically was not suggesting that the pace or lilt of Cameroonian English is evidence of stupidity—though I can see how it might have come across that way in the original post. (In fact, I was grateful that people spoke English slowly to me so that I had a chance of understanding them.) Just speaking for myself and my own background, I am glad that, as commenter facter put it, we Americans “can joke about ourselves.”
I wanted to highlight the excellent point made in different ways by Naneh, Reex Flames, nadine, and routine, about the multilingualism of Cameroonians. I came away impressed by how many languages Cameroonians speak, especially because I come from a culture that (sadly) does not put much value on learning other people's languages. I am a little bit embarassed that I only speak English fluently, though I have enough French, Spanish, and Tagalog to get by. The average Cameroonian is far ahead of me on language abilities.
I also appreciated Papa Mama's point (even if it was made in a sarcastic way) about the internet leveling the playing field between people in different parts of the world. Papa Mama points out that the internet enables Europeans and Americans to be exposed to the thoughts of Africans. To that I say, amen and hallelujah. I am grateful that we are able to have this dialogue, which in earlier times would have been impossible, and I hope that we will be able to learn something from it.
Finally, I strongly object to the insinuations made by Reex Flames (for which, to be fair, Reex Flames later apologized) and Unitedstatesofafrica that I went to Cameroon with fantasies of “helping” or “making a difference” by bringing the light of my Euro-American brilliance to the Africans. If you read more of my blog or talked to me about development efforts, you would know that I am very skeptical of arrogant Western attitudes about helping lower-income countries. My motivations for traveling were to learn about Cameroon and Africa, and to spend time with a special someone. As a few commenters pointed out, I was writing for my friends and family, and I had no intention of offending a whole bunch of Cameroonians. But since I did, I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify and continue the discussion.
First of all, I want to assure my critics that I intended no disrespect toward Cameroonians, and I regret that I have offended some readers. I believe that many of the people who wrote comments have misunderstood the spirit and intent of my post. But taken out of context, I can see how what I wrote in those few paragraphs came across as inflammatory and condescending. There are also parts of the post, the "Special English" paragraph in particular, that in retrospect I should have worded differently.
The reference to the "Queen's English" was obviously the source of a lot of misunderstanding (see posts by Afrika/Unitedstatesofafrica, Samm, oyibbao, and Atanga Belmondo). As commenter Steve Jackson pointed out, I am not British, but American, so I myself do not speak "the Queen's English" either. I meant "Queen's English" as an ironic rhetorical device, not as any kind of statement of how people "should" speak, and certainly not as any kind of statement of a pro-colonial attitude. I do not see language in terms of better or worse, right or wrong. I agree with commenter oyibaao's observation "language is a means of communication that is influenced by time, place, and events." To borrow a phrase from the Bible, language is for people, not people for language.
So why would I write about differences in the way Cameroonians and I use English? As commenters Caitlin, Ras Tuge, Steve Jackson, Le Chiffre, and facter all surmised, the main motivation was humor. I write about this stuff because it’s funny—not in the sense that I am mocking Cameroonians or viewing myself as better than they are, but because language differences are one of the great sources of humor in travel. On this blog, I have written about the differences between British and American English here, here, and here, and about New Zealanders' accents here. In my previous blog, I wrote about differences in the way Americans and Filipinos use English. I was no more trying to insult Cameroonians in the post under discussion than I was trying to insult Brits, New Zealanders, and Filipinos in those other posts. If more Cameroonians had a chance to visit Britain or the U.S.—and I regret that so few have that opportunity—there would be things they would find funny about the way Brits and Americans speak. And I can assure you, Reex Flames, that during 3 weeks in Cameroon I was the subject of plenty of mockery because of my speech, dress, and all of the other things that make us different from each other. But I was a guest in Cameroon, so I don’t think I have any right to complain.
I think a lot of commenters missed that some of the humor was directed at me and at Americans. As commenter Caitlin correctly remarked: “To me it comes across that the author is laughing at himself for his assumption that he'll be able to communicate in an English-speaking country when in fact the type of English may not be anything like his own.” I also made reference to the “ugly American” stereotype: the tendency of Americans who speak only English to assume, absurdly, that if they just speak slowly and over-enunciate enough that non-native speakers of English will understand them. As I said, the “Special English” paragraph was not the best written, but I was merely pointing out the irony that "ugly American" English has some similarities with the version of English spoken in Anglophone Cameroon. I emphatically was not suggesting that the pace or lilt of Cameroonian English is evidence of stupidity—though I can see how it might have come across that way in the original post. (In fact, I was grateful that people spoke English slowly to me so that I had a chance of understanding them.) Just speaking for myself and my own background, I am glad that, as commenter facter put it, we Americans “can joke about ourselves.”
I wanted to highlight the excellent point made in different ways by Naneh, Reex Flames, nadine, and routine, about the multilingualism of Cameroonians. I came away impressed by how many languages Cameroonians speak, especially because I come from a culture that (sadly) does not put much value on learning other people's languages. I am a little bit embarassed that I only speak English fluently, though I have enough French, Spanish, and Tagalog to get by. The average Cameroonian is far ahead of me on language abilities.
I also appreciated Papa Mama's point (even if it was made in a sarcastic way) about the internet leveling the playing field between people in different parts of the world. Papa Mama points out that the internet enables Europeans and Americans to be exposed to the thoughts of Africans. To that I say, amen and hallelujah. I am grateful that we are able to have this dialogue, which in earlier times would have been impossible, and I hope that we will be able to learn something from it.
Finally, I strongly object to the insinuations made by Reex Flames (for which, to be fair, Reex Flames later apologized) and Unitedstatesofafrica that I went to Cameroon with fantasies of “helping” or “making a difference” by bringing the light of my Euro-American brilliance to the Africans. If you read more of my blog or talked to me about development efforts, you would know that I am very skeptical of arrogant Western attitudes about helping lower-income countries. My motivations for traveling were to learn about Cameroon and Africa, and to spend time with a special someone. As a few commenters pointed out, I was writing for my friends and family, and I had no intention of offending a whole bunch of Cameroonians. But since I did, I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify and continue the discussion.
22 April 2009
one more
Kate has posted her final round-up on our trip. I second her assessment that our blogs complement each other well. (That just sounded pretty self-congratulatory, didn't it?) It seems that I pick up stuff she doesn't even notice anymore, such as the minutia of Cameroonian culture and hygiene, and she picks up stuff I don't notice anymore, like how it feels to climb a reeeeally big mountain. Unfortunately our time as a traveling duo is over for now... though there are other potential plans in the hopper!
21 April 2009
every country by 35?
If you think I'm a voracious traveler, check out this guy. But hey, I've been to Chad and he hasn't, so I've got something on him!
And now, back to my regularly scheduled reign of terror.
And now, back to my regularly scheduled reign of terror.
19 April 2009
closing thoughts on cameroon: mamoudou's question
This will be my last post on Cameroon, apart from directing you to Kate’s posts on our trip, which she is now unrolling. In fact I’m going to take a short break from the blog altogether, since my adventures have put me in a bad spot with schoolwork and deadlines. I am embarking on what I only half-jokingly refer to as a 2-week “reign of terror”—an all-out academic effort that will consume most of my waking hours. On the bright side, next time you hear from me I will likely be enjoying a (hopefully well-deserved) weekend in Copenhagen. You could say that the Danish capital is in some ways the anti-Douala: clean, safe, sedate.
I cannot for the life of me remember who told me this, but somebody remarked recently that the worst tragedy of global poverty is that it’s an enormous waste of human talent. Warren Buffett, of all people, has made a similar point: “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to product in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.” I’m not sure that wasted talent is the worst thing, but Cameroon did introduce me to several amazing human beings who are being blocked and held back from their full potential by the poverty of their country. It’s stories like theirs that help keep me motivated to do what I’m doing, even in the midst of an academic reign of terror.
One was John, a young teacher in Kate’s town. John is very smart (his proficient English is self-taught, from a dictionary no less), quietly determined, and wise beyond his years. He’s exactly the kind of male role model you’d want for kids, boys especially. He’s visibly impatient with the corruption and inefficiency that are rife in Cameroon. I learned that he would like to attend a three-year teacher’s college in Maroua, which would open up lots of career opportunities for him, but it’s not affordable. I asked him how much it would cost, and I felt a lump in my throat as I realized that the enrollment fee and 3 years' tuition comes to approximately the amount of CFA that I withdrew on my first trip to the ATM in N’Djaména.
I also met Mamoudou, who runs a small development NGO (non-governmental organization) and is of Kate’s local “counterparts,” in Peace Corps lingo. He won funding from the U.S. embassy through an extremely competitive process to provide fuel-efficent stoves to local households. It’s the kind of effort that is needed on a larger scale to help curb deforestation and desertification in Cameroon’s North. Mamoudou has lots of ambitions, but the funding is hard to come by. As we sat in his modest home, he told me about what he was doing, and then he turned the tables on me. Hearing that I am in a Development Studies program, he asked me for my definition of development. Wow, I thought—this guy goes right for the jugular. Later, he asked what I was going to bring back with me from Cameroon. Among other things, I told him that I was going to tell people about him. He struck me as the epitome of a “Searcher” in Bill Easterly’s terminology—the kind of grassroots innovator who is needed for real development to happen.
In studying development it’s easy to fall into the trap of “problematizing” the people development is supposed to benefit—in other words, seeing them in terms of unmet needs and deprivations rather than possibilities. John and Mamoudou are salutary reminders of why that mindset doesn’t work. Yet it’s also impossible for me not to feel a little bit of grief for the thwarted ambitions of the world’s Johns and Mamoudous. I’ve met enough gifted people in my life to know that they’re everywhere. Perhaps the best response I can think of to Mamoudou’s first question is that the task of development is to set them free.
I cannot for the life of me remember who told me this, but somebody remarked recently that the worst tragedy of global poverty is that it’s an enormous waste of human talent. Warren Buffett, of all people, has made a similar point: “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to product in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.” I’m not sure that wasted talent is the worst thing, but Cameroon did introduce me to several amazing human beings who are being blocked and held back from their full potential by the poverty of their country. It’s stories like theirs that help keep me motivated to do what I’m doing, even in the midst of an academic reign of terror.
One was John, a young teacher in Kate’s town. John is very smart (his proficient English is self-taught, from a dictionary no less), quietly determined, and wise beyond his years. He’s exactly the kind of male role model you’d want for kids, boys especially. He’s visibly impatient with the corruption and inefficiency that are rife in Cameroon. I learned that he would like to attend a three-year teacher’s college in Maroua, which would open up lots of career opportunities for him, but it’s not affordable. I asked him how much it would cost, and I felt a lump in my throat as I realized that the enrollment fee and 3 years' tuition comes to approximately the amount of CFA that I withdrew on my first trip to the ATM in N’Djaména.
I also met Mamoudou, who runs a small development NGO (non-governmental organization) and is of Kate’s local “counterparts,” in Peace Corps lingo. He won funding from the U.S. embassy through an extremely competitive process to provide fuel-efficent stoves to local households. It’s the kind of effort that is needed on a larger scale to help curb deforestation and desertification in Cameroon’s North. Mamoudou has lots of ambitions, but the funding is hard to come by. As we sat in his modest home, he told me about what he was doing, and then he turned the tables on me. Hearing that I am in a Development Studies program, he asked me for my definition of development. Wow, I thought—this guy goes right for the jugular. Later, he asked what I was going to bring back with me from Cameroon. Among other things, I told him that I was going to tell people about him. He struck me as the epitome of a “Searcher” in Bill Easterly’s terminology—the kind of grassroots innovator who is needed for real development to happen.
In studying development it’s easy to fall into the trap of “problematizing” the people development is supposed to benefit—in other words, seeing them in terms of unmet needs and deprivations rather than possibilities. John and Mamoudou are salutary reminders of why that mindset doesn’t work. Yet it’s also impossible for me not to feel a little bit of grief for the thwarted ambitions of the world’s Johns and Mamoudous. I’ve met enough gifted people in my life to know that they’re everywhere. Perhaps the best response I can think of to Mamoudou’s first question is that the task of development is to set them free.
18 April 2009
on arguing, protocol, and nose-picking
I would be slacking in my bloggy duties if I didn’t provide some kind of commentary on what I experienced of Cameroonian culture. Certain professors of mine at Cambridge would never forgive me if I didn’t preface these observations with the caveats that these are broad generalizations, that there is lots of cultural diversity within Cameroon, and wocka wocka wocka. On we go.
Confrontation. In at least one sense, Cameroon’s culture is the opposite of an Asian culture—namely its high tolerance for interpersonal conflict. I would frequently observe Cameroonians engaged in what appeared to be shouting matches, but Kate and others assured me that that’s just how they roll. A Peace Corps volunteer I met on our long train ride has taken the idea of being integré to the extreme on this score. In dealing with railroad employees, fellow passengers, and the assorted vendors and hustlers associated with the rail system, I watched him adopt the same kind of brash, confrontational, in-your-face attitude that he and other PCVs attribute to Cameroonians.
But the strangest thing about the Cameroonian approach to conflict is how quickly it can all be turned off. A Cameroonian can seem to be chewing you out one moment and acting like your best friend the next; it’s as quick as flipping a light switch. Here again, the culture seems to be the opposite of what I’ve experience of Asian cultures, in which personal slights can linger in the atmosphere for a very long time. When Kate and I arrived in Limbe, we tried to explain the location of our hotel to our cabbie—who, you should be unsurprised to hear, had never heard of said hotel. He repeatedly claimed that we would have to pay him extra because the hotel was located inside a botanic garden that charged an entrance fee; we knew that it wasn’t. We went through several rounds of him arguing with us, his face lit up with rage, interspersed with bizarrely friendly questions and commentary about the town, Kate’s post in the Northern Cameroon, and other topics.
Protocol. Cameroonians are big on protocol. This is the kind of principle that one typically discovers in the breach, and we had a couple of educational but mildly unpleasant encounters with Cameroonian protocol.
Prior to our arrival in Maroua, a northern transport hub where we spent the night of my birthday, Kate received an invitation from a fellow PCV who happens also to be a Williams grad. We were invited to share a (non-alcoholic) hot beverage, the name and significance of which I forget but which has something to do with a Muslim holiday, with the sister of the lamido from Kate’s town. A lamido is the traditional local chief in Northern Cameroon, and you can read about Kate’s fascinating run-in with the local lamido here. (I’m not really addressing gender issues in Cameroon here, primarily because Kate does a really nice job of it in her blog.) We arrived to an elaborate welcome from members of the princess’ household and then the princess herself. As we sat waiting on a mat and darkness fell, a creeping sense of unease set in. Hot-beverage-whose-name-and-significance-I-forget (HBWNASIF) doesn’t take that long to hear up; it was becoming clear that, contrary to her invitation, the princess had something fancier in mind for us. With birthday celebrating plans in the hopper, other errands to do, and an early wakeup the next morning, we were not prepared for a multi-hour commitment. Perhaps no self-respecting princess would have guests over only for HBWNASIF, and perhaps the real import of the invitation would have been something a real Cameroonian could have deciphered. We were caught completely off guard. Austin, the Williams alum PCV, extracted us from the situation with all of the diplomatic skill he could muster. The parting was friendly and Kate and Austin promised a return visit, but I worried that the incident may have set Kate father back with the lamido and his family.
A big part of Cameroonian protocol is letting people know when you’re entering their territory. Roadside ID checks are a standard part of most any bus trip, and Lonely Planet advises travelers who are going off the beaten tourist track to announce themselves to the local lamido or fon (as they are called in the South). During our biking/hiking trip on the Ring Road, Kate and I spent two nights in the village of Missaje (mee-SAH-jay), which does see a trickle of foreign tourists but is still the kind of place where two people can eat out for less than $1. By our second night, it became clear that we had been noticed. At the local watering hole, an intoxicated but well-dressed man who said he was a journalist struck up a conversation with us. He offered to present us to the local authorities. He was just looking out for us, he said, because an introduction would make things easier later on in the event that we were “subpoenaed.” He was sloshed and obviously full of shit, but the whole encounter still felt ominous. Kate calmly and politely explained that she lived in Cameroon and understood the custom, but that we were leaving first thing the next morning and it was too late at night for anything to be done in any case. He backed off—but not before obliquely slighting Kate’s character—and we finished our drinks and got out of there. To smooth things over, Kate suggested we give our journalist friend a final “greeting” before we left. He responded with extreme friendliness, as if nothing had happened. There’s that on/off switch again.
Just for Fun. On a lighter note, my picks for:
- Grossest Cameroonian habit. Flagrant, public nose picking. And sometimes eating.
- Strangest appropriation of Western food. Spaghetti omelets, which are on offer at omelet shacks in most sizeable towns.
- Best way to get tipsy while meeting your Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin C. Top Pamplemousse (grapefruit soda) with whisky (sold in 50 mL plastic sachets).
- Funniest placenames. Bum and Dumbo, both in Anglophone Cameroon.
- Best Cameroonian Slogan. “On est ensemble”—roughly translated as, “we’re in this together,” and the best way to signal solidarity with your travel mate in the event of drunk journalists, biting ants, muggings, derailed invitations to drink HBWNASIF, and other mishaps.
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