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A view from the cheap seat

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A view from the cheap seat

As I stub my cigarette into the ash tray at the King’s Arms, I set alight the corner of these notes from a bygone student producer.:

Tuesday 4th Week Michaelmas

List for producing Hamlet without the character of Hamlet:

Finance – BORING

Auditions – basically whack out some texts to some mates. FACEBOOK EVENT.

Marketing – that auditions page is going to need a saucy little banner.

Find people to do lighting and sound – query whether our production is even going to need lights and sound. We don’t need a Hamlet, so do we need lights and sound and all that stuff?

Set design – As the producer, I am going to broach the subject of, what I will term, ‘ironically basic’. We do nothing with the set. We spend NO money on it, as sort of an ironic statement on the ridiculously lavish productions which have been produced in Oxford. (Did any of you see The Architect? Or Jerusalem? Because I didn’t. But I heard the sets were pretty damn alright.)

Saturday, 4th Week, Michaelmas
Had a long Facebook chat with Mark, which involved really ramping up the use of kisses so I felt super drama-ish.

Apparently, we need lights. Apparently, we need sound. And apparently, we need a set and we do need a bloody skull (might have to clarify that actually). I am going to be honest here; I’m slightly regretting deciding to work with Mark, and all of his frankly unnecessarily stressful demands.

Oh, and he also noticed a flaw with my list. “We need to do a bid,” he whined at me through the emoji of a ‘large cat typing at a computer’. “Haha obvs,” I replied, with ‘large unicorn cat’ (really wishing I had put ‘large cat knocked out on the floor’ because Mark is being a bit of a dick).

The wisdom of Rufus Norris

Francesca Nicholls
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The wisdom of Rufus Norris

I wonder what would Rufus Norris, Artistic Director of the National Theatre, make of that table? Positioned in front of him was a small table with a bottle of water particularly well poised in front of two bottles of red wine. To my disappointment, Norris didn’t choose the wine. The reason why I was intrigued by Norris’ perspective on the table relates directly to his directing of Table.

For those unaware of it, Table by Rufus Norris and his wife, Tanya Ronder, was an idea that occurred to him when talking to a pessimistic young director who complained endlessly of her inability to begin creating a play. Norris explains, “I grew tired of her inability to act. I told her, ‘Look, you can create anything from something. Think about this table, people have had arguments over it, people have cried over it, chewing gum from years ago has been stuck on the bottom of it.’” He proceeded to encourage the young director, “‘See, look how easy it is… but you can’t steal that idea. That’s mine!’”

For Norris, creativity stemmed from many places but particularly ‘space’. He encouraged the audience to think of a small space on the Keble College quad and question what has happened there. What arguments have there been? Whose hearts were crushed?

Norris was indeed a particularly reassuring figure; he did not have that obnoxious thespian air about him, nor a sense of self-importance despite his marvellous achievements. Instead he re-emphasised over and over again how lucky he was, but also how crucial it was for those in- terested in gaining a career in the theatre to act now. Norris explained that his own path into the theatre began due to his crush on a friend called Lynn who he followed into the RADA scene. Afteracting in RADA, he participated in labouring jobs, from painting and decorating to cleaning toilets. He then explained, “I got involved with a French company and, because of my building trade experience, they asked me to put up stud walls. As a kind of ‘carrot’, they offered me a part in a play in which I had to be crucified naked. There is no public record. It was not a very good play. I was terrible in it. Yet, while we were per- forming, I was doing session work with a friend as a musician, and his wife asked me to deliver [a script] to my wife. Before I went home I read it and took it in the next day saying, ‘Can we do t hisbecause I want to write music or be in it.’ Brian Astbury [Space Theatre] said, ‘You’re too gobby as an actor, and all of your interest is in the whole and not the part. Direct it yourself.’”

From that moment forward Norris explained that he never gave up. “Fear is a great motivator to me – the fear of failure.” He openly admits that he was financially struggling through his artistic endeavours As he beautifully summarises, “I was 36 before I earned £10,000 in a year. It’s all about stamina. Of the people who started when I started most of them have got their lives together earlier than I did, but it meant they diverted away from the thing that continues to get me out of bed.

“It’s a fantastic privilege to enjoy what you spend most of your life doing. Theatre, despite its reputation, is a tinsel-mine. A tinsel-mine is a hard place to work. If you keep on going you won’t fall away. You’ll be employable.”

Rufus Norris certainly imparted a sense of hope and inspiration into those within the audience. Ultimately, he said, if you want to work in the theatre, saying ‘tomorrow’ is not enough. If you love it enough, if you have passion enough, then you cannot wait for next week or next month. The time is now. 

Monumental Art: Twin

Dominic Hand
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Monumental Art: Twin

Entering MOMA’s ‘Gallery 20’ two summers ago, I remember being stunned as a tour group was shepherded past one of the most beautiful works by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters. Robert Ryman is our Vermeer. He makes surfaces play delicately with light and space. He is often pigeonholed as ‘minimalist’, above all due to his white-on-white colour scheme, but his works are never static or impersonal representations. 

He is concerned with painting not as product, but as process: not what to paint, but how. Twin was painted in 1966, and is remarkably simple, even for Ryman. From afar, it blends almost perfectly with the wall. But as we approach we are made aware of its interactions with light and space, of how its presence seems to make these properties real. His trademark tactile surface, scruffy and vague, is preserved in the faintly scored lines that run horizontally across the canvas, catching light faintly on each frayed lip. Ryman leaves the edges of canvas unpainted, as a document of the process of its making.

Twin situates Ryman with other contemporary artists, specifically Brice Marden, who painted The Dylan Painting in the same year, also leaving an edge of canvas exposed. Marden’s concept of ‘Plane Image’ – a nicely clunky and conceptually rich pun – emphasises that an apparently dimensionless painted surface can have, in fact, enormous depth.

Ryman wrote, “You hear it occasionally, that everything’s been done in painting. Well, it’s not so. There’s everything to do in painting. I feel that in a sense painting is just beginning.” A painting like Twin cannot be reproduced by ideas or by photographs. It is continually ‘just beginning’ because the work is formed by an experience of it, and its surrounding light and space. I spent almost an hour in front of Twin. I still don’t think I’ve seen a more delicate or subtle painting.

This painting invites meditation, simultaneously a part of its construction and the act of viewing. The painting’s deliberate imperfections, similar to Agnes Martin’s approximated grid paintings, demand even more intense concentration, despite its plainness. It is humble: what Ryman has done is ostensibly only a little different from the worker who painted the gallery walls. Yet it is irreproducible, conceptually intricate, and masterfully finished. 

Primo Levi: A life broken down to its elements

Jessica Poole
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Primo Levi: A life broken down to its elements

In my experience, telling humanities students that they should really read The Periodic Table tends to make them widen thir eyes, their complexions paling as they cover their ears and moan about the trauma of GCSE chemistry. Really? Even I know letters and numbers in boxes on the wall are not enthralling reading. The book I’m referring to is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. The book is semi-autobiographical, each of its chapters finding a central metaphor in the properties of a chemical element. 

Levi was Italian, Jewish by birth, born just a few months after the First World War, and persecuted for his ethnicity up to and during the Second. Most of his writing revolves around his experience of Auschwitz, where he was held for 11 months in 1944. Indeed this is the subject of his most famous work, If This is a Man. 

Unlike many of his other books, The Periodic Table does not have his experience in the concentration camp as its main focus. Indeed, there is only one chapter which really touches on it, and even this refuses to get wholly engulfed by the events that no doubt shaped the rest of his life. In this sense, the title is highly apt: a life comprised of many elements which form the set. Levi was a chemist, an author, a husband and father, among many other things, and in his book he gives the defining moments of his earlier life a single box and nothing more. I specify earlier life, because it is a point to note that in the book, he mentions nothing of his wife, Lucia, or any of his time later on, and though he appears to put on display every personal aspect of the first half of his life, he consciously excluded the life that surrounded him as he wrote. 

Levi’s writing style possesses straightforwardness; events are stated simply, and the language leaves the reader room for their own imagination. He somehow adds a fantastical tint to his life, trimmed with sardonic wit that I personally very much enjoyed. He has an appreciation, one that I find common to grandparents and scientists, of his own mistakes and those of others, and of the flaws in humanity as a whole. His directness and honesty are at points disarming: when he talks of the work he did in chemistry, he does not make out that his science was groundbreaking, but instead tells us of its most mundane aspects.

This includes descriptions of paint factories where he worked, or his obviously misguided experiments to develop a diabetes cure. The science he sketches out is very much not the fashionable impression given by the likes of Hawking or Dawkins, though he includes it as he does other significant parts of his life, unconcerned as to whether a reader will find it exciting. It matters to Levi and this is what comes across. In this respect, he is not a self-conscious writer. This humble view of himself, however, does not impede his ability to look at the world as a whole in a fantastical way, full of emotion and humanity that is never associated with the cold and unfeeling world of science. He writes on “the borderline between chemistry and white magic”, and I believe it is his ability to write about the science which has meaning for him which allows such imaginative expression. 

In seeing such snippets of his struggles through short stories centred around elements, coupled with a writing style that has all the humble clarity of mathematics, I often found the need to remind myself that his life was not a rambling walk through a wood, but a series of battles, from the racial laws that almost prevented him obtaining a degree, to his imprisonment in Auschwitz and his drawn-out journey home.

“I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.”

What went on in Levi’s mind after his experiences, psychologists can only theorise and the rest of us only guess. Among all the knowledge of the evil humans can do, and the horror of the real world, he manages to convey a comfort known to every chemist: that however incomprehensible life may seem, you can always break it back down into its elements.

Confessions of a student chef: Daunish Negargar

Daunish Negargar
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Confessions of a student chef: Daunish Negargar

When my wonderful and highly competent editor texted me, “Hey bbz, r u bad at cooking?”, I knew this was my destiny. I began with high hopes, dreaming of a chocolate soufflé; light, fluffy and sumptuous – it would put my personal hero Martha Stewart to shame. When I noticed the lack of some key utensils – namely ramekins, a working oven, and a desire to succeed, I realised this was unlikely to work, and eventually settled on a far less challenging dish: a chocolate microwave mug cake. Less sexy, but certainly less fuss.

In many ways, the cooking experience was pretty representative of my first year of Oxford. I had enthusiasm, cake ingredients, ambition, my Mickey mouse mug, and a surefire plan to impress everyone with my hidden talents. My initial optimism faded as I watched molten chocolate overflow in the microwave, forming a crust around the mug and microwave plate. My heart sunk as I looked at the spongey mess which remained. The final blow came as I reached the bottom of my mug cake and found a thin residue of flour and cocoa powder, mocking me as my world crashed down around me.

Would I consider this recipe a success? Well, it was (sort of) edible, and less effort than walking to Tesco… so, yes.

Recipe of the week: Thai Peanut Tofu

Luke Barratt
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Recipe of the week: Thai Peanut Tofu

Don’t you think it’s past thai-me you learned how to cook a proper noodle dish, and stopped being such a to-fool? This spicy, flavoursome dish is simple and fairly quick to make; plus, it costs peanuts!

For the tofu:
180g tofu
A handful of peanuts
A handful of fresh basil
6cm ginger, finely chopped
2 shallots, finely chopped
One serving of noodles
Soy sauce

For the sauce:
1 finger chilli, finely chopped
2 tbsp peanut butter
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp sugar

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Drain the tofu fully by wrapping it in kitchen towel, placing it between two boards, and leaving for 15 minutes. Chop into 4cm cubes, and place with the shallots and the ginger on a baking tray. Sprinkle with soy sauce until all the tofu is light brown.

2. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the tofu is golden, turning it over every so often to stop it sticking to the tray. Meanwhile, begin the sauce. Stir the ingredients in a saucepan on a low heat, leaving to simmer for 10 minutes. Boil the noodles, drain well and rinse with cold water.

3. When the tofu is done, combine everything in a large wok over a low heat. Add the peanuts and the basil, and serve with soy sauce to taste.

A dark and memorable Fairytale

Catherine Kelly
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A dark and memorable Fairytale

The premise of Haruki Murakami’s illustrated novella The Strange Library is half Kafka, half History Finalist’s anxious dream. The unnamed protagonist finds himself locked in the labyrinthine dungeon of his local library and forced to memorise three books on the subject of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. Unsurprisingly for Murakami, it only gets stranger from there. Kafka has become an almost obligatory reference in reviews of Murakami, but it’s an influence he does little to conceal. From 2002’s Kafka on the Shore to 2013’s ‘Samsa in Love’, the German writer feels less like an influence on Murakami’s work than a character within it.

Translated by Ted Goossen, The Strange Library is Murakami’s first fully illustrated work of fiction. The hardcover edition, designed by Suzanne Dean, cobbles together advertisements, illustrations and ephemera all taken from various books in the London Library. Text and image meld together in lines magnified and stretched over pages; the beautifully marbled end pages mix with brightly coloured drawings of donuts and parakeets, monochrome moons and anatomical diagrams.

Murakami’s style has always been highly image-driven and the rich collage design suits his prose so well that you begin to wonder why he hasn’t done it before.

With a style as recognisable as Murakami’s, there’s a danger of repeating old tricks. The Strange Library hits several traditional Murakami notes: an underground realm, a maniac with a soft-spot for bureaucracy, an anthropomorphic sheep, a mysterious girl with an ambiguous identity. Yet Murakami is adept at using these tropes to sketch his own mythology, and The Strange Library’s fairytale simplicity fits well into his world.

This is not to say that Murakami’s prose doesn’t possess some of the clunkiness that always gets blamed on his translators; the simile “like a blind dolphin”, comes to mind. Murakami has always suggested that originality of imagery trumps lyricism and he is convincing enough to make you agree, if only for the 70-odd pages of the novella.

Fans of Murakami tend to have a favourite translator of his work. I would put J. Philip Gabriel top, who won the PEN Translation Prize in 2006 for Kafka on the Shore. Ted Goossen, who has translated some of Murakami’s short fiction for The New Yorker, is an accomplished though less common name on Murakami spines. Goossen has an ear for the unsettling calm of Murakami’s work.

In The Strange Library, Murakami has created a dark and memorable fairytale about the lingering influence of childhood fears and the isolation of adulthood.

More for me at Edamame

Trina Wilson
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More for me at Edamame

People had been urging me to check this place out for months. Whenever I complained of a craving for tofu, or that the only sushi to be found in Oxford comes from chain restaurants or supermarkets, there was always one person in hearing distance who passed on this tip. It is only now I’ve actually bothered to follow these directions that I wish I’d listened much sooner.

After hearing that this chic eatery was the darling of Oxford’s hippest, grooviest scenesters, I was concerned about my chances just turning up on a Friday at 6pm without booking, but as soon as we arrived we were warmly ushered to the two free seats at a six-person table. The wide, gracefully curved table allowed us to easily turn to face each other and hold a conversation separately from its other occupants, whose own conversations were kept private from us. Despite this set-up, the low-ceilinged, cozy room and its excellent acoustics gave the little restaurant an intimate, but relaxed feel. Although packed, it never felt oppressively so, and we never had to budge out of anyone’s way as they tried to get past.

We ordered a few of the mains to share and a rice bowl each, as per the menu’s recommendation, along with a few sides and specials (including the namesake, edamame). All of it, and the sushi particularly, was beautifully presented and plated at no compromise to taste, convenience, or portion size. Everything arrived impressively quickly, starting with the edamame, which was served in a delightfully kitsch wicker basket. The pods were basic but well done, lacking the unnecessary quirks some feel are needed to personalise the Japanese staple. This was a pretty description of most of the dishes, where the biggest surprise was the quality of the food, particularly the tofu, which was equally impressive in all of the dishes that contained it.

The waiting team routinely checked on us with a degree of unobtrusiveness that didn’t make me feel rushed, though we had no complaints for them. When we paid, I was staggered it was only £25. I wish I’d ordered more.

Bar Review: Queen’s

The Bar Review Team
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Bar Review: Queen’s

★★★☆☆

Three stars

George Orwell described his ideal pub as “uncompromisingly Victorian”, saying, “It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries.” This is a sentiment often missed by college bars, but these wise words from my personal hero came immediately to my mind and reverberated through my body as I walked into Queen’s. The low ceiling, stone walls, thick wooden beams, dim lighting and wooden cornered bar combine to form a pleasantly cosy atmosphere, and all fit well with Orwell’s vision of “solid, comfortable ugliness”.

This disregard for modern trends allows you actually to relax back into your seat without the fear that the condensation from your pint could do unspeakable damage to anything you put it down on. Few college bars attempt the old English pub feel, probably because we live in a city with an actual old English pub on every street. But Queen’s has achieved something vaguely resembling the real thing, though the most obvious mark of inauthenticity is felt when you leave with your wallet unemptied by the daylight robbers who run the Turf Tavern and The King’s Arms, and their cohorts. The atmosphere was aided by friendly staff who clearly knew what they were doing, and who, Cheers-esque, seemed to know everyone who walked in by their nickname and favourite drink; very impressive.

It did suffer from the bane of many other college bars, something I’ve previously dubbed the ‘spare-room’ problem. Assuming the bar wasn’t opened in 1341 when Robert de Eglesfield set up camp, it’s been built in a place not specifically designed for a bar. This leaves the bar too small for sufficient seating, or with such terrible acoustics that you can’t hear yourself think. Unfortunately for Queen’s, their bar is afflicted with both these problems. By half past nine, there were people stood around the edges of the room, waiting to pounce predatorily on the next open seats, and the following morning my voice was completely gone from the shouting necessary to talk to the person next to me. I croaked my way through a tutorial, all the while begrudging Queen’s for how they had forsaken me.

Their drinks choice really is nothing special, and would quickly become tiresome for regulars, but it is notably cheap across the board. So much so that their signature drink, the Sex on the Quad, was £2.80 for the rough equivalent of a triple. This is a big tick for me, and would make pre-drinking here very easy indeed. Although, their Sex on the Quad was just Sex on the Beach, so it’s not really a signature drink if we’re going to get picky.

A far less reputable Oxford publication that rhymes with shmersa recently hyperbolically claimed Queen’s is the best college bar in Oxford. I almost agree. Queen’s does have a lovely feel to it and wonderfully cheap drinks, so if you can get past the unusually grumpy porters, give it a shot. 

We need to divest from fossil fuels, and divest now

Rivka Mikhaela
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We need to divest from fossil fuels, and divest now

You’ve heard it before, but it bears, or rather needs, repetition: the world is dying and it is our fault. Climate change has already lead to the displacement of marginalised communities around the world (think Hurricane Katrina, think Vanuatu) and it is our fault. The only response of a just society in the face of such a catastrophic and hyperbole-inducing horror as global warming is to stop, reflect, and fight with everything it has to reverse the damage. Unfortunately, while some people have cottoned on to this, the leaders of our society have not. Lobbying governments to take climate change seriously is the focus of many environmental activists, and the most promising lobbying strategy globally is fossil fuel divestment.

Monday 18th May will see the culmination of two years’ work by the Oxford Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign as the University Council will discuss whether or not to disinvest its £3.8 billion endowment from companies involved in the exploration, ownership or extraction of fossil fuels. If you have been following the campaign, you may know that this was supposed to be discussed two months ago, but the Council deferred the decision under the spotlight of international media. Oxford cannot afford to postpone again, for reasons of both reputation and responsibility, particularly when we now know that if we are to stay below the two degree target for warming, 80 per cent of coal has to remain in the ground.

The OUSU-affiliated Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign has widespread support, including from 32 common rooms, over 100 academics and almost 800 alumni, who have pledged not to donate to the University unless they fully divest. Furthermore, over 65 Oxford alumni, including solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett and journalist George Monbiot, have promised to hand back their degrees if the University does not divest on May 18th. This is both a matter of principle and an attempt to wield Oxford’s prestige against it. In the words of Sunniva Taylor, an alumna who has made this pledge, “This is not just a question of integrity for me. I want to use the privilege that having [an Oxford degree] gives me to try and shake things up; to use my power to draw attention to others. The University of Oxford still has a lot of influence – nationally and globally – and so the choices it makes about where it puts its money really do matter.”

Critics of divestment, such as the one in Nature this week, misidentify its objectives. The aim is not to push the stock price of non-renewable energy companies down or even to raise awareness – it is about recognising that investment is a political statement and using it thus. In the case of universities, it is about challenging the dissonance between producing anti-climate change research and building for the future, and profiting from the drivers of climate change. As Jeremy Leggett, who has pledged to hand his degree back, put it, “I don’t think universities should be training young people to craft a viable civilisation with one hand and bankroll its sabotage with the other.”

The effects of the divestment campaign are already being felt – Deutsche Bank published a report earlier this year forecasting peak carbon rather than peak oil as the leading driver of oil prices, and HSBC has advised clients that fossil fuel companies will become ‘economically non-viable’. But the divestment movement is not about responding to financial incentive: it is about creating financial incentive that is ethically sound. For the wealth of our institutions to be aligned with the success of fossil fuel companies is to endorse their extraction, exploitation, pollution and lobbying against effective climate policy. To stay invested in this industry is a political statement. This is not the first time that divestment has been brought to Oxford. Whether against South African apartheid, arms manufacturing or the tobacco industry, divestment has a rich history as an effective tool within wider campaigning, and with institutions from SOAS to the British Medical Association to the World Council of Churches already cutting their investments in fossil fuels, Oxford’s continued inaction would bring it down on the wrong side of history.

Every voice counts towards Monday’s decision. Please direct any alumni you know to promise to withhold donations until Oxford divests, and to the degree hand-back pledge. Students can sign the general petition online, and ask their tutors to sign the academic open letter and contact Cara Turton-Chambers (Hertford) about passing a motion of support in your common room. There will also be a demonstration at 4pm outside the RadCam this Saturday (16th May) – please come along.

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