Friday 12th June 2026
Blog Page 891

England on the brink of success

TJ Fitzgerald
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England on the brink of success

“Youngsters these days have no regard for tradition. We don’t get to finals of world cups. How dare they.”

Peter Crouch’s tweet sums up English international football at the moment. England have strug- gled to find success for a long time now at international football at the senior level.

Gareth Southgate’s England may have qualified for the 2018 World Cup and have not been beaten in over 35 qualifying games for major tournaments. They have the odd world-class player such as Harry Kane leading the line, but, to be honest, nobody is going into this World Cup full of confidence.

However, at youth level, England cannot stop winning. So far in 2017 England have won the Under-17 World Cup, the Under-20 World Cup and the European Under-19 Championships. Maybe World Cups are just like buses: we wait fifty years and then two come at once. Rhian Brewster has grabbed a lot of the headlines throughout the U17 tournament, scoring hat-tricks in both the quarter-finals and the semi-finals, and leading the massive comeback from 2-0 down to winning 5-2 in the final.

The Liverpool striker’s eight goals throughout the tournament have shown the world why Jürgen Klopp is so excited about this young talent. However, he is just one of a much wider team that has had so much success.

The Under-20 team saw similar success this summer too, with Liverpool forward Dominic Solanke winning the Golden Boot at that age group’s World Cup. Many of these young players are trying to fight their way into their respective clubs’ starting teams. Dominic Calvert-Lewin is regularly starting for Everton, and Joe Gomez (England U21 Captain) and Trent Alexander-Arnold are shining this season for Liverpool.

This is providing England fans with a lot of hope for the future. After all, not only do England have a sensational amount of talent about to break through, but also the current senior line-up has a number of young stars, such as Marcus Rashford and Dele Alli, in the team. Jordan Pickford is a promising young keeper, and Kane will be in the prime of his career by 2022.

All England need is a top manager to help organise the national team in an effective manner and bring the success in international football at the senior level that we all hope for.

Mauricio Pochettino has played a big role in bringing a number of current England players through, and has been described as ‘England’s secret weapon’ by Gareth Southgate.

Indeed, Pochettino has recently revealed ambitions to manage England in the future – so maybe, England senior team may one day soon follow its youth divisions and bring the World Cup home.

The insincerity of the female nude

Priya Vempali
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The insincerity of the female nude

John Berger once wrote: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.”

These are the words which ring in my ears as I stroll through the halls of an art gallery, confronted by a never-ending stream of breasts, lips, cheeks, and hair – these are faces without stories, mouths without voices, smiles without substance.

As a woman, you become accustomed to seeing your own image reflected wherever you look, in a glamourised, beautified format. However, something about seeing the female form anatomised, deconstructed and rebuilt according to the male gaze never fails to astound me. It’s a disconcerting experience, only ever seeing reflections of your gender from an outsider’s perspective.

That’s not to say that men cannot express the subtleties of the female form within their work, but rather that women shouldn’t be confined to the other side of the canvas. When it comes to the artist-subject dynamic, I think that women probably have a better understanding of their own bodies than the men who attempt to possess them.

Historically, the gender imbalance within the art world has seen women adopting the role of the silent muse, the creative spark which spurs the male genius into producing yet another masterpiece – so long as he doesn’t cast her off in favour of a younger, prettier model. This is the view which continues to pervade the creative fields, despite second and third-wave feminist attempts to reclaim the female body as our own.

Indeed, Germaine Greer has described the muse, in her purest aspect, as being “the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work.” Disregarding the overtly sexualised submission within this statement, Greer’s perception of the female role here is rather degrading, as the woman is conceptualised as an aspect of the male genius rather than an individual in her own right. The compensation here, apparently, is that there is a kind of role reversal, whereby the female assumes the dominant position: “her role is to penetrate the mind rather than to have her body penetrated.”

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced by this flimsy recompense. As an English student, I am constantly presented with the patriarchal tradition of glorifying the female body, most blatantly for instance in Petrarchan poetry. Just like the female muse in artwork, the Petrarchan vision espouses a notion of femininity, which is supposedly empowered through identification with the erotic. Indeed, the form exalts the apparent sexual authority of the writer’s ‘cruel mistress’, whilst she, ironically, remains little more than the silent object of male fantasies.

The idea that as a woman, the muse should take pride in her sexual dominance over the male creative is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Should we, as a gender, not aspire to be more than glorified mannequins ready to be stripped and painted, or is the glass ceiling too firmly established to be broken within the world of fine art?

One individual whose work provides a direct response to female objectification is the artist Tracey Emin, whose installation ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ saw her painting naked in a Stockholm art gallery for three weeks in 1996.

Viewers could come and see her working through fish-eye lenses in the gallery walls, and yet as the subject and object of her own piece, Emin remained in complete control. She subverted the traditional role of the female nude by bringing her naked body into a position of authority rather than submission, the domain of the creator rather than the muse.

In this way, she provided women with an example of what true female empowerment within the arts might look like: a world in which female nudity is not necessarily sexualised, but an extension of our own authentic identities.

Instead of attempting to reclaim the ‘nude’ from centuries of male artists, let us as women boldly reclaim that which is already ours – our own naked bodies.

Memorable sax solos and individual flair at the Varsity jazz-off

Thomas Athey and Kenji Newton
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Memorable sax solos and individual flair at the Varsity jazz-off

In the World of Oxford jazz, events don’t come much bigger than the annual co-hosted gig with Cambridge. A musical equivalent of a Varsity match, the show involves back-to-back performances from the Oxford University Jazz Orchestra (OUJO) and their Cambridge equivalent, with each side showing the very best they have to offer. Having been held regularly since 2004, this year was billed as one of the biggest yet.

Held in the Magdalen College Auditorium, it took place last Friday in the appropriately chosen venue. Naturally the acoustics were excellent, both for the audience and the performers themselves as you could tell from the tightness of the performance that for the most part the orchestras could hear each other well. Admittedly, there was a small amount of home advantage. Cambridge seemed to suffer more from technical difficulties (sabotage?), and to some extent Oxford was able to be more adventurous given they knew the surroundings better. To be fair though, the Tabs handled the constraints well, and their male singer Harry Castle deserves to be commended for his ability to recover from originally not having a working microphone.

Cambridge were first to take to the stage this year, and worked through a mixture of covers and original arrangements. I particular liked the performance of ‘Crazy’, originally by Gnarls Barkley, which for me was when Cambridge seemed most relaxed and able to enjoy their performance. Robin Jacob-Owens also deserves a special mention for his alto sax solos, which received appraising applause from the audience as indeed did all the solos throughout the show. More generally however, it was a solid and well-executed performance from the Cambridge orchestra that grew in confidence as the show  progressed.

Oxford’s set too consisted of many impressive individual performances and solos, indeed too many to separately name. However, Matt Ward’s many trumpet solos were the most memorable, especially the one in Oxford’s second number ‘Basically Blues.’ Drummer Matt Venvell seemed to have been given greater freedom for moments of individual flair as well as keeping rhythm, ensuring a strong performance all round. Encompassing a variety of covers and original arrangements, the orchestra showed an impressive unity of sound with clear focus.

With at least seventeen musicians on stage at any one time, and sometimes more when singers were present, this was an impressive achievement. It was perhaps best expressed in arrangements such as ‘Pennies from Heaven’, where Oxford had ample opportunity to show everything they had to offer. If this show was about demonstrating the very best they can do, then OUJO delivered. With the show having been brought to a climax with Oxford’s final number, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, as way of an encore there was a slightly rouge arrangement of ‘Wonderwall’. I wish I could say that OUJO managed to breath life back into this tired classic, but to be honest, it’s just too far gone. However, at least this gave the performers a chance to relax on this final number, with all musicians clearly enjoying themselves.

The jury’s out on whether either orchestra can be said to have ‘won’, but it was a highly successful show and on this evidence there deserve to be many more such line-ups in the future.

Mountains review – ‘uncomfortable and immersive’

Michael OConnor
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Mountains review – ‘uncomfortable and immersive’

Mountains isn’t really a play. It’s a sensory experience. Other than three poetic monologues, there are no words. Instead, the actors convey the drama of pregnancy and birth through movement and sound. As such, the performance is unlike most other student theatre in Oxford.

The journey to the performance venue – St Catherine’s boathouse – is an adventure in itself. Walking along the Thames path, Oxford gradually disappears into the night and the open country begins. The boathouse is only ten minutes out from St Aldate’s. But it feels as though it’s off the map in the middle of nowhere. Outside the boathouse, audience members are handed masks to wear. Then the audience is led up to the room where the action takes place. At first glance, it looks like the setting for a cultish ceremony – it is dimly-lit and draped with red fabric. The beginning of the play hardly dispels this impression.

The first five minutes of the performance are immensely disorienting. The actors pound the floor with their hands, slap their chests, tear at their clothes and contort their limbs. The space is small and the actors are less than a metre away from the audience. Combined with the subject matter, this means that the whole experience is oddly voyeuristic. If not for the masks, I would have felt distinctly awkward. But that is part of the performance’s power – it is intimate, uncomfortable and immersive.

Mountains must be physically exhausting for the cast. They throw themselves around the stage from start to finish. I, too, found the performance tiring as the audience must stand up for the whole hour. From time to time, I also found it mentally draining. There are periods when the actors’ movements repeat endlessly and William Lucas’s soundtrack seems stuck in a loop. Mountains feels as though it could do with a little more editing, a little sanding down at the edges. Nonetheless, it still retains a raw energy that is enough to overcome most of its faults.

The three monologues, written by Kat Dixon-Ward, are poetic and arrestingly direct. Occasionally, they lapse into cliché or ring false. But for the most part they are just the right mixture of smooth musicality and sharpness. For me, the Second Woman’s meditation on her unborn child particularly stood out. It was delivered with warmth and feeling by Teddy Brigs and proved to be one of the few hopeful moments in an otherwise dark performance.

Towards the end of the play, the audience is led out of the close confines of the boathouse into the night. At this point, three or four people are led off in separate direction to hear stories of pregnancy or motherhood while the bulk of the audience are treated to an improvised speech by one of the cast. In the background, a film installation by Bea Grant plays.

This shift of scene is, I imagine, intended to mimic the emergence of a young baby into the world – and it succeeds. The transition from a small, dark, warm room to the open air is quite unexpected and helps to shift the play out of the theatre and into the outside world. The director, Bea Udale-Smith deserves a great deal of credit for this coup de théâtre.

Mountain is an exciting performance. It could be shorter, tighter, more economical with its movements and more varied in its sounds. But it is nothing if not adventurous. I would recommend it to anyone who fancies something a little bit off the beaten track.

Rock’s best storyteller

Barney Pite
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Rock’s best storyteller

Outside the world of indie rock, John Darnielle is almost unheard of, and even within it he’s not exactly a household name. As the lead singer of the Mountain Goats, a band with a small but extremely devoted cult-following, he’s had to get used to artistic anonymity. If you get it, his music is sensitive and all encompassing, emotionally charged and always well considered. If you don’t, it’s rasping and weird.

Darinelle published his second novel this year. Following his 2014 debut, Wolf in a White Van, the new Universal Harvester is a story set in built out of creepy homes and Iowa cornfields. Darnielle’s songs tend to look back to past times that have disappeared: his childhood in Southern California with an abusive stepfather, or his experiences living as a teenage meth-addict in Portland, Oregon. Universal Harvester, which evokes the pre-digital age of burner phones, fi lm rental and the dial-up internet, is no exception.

It is a mysterious and accomplished work of fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, described it as ‘moving’ and ‘beautifully etched’, whilst the TSL judged its tone to be ‘bewitchingly and eerily still’. Darnielle’s greatest skill as a songwriter is his ability to write a defined sense of atmosphere, and this ability is extended into his novel; Universal Harvester evokes a world in which nothing changes, where the days ‘roll on like hills too low to give names to.’

The world of indie rock has proved to be fertile ground for novelists. Nick Cave has published prolifically and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists writes fantasy novels for younger readers. Darnielle’s new novel confirms the status that Rolling Stone granted him, that of ‘Rock’s best storyteller’, and supports what fans of the Mountain Goats believed: he deserves more attention than he gets.

House of Fear and the reinvention of fairytale

Libby Cherry
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House of Fear and the reinvention of fairytale

In his Preface to Carrington’s House of Fear, Max Ernst defined the ideal reader of Leonora Carrington, as one that would less read than imbibe her prose. Written in 1974, The Hearing Trumpet is the focal point of Carrington’s new period of artistic creation, and in part acts as a meditation on her Surrealist art of the 1930s. Like any fairytale, reading Carrington’s most extended piece of prose is coloured not only by the story itself, but by its accompanying artwork. Her painting, The Giantess adorns the cover of my edition and captures the haphazard, mythic strands of the novella in a single tableau, from the egg to the wolf to the black geese.

The fairytale is a collision site of temporality, combining the childish and the macabre, and The Hearing Trumpet is no different. “People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats,” attests Carmella to the nonagenarian protagonist, Marion. Childhood and old age become fused and separated from the ‘adult’ world. Indeed, it’s only through Camella’s gift of the eponymous trumpet that Marion can pierce this divide and is able to discover her children’s plot to send her to retirement home. Yet the home itself has more of the atmosphere of a lively all-girls boarding school, watched over by the ineffectual Dr Gambit. Guided by Marion through the story, we find the wild ramblings of an infant equivalent to demented mental wanderings, as the “wild anemones” of fairytale morph into the “wild enemas” of aging’s reality.

Carrington’s work represents an outgrowing of fairytale, grotesquely lurid rather than romantically tinted. Within the institution, the women live in parodies of fairytale houses such as “dwellings shaped like toadstalls”, shaped being the word of significance here. or the institution is a place of falsities, the saccharine pastel shades of their houses are cloying and the furniture an illusion, painted on the walls. It’s “like banging one’s nose against a glass door” grumbles Marion in her deadpan tone. Despite the ridiculousness, there is a sinister element to the home, perhaps reminiscent of Carrington’s own experience within a Spanish mental asylum in 1940. Dr Gambit’s continual mantra to “Remember Ourselves” in order to “create objective observation of Personality”, denies imagination and forces the women into an identity socially prescribed to them.

The image of the glass door and, by extension, the glass ceiling becomes all the more important because the story progresses, as the retirement home becomes a female utopia that “creeps with ovaries” and where women dance under the moon and pray to Venus. Out of a mishmash of myths, Carrington creates a pseudofeminist creed offering the women a literal and ideological escape from their damsel-like languishing within the prisons of their plastic fairytale homes. Old age, with its associated wisdom, ugliness and menopause-associated androgyny, becomes a route out of feminine passive beauty. Marion’s “short grey beard” re-claims and re-purposes female masculinity as not “repulsive” but “gallant”, witchlike features not only a symptom of societal ostracism but power.

In this way, Carrington’s own voice and philosophy is defiantly audible. I shall never get on with my narrative if I can’t control these memories”, Marion/Carrington declares, and indeed amongst the mythic references with the novella itself are threads from Carrington’s own extraordinary life, rupturing the fictional world she has created. We imagine Marion’s companions were taken from real life, the European crones sequestered in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country mirroring Carrington’s own French intellectual community in Mexico. Carrington uses Marion as a platform for her own sentiments, from bewailing the domestication of Surrealist art that hangs in “almost every village rectory and girl’s school” to recounting her own life experiences.

The Hearing Trumpet may be a piece of flagrant and unabashed escapism, in its own words, “not an intellectual book, just fairytales”. Yet like any fairytale behind the psychedelic effects, there are moments of cogent truth, such as “why was Eve blamed for everything?” and “for real understanding one can only depend on dogs”. Carrington’s novel offers the literary equivalent of Andre Breton’s surrealist “dizzy descent into ourselves”, where the strangeness of the fictional world reveals the true oddities and malformities in what we consider reality.

Christ Church students protest early bop shut down

Emily Lawford
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Christ Church students protest early bop shut down

Christ Church students protested outside their JCR on Saturday night after their bop was shut down almost an hour early.

Students were evacuated from the bop due to the sounding of a fire alarm at 11.15 pm. The JCR was not reopened, and a group of students gathered outside in protest.

At the college party, triple vodka oranges – or ‘bop juice’ – were sold at a rate of four for £1 until 10.30 pm. The price was then increased to three for £1.

Christ Church introduced bouncers for bops earlier this term and capped the number of students allowed inside the JCR at 175, for fire safety reasons.

At Saturday’s bop, this number was further reduced to 130, with a ‘one in one out’ policy to prevent overcrowding. This led to the buildup of a queue outside the JCR.

Those waiting in the queue were able to purchase drinks from a secondary bar set up outside, in preparation for the bop.

Reportedly, drunk students protested the early shutdown, chanting abuse about the Junior Censor and attempting to reenter the JCR.

After this proved unsuccessful, many made their way to an after-party in Peckwater Quad. However, that event was also closed down after fire alarms were sounded in the venue.

One Christ Church second-year told Cherwell: “Having so much additional security is a little bit patronising, and treating people like children makes them act like children. I think it’s all a bit stupid.

“It’s because they don’t want us to end up in The Sun again somehow.”

Saturday’s incident follows a series of recent controversies surrounding Christ Church bops.

At the college freshers’ bop earlier this term, up to 100 croissants were handed out to students in order to mitigate drunkenness. Many students also went topless in the JCR.

Last Trinity term, a Christ Church student was banned from all JCR events after wearing a pillowcase resembling a KKK hood to a bop.

The president of Christ Church JCR declined to comment.

 

 

 

 

Oxford SU: University should offer free student bike repair

Iggy Wood
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Oxford SU: University should offer free student bike repair

Oxford SU will lobby the University to introduce a free bike repair system for students.

The University’s ‘Mobile Mechanic’ scheme currently provides staff and students with access to bicycle repair services from two local companies. It is free of charge and for staff only.

At a meeting on Wednesday students voted for Oxford SU to try and extend this free provision to students. The SU’s vice president for Charities and Community, Tom Barringer, will now approach the University with the proposal.

Barringer told Cherwell: “I’m very happy that this motion passed. Extending access to the University bike doctors for students is already something I’ve talked to the Estates Department about, and having this motion come up independently through Council will serve to highlight how important the issue of bike safety and fair access to bike mechanics is for students.”

Despite concerns about funding, the motion proposed by Tiger Hills and Tom Wernham passed without opposition.

Hills and Wernham told Cherwell that the motion was aiming for the “equitable treatment” of students and staff.

“Students need to travel around the city just as much, if not more, than university employees,” said Hills, “but for staff, labour costs for repairs are free, whereas students have to pay.”

The pair said such costs are especially prohibitive for poorer students. “Cycling in Oxford won’t be safe until students are riding well-maintained bikes,” Wernham summarised.

Oxford SU’s resolution forms part of a broader movement to improve cycling safety in Oxford. Last Thursday, the Claudia Charter for Cycling Safety was launched in memory of the D.Phil student Claudia Comberti, who was killed in a cycling accident earlier this year.

The initiative, which calls for a minimum of £10 per cyclist to be spent on improving cycling infrastructure, met with unanimous approval from Oxford City Council.

Cycling safety has long been a problem for the city. Based on data from 2009-2015, The Plain roundabout – which joins Iffley Road, Cowley Road, St Clement’s and the High Street, and serves more than 11,000 cyclist a day – was the second most dangerous roundabout for cyclists in the UK. The junction, which links the city centre with Cowley, has since been redeveloped.

In response to the motion, the University told Cherwell it would not extend the service to students.

“The service currently allows for students to present their bicycle to the bike mechanic, who would then provide them with advice on what is needed and a quote for making minor repairs,” it said.

“University staff receive free labour for minor repairs but must pay for all parts. The service is designed for quick checks/repairs and not for full servicing, for which we would expect University staff to use a reputable bike shop.

“The service is funded by the Green Travel Fund (staff parking charges) but due to financial and capacity constraints it is not possible to extend the free labour for minor repairs to students. The University is currently in discussions with the Oxford Student Union regarding opportunities to widen cycling support to students.”

Oxford falls in global employability rankings

Joe Sibley
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Oxford falls in global employability rankings

Oxford University has dropped outside the top ten universities for graduate employability worldwide.

The ability of 150 universities to prepare students for the workplace was assessed by employers for rankings published by Times Higher Education (THE).

Oxford, which holds the overall THE world university ranking top spot, has fallen this year from seventh to 15th position in world employability rankings.

This is the biggest drop in the top 30, raising concerns that Oxford may have fallen behind its global counterparts in its ability to offer its graduates good employment prospects in a post-Brexit landscape.

With ties to European companies and institutions weakening, Oxford graduates seem to have become less sought-after as the advantages of a British education, and the links it provides to the UK and the city of London, become less important in the eyes of employers.

Additionally, perceived difficulties for international students wanting to come to Oxford to study, and to remain in the UK upon graduation, has led to many European students looking to carry out their education at highly regarded universities outside of the UK.

A University spokesperson told Cherwell: “While there is still a great deal of uncertainty about what the final impact of Brexit might be, we are confident that an Oxford education will continue to be viewed as excellent preparation for a wide range of professions.”

The California Institute of Technology once again led the global employability rankings, with Harvard University and Columbia University in second and third place respectively. In fifth place, the University of Cambridge was the highest ranked UK institution.

Day in the Life: Cherwell Editor

Jack Hunter
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Day in the Life: Cherwell Editor

Friday morning, 11am. I wake up after a long lie in, recovering from a late night in the Choffices. We had the paper almost finished, but at midnight one of the news editors discovered a suspicious student society blog, and four hours and half a dozen cups of coffee later we’d proven a vast international conspiracy.

Another week, another shocking Union revelation (President Zabilowicz had misplaced a comma in his latest email accusing us of defamation), more penetratingly insightful comment pieces (a PPE fresher read an article in the Economist and is now an expert on US foreign policy), and another compelling exploration of existentialist literature (an insufferably edgy English student read some Camus the week before). Well done us!

I check my LinkedIn, and – nice! – another invitation to connect from a junior Daily Mail hack! If I can just leak a few sensitive details about left-wing student movements to him, maybe I’ll make it onto their grad scheme.

I grab a sandwich from Pret and head out to conference, arriving just in time to catch one of the fashion editors attempting to justify her decision to place a photo between two columns of text.

It occurs to me afterwards that perhaps shouting quotes from the style guide at her until she burst into tears was a bit too harsh, but staff members do need to learn that this isn’t an opportunity to have fun: we’re trying to hold the University and its institutions to account.

After hurriedly scribbling down some notes and thrashing out a crap essay, I’m free to get back to Cherwell business. I give a speech to my JCR defending the freedom of the press, invoking the paper’s noble history, and issuing a grovelling apology for libelling them the week before.

As I leave the meeting my phone rings – the corporate overlords are checking in again. They attempt to convince me to run a front page advertorial extolling the virtues of working in sales at BAE Systems.

I refuse initially, but the chairman is insistent that he won’t get that internship at Slaughter & May if Cherwell goes bankrupt before the end of the year.

So I agree, hang up, and then head back to bed. That email with the subject line ‘**NOTIFICATION OF ARTICLE INACCURACIES**’ can wait until tomorrow.

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