Conorthoughts

Angry of Tunbridge Wells and Pimlico

This is Oliver Goldsmith, drawn by a certain Gilbert and engraved by a J. Linton. He looks splendidly grumpy which is how I think I sound below, browned off this evening by his college.

Dear Professor Besson,

could you please explain to me - or get a colleague to explain - what happened to the presentation under the auspices of the anthropology department of Jean Rouch's work that was scheduled for Tuesday 1st December? I had found a notice for it on the college website, and paste it at the bottom here.

The event did not take place in the location that was given. There was no sign announcing a change of venue or cancellation, not did the person holding a seminar in the room at that time have any knowledge of the event or of its whereabouts. The college porter's office knew nothing about it. One of the other half dozen people I met in search of the event went to the anthropology department to enquire but the administrative staff there knew nothing about it.

As a member of the public, I am appalled and angry that a department in a college of Goldsmith's standing could announce a public event and then apparently give no further notice about it or its cancellation. I wasted my evening as a result travelling from Pimlico and back.

If I do not receive a satisfactory response, I will make it my business to lodge a complaint with the pro-chancellor of the college - or whoever its most senior officer is – and with the body which funds the department.

I have also written to some of your colleagues and have dropped an email to someone I happen to know at the college, Nick Couldry of the Department of Media Studies, to ask him whether this kind of apparently shoddy behaviour is a regular feature of academic life at Goldsmith's.

Yours Sincerely,

Conor Joyce

Joram Ten Brink-on the African cinema of Jean Rouch
Goldsmiths Anthropology Society:
Discovering Jean Rouch work- early works in Africa and their impact on film making in Europe (including screening of extracts from Rouch's major film productions in West Africa)
Joram ten Brink is a filmmaker and a Professor of Film at the University of Westminster. He works as a writer/director of documentary and experimental films in the UK and Holland. His films have been broadcasted and theatrically released in the UK, USA, Holland, Israel, France, Germany and Spain. His work has been screened at the Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals and at MOMA in New York. Prof. ten Brink heads the practice based PhD programme in Arts and Design at the University of Westminster and is the director of Centre for Production and Research in Documentary film. In 2004 he organised a major international conference and a programme of screenings on the work of the French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. In 2007 he edited the first major book on Rouch's work in English – Building Bridges- the cinema of Jean Rouch (Wallflower Press, London). http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-1163

Event Information
Location: RHB 137 Cost: Free to attend Website: www.calamma.net/anthropologysociety Department: Anthropology Time: 1 December 2009, 17:00 - 19:00

Leaf

A leaf came through the door, well, under it, from the school opposite. I brought it up to my flat, after some days. It was all on its own. Now we're together.

Toes

 

A postscript to my last blog. Here are the man's toes blown up (His fingers are holding up better.):

 

 

Holding hands

I was in the Mesopotamian rooms in the Louvre the week before last. Many people were holding hands but I was on my own. Here are some hands I came across in the Sumerian section:

 
 

Here they are blown up:

The fingers look to me like they might be in need of sucking not just holding. Do you think I am right in imagining that they are anxiety-filled? They must be the hands of a nobleman or a king: they are not those of anyone who has ever done much manual work. Here is the sculpture in full (well, almost):

 

A word for John Bull

Here is my quote of the day, of the week in fact (Why not throw in the month?):

"Many people in the world say that the English are racists. I don't agree."

Ali Farka Touré the late Malian musician in conversation with the BBC music journalist Andy Kershaw in 2003 north of Timbuktu.  

Weekend away

 

I've got to bloody well post something and it has taken me three-quarters of an hour to get this damned photo to the size I wanted so this will have to be short. I went away the weekend before last to stay with Jonathan and Louise in Stony Stratford near Milton Keynes and it did me a lot of good, as close to a country idyll as I have access to at the moment. They made me very welcome, as ever. The painting of their house, the red door, is by Louise's father whose name I cannot remember.

I'm partly posting this to compete with and try to emulate my friend Charles - I am losing hands down, emulating my hat - who posts with ease and style and flair and all round brilliance on his blog, usually using a photo with humour to start on which he hangs his piece. I thought if I could at least use photos for a start, some of Charles' ease and creative flow might rub off, mimetically. It is maddening all these people who can produce, the millions of them. They should all, I feel sometimes, be shot, unless I am made to join their number by a decree of some higher force (not the G20, meeting down the road today).

I'm also posting this to cross-reference to a post of Charles' - done, his latest -  in order to finally try to work out how the cross-referencing works in the blogosphere, hopefully with Charles' help. In theory, when I link to him on my blog, for example two lines above, he should automatically get a message in his email box informing him of this fact, I think. In theory then, the conversation and cross-referencing goes on - I've even bloody well forgotten what the cross-referencing is called in blogo language - forming a network of references spreading out across multiple bloggers, towards Mars. Until you have this aspect of the blogging software going, my understanding is that you are not blogging in a full sense.        

Caffé latte

What's in a caffé latte? There's enough in the remains of this morning's one you half-see above for me to celebrate it with a photo. It is Monday 10th March and I haven't made one - usually a Saturday or Sunday morning treat - since about 21st December. What makes it a caffé latte rather than a milky coffee? It is the little Italian coffee-maker, made, it so happens in China, and how the words link each one - each milky coffee I've ever made - to the first such, made in Italy in the apartment of Andrea's parents above the pharmacy on the main street of Santa Margherita Ligure in, I think it was, August 1980.

So pleasurable is the preparing and partaking of a caffé latte that I have, it seems, to already be in a pleasure zone, have to already have enough pleasure in my life, for it - the idea of making one - to form. It is clearly not enough to see one of the parts of the machine for a latte to come into my head: in my tiny kitchen, I must have seen them dozens of times over all the mornings between 21st December and 10th March.

That I made one this morning - it was good - is a sign that my mood is finally improving, following disimprovement on the 22nd December connected to an unpleasant meeting to do with this. 

And the geek in the corner? That's Siegfried Kracauer, the German writer, philosopher and theorist of photography and film. My own theory about him - of which, some other time - is that his ugliness played a defining role in the development of his thinking. Harry Graf Kessler writes in his Diaries, in the one fleeting reference to Kracauer, of his "monstrous ugliness I can't get used to"¹.    

And the photo?

                                         (To be continued)

                                           

Notes

1. Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, Ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Insel Taschenbuch, Frankfurt, 1996, p. 763. 

Night out

I've got to get out. Anything. Maybe there is a lecture at the L.S.E.. I check in my bookmarks in the folder 'lectures & seminars'. 'Can the EU make a difference in the Middle East? Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu. 6.30-8pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building'. It doesn't sound that promising but may be marginally more interesting than 'Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today', with Polly Toynbee. At least there will probably be some ranting and raving. It is 6.15. Damn it, I'll go. I'll only be 20 minutes late.   

Career update

I walked out - resigned, that is - a month ago from my latest job, as a marketing writer in the asset management division of Bank of New York Mellon in London, before the job resigned on me. My boss who was not an easy person had become unhappy with my performance, unfairly I thought, and then made it difficult for me to continue in the New Year to the end of my probationary period. I am having to repeat a mantra - simple thoughts about what happened, a string of positive thoughts overall - every time I have a new thought about the experience, for new thoughts risk opening things up in an unproductive way. I have a tendency, in difficult situations, to think negative thoughts and these are to be warded against here. Writing this is a new thought, though an oddly gentle one, and I will bring it to a close by substituting the mantra for it, and, where I would normally put a full stop at the end of this sentence, say in its place the string of words  

New girlfriend, old boss

Girlfriend in the sense of woman friend. No, that is my desk where I am writing this. I tried to get rid of those two awful sort-of-garden green chairs but my landlord said he had nowhere to store them and there was no question of putting them out with the garbage.     

I noticed her towards the back as I walked up the steps of the far aisle in the almost empty, dark, cinema. She had shopping bags spread out around her, ordinary supermarket white-ish ones – there was something of the bag lady about her – and she sat at the end of the row, on her own.

She let me through, with grace.

Did I get her to let me through to the middle of the row because I already wanted something of her? Or did I want to sit in that row? I did want to sit somewhere around there. Happy-Go-Lucky was the film, about Polly, a light-spirited North London primary-school teacher, her day-to-day life and her friends, incidents, trouble with her driving instructor.

I had forgotten the film's name other than the 'happy' but in the little 'What is on' magazine in yesterday's, Saturday's, Guardian (that I use as my weekly radio and T.V. guide) I happened to notice that it is now out in DVD 

Had I seen her face as she let me in? Not really, but I had got a sense in the rhythm of her movement of how she felt, warmly, about her appearance and imagined something positive about. She was my age group, that I could tell.

The film was gentle and warm and funny. Three and a half stars. Afterwards in the foyer - had she left first or did I go past her? I think I may have passed her as we walked out -   I did not take a deep breath and asked her whether she had enjoyed it. She replied and we talked and walked and found our bicycles, her's almost as elegant as she, and we walked, and further north she had a water and I a rough - gaseous, too lively - pint of Carlsberg, never Denmark's best. Let me call her Anna. She is a foreign lady, from the Balkans, talkative, funny.

J - let me call him Rob - was waiting for me at Sloane Square tube, I could see, as I locked my bicycle and, before presenting myself, took my trouser legs out of my socks, put in there in place of cycle clips. I insisted on buying in the trendy cocktail bar, two pints of German Hefe Weizen beer at the staggering trendy-bar-in-Sloane-Square price served in fine, vertically thrusting, Hefe Weizen glasses. It only strikes me now, five days later that they were served without the lemon slice they always come with in southern Germany. Finding no room to sit inside, we stood outside, Rob's suggestion, in the English manner.

Do I make people talk? Perhaps I should put up a plate as a psychoanalyst, and listen for a Sloane Square hourly rate. Rob talked. I let him. I enjoyed his talk, always have. Because he was my boss, I know, and thus can follow, his quite particular and lightning thought processes. I do have to get him to repeat himself a little. The connections are indeed electrical. Why do I defer to him? Why do I become so passive, the shadow of my person, charming, listening.

Do I feel inferior? Rob lives intensely in a world I have begun to live in again in my pay-check life, investment. He mainlines it, as he always did, now mixing on Sloane Square comments about quoted companies with accounts of his work place and of lunches with bosses of public companies, mixing them like the barmen inside the open door are shaking cocktails. I find it intriguing, peppered with investment advice of icy quality, through the Hefe Weizen.

I say nothing, other than ask the next question. Rob works at an analytical coal-face of the industry that I am in as of two weeks and two days ago, 'asset management' it is called.

We have got on to the Georgia. Rob, naturally, has been there - he has travelled widely - and has tales to tell of the South Ossetian economy and explains to me the Ossetians' ethnic origins, how their language is essentially a dialect of Farsi, that they were a Persian population who had moved east and then had been driven by the Mongols moving west high up into the Caucuses like a number of other peoples. There they remain.

Why did I not question, sensitive being Irish to national questions, Rob's line on the Georgians and the viability of their state?

To return to Anna. We are on the South Bank and it is raining and she is talking and I am not. I had waited for her to emerge with her soft silver bullet of a bicycle from the lift that brings you from the level of the pedestrain bridge over the Thames from Embankment to the South bank level. She emerged from Anna's lift, as I call it, in a green cyclist's smock. Such a sense of colour - mainly subdued colours - and of line, of hats. These things are probably passed from mother to daughter. Her face is oval, her eyes dark, smiling like the areas around her eyes. Her straight black hair is artfully cut - she is to go roller-skating with her hairdressser - quite tight to her head, with some thin stray strands bringing out the angularity of her features. The grey woolen hat, pulled tightly over her head, to half way down her brow, mirrors the tight fit of her haircut, bringing out the slim alertness of her features and body. A touch of a Modigliani female form. Is it possible to try to describe in written words a beautiful woman's looks without ... ?

Afterwards she texts "Poor thing I didn't let you speak yesterday. Filling guilty" (I like the "filling" as if guilt is a liquid you could pour into the tank of your soul). "I wouldn't blame you if you newer" (I like the "newer") "want to see me again. A." 

What did she talk about? I cannot remember. It was amusing. What am I looking for, from her, from them?

Lately, she texted me for the first time, mis-spelling my name not for the first time, something to which I am sensitive, feeling that knowing and spelling correctly a friend's  name is a basic mark of respect, more than mis-spelling it, giving me another name. I was pleased that she texted me, unprompted. I think she might like me, not in the love sense.

Does Rob respect me? Does he respect my intelligence? Do I respect him, or her, Anna? Do I defend myself against the arrows of possible disrespect, of not being esteemed, of un-love by getting my retaliation in first, if only in my mind's eye, by judging, seeing or imagining a weakness and categorising the person as less than me on some abstract scale and then saying nothing? Is writing this an act of revenge, for nothing? Did my father do this? Was he getting revenge? Did I internalise a way of thinking about others, my cognitive and emotional make-up being genetically so close to his that his relation to others got encoded in my personality? How?    

                                                                  To be continued (or not)