Progress, of sorts

I’m not sure what to make of that last post of mine: it was terribly self-indulgent I realise, and it’s not one of my prouder efforts. But hell, it was on my mind and I felt like spouting off. I probably need to employ an editor, though I do try and listen to my dear pal Grant’s advice, most of which I seem to ignore. Apologies for this one old boy, but I have to quote you here:

“Reading the latest entry in TLGTIR it's good to see you've taken my advice about brevity, clarity and eschewal of self-indulgence, and completely discarded it.”

Whoops. I’ll try harder the next time.

Though I do want to say this, on the topic of the ‘unexamined life’:

Lately I’ve spent some time in my history classes looking at Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plato and discussing the purpose of history. When you ask students what they consider the purpose of history, you get the same response across the board, something along the lines of ‘to learn from our past mistakes’.

I don’t like this at all as a rationale for studying the past. Mainly because we keep making the same damn mistakes over and over and never seem to learn from them. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?

I tend to get a bit more philosophical on this one: we study history in order to know what makes us human. To get a sense of where we come from. To get a sense of where national pride came from, and why the citizen of his nation feels his nation to be so superior to all others. This then allows us an idea of how prejudice originate, and why people hold the beliefs they do about other races and ethnicities. Where did all these ideas about who we are and who others are come about?

‘This is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from his the past by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
‘It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the de-formed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.’
Milan Kundera, The Curtain

There are many things that separate humans from animals, some of them debatable. We use tools, we wear jewellery, we keep records of our past, we can reason, we can make and keep promises but perhaps most important, we have a strong sense of self-awareness. We’re aware of the fact that we exist and we consider and ponder the reasons for our existence. This, essentially, is what makes us human. And the more we examine who we are, the more aware we become of what we are.

When it comes to talking about the [unbearable?] lightness of being, no one describes it better than Kundera. I’ve been overly reliant on The Curtain (a series of seven essays on the art of the novel) for inspiration lately, quoting it ad nauseam on these very pages. Though it’s only 168 pages long, I’ve been taking ages to get through it, reading and re-reading and pondering the material. This is very apt:

‘They are just beginning the journey into the unknown; no question, they are drifting, but theirs is a singular sort of drifting: they drift without knowing that’s what they are doing; for they are doubly inexperienced: they do not know the world and they do not know themselves; only when they look back on it from the distance of adulthood will they see their drifting; and besides: only with that distance will they be capable of understanding the very notion of drifting. For the moment, with no understanding of the view the future will one day take of their long-gone youth, they defend their convictions far more aggressively than an adult man would defend his, a man who has had experience with the fragility of human certainties.’

In terms of my own story and existential angst, Jeff came pretty damn close to equally Kundera for his analysis on drifting. Although I can’t articulate it as eloquently as Jeff, what he had to say went something like this: when it comes to travelling there are 3 types of people out there. There’s the light, drifting type – think a feather, or pollen – who floats around from place to place, barely touching down, merely gliding effortlessly through the air. There’s the hard type – a rounded, polished stone – who bounces around from place to place, absorbing nothing and always moving on to something new. And then there’s the 3rd type, the double sticky-sided tape, who picks up little bits and pieces everywhere he goes, adding on and burdening himself with more pressure and experiences, absorbing everything, shedding very little to nothing, all the while risking being torn asunder.

(Something else to consider, which I’ll thankfully refrain from doing here. Why do I feel the need to travel so much? Is it for the sense of adventure? Or for the need to escape? If it is merely escape, and I often fear so, it’s time to re-evaluate matters. I’ll do that on my own and spare my faithful readers any more of my agonising.)

Now for a bit of jumping around

Back to that topic of reading from two posts ago. A few more quotations to share:

‘How well he is read/To reason against reading.’
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

(again, thanks to Grant for this one; by now I ought to fess up and put him down as a co-writer on this thing)

‘When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.’
Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Revisiting why I bother reading, when I can’t seem to keep much of it in:

‘The novel is a very poorly fortified castle. If I take an hour to read twenty pages, a novel of four hundred pages will take me twenty hours, thus about a week. Rarely do we have a whole week free. It is more likely that, between sessions of reading, intervals of several days will occur, during which forgetting will immediately set up its worksite. But it is not only in the intervals that forgetting does its work; it participates in the reading continuously, with never a moment’s lapse; turning the page, I already forget what I just (sic) read; I retain only a kind summary indispensable for understanding what is to follow, but all the details, the small observations, the admirable phrasings are already gone. Erased. Someday, years later, I will start to talk about this novel to a friend, and we will find that our memories have retained only a few shreds of the text and have reconstructed very different books for each of us.'
The Curtain

Onto more anecdotal matters

I’m about to break one of my promises by sharing a schmaltzy teaching tale. In all honesty, there have been a couple I’ve been tempted to share lately, including one featuring some potentially scandalous comments from one of my female teenage students. For legal reasons, I’ll refrain from discussing that further; email me if you really want to hear further details and I’ll consider sharing.

At the conclusion of my civics class, I often ask the students to write a reflection on the day’s lesson. It’s meant to be on the content of what I’ve attempted to teach them. Sometimes I ask them to write down three things: 1 thing they’ve learnt, 1 thing they’ve found interesting and 1 thing they don’t understand or have a question about.

Now, I’m awfully open with my students, telling them various stories of my shenanigans and tomfoolery – trying to leave out the bits that include alcohol – with the aim of somehow tying it into the theme of the point of the lesson. This isn’t always successful. I’ve already divulged some of my more shameful episodes, including tales from various public baths, my rib-cracking experience in Riga and getting kidnapped by rebels in the Nigerian Delta. They at least laugh at me.

For whatever reason – probably because I just love incriminating my friends – I recently shared with the class a few probably inappropriate anecdotes. One involved me and Jeff’s excursion in Petra – discussed in more detail in a previous post – which keep in mind occurred during our accidental celebration of Ramadan. Because we’d failed to adequately prepare for a day of gamboling amongst the rocks, we had no food, little water, and resorted to Coke and Fanta to keep us afloat. By mid-afternoon we were delirious and making no sense to each other.

Upon scaling the heights and reaching the top of one precarious path, Jeff had the bright idea of pulling his trousers down (but thankfully keeping his boxers on) to let the breeze course through his…whatever. I duly did the same, and man did it feel great. We stood up there feeling like real men, free as can be in the blowing wind.

I shared that tale. What relevance did it have to the topic? I’ve got no idea.

Another one I shared involved my dear friend ‘Dr Wasabi Islam’, who thinks there are fewer things more refreshing in life than removing all of your clothes before taking a dump. Trust me on this one: he’s right. Especially on a sticky, hot summer’s day, it takes a real load off.

I shared that tale. What relevance did it have to the topic? I’ve got no idea.

So at the end of class, I asked the class to reflect on the lesson, using that three things format. Roughly a 1/3 of the class took it seriously and commented on the actual ‘content’ of the lesson. Some of the remaining samples were as follows:

What they learnt/found interesting:

1. Mr Pedzo and his friend took off their pants and let the wind blow on their balls.
2. Mr Pedzo’s friend decided to take off his pants and then so did he and it felt really good.
3. It feels really good to take off your pants at the top of mountains and feel the wind.
4. Mr Pedzo’s friend Dr Wasabi Islam likes to take off his clothes before he takes a dump and this feels really refreshing.
5. Dr Wasabi Islam likes to relax before taking a dump by taking off all his clothes.
6. Mr Pedzo has some weird friends.

What they didn’t understand/had questions about:

1. How it can feel good to have the wind blowing on you on a mountain after taking off your pants because I’m a girl, I don’t think it would be the same.
2. Mr Pedzo’s friend takes off his clothes before taking a dump, but he didn’t say if he did, I wonder if he does.
3. Why Mr Pedzo and his friend just didn’t wear shorts when they were hiking on top of the mountain.
4. What if I really have to go and I don’t have time to take my clothes off and make a mess on accident.
5. Does Dr Wasabi Islam take off all his clothes every time he takes a dump? What if he’s in public?
6. Why does Mr Pedzo have such weird friends?

I have to wonder just how effective a teacher I really am.

Various snippets of various things

Elizabeth so kindly/cruelly pointed out this article in the comments section of my last post:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/02/ryszard-kapuscinski-accused-fiction-biography

I’m glad she did, though it pains me to learn that my literary hero is a potential fraud. Still, it does nothing to detract from his magnificent oeuvre, and I consistently recommend his works to everyone I come into contact with. My favourites vary, but The Shadow of the Sun has to come top of the list. The Soccer War and Imperium are also classics, but you can’t really go wrong with any of his material.

In the interests of transparency, I also recommend this one:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/06/ian-jack-ryszard-kapuscinski

While I’m a roll with the links, here’s an amusing little ditty about those wacky Central and Eastern Europeans and their petty feuds over names and nationalities:

‘You say Lwów, I say Lviv: a guide to Eastern Europe’s most tedious arguments’
‘Ukraine/Poland: Anyone who spells the capital of Galicia as Lwów is a Polish nationalist who bayonets Ukrainian babies for fun. Anyone who says it is spelled Lviv is a Ukrainian fascist who bayonets Polish babies for fun. Anyone who spells it Lvov is a Soviet mass murderer. And anyone who calls it Lemberg is a Nazi. See you in Leopolis for further discussion.’

The rest of it can be found here:

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15810902

In honour of Easter, a brief anecdote from my high school days. This might be the farthest I’ve delved into the past on these pages.

Charlie Buchanan – some fellow readers may remember him – was quite a religious young man, who was persistent in his attempts to get me to attend church. I never gave in, but the kid was relentless in his crusade. This was one particularly memorable exchange:

CB: So, what about coming to church this Sunday?
DP: Sorry, I can’t, I have a baseball game (our league in England played on Sundays)
CB: You know, Jesus died for you.
DP: Yes, he died on a Friday and then rose on a Sunday to watch me play baseball.

I was never invited to church again.

I end with a trivia question I posed two posts ago:

According to Uefa, in which city can be found the only stadium in Europe that ‘conforms to every single safety and security measure that [Uefa] stipulates’? The complex comes replete with two full-size stadia, an arena licensed for international meetings of any indoor sport, a five-pitch training ground, a sports academy, a hotel, bar and restaurant.

I wish I could say I was deluged by answers, but got only 1 response. Mike’s guess was Ibrox, which is incorrect.

The answer? Tiraspol, capital of Transnistria (a part of Moldova, depending on your politics), and home of FC Sheriff Tiraspol. Surely they deserve to be awarded a Champions League final, with such splendid facilities.

For football geeks like myself, this is absolutely fascinating.

I probably ought to get out more.

There are few better feelings in the world

Another Day of Life

‘The unexamined life is not worth living’.
Socrates

I've never been so lost or confused in my life.

Okay, so maybe that’s a tad melodramatic, but I’m feeling a bit out of sorts at the moment, in a bit of an existentialist funk (if existentialism isn’t your cup of tea, then cease reading now) or something.

Indecision, impatience and anxiety stemming from uncertainty are my biggest vices (coffee has been banished from the list since I’m down to no more than 2 cups a day now).

My friends think I live quite the charmed life; Andrew calls me a ‘rambling soul’. Others tell me how lucky I am. Luck’s got nothing to do with it.

‘Luck is the residue of design’.
Milton

‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity’.
Seneca

Don’t get me wrong here: I suppose I have been awfully fortunate in that I’ve had the opportunity to travel the globe as a means of assuaging my wanderlust over the past few years. It took me a while to get my act together, though I certainly haven’t got regrets. I still lament my lack of language ability and the apathetic attitude I had to them as a kid, even whilst living in Spain and Germany, though I’m suddenly starting to feel the world of possibilities is constricting my ability to think rationally. It was the Greeks who were the first to see that there was a rational order to the universe – have we progressed at all since then?

This has been an ongoing issue, but I can’t shake these feelings of emptiness that continually linger; I wonder if I’m impossible to satisfy. I’m not sure what I want, what I’m after, where I want to be, what I’m doing with myself. A nine month stint here, a three month stint there – is this a healthy way to live?

It is, perhaps, depending on one’s emotional constitution. Mine is weak: I become emotionally attached easily. And I hate goodbyes and the subsequent heartache.

I hate to use such crude financial terminology but time becomes an investment. Moving to a new place takes an investment of time, energy, and yes, emotions, with no guarantee of any type of future returns. It becomes a high risk/low reward strategy, and at some point, one does have to ask oneself, are the risks worth the potentially low rewards?

Meeting new people is a massive investment of emotions. Especially when it comes to those special people in your life, whether dear, dear friends or fledgling romances that offer so much promise only to crumble when you least expect it.

And then there’s that emptiness and longing that yet again surface when, during the goodbye process, the harsh reality that you may never see this person again hits, and your emotions play havoc on your soul. The anguish that inevitably follows is draining.

You start to ask yourself whether it’s worth it, and what the point of it all is. Why do we put ourselves through such strife and torment, especially when it doesn’t seem to get any easier.

‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all’.
Oscar Wilde

I can see how this sounds self-defeating. Surely the point is merely to ‘live’. These experiences in and of themselves shape us, make us who we are. Much like learning about history gives meaning to what makes us human, learning about ourselves sheds light on what makes us us.

But at some point we have to stop and ask: what is it that fulfills me?

What does fulfill people – is it work? Love? Happiness? How many people truly love their jobs? Honestly, truly, candidly, etc, etc?

According to Kierkegaard, the fundamental theme of our existence is the idea that we can achieve meaning for our lives only through a decisive, life-defining commitment.

‘Once I make up my mind I’m filled with indecision’.
Oscar Levant

So where does that leave those of us who struggle to make decisions? Those of us who are scared to miss out on something because of the limitless array of possibilities out there? I’m not just talking about jobs – I’m talking about life in general, new experiences, new friends, romance, feelings, getting to know yourself, opening your eyes to the world…

What about letting others make that decision for us? As in, when the timing and circumstances are right, things just fall into place. You may not be sure of where you want to go, but suddenly someone appears on the scene who seems to make the decision making process that much easier. Only it isn’t easier because there’s confusion coursing through the two of you, and the decision-making process gets murky and convoluted. It comes back to knowing yourself, in the end. How can you trust others to make the right choices if you can’t trust yourself? Or am I contradicting myself here?

And there’s a catch anyway: getting the timing right. Timing is everything. Which means it’s awfully frustrating.

As for that age-old question of whether to follow the heart or the head? These days I trust neither.

Kierkegaard also says that only by accepting our own life story as it is can we be liberated from the craving for some sort of large-scale teleological legitimation for our existence.

Thus, must we first accept who we are before we can find fulfillment?

How can we accept who we are – or, our life story – if we’ve got no idea who we are or what we want?

How sure can one be of anything? Is it relative? We may think we’re sure of something, but that’s probably only because we’re so unsure of everything else, making the seemingly sure bet that much surer only because we’re so unsure about the unsure bits. Thus, we’re sure about something because in comparison, it’s at the very least a safer bet than the alternatives.

(There’s a bit of Donald Rumsfeld in all of us.)

Is life one giant process of elimination? Let me try this – nope, no good, next. Oh, that’s no good either. Next. Let’s give this a shot. And so on and so forth.

'Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospect; it has to be shattered before being ascertained'.
Nabokov

Lately in my emails the buzzphrase has been something to the effect of ‘uncertainty is a cool thing in retrospect’. At the time, especially with someone like me who suffers from impatience as a vice, it’s a day-to-day killer. The anxiety can be overwhelming, rendering the simplest of everyday thinking tasks a challenge. Keeping my thoughts straight, thinking one day at a time, becomes downright impossible when the future is so cloudy and undefined. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a frisson of excitement to this kind of existence, but it’s hard to appreciate at the time, in a way like nostalgia. We might not be altogether thrilled with a place, but we often know, even while we are there, that we’ll look back on the experience in a fond light. And yet we remain powerless to accept and appreciate the situation for what it is. We become immune, and thus complacent.

'The world is what it is; men who have nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it'.
VS Naipaul

Here I am, with a few weeks left in my student-teaching placement, suddenly doubting whether this is well and truly what I want to do. On top of that, I’m terrified of committing to a couple of years somewhere when I’m not even sure of where I’m going with all of this. Sometimes I see my steps in life as a means to an end, but an end to what? What’s my ultimate destination? I ought to relish this uncertainty, the excitement and challenge of what lies ahead. But when your head isn’t clear, and making the simplest of choices becomes the most arduous of tasks, you come to a brick wall and are so tempted to bang your head against it.

Work: I’m not even aware of half of what’s out there, but I take comfort in the fact that most of us don’t. Then again, many of us are established in some sort of line of work, and a part of me admires those who have a firm plan and know exactly what they want to do. My students are mesmerised by the places I’ve been: when I ask them who would like to travel, around 5 or 6 amongst a sample size of over 60 answer yes. And the preferred destinations are usually England, France or Australia. When I ask whether they want to own their own homes, they look at me perplexed. When I ask about whether they want children, they’re incredulous when I tell them I don’t.

At times I wish I were like the rest of us. It would be so much easier.

But then life isn’t meant to be easy.

I’m delving pretty deep into my philosophical bag of tricks here, but I’m now turning to Marxism for help; surely the natural place to turn when one is confused about the world of work. What I lack - bearing in mind here that I’m not a Marxist, so maybe this isn’t even the problem – is that sense of being where the skill set required for success is a relentless instrumentalism. Alongside that is what I see as a pathological level of self-mastery of the emotions, only bought at the price of the corrosion of the capacity for intimacy and a stable, balanced sense of self. Somehow or another, that makes sense to me.

Ultimately, the ultimate harbinger of doom is time; more specifically, the lack of it.

Time is the most ephemeral of concepts. There just isn’t enough of it to satisfy all of my cravings. Time is finite, and thus an eternity is needed in order to accomplish only a smidgeon of what it is we want to. And perhaps even an eternity isn’t enough.

In the summer of 2002, whilst preparing for my Master’s at Edinburgh, I discovered the great, late Polish writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I fell in love with his work, and I fell hard and fast for Africa at the same time. Reading The Shadow of the Sun, probably my favourite book, whetted my appetite and curiosity for a place that was only satiated once I’d been to Nigeria. But the Africa bug never leaves us, and though I’m only mildly tempted to return at the moment, every now and then I do entertain the notion of a return.

Because the idea of time flusters me more than anything else, it must have been something like this that I could identify and find solace in. I quote at length because it’s so eloquent and stirring:

“The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time's slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man's defeat – time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).

Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.”

I’m ready to concede defeat to time. It gets the better of me. I can hardly believe I’m about to quote my mother here, but she likes to say on a daily basis, to the point of annoyance, ‘take your time, or time takes you.’

Let it, I say.

Here’s a challenge I’m now posing to my dear and loyal readers: why don’t you decide on the next step for me? I’ll entertain all [relatively serious] suggestions, weigh them with great consideration, and choose the best option, if the opportunity permits. Keep in mind my skill set, or lack thereof, and interests. This is also a test as to how well you know me. Consider this some kind of grand experiment. I'm open to a lot of things.

There’s an infinite world of possibilities out there: that is exciting.

But there’s also the tragic possibility that the one thing we finally discover we think we want the most, more than anything else in the world, which for a while is there for the taking, fleetingly slips from our grasp, while we’re powerless to stop it.

It’s that kind of heartbreak which terrifies me the most.

Working out the right angle

“Some have been afflicted by bibliomania through idleness, and for them there is small hope of cure; others, I count myself among them, from excess of affairs. Many, like asses that wear out their time for provender, are so buried in the minor and immediate tasks of earning a living as to get confounded promptly and permanently with the victims of commercial ambition, whence it comes to pass that, slyly and insensibly perverted, nerves frayed and brains dulled, they take to books as sick souls take to drugs. They hoard at first against a time of leisure when they may perchance read, and end by hoarding for the sake of hoarding, thus allying themselves with those dizzards who wallow among possessions which they cannot use, and who die before they have lived.”

Anatomy of Bibliomania (Holbrook Jackson)


Not that I’ve ever been a big believer in New Year’s Resolutions – I seem to be stuck in a school/university mindset where, if I make resolutions, I make them in September - but I may be one of those rare breeds of people who keeps telling myself that I need to read less. Aren’t people always saying that they ought to read more? I’m quite the opposite: reading rules my life and it’s proving to be more and more of a hindrance as the years pass me by.

I realise I’m a bit late in talking about a New Year’s resolution; after all, we are fast approaching the Ides of March. But this is my first posting of 2010. The original trickle of concerns/complaints from my legions of loyal readers has gone from a piddling stream to a raging torrent (though thankfully no vile insults directed my way just yet) and before I get deluged by the floods, I reckoned it was about time that I inundated my followers with a scatter-shot diatribe of my not-so-coherent thoughts. (how’s that for water and flood metaphors?)

I’ve got a feeling that I may be quoting a fair few friends today, and I’ll start with Yonni, who sometime ago offered me some generous and kind flattering words of praise and as well as some very valuable advice, the gist of which was this: just write. Just put words down [on paper], they don’t have to always make sense, just write, write, write. I’d long been putting such simple advice off for lack of the ‘right angle’. I should elaborate.

I’m currently in the midst of student-teaching (civics and world history) at a local high school. It has certainly been a challenge and it’s not my intention to discuss that at any length here, for a variety of reasons. First, it would probably be deadly boring – think about, if you’re aware of them, those cringeworthy memoirs in the form of a daily diary written by first year teachers at inner-city schools (I actually only know of one book, but there are a few blogs out there). Second, it would strike me as rather unprofessional. Third, I need a break from even thinking about it. And fourth, it would inevitably turn into me whingeing and ranting and raving and I really don’t want to do that – let’s keep things cheerful and positive.

That said, I may every now and then share a tale or two if it’s of wider interest to a theme I’m crapping on about.

I’m certainly awfully busy these days, which is one excuse for not writing more, but there’s also tiredness, motivational issues, brain-mushiness after a day of being used and abused at school and, most of all, a lack of inspiration. There are one or two things that, in a vague sense, I’d like to share, but the thoughts aren’t really well-formed enough to constitute thoughts that would make much sense in their current, inchoate states. Nor is the angle there just yet, if that makes sense.

Back to the reading thing. I hope to avoid sounding, uh, pretentious here.

Why do people read? Sounds a silly, obvious question, but I’ve lately been asking myself this question. In a recent, way-too-short-for-my-liking conversation with Grant, this topic came up. I wonder about this because it seems like these days much of what I read fails to sink in. I feel terribly guilty for reading fiction, unless it’s of the stimulating, existential (bah!), thought-provoking kind. Plus, as an aspiring social studies teacher, I should be reading plenty of non-fiction, which I do anyway. And which I love.

Or do I?

I quote Elizabeth here, who once accused me of liking the idea of reading more than the reading itself (apologies if I’m misquoting here). I reacted in an overly flabbergasted manner at the time, but oftentimes my mind wanders back to that conversation and I think that perhaps she might have been onto something. This is potentially tragic. It could also be explored in greater depth, but I shan’t just now.

I get irritable and cranky if I can’t find the time to read in a day. That’s why the past few years of teaching English have been great: it affords me ample time to read (it’s either that, or going out to bars and clubs and getting stocious and then my ribs cracked or - horror of all horrors! - actually spending the time to learn the local language).

Reading rules my life. Whether it’s news or sport or whatever else, I put reading before so much else, sacrificing the things that really need to get done. Like now, for example. I really need to work on my CV and send out some covering letters for teaching positions, which can be lengthy affairs, plus of course, some lesson planning.

And don’t get me started on technology. Things like the Kindle and various other computer-type readers scare the bejesus out of me. What’s the future coming to? Should we celebrate or lament the decline in print journalism? What if newspapers start charging for content – many already do – and linking them via a subscription service to one of these wretched e-reader devices? What will happen to the fun of spotting the cover of a book someone’s reading on public transport and then saying ‘Hey, I read that recently, so what do you think thus far?’ (such a geek am I that I can’t even use this as a thinly-veiled excuse to hit on women, as I seem to ask more men about what they’re reading, though you may recall the time at Keene where I asked a girl what she thought of Cod, only to be met with a caustic ‘Uh, I have a boyfriend’).

But here’s the deal. I spend ages and ages reading whatever intrigues me (which is a lot) and I make calculated plans on when and how I’m going to get them read. I take notes in the margins. I take notes in various notebooks and journals, which have rapidly piled up over the years (where else do you think I get all these endless quotations and tidbits from?). But for what? I do seem to get some pleasure in reading, but a few hours later I’m hard pressed to remember much of what I’ve read. And then I think to myself, what was the point of that if I’ve just forgotten it all? Shouldn’t I have spent my time doing something more substantial and productive?

No doubt after wrapping this up, I’ll probably pick up another book: I tend to have 4-5 on the go at a time, and quite a few others with a bookmark languishing 1/3 of the way through from who knows how long ago. I’ll never learn.

Anyway, while I’m on the topic, a couple of words on a couple of books. I recently finished Freakanomics (on audiobook, no less, which means there might be hope for a Luddite like me with e-readers in the future; this coming from the same guy who swore never to cave in and get an Ipod) which has been somewhat of a sensation in the economics world (the Guardian named it one of the books of the decade, in fact). This is just one of a glut of books out there trying to bring the esoteric world of numbers and finance to a mass audience – I like this kind of stuff, because I find economics fascinating yet struggle with things like equilibrium curves and the Black-Sholes Model or Theory or whatever the hell it’s called. These books tend to be engaging, accessible and revelatory.

Freakanomics, however, was a massive disappointment. It’s one of those typical books that has about 15-20 pages of truly original material, padded out with pages upon pages of dross and fluff. It could have – and should have – been part of a series of essay collections. After the initial, sometimes bewildering insight, the chapters veer off into a morass of dull statistics and over-elaboration. For my money, better books out there include The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford) and especially Naked Economics (Charles Wheelan).

[Another book which left me similarly underwhelmed despite the heaps of critical praise piled upon it: Black Swan (Nassim Taleb); I found it full of holes and flimsy arguments, though I do agree with the general premise: looking at the impact of improbable events which are near impossible to forecast. In other words, why bother with risk models when some potentially catastrophic event can come and wipe everything out? That’s the book in a nutshell, no read to bother reading it now.]

Trivia question for fellow football geeks: according to Uefa, in which city can be found the only stadium in Europe that ‘conforms to every single safety and security measure that [Uefa] stipulates’? The complex comes replete with two full-size stadia, an arena licensed for international meetings of any indoor sport, a five-pitch training ground, a sports academy, a hotel, bar and restaurant. The answer is awfully surprising, and to give you a clue, I read about this in McMafia: A Journey Through the Criminal Underworld (Misha Glenny). Which means the answer probably isn’t London or Madrid. I’ll answer this in my next post. (by the way, terrific book thus far)

Okay, so maybe this is why I read – I didn’t know that before and now I do. It all makes perfect sense now – I really needed to know this in order to enrich my life!

I feel some sort of apology is due for the banal nature of this post. If it was somewhat insipid and torpid at times, it’s mainly because I’m rusty, but also because my brain isn’t fully functioning and I simply felt like spouting off a load of piffle. I blame it on the deleterious effects of student-teaching – either that, or I can blame Yonni. Although I can’t promise to do better the next time, I do aim to try and churn one of these things out every weekend for the foreseeable future. I’ll work on providing a little more ballast to future endeavours.

Thanks for reading anyway. Happy New Year.

Ways of Escape

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
(LP Hartley)

“[The travel book] is little more than a licence to bore…the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing.”
(Paul Theroux)

“Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of western ways by ‘imagining’ the east as decayed and degenerate.”
(William Dalrymple)

“In an age when journalism is becoming more and more etiolated, when articles are becoming shorter and shorter, usually lacking all historical context, travel writing is one of the few venues to write with some complexity about an alien culture.”
(Rory Stewart)


For my final dispatch of 2009, I thought I would take yet another trip down memory lane to revisit some of my old haunts. I was a bit reticent in starting this blog earlier this year. Whether it was my technophobia, my consternation over what I possibly had to say, or my fear of drifting into an overly self-indulgent solipsism, I wasn’t sure if I would hack it, or at least keep up the pace. I must admit that, at times, I’ve felt the burden of expectation from my legions of fans who goaded me into this nascent endeavour and it’s been tough to motivate myself. But at other times, I’ve had a blast and thoroughly enjoyed regaling all my readers with the tales of my shenanigans abroad. I only hope that come 2010 I’ll be able to keep up the pace, for in late January I start full-time [student] teaching. These postings may dry up a bit, though I shall do my best to churn out as many diatribes as possible.

So, now, I delve back into my pre-blogging days and provide the original accounts from some of my adventures over the years. In the interests of transparency, I’ll list the approximate date I originally composed the piece. It will also give you a chance to see how – or if – my writing has evolved over the years. Unless otherwise noted, all the excerpts below were sent as group emails to a select audience. For those of you who didn’t know me before any of the events I’m sharing…well, I don’t really know what to say.

As an added bonus, where I’ve seen fit, I’ve added a few bits of contemporary analysis, or a quotation or two that I’ve dug up out of my notes.

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‘Nigeria is not a great country. It is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that give least value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth!’
(Chinua Achebe)

I’m deep in the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria, working for one of the most frivolous development organisations that I have ever come across…

In light of recent developments down here - militant rebel youths in Port Harcourt are supposedly waging an insurgency against all the big oil multi-nationals, kidnapping westerners, shooting indiscriminately on the streets and in restaurants, etc. - I thank the few of you who have recently written with concerns over my safety and well-being. Even though I am based in Yenagoa, capital of Bayelsa state, I am rather close to Port Harcourt and I do spend a fair amount of my time there. But please don’t fret: the problems are probably overblown (standard fare for this neck of woods), directed towards those in the oil industry and for the most part it’s all localised. If there is a positive to the organisation I work for, they do put a high priority on the safety of staff…

Yenagoa has charm, a city built on sand in the flatlands puddled with mangrove swamps. It is much like I pictured it, something right out of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter or VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Houses, food kitchens, stalls and dingily-lit supermarkets crowded with imported goods cling to an impressive road built by the Germans and paid for - at double its worth - with redistributed oil money. Palm groves lace the background, and beyond them the tragically beautiful sight of the ubiquitous gas flares light up the night sky for miles. The sunsets are among the most immaculate I’ve ever seen, especially lately as the rainy season dies down and the clouds slowly make way for increasing amounts of blues, reds, oranges and purples in the early evening sky. I am not sure whether I will miss the rainy season. At times, it bucketed down incessantly for days on end. But at least it kept things cool. Now it’s slowly getting drier and therefore hotter and steamier…

The day-to-day situation down here is depressing: billions of dollars of oil money go directly into the coffers of federal and state government officials who then lavish gifts upon their friends and family; really, the corruption is utterly ridiculous and in my dealings with the state government I see it on an almost daily basis. In the meantime the majority of the people remain impoverished. The income inequality is unbelievable; there is no middle class…

There is no escaping the pothole-lined roads, the sight of charred vehicles (and the occasional body) every few hundred meters, not to mention the constant army and police presence and omnipresent roadblocks. I’ve given up trying to keep track of the amount in bribes I’ve had to dish out since my arrival. And we can’t travel after 6pm on any given day due to the constant high risks of armed robbery. Great fun, I’m telling you…

The food thing: I may seem to miss a lot of the home comforts but I’ve managed to delve right into some of the local delicacies. Because of the aforementioned lack of variety and choice, you really have little option but to eat the same delights as the locals (I was tempted to say natives there…). I hesitate to ask exactly what constitutes the bush-meat stew, but it tastes great so I plug away. Fried snails look delicious but are a bit on the rubbery side. ‘Beef’ means the whole cow: nothing goes to waste. When ordering beef, you can expect skin, guts, even some lovely tufts of hair. Absolutely delectable. I must say, however, that for the most part I’m consuming more basic sundries like roasted fish (probably from the heavily oil-polluted local waters), plantains in various forms, okra and rice dishes…

(October 2004)

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Postscript: in the summer of 2005, whilst teaching at summer school in Uxbridge, my friend Aoife visited from Cambridge for the day and I dragged the poor girl, against her will, to New Cross in south London for a Nigerian meal. I enjoyed it and was fine; after all, I made it through my stint in Nigeria with hardly any stomach problems, which is astounding considering the levels of hygiene and the amount of street food I indulged in. Poor Aoife didn’t fare so well. She’s barely spoken to me since.

Postscript, part 2: I re-visited that very same restaurant in August 2008. I tried to dupe Grant into going with me, but he wisely refused. So I made the solo trek and once again, enjoyed an exquisite Nigerian dish. My stomach didn’t forgive me for over a week and I had a small Nigerian running around in my belly for days. It was agonising, but that was that. I haven’t back since. So there you are Aoife: I got my come-uppance.

(December 2009)

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You see the thanks I get? This was from one my students in Nigeria:

Hi Daniel,
It was so bad that d devil used u as his instrument to deprive me of my Ph.D studyfellowship thro yr ill pieces of advice like including my bank statement.Regards.
t.t.t

(Sometime in early 2005)

And this, I feel terribly guilty for sharing. People somehow managed to get hold of my email address and send me letters like the ones below. These are all snippets from one particular boy, all received after I left Nigeria and was living in Belfast. I don’t intend it as dark humour, more as a sign of just how desperate some of the people there are. I did my best to help as many people as I could, but for various legal reasons I can’t divulge exactly what here.

Daniel,

How are you doing bro, I've been send mails but you are not replying. What's the problem. I do really care for your health. Are you sure that you are alright? pls tell me what happened so that my mind can rest or so i can start looking up for solutions.

Is it cos i told you to send me things? Pls don't send me anymore, Your brotherhood is enough and I only want you around.

Send me a proof that you are alright by replying.

PLs danny, I've never been at rest since your inability to reply my mail.
Just reply this one.

Danny,
How are you doing. What's up with the job you're looking for. Hope are getting well. How's your groundma's health.
It's really hard here. I'm in a hell of frustrations and i really need your help in any kind. Advice, Finance, lots of them. Please reply at once because your are my bro who will help me now.
Danny remember, No father, No elder Brother and in nigeria's frustrations.
Offer me any help you can at the moment. I need some clothes and footwears, if you can send me ones you no longer use, I'll be most gratteful.
Good luck in you life and to good health to you and your friends and family.

Hi Danny,
wish you all happiness of life. How are you doing? How is your Groundma and all your family members? Hope that you're coping good. Well it's just as if you have forgotten me, but nevertheless, i still understand. Sorry i've kept off contact, it's because of too much poverty that is hanging on my neck.
It's not been easy with me, the toughness of my going is under a constant increment. Infact, i need all the lucks in the world to carry on. Less i forget, what are you up to now? Have you gotten the job i've been praying for? Tell me about your new realm and dimension.
Well whenever you pick up your qouran, please remember my own case to God as i do remember yours in my prayers. Please Daniel, if you have anything to help me on, just don't hesitate to send it to me. You know i told you that i want to write a movie, but it's too tough with me now financially that i can't even pay for the typing.
Please danny, any how , but please send a small something to me, even a note of a Hundred pounds Bill. wrap it with a paper and send it to as a letter to…

(emails received over the course of early-mid 2005)

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Chinua Achebe, probably Nigeria’s most well-known writer, whose Things Fall Apart is part of the curriculum in many schools, had this to say in his slim tome, The Trouble with Nigeria:

‘Look at our collapsing public utilities, our inefficient and wasteful parastatals and state-owned companies. If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own bore-hole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline. One day soon, you will have to build your own post office to send your letters!’

‘My frank and honest opinion is that anybody who can say that corruption in Nigeria has not yet become alarming is either a fool, a crook or else does not live in this country.’

‘It is a measure of our self-delusion that we can talk about developing tourism in Nigeria. Only a masochist with an exuberant taste for self-violence will pick Nigeria for a holiday; only [someone] seeking to know punishment and poverty at first hand! No, Nigeria may be a paradise for adventurers and pirates, but not tourists.’

(December 2009)

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I never really sent out much during my time in Riga. I was too busy reading, whingeing about my poorly foot, getting beaten up in dodgy ‘clubs’, and doing lots of research and writing about education policies in Latvia and the effect that this had on ethnic Russians. Here I’m sharing my ‘creative’ side. A few of my more buffoonish friends – you know who you are – were the lucky recipients of the following haikus.

Part I: on a good day (rare)

Glorious Riga
Beautiful ladies, hello!
'Tis delight to meet

Part II: standard day (the norm)

Ladies of the night,
Gentle, promising, lovely
No: whores, sluts and tramps

Part III: special occasions (every now and then)

How much for you dear?
Why for you, big boy, nothing
Why so cheap? You man?

(November 2007)

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Lviv is probably a good example of simultaneous poverty and splendour in grandeur. This place has untapped potential, lots of it, but it seems to be more Russian poor than East European poor. It’s constantly compared to Krakow and is even audaciously called by some a ‘poor man’s Prague’. I say it’s still a ways from such lofty comparisons, even if it does have a heavy central European feel to it. Despite the dear old grannies selling rotten, withering bunches of flowers and rancid bags of apples on street corners, despite the open drains releasing waste water onto the cobbled streets, despite the crumbling, deteriorating yet magnificent architecture, despite the statues with missing legs and noses, despite the insolent and often non-existent customer service in all the charming cafes, and despite the thick coat of grime and dust that seems to cover every edifice, this place has immeasurable, almost indescribable allure. A lot of the city is remarkably and miraculously well-preserved: Lviv (Lvov/Lwow/Lemberg) has a long and tortured history of being traded between the Russians, Poles, Germans and Austro-Hungarians and there seems to be that surreal look characteristic of a city that has been bandied about too often. There’s really not much of a Russian or Soviet feel to the city itself – save for one or two of those stark, realist statues paying homage to the great defenders of years past - although the outskirts do tend to remind one of those bland, featureless Soviet conurbations that grew impressively from nothing in just a few short years and dishearten by their sameness and banality. But for the most part, Moscow thankfully ignored Lviv.

Have I mentioned the great public transport system? There are the usual trams and trolleybuses characteristic of most European cities, albeit circa-1950s, but the most common and fun mode of getting around is by marshrutka. It’s nothing more than a minibus that stops on demand, akin to the kinds you find in most lesser developed countries in places like Africa and the Caribbean, bursting to the rafters with way too many people, violating every safety regulation known to mankind. Now I understand that when you get a congregation of old, fat, sweaty bodies who haven’t showered since the cold war in heavy overcoats you can expect a rather foul and putrid stench but I find myself longing for the good old days of Nigeria where the only odours on offer were those of dead chickens and excess sweat. Here you get a myriad range of wonderful scents, mostly consisting of various fart-like fragrances. I really can’t convey to you the amazing gamut of smells you get: I thought I’d been exposed to many different types of farts over the years but every day I get another new and pleasant surprise. And nobody seems to notice and/or care: old men let rip with grandiose farts of artistic proportions and people don’t batter an eyelid at any of these signs of anal loquacity. I even had a student whose sonic blasts throughout class often meant that other students’ comments were barely audible at times. He was admittedly a weak student but any time he opened his mouth and attempted to speak the sound would come out the wrong end: a direct link seemed to be established between him opening his mouth and his bottom opening up. He was lucky to get out any coherent words, but when he did, they were usually accompanied by a chorus of approval from his backside. I could hardly contain my laughter but the other students just sat there glumly, seemingly oblivious to this mayhem. I was even proud of myself for telling him that his arse had indeed put forward a very compelling argument after one beauty of a ‘remark’ but I’m afraid this comment was lost on the majority of the class. Thankfully he only actually showed up to 3 classes and hasn’t been seen since.

(November 2005)

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Another gem from the recent book on Communist jokes I’ve been reading:

Grandma Hanacka enters the tram in Prague with a heavy sack and a suitcase. While stowing her baggage, she does something that no lady in polite company would normally do. The Germans in the car hold their noses in disgust. Granny turns to her Czech fellow travellers: ‘They’ve shut our mouths but they can’t do the same to our arses.’

Now here’s a guy I’d love to meet: Jerzy Urban, a Polish satirist, described as ‘the sort of man who ostentatiously and deliberately breaks wind in living rooms and watches the reaction of other guests’. My kind of man.

(December 2009)

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The future: the next few weeks ought to be fun. I’m now finished at Keene and can look forward to a month-long hiatus from the education world before I take up my teaching placement in Manchester. In a few short days Emma will be descending upon these cold and frosty shores – her first trip to the US - and after Christmas, the two of us are setting off on a 2-week road trip across the Midwest and down into the deep South for a gumbo-fuelled odyssey of fun and adventure. In early January, our dear friends and frequent Layman’s Guide guest stars Brian and Kristen are tying the knot. I certainly can’t wait.

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“As my body continues on its journey, my thoughts keep turning back and bury themselves in days past.”
(Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to his mother, 23 Nov 1849)

Those who forget the past...

Recently one of my classes met at the Cohen Centre for Holocaust Studies at Keene, where we were treated to a presentation by the director of the centre. Without going into any specifics, the class revolved around how to teach the Holocaust in American high school history classes. It was a fascinating, thought-provoking discussion which I may share more details of at a later date. There were things I agreed with, but some which I found more contentious. But never mind all that.

Inevitably, the subject of Holocaust denial – and how to handle it in the classroom – was raised, and it turns out that this, tragically, is an issue that comes up all-too frequently in New Hampshire schools, which on first thought is awfully surprising, but on second, not so much. Again, a sensitive topic for a later discussion, perhaps.

I thought this was an apt time to pluck out an old, festering post I put together whilst in Bishkek. In the interests of transparency, I’m providing this disclaimer, and I’ve decided to include it, more or less unedited, below. I wrote about 95% of it in Bishkek and then struggled with a fitting conclusion, which I haven’t tried to rectify now. Conclusions have always been a weakness of mine, and though I’m not too happy that it ends somewhat abruptly without a heartfelt wrap-up, I will leave it as is and offer up a light-hearted epilogue in lieu of.

This was originally composed sometime in March 2009:


Political [in]correctness gone mad?

Although I’ve promised myself – in order to maintain my sanity – not to delve into too many stories regarding my teaching, this one is just too good to pass up. It is also quite shocking and tragic and has left me bitter in so many ways.

The last thing I want to be accused of us naivety. I’ve been to a few places around the globe and have encountered prejudice and racism in many different guises. Most of the time I attribute it to ignorance or bad education, but after some time a pattern emerges and one comes to realise that this truly is an endemic phenomenon all over the world.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, though I did go through a brief phase where I doubted the truth behind the moon landings. Thankfully I’m well past that, and am now happy to toe the party line when it comes to accepting historical events.

No myth

It was in Riga where I first encountered the overwhelming reluctance to accept the official version of the events of 9/11. Most readers are undoubtedly aware of the various conspiracy theories that have been bandied about, but I have to admit that until I went to Riga I had never actually met someone who fell for any of these. But then some of my students – all Russian admittedly – asked me whether I actually believed 9/11 had happened as had been reported and I thought to myself, ‘uh oh, where is this going?’ Sure enough, I was soon facing a barrage of questions and accusations: how could I be so gullible, how could I be so naïve, how could I not see that the whole thing was fabricated by the government/the Jews/aliens/whomever? Not in Nigeria, not in Ukraine and not in Spain had I encountered such antagonism, such an onslaught of questioning as I then faced in Latvia. And again, not to sound like a Russophobe, but it was only the Russians who attacked me on this point. My Latvian students were staunchly pro-American and merely sat in quiet disbelief as their classmates sallied forth with a torrent of abuse and sheer disdain for my opinion on the matter. I was stunned, a bit flustered and deeply mortified.

I could go on with this point, but it came up just a few days ago in one of my classes here. I should have known better than to say, ‘You know, some of my students in Latvia actually believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy perpetrated by the American gov-’ ‘YES, YES, IT IS TRUE, IT IS TRUE…’ chorused half the class in raucous approval of their Russian cohorts thousands of miles away. Damn these fringes of the former Soviet Union! I quickly dropped this line of thought and moved on.

But this is not the source of my recent angst. What happened the other day was, in my opinion, far worse, far more disturbing and is unfortunately all too widespread an occurrence all over the world. It will no doubt be offensive to some, but I am choosing to report it all the same.

Every Wednesday, the school runs what is called Talking Club, and once a month two teachers get to sacrifice their day off to spend 3 hours running conversational lessons. Myriad topics are on offer, and last Wednesday another teacher and I ran a session with the topic of ‘Politically Incorrect Jokes’. After my colleague’s opening 20 minute monologue where he proceeded to list every known racial epithet that existed in the English language, we turned the floor over to the students to discuss, in small groups, whether it was ever acceptable to tell jokes making fun of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. You can see where this one was headed. It got ugly fast.

‘The solution would be to have slavery again…it would be better that way’

Yes, that line was uttered by a student. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Another argued that there was nothing wrong with ‘porch monkey’. Another suggested that if they can call each other n------ then so can we. When I explained the racist origins of this word, I was told that ‘we should go back to the slavery days then so that we can use that word without getting into trouble’. I heard many more that I did my best to vanquish from my head as soon as the class was over. In all fairness, in a class of some 25 students, only a handful (4-5) were forthright in their opinions, and there were plenty as aghast as I with these statements.

A wee while later, the topic was off-limits jokes. In other words, what subjects are completely taboo? Funnily enough, not many; in fact, none that I can remember. Now, the object of these talking clubs is to initiate discussion, so it was my job to provide some talking points, warmers, a bit of bait even. So I asked one particular group of university-age women whether any of the following topics were no-go’s:

“Communism?”
“No, that’s okay, we can laugh about Communism.”
“Other ethnicities, like Russians, Estonians, Kazakhs?”
“No, that’s okay also, we like these jokes.”
“Mother-in-law jokes” (a popular one amongst Russians which I like)
“Oh no, those are funny, those are okay.”
“Jokes about other religions?”
“No, those are fine, no problems with those.”
“Even the Holocaust?”
“No, of course that’s okay, it’s not real anyway, it didn’t even happen.”

!!!

This never fails to flummox me. I just never know what to say in response. Needless to say I was flabbergasted, but the next few minutes are somewhat of an incoherent blur. I tried to reason and rationalise with them in as diplomatic a way as possible, but in the past I have lost my temper a bit and I was determined not to this time. When I realised I was up against it, and there was no winning this argument, I bit my tongue, conceded defeat, and moved onto another group. Thankfully Holocaust denial didn’t come up this time, but then I didn’t give it the opportunity.

I can’t think of a way to end this. Saying ‘this bothers me’ just isn’t nearly strong enough.

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Epilogue, 14 December 2009:

I’m currently reading Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes (by Ben Lewis, who is Jewish), which I’d heartily recommend. There are so many gems inside, and I thought I’d share with you a couple that really made me chuckle:

One day Jacob, a Russian Jew, slipped on the wet river bank and fell into the water. Unfortunately, he could not swim and was in serious danger of drowning. Two Tsarist policemen heard cries for help and rushed over. But when they saw that it was a Jew, they laughed and just stood there watching him drown.
‘Help, I can’t swim,’ shouted Jacob.
‘Then you will just have to drown,’ they replied.
Suddenly Jacob shouted out with his last breath: ‘Down with the Tsar!’
The policemen immediately rushed into the river, pulled him out, and arrested him for troublemaking.

I’ll end it with an encore.

What do freedom of speech and oral sex have in common? One slip of the tongue and you get it in the arse.

How genius thinks in the wee hours

For the past couple of months, twice a week I’ve had to make a roughly 6 mile round-trip journey on foot to get to the local high school where I observe and occasionally ‘teach’ lessons. As an avid walker, I usually enjoy these walks, though setting out at 6am on a cold winter morning isn’t the most ideal time for this kind of fun. By the time I get to school, it takes me about 15-20 minutes before I can properly utter a coherent word seeing as my jaw and cheeks are so frozen. Temperatures at that time of morning have lately been in the 15F/-8C range, which is more or less what I’m used to from the past few years of living abroad, though until now I’d never really walked quite so far at such an ungodly time of morning.

This morning, on my way back from school for the last time, I was walking along the pavement, minding my own business in a residential neighbourhood, when a man came out of his house. The following dialogue then took place:

Man: ‘Hey, can I help you find anything?’
Me: (a bit perplexed) ‘Um, no.’ (I certainly didn’t look lost at all, and I wasn’t weaving and stumbling into the road or anything.)
Man: ‘Are you lost? Do you need directions?’
Me: ‘No, I’m fine, just on my way home. Thanks.’
Man: ‘No problem, just want to make sure you’re okay.’

It took me a few minutes for this exchange to register, but then it got me thinking (what else am I supposed to do on a 50 minute walk?). In general, outside of bigger cities in America, people generally don’t walk to get places, especially when longer distances are involved (Yes, you’ve heard this one before, it’s yet another one of my diatribes about the lack of public transportation and how nobody around here walks – but bear with me here, this is important!). This guy had probably seen me a few times and thought I was casing the neighbourhood or something: they’re not used to idle walkers round here.

The first time I showed up at the school, when signing in at the visitor’s desk, I left the spot for license plate number blank. The secretary noticed and asked me to fill that out. When I told her I didn’t have a car, she was absolutely astonished: ‘Where do you live? How did you get here? You walked? All that way? Are you crazy?’ Whilst walking home one day, a classmate driving by noticed me and offered a lift: ‘Where’s your car?’ he politely inquired. Three teachers, on separate days, have all asked me: ‘Was that you I saw walking this morning?’ whereupon, instead of answering ‘Yes, you numpty, thanks for offering me a lift!’ I meekly replied ‘Yeah, so what’. Cue same incredulous looks and cross-examinations.

So, generally, people in these parts (by that I mean the US, of course) tend not to walk long distances unless they are doing it for purely exercise purposes. I constantly see people, often two plumpish middle-aged women, power walking, clad in their pink and lime green designer workout gear with reflective patches interspersed amongst their outfits, feverishly waddling their hips and swinging their arms. Then there are the frequent joggers as well. But I never see people out for casual strolls. This was one thing – there weren’t many, mind – that I liked about San Sebastian, the couples, the families, the groups of friends, out meandering aimlessly along the promenade or boardwalk with no real purpose in mind. I realise that I don’t exactly do that when walking to and from school, but there’s still a certain overlap in MOs here.

That’s not all. Today I had an amazing revelation. This is what an over-active/over-analytical mind does to a man; either that, or the lack of sleep and the bone-chilling cold and the hazy state of mind. All that, combined with the fact that I’m an aspiring social studies teachers, and I suddenly started ruminating and drawing all sorts of parallels between the power walkers/joggers – not something nearly as prevalent in other countries, I’ve found – and the pace and frenetic nature of the American way of life in general. To crudely generalize, and without going into too much arcane detail, America is certainly more hectic and cutthroat a society than many other countries, and I’m thinking business-climate here. Everything moves at a faster pace, everyone is in a rush and life will quickly pass you by if you stop and linger for too long. It didn’t take me long to bring politics into this, and the thought popped into my head that in America, politicians run for election, whereas in Britain they stand for it. What fascinating and profound insight! How on earth this popped into my head, I don’t know, but that’s what tends to happens to warped masterminds like myself.

I’m not making any connections to Britain in this case, but it was just the first thought that sprung to mind. And now, dear readers of other tongues, I ask you this: what verb do you use in your language in the context of running/standing for election? I genuinely don’t know what other languages use, but I’m suddenly dying to find out. I want to know what the rest of the world uses, so I’d much appreciate it if all of you could let me know. I shan’t sleep until I find out.

I just had to share this within 12 hours because otherwise I would’ve banished it to the back of my brain where it would have rotted away for an eternity, lost to the world forever. But there you have it: the power of early-morning, over-active thinking. Try it sometime. At the very least, it’s good exercise. For the legs anyway.

So what have the losers got to say?

“It is universally well known, That in digesting our common Food, there is created or produced in the Bowels of human Creatures, a great Quantity of Wind.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.
Were it not for the odiously offensive Smell accompanying such Escapes, polite People would probably be under no more Restraint in discharging such Wind in Company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their Noses.”

Benjamin Franklin, A Letter To A Royal Academy, 1781

According to my good pal Jeff, there are two universal truths in life:
1. Girls are sexy.
2. Farts are funny.

But this begs the obvious question: why are farts so widely thought of as impolite, foul, fetid, unpleasant, ill-mannered actions? Why is it so taboo to even discuss farting in polite company? Fortunately it’s not like this in all societies. When I lived in Germany, our landlord used to call round to our house and in her heavily-accented English, politely inquire of us on many a morning, “Now, how is your stool?” Fine, thank you, oma! That’s politeness and consideration for you.

However, it’s not my intention to delve into the pros and cons of farting in public, and I’ve already digressed from my main point here. I’m more curious about the above quoted passage from that finest of American statesmen, Benjamin Franklin. This is not a side most American schoolchildren are exposed to in school. We instead are taught that Ben was a fine statesman, orotund (and rotund) orator, magnificent inventor, and charming raconteur known for his acerbic wit (somewhat the ladies man, too, allegedly). It just saddens me that there’s another side to this great individual that very few of us are fortunate enough to have gained wind of. This is surely a heinous crime.

[and yes, of course that pun was intended!]

I recently had to take a social studies certification exam for my course. Because the scope was so wide and varied – from US and world history to economics to geography to civics to sociology – I had lots of brushing up to do in many areas. Including American history, which I hadn’t really studied in any great depth since high school.

It’s one of the oldest adages that history is written by the victors. There are, of course, notable exceptions in English – the Spanish Civil War springs to mind – but for the most part, we’re left with the winner’s versions. So I thought it would be interesting to read The Penguin History of the USA, written by Hugh Brogan, a former Cambridge historian: what a terrific find. Though the prose is somewhat turgid and bombastic in parts, and though Brogan has a puerile proclivity for ridiculing the early American colonists as pettifogging and petulant whingers, the book presents a fascinating take on American history. I certainly learnt a lot that I hadn’t before. (And no, I don’t think he’s bitter or anything.)

Booze, burning and bacchanalia

There are a few recurring themes in American history, one of which is the mighty impact of booze. Whisky, for example, ‘was regularly adopted to cheat [Native Americans] of their land and fair payment.’ Alcohol was a regular part of early American society, a fact to which the author devotes considerable attention. Boston was a major exporter of rum, in direct competition with the Caribbean variety, primarily because ‘it was much cheaper, which was a decisive consideration with the poor and frugal consumers of North America’. Apparently, Bostonians ‘sat tippling and sotting for whole evenings, or perhaps for whole days’. Aren’t these the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

Burning as a punishment was widespread, the reasons varied. Many years after the Salem Witch Trials, insubordinate slaves were often burned to death. This is generally glossed over but in this case, it was the footnote that caught my eye: ‘The British must not make too much of these incidents. As late as 1763 a white woman was burned in England for murdering her husband.’ Well in that case…

A bit of tarring and feathering for a laugh

Sometimes his disdain for America’s founding fathers is subtle, at other times glaringly blunt: he doesn’t mince his words. John Hancock, Boston’s richest merchant and leading smuggler, was a ‘mixture of vanity, pique and cowardice.’ Samuel Adams, that purveyor of fine beer, was ‘incompetent at just about everything’ he did, except for politics; that somehow isn’t very comforting. And here’s a side of America we never get to read about in the textbooks. In the days just before independence, there was all sorts of squabbling amongst the colonists. Adams said that justice and liberty in America were being subverted by ‘pensioners, placemen and other jobbers, for an abandon’d and shameless ministry; hirelings, pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores’. This kind of excessive sexual abuse was supposedly profuse from Adams and his cronies. John Adams once compared England to imperial Rome, both being the prey of ‘musicians, pimps, panders and catamites.’ James Otis called members of the House of Commons ‘a parcel of button-makers, gamesters, pin-makers, pimps and whore masters’. I don’t remember such evocative language in the textbooks I studied. And is being a button or pin maker such a bad thing? Maybe it’s not very manly. Accusing them all of being a bunch of hapless haberdashers would be a far greater insult in my book.

Brogan takes an especially keen interest in the Mormons. Amongst all sorts of lucid description of Mormon religious practice is this valuable nugget of insight: ‘Looked at in detail, the intricacies of Mormon polygamy strikingly resemble those of twentieth-century American divorce, especially as to wife-swapping.’ I’m not sure what kind of light that paints wife-swapping in.

And what of the South, and its magnificent standard of education in the 1800s? ‘The colleges of the South remained jokes until the twentieth century. Instead of science and Greek, the young gentlemen learned to hold their liquor, or at least not to mind getting blind drunk; how to use a knife in a brawl; how to handle dueling pistols and to play cards; how to race and bet on horses. They were provincial, ignorant and overbearing: excellent cannon-fodder, as it turned out.’ I now feel somewhat cheated with my college education. All those loans, all that debt, and for what? I’ve got no idea how to duel.

If we fast-forward to the 1950s, to the height of the anti-Communist hysteria, we see many suspected of having red sympathies being given the old heave-ho. In New York City, a public washroom attendant was dismissed for past membership of the Communist party. ‘No doubt he would have corrupted his customers with Soviet soap or Communist lavatory paper’. (This brings to mind the old popular Communist-era joke: Why, despite constant shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany/Czechoslovakia/Hungary always two-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Russia. It also recalls fond, yet painful, memories of toilet paper in many parts of the developing world, especially the former Soviet Union: that brown, sand-papered consistency stuff that leaves you in a constantly chaffed state. But at least it’s dirt-cheap.)

And the old curmudgeon takes a few pot-shots at 60s youth: ‘it is easy to be unkind about youth in the 60s…these ignorant, provincial, conceited young people…[who] turned out to be quite as unpleasant and as stupid as what they condemned.’ Though it ‘was nevertheless a great mistake to dismiss them all as no more than middle-class hooligans’.

And did you know that in 1760 King George II ‘died at stool in his closet’. The author handily provides a translation in his footnotes: ‘In modern idiom, on the lavatory.’

This stuff is important kids. It’s history! And it will be the kind of history that I will no doubt focus on; my students are in for a real treat.

Not much of a choice, really

As far as recommending the book, initially I’d say yes, though with a few caveats. There’s no doubt that Brogan’s heuristic approach is a major draw; once I was sucked in I couldn’t stop reading. But his attitude towards America at times is convoluted, soaked in layers of optimism and obsolescence, hubris and delusion, and it’s hard to discern his actual attitude. I was never sure whether it was one of calculated condescension or bemused indifference (and yes, that does make sense), and this bugged me for one reason or another. There’s no way in hell something like this would ever be used in an American high school classroom, though I would argue that certain excerpts from it could be used as a counterweight to your average, soporific high school textbooks. The problem with all textbooks, and the ones taking a survey approach to American history in particular, is that they are drenched in provincialism. But I think that reflects more on American education than American society, and these textbooks are evidence less of provincialism than of the intellectual orientation that downplays the importance of aesthetic criteria. It doesn’t matter how it’s written – though the blander the better – as long as it presents the [sanitised] facts in an orderly, coherent fashion. To my mind, this only demonstrates that indifference to aesthetic value inevitably shifts the whole culture back into provincialism. Thus, what we read in school, and the way it’s written, does matter.

But really, what do I know?

Time for a quick multiple-choice exam

Which of the following would you consider to be the most quintessentially and stereoptypically modern American phenomena?

A. Nascar (or, for the uninitiated, stock-car racing). A truly eye-opening, revelatory experience was going to a Nascar race, the New Hampshire 500 back in September. The amount of Confederate flags was staggering and I’m surprised I didn’t get assaulted for wearing a Stone Roses t-shirt adorned with the Union Jack. Honestly, what was I thinking?
B. The other day in the high school, I overhead two students discussing their weekends. I heard ‘five-pointer’ and ‘six-pointer’ and I started thinking, when did they change the scoring in basketball? when it dawned on me that they weren’t talking about basketball, but about hunting, and who had bagged the biggest deer.
C. Cars honking their horns at me as I walk along the parts of the road without any pavements, one guy shouting out the window, ‘where’s your car, buddy?’
D. In a coffee shop the other day, a woman, adorned in a fleece top, seemed flustered when complaining to the woman behind the counter, ‘I’m in a bit of a rush, I have to run and get Caitlyn from soccer practice, pick up my dry cleaning and then get home to get the stuff for the bake sale, then go to the P[arent] T[eacher] A[associaton] meeting.’ I didn’t see what she was driving but if I were a betting man, I’d say an SUV.
E. Not only attending a post-Thanksgiving Day holiday parade, but actually participating in one. While my father was a huge hit in his converted fighter jet go-kart, which he spent weeks working on, I was inveigled into following behind in the support vehicle - his minivan - wearing a Santa hat, Christmas music blaring from the speakers, while hundreds, if not thousands, of people lined the streets of Salem, NH waving at me, wishing me a Merry Christmas (they don’t go for the politically correct ‘Happy Holidays’ around here).

My old man doing the community proud

[P]arting thoughts from Ben

He that is conscious of
A Stink in his Breeches,
is jealous of every Wrinkle
in another’s Nose.

Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1751