Monday, May 5, 2025
Blog Page 1654

Assassinations in Oxford

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In the first round, I died moments after the game started. I was sitting unaware in the JCR when our Vice-President came up and hit me with a sock ball. The email that signified the start of the game had been sent out a mere thirty seconds before (I did not even know whom I was to target and give an item meaning I had ‘assassinated’ them), and I was the first unfortunate casualty. For me, it was over before it had all really started. 

For others though, it was only the beginning. Normal college life was turned on its head as friendships became strained and college family ties were broken. Secret knocks were developed, before cruelly being sold on to the assassin. One assassin claimed to be in need of some peer support welfare counselling, before taking out his counsellor. The JCR Secretary got involved through dreaming up spurious reasons for JCR meetings and then using them to get to his targets.

Even for those of us who were dead, the excitement continued. There were plenty of opportunities to betray friends, construct wonderful traps or simply just watch the carnage unfold. The Facebook event page gave regular updates, making it nigh on impossible to focus on that imminent essay deadline. Even though I played for less then a minute, Assassins has become a firm favourite, to the extent that we have now set up a second round, and are also wondering why it is only a Trinity-term feature of college life.

Procrastination Destination: Oxford Ice Rink

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Exemplified by its grace, skill and agility, ice skating has been used as a means of procrastination ever since Homo Sapiens took it upon themselves to conquer ice – which, if you’re interested, was  around 4,000 years ago. Blimey. So why don’t you get in on this pastime: it has got quite the reassuring heritage, after all. And what with it being only a ten-minute stroll out of town, it’s procrastination which even the most stressed of students can commit to. 

 
   Oxford Ice Rink
Exemplified by its grace, skill and agility, ice skating has been used as a means of procrastination ever since Homo Sapiens took it upon themselves to conquer ice – which, if you’re interested, was  around 4,000 years ago. Blimey. So why don’t you get in on this pastime: it has got quite the reassuring heritage, after all. And what with it being only a ten-minute stroll out of town, it’s procrastination which even the most stressed of students can commit to.
 The Oxford Ice Rink is tucked modestly out of the way along  Oxpens road. Unassuming, oblong and unknown to most students is the exhilarating experience contained within this building, achieved merely by shuffling around on a frozen body of water. The rink is open mornings till late(ish) at night, perfect for the nocturnal breed of finalist, or for the eager early bird. Student discount is, of course, readily available, with most sessions costing a manageable £5.40 including skate hire.
Skill is optional for participation. If, like me, you’re more Bambi on ice than anything else, do not despair. Indeed, I’m constantly and patronisingly reminded that I’ll ‘pick it up quite fast’, so there really is hope for all. If this is the case, however, do consider wearing appropriate clothing. I have learnt the hard and humiliating way that wearing a skirt plus ice skates plus face plummet equals unintentional flashing of underwear to the entire rink, a flashing exacerbated by the process of scrambling to stand up again (which can be quite a lengthy business when you start out.)
But you’ll be pleased to hear skating’s not the only activity you can participate in (let’s face it, skating in a circuit for two hours has the dangerous potential to get boring.) The rink also offers hours of entertainment in the form of simple and understated observation. During the day you will  find a collection of figure skaters practicing for their next several hundred gold medals or so. Often wearing ridiculous costumes, these creatures showcase the very best of comedy, exhibiting face plants you can only dream of, impressive athleticism, superfluous crotch exposure, and skating drama to rival that of ‘Dancing on Ice’.
erhaps you’re already mid-way through finals and need a break from cramming for a minute (or sixty) or perhaps you’ve finally exhausted all good YouTube procrastination and need to move on to greater things. Whatever the reason, whether you’re a ice skating god or a destructive hazard to all, ice skating is the ideal work postponer

The Oxford Ice Rink is tucked modestly out of the way along Oxpens road. Unassuming, oblong and unknown to most students is the exhilarating experience contained within this building, achieved merely by shuffling around on a frozen body of water. The rink is open mornings till late(ish) at night, perfect for the nocturnal breed of finalist, or for the eager early bird. Student discount is, of course, readily available, with most sessions costing a manageable £5.40 including skate hire.

Skill is optional for participation. If, like me, you’re more Bambi on ice than anything else, do not despair. Indeed, I’m constantly and patronisingly reminded that I’ll ‘pick it up quite fast’, so there really is hope for all. If this is the case, however, do consider wearing appropriate clothing. I have learnt the hard and humiliating way that wearing a skirt plus ice skates plus face plummet equals unintentional flashing of underwear to the entire rink, a flashing exacerbated by the process of scrambling to stand up again (which can be quite a lengthy business when you start out.)

But you’ll be pleased to hear skating’s not the only activity you can participate in (let’s face it, skating in a circuit for two hours has the dangerous potential to get boring.) The rink also offers hours of entertainment in the form of simple and understated observation. During the day you will  find a collection of figure skaters practicing for their next several hundred gold medals or so. Often wearing ridiculous costumes, these creatures showcase the very best of comedy, exhibiting face plants you can only dream of, impressive athleticism, superfluous crotch exposure, and skating drama to rival that of ‘Dancing on Ice’.

Perhaps you’re already mid-way through finals and need a break from cramming for a minute (or sixty) or perhaps you’ve finally exhausted all good YouTube procrastination and need to move on to greater things. Whatever the reason, whether you’re a ice skating god or a destructive hazard to all, ice skating is the ideal work postponer. 

Snog Marry Avoid? #6: Trinity Special

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Which of Henry VIII’s wives floated your boats?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cannes you feel the love tonight?

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There’s sand in your size nines. You can smell fromage on every street corner. You’re being engaged in conversations where people expect you to have watched the Dardenne Brothers’ entire filmography. You can only be at Cannes. The lure of the Croisette has proven inescapable for filmmakers for 65 years. Classic films like Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver and MASH have all taken away its coveted Palme d’Or award and, this year, the competition is as hot and highbrow as ever. And as the film elite from all over the world descent on the beautiful South of France, I’m stuck in rainy Oxford preparing for exams. Bitter? Not a chance.

The problem with Cannes is the assumptions that the jury make about the correlation be- tween a) being written and performed in a for eign language and b) running time and overall quality. A quick look down the list of films that are in competition shows that this ‘elite’ group of films are frequently over two and a half hours long. This is a competition that gave the top prize to The White Ribbon. Clearly the boredom of the audience isn’t factored into the decision-making process. But whilst all this ‘art’ is being screened to sate the ravenous appetite of Hollywood’s ruling middle class, the whole thing is decked in rampant, whorish consumerism. Madagascar 3 is going to be one of the biggest events of the festival, not because of its outstanding cinematic worth but because of the promotional cash that the studio threw at the festival organisers. On top of this there will be hundreds of parties with more free alcohol than grovelling sycophants (of which I’d slightly like to be one) and goodie bags that each have a market value in excess of the sum value of the contents of my room.

It’s a contradiction that is made less appealing because of the fact that there will, undoubtedly, be some genuinely brilliant films on show, but those stellar pieces are liable to get lost amongst the glitter and finger food. The festival’s merits are undeniable, it’s just a shame that they’ve been overshadowed by the dually tedious and crass way that the whole affair is conducted.

My highlights this year, if I were there, would be David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (starring Robert Pattinson in a proper, grown-up role), Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love and John Hillcoat’s Lawless. The jury is unlikely to give the top prize to Michael Haneke again so shortly after The White Ribbon’s success, but his new film, Love, looks phenomenal.

Sometimes the freedom of being screened outside of the main competition provides the most interesting films of the festival. ‘Un Certain Regard’, the second tier of the Cannes echelons, always contains a hit-and-miss collection of films from rising and established filmmakers, and this year is bound to be no different. French Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan follows last year’s Heartbeats with his new film Laurence Anyways, which is bound to make a splash sur la plage. Also worth keeping an eye on is the directorial debut of Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, and Renoir, the latest film from Gilles Bourdos.

Undoubtedly there will be flashes of genius all around the city. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner, The Tree of Life, went on to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar whilst the eventual winner of that award, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, was screened, to general hysteria, out of competition. Come January, when the Academy Award nominations are released, many of the names that’ll be adorning the headlines will’ve been seen first at Cannes. For punters and critics it’s the place to see films, but for studios and filmmakers, it’s the place to sell films.

Chances are, though, that some off the wall choice, like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, will emerge from the shadows and steal the show from the big dogs expected to walk away with the prizes. That is, if they can get in ahead of the shameless PR stunts, 60-foot billboards of Ryan Gosling’s abs and the trollied distributors’ intern who’s trying to get off with Harvey Weinstein.

Review: The Dictator

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He’s the one who everybody secretly roots for; Sacha Baron Cohen is like that kid in school who says what everyone else in the class is thinking. He’s the one you watch in covert anticipation, waiting for more antics. In his latest film, Cohen takes political incorrectness to a whole new level. We follow General Aladeen of Wadiya, a composite character based on various figures of oppression, most obviously Saddam and Gaddafi. Aladeen falls into difficulty when his advisor Tamir (Sir Ben Kingsley) attempts to usurp his position with the help of the dictator’s look-alike body double. Times are made particularly hard for Aladeen when his beard is removed during torture in America leaving the Wadiyan dictator virtually unrecognisable and fighting to retain his leadership.

Somehow not only does Cohen illustrate our times perfectly with the odd Justin Bieber reference, an Apple store techie, and the sporting of a rather fetching US onesie; he also gets us rooting for ‘the beloved oppressor’. Particularly laugh-out-loud moments include Aladeen’s approach to rude customers – most notably an overweight boy in his friend Zoey’s (Anna Faris) shop – and a hilarious encounter with two tourists on a helicopter flight who are convinced of an impending terrorist attack. As ever, filmgoers will respond in one of two ways to this movie: either they will rant at the inappropriateness of it all or they will declare it complete genius. And despite its slightly controversial premise, this film is certainly clever, not only in terms of extracting comedy from an on-going political issue but also in terms of the questions Cohen prompts regarding the position of the US and the morality behind intervention to end dictatorships.

This is a comedy with an edge, thought-provoking in its own way but entertaining; backed up by performances from Anna Faris (Scary Movie 4, Friends Season 10) who takes on the cause-crazed, organic-loving feminist role brilliantly and Sir Ben Kingsley who sets Cohen up for his great comic moments. There’s even a Megan Fox cameo in there too. Funny, current and controversial once again: Cohen’s exceeded himself. It would seem no one’s safe from his ridicule. The big question is, who’s next?

TV Flop of the Week: Made in Chelsea

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I think I’m done with Made In Chelsea. I mean it was always a pretty difficult relationship: the first couple of series failed to tempt me away from Arj and vajazzles, but with the hope that Professor Green – Millie’s current squeeze- would become a permanent fixture, I was drawn in. Everything was going fine: Ollie’s declaration that he was trying out being gay ‘for this month’ was relatively amusing, and Prof Green was afforded some, albeit minimal, screen time. Sadly last week’s episode, probaably one of the most stressful hours of TV I have ever watched, has ruined it forever.

I don’t really know where to begin. I don’t give a shit about Louise cheating on iced-bun Jamie with stretch armstrong lookalike boyfriend Spencer; given how excruciating and mechanical Spencer and Louise’s interchanges are, the sex really can’t have been worth it. 

Then there were the awful scenes at the spa, where the girls flocked to help cheer up Louise at this difficult time in her life. Millie’s face upon Rosie turning up was profoundly slapable and lasted over half an hour.

It really is a testament to the likeability of the characters when smarmy Francis Boolay comes out on top; the only semi-decent moments of the last episode came when Francis told Jamie to consider ‘What Jesus Would Have Done?’ and forgive Spencer and Louise. The landfill-indie soundtrack that booms over every scene, regardless of its content, well and truly finished me off. I had no idea there were so many bands as shit as Mumford & Sons, with emotive Made in Chelsea-appropriate lyrics. I’m sorry but there’s only one Chelsea team winning this week and it’s not this lot.

Cherwell Cartoon: Trinity 2012 Week 5

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Cherwell Cartoon: Trinity 2012 Week 4

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Cherwell Cartoon: Trinity 2012 Week 6

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Here’s to you, Ms Robinson

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I remembered how obscure American fiction can become in Oxford when I told my friends I was going to hear Marilynne Robinson and was met with blank expressions. In many ways, Robinson – widely considered one of America’s best living authors – is both a niche and a lower-class ‘c’ catholic writer. She is a novelist and an essayist. She writes on science, religion, politics, and history – local, national, and international. Her writings are extremely porous and her interests seep into one another. If you are likely to turn from writing which includes religion, or which seriously considers the ideals of American democracy, or which is still interested in the Western frontier as a symbol, alongside the nuclear disaster in Japan, or the new austerity, or lost American heroes, she presents a problem.

Despite – or perhaps because of – America’s global hegemony, being American has never been less popular. Americans are fat, they saturate the world market with their fast culture, their voices screech in the streets of Oxford, as they ask ‘But where’s the University?’ whilst clutching their Union Jack pillows and Jubilee tat (just for the record, I’m American). Robinson proves the superficiality and gross inadequacy of this cultural stereotyping.

Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was published to great acclaim in 1981, won the PEN/Hemingway award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second novel, Gilead, was published twenty-four years later and did win the Pulitzer. Home followed in 2005. In the meantime she has taught at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I’m inclined not to rate the glories of the state of Iowa and I’m much moved by Robinson’s sympathy for her adopted landscape, but all writing hopefuls consider the Iowa Writer’s Workshop to be a kind of Elysium. Flannery O’Connor went there. Robert Lowell taught there.

Her career as a novelist has been interspersed with collections of essays, and the latest offering, When I Was a Child I Read Books, was published last month. Robinson, an honorary Oxford D.Litt after last year’s Encaenia, returned to Oxford this week to lecture on ‘Christology’ at the Exam Schools and to read from her new book in Blackwell’s sunken Norrington room.

Robinson first read from her title essay, ‘When I was a child’, the best essay of the volume, describing her early habits of reading and her childhood in Idaho. Robinson has a placid expression, and she cocks her head from side to side when she reads and when she answers questions, as though her hair is too heavy for her neck. This gives her a kind of gravitas. Her accent is uncompromisingly American but her voice is like the lower notes of a piano, with a steady habitual rise, and an easy skipping around. ‘I find that the hardest work,’ she read, ‘is to convince the world – in fact it may be impossible – is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.’ Housekeeping was set in the Idaho of Robinson’s imagination; it is a perfect novel, dark and quiet and fir-brooding.

After studying at Brown in Massachusetts and living on the East Coast, Robinson moved to what she terms with dignity ‘the middle west’. Gilead, from which she read next, reflected this change of landscape. In the novel, an ageing Iowan Congregationalist minister, John Ames, writes the young son who he will probably never know in manhood a series of letters. Turning the ‘middle west’ into great literature may seem like an impossible task for coastal critics, but Robinson is earnest and immovable in her defence of this part of America which is so often seen as being ‘without history’. Robinson traced the impetus of the novel back to her need to ‘know the narrative of a place’ when she encounters it. She called the cultural amnesia which midwesterns experience an ‘alienation from one’s own history, as if a prolonged historical moment never happened at all’.

Robinson is interested in the settling of these places, in the movement of young intellectuals and idealists from the east to found new societies in the middle west and beyond. Many of these new societies were founded by abolitionists and were part of the Underground Railroad. Colleges and universities were established and most of them admitted women and black Americans from the beginning. Here was a ‘culture being established,’ said Robinson, ‘and with a great brilliance with reforms that wouldn’t happen for another hundred years.’

The character of Ames is a great favourite in recent American literature, and his fans flocked to the Robinson event in grey-topped glory. Robinson read the excerpt from Gilead in which Ames is introduced to his second wife, his son’s mother, like a tender sermon. The character’s appearance in Robinson’s mind, after a twenty year hiatus from fiction-writing, was sudden, though ‘nothing silly like an apparition’. Instead, said Robinson, it was like ‘you suddenly feel like you know someone’. When she was asked whether Ames would make another appearance, Robinson said her lips were sealed, but the merry silence was interpreted with a suddenly generated anticipation.

John Ames is not the mouthpiece of Robinson, but his inclusion in her canon signals her deep and abiding interest in matters of religious faith. This is where many readers of her work find themselves uneasy.   She writes in her essay ‘Wondrous Love’ that, like it or not, Christians of all denominations are ‘members of one household. I confess from time to time I find this difficult. This difficulty may be owed in part to the fact that I have reason to believe they would not extend this courtesy to me.’ What does one do with a novelist who is right of her secular readers and left of her religious readers?

Robinson herself is an active member of a Congregationalist Church across the street from her university. She is interested not only in practical faith and in simple story telling – to her, the Bible is narrative – but the ideas behind and around faith. Robinson is a critic and her description of her faith marks it out as something measured and considered. To skip over the essays or writings in which she contests or argues for things of faith is to miss the chance to extend an act of sympathy to an astute and gentle writer who happens to have made the cultural misalliance of siding with the majority religion.

I suspect Robinson was awarded her D.Litt not only for the lucid prose of her novels but her unusual public position on the bridge between religion and science. Robinson, who is religious and avidly interested in science, disputes with both Creationists and evangelical atheists in what she terms the ‘pillow fight’ or ‘street theatre’ which has been played out between them in the media. ‘It’s difficult to tell what is authentic and what is media-driven,’ she said to the Blackwell’s audience. For Robinson, the two discourses of religion and science are not incompatible; as she writes in her essay ‘Freedom of Thought’ against ‘the idea, which is very broadly assumed to be true, [which] is again to reinforce the notion that science and religion are struggling for possession of a single piece of turf, and science holds the high ground and gets to choose the weapons.’ She then described the aesthetic effect of scientific knowledge upon her.

Robinson’s habits of auto-didacticism are impressive; she admitted to her audience that when she realised she had had a poor scientific education, she read to fill the gaps. She calls herself a humanist, and admits to her constant interest in basic humanism. The prototypical humanist, like Erasmus or More, is interested in compulsive reading, in things of the mind, and a general, liberal, knowledge. The humanist spins something vast and connective and well-spoken out of the knowledge gleaned. Robinson is clearly writing in this mould. Her essays are elegantly argued but accessible to the layperson; she omits dense technicalities and laborious explanations for the rhetorically persuasive tone of someone who has learned themselves.

This latest volume indeed sounds incredibly ‘spoken’, and the sentences are written as such to make one imagine the voice speaking them. This is probably because Robinson’s volumes of essays come out of her speaking engagements and lectures.

An audience member asked Robinson whether she had anything to say about ‘sorrow’, an emotion which recurs in her characters and the atmosphere of her novels. Robinson volunteered that she thought current society was too quick to diagnose sorrow and grief as depressive and medicate them. Sorrow, she said, is a ‘legitimate music. Though I don’t believe in self-indulgence, I believe in the integrity of one’s own life.’ Here, Robinson elegantly summarises her American and her humanist inheritances: her hardy Protestant self-regard, and the pioneering principle of individuality within community. Robinson’s apt ways of speaking and writing make her an ideal observer of a society which may not always agree with her.

In the meantime, before change happens, we can all hope for a pause in which to digest When I was a Child and the promise of a  new novel.