The Privilege meme

I picked this up from the Singing Librarian, and decided that it was an interesting quiz to do.  Charlotte and Z have done it too.

It was devised by PhD students at Indiana State University - Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka. If you participate, they ask that you please acknowledge their copyright.

My parents were what’s now termed asset rich and cash poor. We lived surprisingly frugally in a great big house so we looked flash on little cash, and it’s left me slightly uneasy about privilege ever since. That, and the combination of being raised by women who spoke like Celia Johnson while growing up surrounded by the inverted snobbery of the 60s and 70s. I notice that today’s young hackerati are perfectly comfortable describing themselves as “middle class kids”, but I still feel slightly embarrassed and uneasy about it.

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.

Sandhurst counts, presumably.

3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college.

She was told she hadn’t studied hard enough to return for her second year, which left her with no good argument to put for me when I… Oh, never mind.

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

Well, my sister’s a solicitor and I’m stepping out with a doctor.  Oh, and my father-in-law was a university lecturer. I have to conclude that we’re as professional and middle class as all get out. So, despite the Americanisms, yeah, I guess.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

Had more than 5,000 books in my childhood home, though I doubt it was up to 50,000. As Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird: “I did not love to read; you do not love to breathe”.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.

Until I was over 18, graduating from Winnie the Pooh through to Jane Austin.  One of the formative experiences of my life.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18.

Private lessons I assume - my parents very sweetly paid for piano lessons and riding lessons.  Pigs were more likely to fly than I was ever likely to play the piano, and ponies and pony-girls just intimidated me, so it was a lovely gesture but a complete waste.

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

No.  The failure of the piano lessons and riding lessons probably put them off.

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

I don’t know what or who “people who dress and talk like me” are, and I never watch tv anyway.  Um. My family could have stepped out of an Agatha Christie in many respects (those Celia Johnson voices) or Morse, or the Midsummer Murders even. Is being a murderer with be-a-u-tifully en-unc-i-at-ed vowels a positive representation or a negative one?  You decide.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

No freaking way.  Credit cards for teenagers?  No. Absolutely not. My parents had more than enough problems preventing their own costs from turning into debts to give us little debt-lets of our own.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.

Local Education Authority Grant.  I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was.

16. Went to a private high school.

Er.  Yes. It was pants though. A very nice school for the sweet but unintellectual daughters of doctors. Loathed it. Still get flashbacks.

17. Went to summer camp.

Mmm. Opera camp. Just typing it makes me blink in amazement.

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.

Nah.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

Do guest-houses and pubs in English and Scottish seaside towns count as “hotels”?  They do, don’t they.  In fact my parents were pretty frugal with regards to summer holidays, and we tended to lig off family and friends who lived nearer the coast than we did.

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.

Hah! No. None of it was.  It was either second hand (school uniforms) hand-me downs (I had two big sisters) or home made.

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.

Surely a 10 year old Fiat 127 doesn’t count?

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.

But all painted by relatives. Pretty good, some of it, though.

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

I’m not sure what this means.  We were a three generation household, grandparents, parents and kids.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.

Mmmm.

25. You had your own room as a child.

Mmmm.

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.

I can remember being shocked by people who had TVs in their rooms at uni.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

I’d never even been abroad before I was 16. In fact the first time I went to Europe I was 28 or so and married.

31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

Oddly enough, they didn’t, but that was more a matter of their own philistinism than anything else.  I think it was “educational” and so they delegated it to the school to do that. My Ma read a lot of pretty middle-brow stuff, and that was it.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

I remember once, aged 5, being held in front of an open internal door and being told that I could feel the heat coming out of the room (I couldn’t) and that I should learn to shut doors. I also remember having baths by candlelight because of a mixture of powercuts and fuel prices.  I remember frost on the inside of the windows, though that was only one winter. I do remember lying in bed for an hour because it was too cold for me to want to get up. I may not have known how much the bills were, but I was very aware that fuel costs money, and still am.  I cannot leave a light on in an empty room to this day.

So 16 yeses out of 34.  I was raised and educated with middle class values but my parents were surprisingly uncultured: lots of books, but no trips to the theatre, art galleries, museums or concerts.  Privately educated, but definitely on the cheap.   There wasn’t, as I said, a lot of spare cash to go round.  However, I am irredeemably middle class. I’m nervous around plumbers and comfortable with lawyers, and I guess that proves it completely.

Oh well.

Flash Parks

Some time ago there was a fashion, or a flashion perhaps, for flash mobbing.  Wikipedia’s current definition says: “A  is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.”

The other day I took a trip from Settle to Carlisle, and when we got there, we found what I can only describe as a flash municipal park.

The plants were orderly and very very plentiful and

so healthy and cheap that the one I was with had to remind me just how difficult it would be to wrestle them on and off the train.  Otherwise I’d have flashed my cash and bought half the pavement.

It’s clever but is it art?

Kipling’s rather mannered poem “The Conundrum of the Workshops” asks “it’s clever, but is it Art?”

Most of the time, it isn’t.

We don’t send teenagers to writing school, get them to live exclusively self-referential lives once they graduate, and expect them to produce work that is either interesting or thought-provoking. However we send our artists to art-school when they are still high on hormones and coherent thinking, expose them to nothing other than cheap drugs, grubby sex and their peers, and expect them to produce art. It’s no wonder that most of their pieces are self-indulgent wank-fests: self-indulgent wanking is what teenagers do, and with some artists you see no evidence that they have grown out of their adolescence.

These past two weeks I’ve some superb imagery by graphic masters and some deeply-felt and hard-won experiences expressed as narrative paintings and I’ll let you know about them in a minute. Let’s start with the wank-fests. Three spring to mind.

The first was a series of films of a bloke in a bear-suit wandering around an empty Berlin art gallery several nights in a row. I cannot remember what it was supposed to be about. Alienation, probably. (There is a reason why the perpetrators of such self-indulgence feel alienated from the rest of us: it’s because they are so self-obsessed. It isn’t us. It really is them). Apparently the bear-suit referenced the fact that the symbol of Berlin is a bear. Presumably the fact it was in the Berlin kunstgalerie references the fact that the artist is a c**t, otherwise why not do it in Warwick, which is also symbolised by a bear. I’m sorry, but if an installation needs a page of A4 to explain itself, then what we have is a writer who embellishes their writing with really complicated illustrations. The woman who put the crack in the Tate Modern would have been an artist if she’d left it at that, but the explanation that it was about alienation (dur) and racism reduced her work to mere illustration. Shame really. As a crack in the floor it was really cool. Unlike Bungle in Berlin, but there you go.

The second was more fest than wank, but precious little of either. The artist’s page of A4 burbled about sensuality. Essentially she tried to eroticise food. However, a pair of melons with a couple of vine-eye bolts and a chain is no more than a visual pun: it’s not even as if nipple rings are that outré any more. It isn’t Mapplethorpe’s Robert having his Nipple Pierced. The rest of the photographs would have made good magazine shots, but they weren’t witty, nor erotic, nor particularly clever and certainly not art. Nice production values, though.

The third was just cheap sensationalism in a Hirsty kind of way: dead animals enlivened with fluorescent paint. There was a mounted head of an Aberdeen Angus, where the nose and horns had been painted the sort of orange you get in highlighter pens. There was a stuffed fox snarled up in a bunch of brightly coloured bailer twine which was almost interesting. And a pair of white rats turned into salt and pepper pots which were, well, a pair of white rats turned into salt and pepper pots. You get the idea.

By contrast, the one I go to art galleries with and I saw some Modiglianis, a Mondrian and a couple of Picassos the other weekend. Now, they were boys who knew how to put colour and shape onto canvas and who knew what they were painting about. The reason they produced master-pieces is not just that they had mastered their craft (though they had) it is that they had progressed beyond their apprenticeships and journey-man days as people too.

The idea that war is hell is trite. It’s a cheap non-idea, like the cheap non-eroticism of the fruit. However, if you’ve experienced atrocities, then that will come through in your expression of them, which is why Guernica is so powerful and the Kandinskys I saw last summer, come to that. And why, based on her art, sex with the melon woman would be banally predictable while she thought it was exotic and edgy. Rather like sex with Rik from the Young Ones. Which confirms my point about dull adolescent thoughts expressed as dull adolescent art, really. (You want eroticism on the edge? Check out Buck Angel’s transsexual porn. Not likely in a provincial art gallery, I’ll admit.)

Experience informs art, and I am coming to think that the way we put our artists into art school actually hamstrings them.

The final exhibition I saw yesterday was a series of narrative paintings of coal-miners mining coal. The artist was himself a miner, though had he been a different generation and class, maybe he’d have spent his time wrapping up aubergines in wire or wandering around museums in animal costumes. Instead he went down the pit and then went through the miners’ strike. The paintings are illuminate the world that George Orwell described as being “like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if there–heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” The paintings, like Orwell’s essay, bring out the physicality of the men and the work: “the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. … It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere.” I found the paintings of the coal-mines powerful and moving, and full of purpose and integrity which was not even slightly ridiculous.

So, if you want to do art that’s worth doing, then you have to have something to say that’s worth saying. And if you have to have a page of A4 stuck on the gallery wall in order to say it, then you aren’t an artist at all. You’re an illustrator.

Here we go again

I am feeling decidedly shifty about this year’s Junior Doctors’ recruitment.

As you all know, I went off on one for most of the first half of last year while the abortion that was MTAS and the obscenity that is MMC unfurled before my horrified eyes. It affected me personally because the one I mention here occasionally was going through the mill. However he was one of the lucky ones, he got his ticket to ride and he’s ok.

This year is going to be far worse. This year the ratios are worse, the ward-fodder is better informed, and the government is studiously ignoring the Tooke Report. There isn’t a centralised system to horrify us all, instead the disasters are going to be private and personal, tucked away in wards and clinics and locum shifts across the country, but no less devastating to those involved.

But this year I’m not going to be on the barricades. I feel guilty and shifty about this. Last year left me wrung out and emotionally exhausted by the whole bloody mess but nowhere near as wrung out and emotionally exhausted as it left the doctors and partners of doctors who were unlucky then and who are now about to go through the mill again. And this is why I feel shifty. I wept and wailed and gnashed my teeth while the one I worry about was at risk, but I know I am not going to do the same thing again this year, because I know I don’t have the energy to be that angry for that long.

I dislike bad-weather activists, and look at me. My personal sun is shining and devil take the hindmost.

In the meantime, let me tell you that it is apparently a good thing that the application ratios are between 3-1 and 19-1 for training posts. £250k of my money, and yours if you live in the UK, to get a Junior Doctor to the point where their career is officially stalled or where they leave the profession.

The implication in the Daily Mail and other isolationist press that foreign doctors are coming over and nicking our doctors’ jobs is despicable. The International Medical Graduates are the reason we still have an NHS. They came here during the last 7 years on the understanding that they would be treated equally, but the government tried to renege on that deal last year.

Shutting the door on new IMGs seems like a good idea to me, but don’t turn around and bite the hands that came across the water during the last 7 years and saved the NHS.

Cold turkey for Christmas

I’ve decided that the only way to deal with my Internet addiction is to cut off my supply.

I’m going to post my wireless router to the one I IM with the most.

This may seem drastic, but I think it’s the only way. It isn’t quite as drastic as it sounds: when the shakes and the screaming get too bad I can stand outside the Library waiting for it to open, like the folks who wait at the pharmacy counter of Sainsburys for their bright green doses of methadone.

The problem is that my home-time is outa whack, and I lose hours of my life dickering around on the Intenet. Since I seem to find it impossible to cut down, I need to make it impossible to go online. I’ve a huge bunch of studying to do, and clicking the NaBloPoMo Randomiser ain’t gonna get me educated.

So, I’ve decided to pull the plug on the Internet for a month. I’ll probably keep a diary and blog about it afterwards. You do see how much the Internet frames how I react with the world?

So I’ll see you in the New Year.

Cats and gender

While I’m on the subject of the Blak Kitteh (who seems to be around again - I glimpsed his back end very briefly the other day swishing out of the cat-flap as I parked my bags in the living room) the one who no longer experiences any gender confusion himself annoys me immensely by always referring to him as “her”. For example: “she came in to eat Tiger’s food the other night” and “I wouldn’t worry about her, she seems to come and go”, and so on. My Ma had a theory of gender in the English language which went “All dogs are he. All cats are she. All veg are greens”. I always felt that there was a bit of a category error sliding in there: “greens” is a noun and not a pronoun after all, but it would have been impertinent to challenge my Ma and I was never impertinent as a child. Ho no. Interestingly, in Gloucestershire water boilers were always “he” as in “‘e’s not bin workin’ since Wen’s’day; ‘e needs the gas-man to come out an’ fix ‘im”.

Let me wrench this post away from these linguistic diversions and back to the point.

The point is that I don’t get on particularly well with female cats, though it may be vice versa of course. If there is going to be any diva-ish behaviour in this house, any prima donna-y flouncing around, then it’s going to be me that does it. If you’re going down hill fast on a hormonal cycle, you might as well free-wheel while you can.

Of course there is no way I can find out if the Blak Kitteh is male or female, but nominally at least, in my idiolect, he’s a he.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but the one who stops over occasionally has a cat which is officially a hermaphrodite. He had to have gender-counselling from the Blue Cross before they’d let him take the cat. But this cat gets the honour of a male pronoun. Now in terms of stroppy prima donna-ish behaviour, this cat could give Naomi Campbell a run for her money. Hermaphrodite or not, this is most definitely a cat which is in touch with its feminine side. The Blak Kitteh on the other hand shows no particular symptoms of gender at all, but if he and I are to rub along at all then so far as I am concerned he is male until proven otherwise.

Just to add another swirl of confusion to the mix, Tiger came originally from a household comprising a womon born womon (to steal a phrase which grates on my teeth) and a male to female transsexual.

Gender. Who needs it?

Getting more for less

I realised the other day that the amount of money I have each month to use as spendies (after the bills) for things like food, petrol, evenings out, kulcher, clothes and entertainment, is less than my monthly mobile phone bill used to be.

Don’t feel sorry for me: I was squanderous in those days and worked abroad so my mobile phone bills were very high indeed. I should imagine I funded at least one Porsche for the directors of Orange. These days, I’m saving like the dickens and living within a tightly defined budget, and getting off on feeling in control.

So, driving along in my not-Porsche the other morning, I did myself a little checklist between then and now:

• Relationship - better
• Job - less nerve-wracking
• Home life - more stable
• Entertainment - easier to find out about events and go to them, though I don’t indulge in expensive impulses any more
• Toys and gadgets - mmm: I would like more of those, but I never was the one to buy them anyway
• Health - better
• Fitness - working on it
• Education - better, I wasn’t in one place long enough to study
• Car - it gets me there, and I wouldn’t spend money on flash cars again
• Clothes - I do miss expensive clothes, but I would broaden my choice more by loosing weight than I would by having more money
• Food - I eat better
• Eating out - I do that less than I used to, but I’m only just beginning to miss it because the gloss rubs off if you have to eat “out” four days a week for months and months on end
• Holidays - probably the biggest cut back, and the one area where if I had a couple of grand I’d blow it without compunction or guilt

At this distance I am not entirely sure what the money gave me. Would I like more? Sure. Do I need more? Thank goodness, no, I don’t.

Alan Bean - fourth man on the moon

Alan Bean is a really lovely guy. He’s witty. He’s fun. He’s funny. He’s impish, which seems an odd word to use about a moon-walker. He was and still is a painstaking professional, but I like the fact that some of the guys on the moon liked to play about and kick back a bit. The humour is only part of it though: he was changed by walking on the moon, changed in profound ways it seems, but he wears that profundity lightly and with grace.

There were a few hundred of us in a shabby, battered, over-lit, over-heated school hall. It was grubbily mundane. I liked that though because it threw the focus of the evening firmly on the man and what he had to say. I wonder what he made of it.

He spoke for about an hour about our place in the universe, about NASA and the Apollo missions, about the fact that the first man on the moon could have been Pete Conrad or David Scott, Thomas Stafford or Gordo Cooper, James Lovell or John Young, that NASA simply pushed for the next step and the next step each time, and the fact it was Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 was hapenstance. He spoke about the training they did, learning to become geologists and rehearsing all the tasks of each of the EVAs in Iceland, Mexico and Hawaii. He spoke about training to be in 1/6th gravity and what is is like to be there. He suggested that the Olympics should be held on the moon, simply because it would be such fun for the athletes to jump around in 1/6th G. He spoke about fear and how he handled it, about being so very far from home. He spoke with enormous generosity about his fellow astronauts. He told us about the work NASA is doing, on a shoestring, to try to get us back there.

The Apollo 12 team were close, closer than many of the Apollo crews perhaps, and one gets the feeling that Pete Conrad and Alan Bean in particular, as well as being supreme professionals, were … naughty. The painting which moved me the most was Bean’s fantasy of the three of them, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and himself, together on the moon. Dick Gordon was the most experienced pilot of the three and never landed on the moon - instead he flew the command module which was their only way back. In Bean’s picture, the three of them are posing for an official portrait on the surface of the moon - a fantasy which allowed his friend to share the experience. If you look closely you can see that Bean is holding up two fingers behind his friend’s head, as goofy pals have done since people started taking snapshots.

His art is interesting. It is strongly narrative and highly figurative; chocolate box art telling specific stories. He strives to convey emotion as well as to record events, which is difficult when you cannot show faces and when all the space-suits look the same. His colours are becoming more impressionistic as he develops as an artist; the skies are softer, the moonscapes redder and browner as he conveys the emotions of the event. But what he portrays is - well - alien. Our planet has an atmosphere and is covered in vegetation, so we are used to landscapes in pretty colours. Turner experimented with painting night scenes and Whistler experimented with compositions in black and grey, but most artists deal in light alone, not light and darkness. I suspect that Bean would seem to be a better artist if his subject matter were not visually so bleak. But it is a matter of astonishing serendipity that one of the dozen test pilots who walked on the moon had it in him to transform the experience for us into art.

Bean spoke of the wonder of being here; the wonder and beauty of our day-to-day world. He said that he had come back and never complained about the weather again. He walked on a different world, it was an experience which he has spent the past 37 years coming to understand, he describes it (amongst other things) as “fun”, but while he was in space it seems he was agonisingly homesick too.

He took questions, and distracted himself into answering them fully and at length. We queued for a while for an autograph, the one I went with and I, but the hall was due to close at 10:00 and the queue had not moved at all - I believe it was because Bean was chatting away at length with the first few people who reached the table.

Of all the moon-walkers, I am glad to have seen Alan Bean and heard him speak.

(Apologies for the quality of the photos - it was a large hall and I was using my mobile phone. However they are important to me, which is why I have posted them here.)

Sorting the sheep from the coats

For reasons I am too tired and too crotchety to go into, I have to devise an exercise to kick-off a workshop at work.

The workshop is to define categories of data and the exercise is to intended to make the peeps really feel that there are many different ways to label and sort information. For example, the father of the one who turns up here occasionally organises his books in order of the date first published. I’ve already told you that my former friend Catriona used to arrange hers by colour. Reed tells us that the British Museum rules for sorting anonymous books are “stark staring bonkers“. I group mine by subject so Heinlein sits next to books about the moon-landings. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.

So I have put together two large tupperware boxes of stuff from various drawers, cupboards and shelves, not to mention the garden, for the group to sort. I don’t even know what all of it is, so it should be fun for the peeps to categorise. I wouldn’t like to sort it myself, so I am glad that the whole thing was my idea.

Here is a selection:

Oil paints, fridge magnets, a stone apple, a bit of plastic that broke off my TV, indoor sparklers, an empty tin of peppermints, a full tin of air gun pellets (I’ll probably remove that one because it may upset people), turbine blades, a rusted nut and bolt (that came out of the garden), padlocks, peacock feathers, some pieces of haematite, a hair scrunchy in the yellow and green BP colours, a length of silver coloured cord, a jar of tarragon from Sweden enticingly labelled “dragon”, a thermometer, a compass, a broken mobile phone, ach… you get the idea.

It will be interesting to see whether or not getting the folks to sort them into categories works as a warm-up exercise. I haven’t yet decided whether to give, say, 20 items to each person and get them sorting individually and let the others work out what categories they’ve used, or whether to give the whole lot to the whole group and see what happens. The first will be more controllable but the second might be more instructive.

I still remain slightly startled by just how eclectic my miscellanea are though.

Not so much strange, as bad

One of my favourite websites is hosted here on WordPress. Strange Maps is always a delight and frequently interesting and educational.

I came across a pretty strange map myself the other day, though in truth this map of the UK is not so much strange as bad.

It’s from an independent travel agency in a small English market town which in fairness should remain anonymous. It’s been painted on the window. I assume that the white lines are meant to represent sandy beach resorts. The white triangle and white circle on the left are all that stands out in a picture of Big Ben while the semi-circular blobby thing on the right represents the giant ferris wheel which is the London Eye.

What is impressive is just how bad the map of the UK is. I found myself saying - “look at Wales! - no look at East Anglia! - no look at Cornwall! - Berwickshire! - the Mull of Kintyre! - Devon!” before just getting out of the car and photographing the dratted thing in a spirit of awe.

In fairness, it would have been painted freehand in reverse on the inside of the window using glass paint or blackboard paint, but why on earth whoever did it didn’t get hold of a real map of the UK, reverse it on their PC and copy it I’ll never know. For a freehand reverse image it probably isn’t that bad.

I do apologise for the quality of the image - it’s a bugger photographing images on glass, and I was taking the one I take to railway stations to a railway station at the time.