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OUSU slams Doctors & Nurses pub-crawl

By
Jack Secunda
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Oxford University Student Union has condemned the ‘Doctors and Nurses’ pub-crawl planned by Carnage UK in Oxford later this week.

During Tuesday’s council, OUSU added its voice to the national criticism of the events company. The motion passed described the Thursday night event as posing “a real danger to students’ health and wellbeing” and “a serious threat to already fragile relations between students and the permanent residents of Oxford.”

Dani Quinn, OUSU VP for Welfare and Equal Opportunities, further argued that some of the planned Carnage activities such as getting “a naughty nurse check-up” were “degrading and sexist”.

OUSU is unable to stop the ‘Doctors and Nurses’ pub-crawl. However, the Student Union is calling on JCRs and MCRs to not promote the event to their members.

The OUSU motion comes at a time of national furore around Carnage UK following the conviction of a Sheffield University student after he urinated on a war memorial at the end of a Carnage night.

District Judge Anthony Brown suggested that the company should take some responsibility for the act saying, “Carnage was the name of the organisation that promote this type of activity and some might say someone should be standing alongside you this morning.”

Since the judge’s comments, National Union of Students has called to stop Carnage at universities. 17 student unions across the country banned Carnage events.

Richard Budden, Vice-President of the National Union of Students, has warned that “there is an acute and real danger to students who get caught up with these nights, not to mention the danger to members of the local population.”

Student opinion at Oxford is mixed, with many students in support of the comany. Tim Wigmore, an undergraduate at Trinity College, believes that “as Carnage runs around 50 nights per year, it would be unfair to generalise about their events based on one isolated incident.”

William Richardson of Somerville College supports this view, claiming that “whilst the depraved actions of an individual have been singled out and highlighted, Carnage cannot be held responsible as the overwhelming majority of students who take part in their events do not act in such a manner.”

However another student has argued, “Although students themselves are responsible for their actions, Carnage events almost certainly encourage binge drinking amongst students.”

Carnage UK regularly organises events in Oxford. Last year, the company ran a ‘dirty porn star’ fancy dress event in Oxford, which involved visiting six bars before the club event at Lava & Ignite.

Inspector Matt Bullivant of Thames Valley Police pointed out that previous Oxford events “have passed off without any significant incidents occurring”, claiming that “there is a greater understanding among Oxford’s student body of the potential ramifications of their actions should they become embroiled in any incidents similar to those we have seen in Sheffield in recent weeks.”

 

5 Minute Tute – Pirates: Somalia’s lawless seas

By
Dr Sarah Percy
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How do Somali pirates hijack ships?

Somali pirates use very low tech methods to hijack ships: they go out in fishing skiffs and are armed with fairly light weaponry, mainly machine guns or other automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They approach a ship and threaten to fire. Most merchant ships are undefended. It is easier and cheaper to pay insurance premiums that will allow a company to pay ransoms than it is to have security on all ships. As the odds of being attacked are fairly low, most shipping companies take a gamble on not being attacked.

Why do they do it?

For the money. Piracy off the Somali coast is a ransom business, and a lucrative one. As a result, pirate hostages are very well looked after (another part of the reason shipping companies are reluctant to provide expensive security for their ships – they’d rather just pay the ransom). A whole infrastructure has sprung up along the coast that allows for looking after hostages. It is also possible to ‘invest’ in a pirate operation in cities like Toronto (home to a huge Somali diaspora). If the pirates are successful, you will get a return on the money you paid.
The political situation in Somalia obviously facilitates piracy. Somalia is the classic example of a ‘failed’ state, allowing criminal activity to go unchecked by central government. There are few economic opportunities for young men. Pirates face almost no consequences for their actions (see below). It’s fairly safe and very lucrative. Success builds success. Pirates who get a good ransom can get better weapons and faster boats, and take more ransoms. The more successful pirates are, the more people will want to become pirates.

How big is the problem?

It’s getting bigger every year. Piracy incidents for 2009 had overtaken those for 2008 in the first nine months of the year, and the International Maritime Bureau estimates that pirate incidents involving guns have gone up 200% this year. However, the number of ships attacked still constitute a very small percentage of the total amount of shipping that moves through the region.

What measures have countries taken to stop piracy?

There are three major naval operations working off the coast of Somalia trying to deal with the problem: Operation Atalanta, an EU mission, the NATO Operation Allied Protector, and the US-led Combined Task Force 150. These operations attempt to ensure the delivery of food aid to Somalia as well as protect shipping in the region. Military ships can arrest and detain pirates, sending them for trial, but what to do with captured pirates is not straightforward: it is not clear where they should be tried, and quite clear that many of them are happy to be captured, seeing it as a ticket to a Western country.

Will these measures work?

The naval operations are actually not tasked with doing very much: just to protect food aid (which is relatively easy and consequently has been relatively successful) and protect shipping. The latter seems to have had mixed success. The evidence seems to indicate that the naval operations are not stopping piracy, just shifting it to different places along the coast.
There are big structural problems that need to be overcome to stop piracy. First, shipping companies would rather use insurance to pay ransoms that just about any other alternative, from providing armed escorts or armed guards on ships to pushing for greater military responses. As long as insurance remains cheap this is likely to continue to be the case. The more ransoms get paid, the more piracy will flourish. Second, there is no question that it is hard to solve the Somali pirate problem without improving the Somali state, which is potentially impossible in the short term.

Is there a link between piracy and terrorism?

Probably not. It seems as though piracy in Somalia is almost completely apolitical and is entirely about the money. Even when pirates have captured ships carrying military equipment (like the Ukrainian vessel carrying battle tanks) it seems to have been by accident rather than by design. However, the success of the Somali pirates demonstrates what could happen should terrorism turn to the seas. Pirates have been very successful with very limited weapons, and terrorists could achieve similarly large effects at very low costs. This is extremely worrying, so the CIA and other agencies are monitoring the Somali pirate situation closely, both to make sure that no links develop between the pirates and groups like Al-Qaeda, and also to make the case that the world’s maritime areas need to be better secured.

Dr Sarah Percy is a Tutorial Fellow in International Relations at Merton College

 

 

Guest Commentator: Yasmin Alibhai Brown

By
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
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The ship flying the flag for free speech is often unsteady, sometimes leaky as it sails capricious, tempestuous seas. Sometimes even the captains jump off and struggle to keep faith with its mission. Like the supremely erudite Stephen Fry who has always, to my knowledge, been an uncompromising champion of free expression.
Yet this autumn came the moment when Mr Fry couldn’t abide by his own credo and ferociously assailed the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir for her freely expressed views on the young pop star Stephen Gately. His gay lifestyle, she suggested was sordid and his death could not have been from natural causes. Now Fry commands a virtual army on the web. He can make or break someone with under a hundred and forty characters. He went for Moir on Twitter, later expanding to full sail wrath on his blog. Other big name liberals and gays have joined in.
I can understand their rage. The column was ugly, insensitive and homophobic. The only real argument is where the line is drawn. Perhaps liberal fundamentalists like Fry now will now be more honest and accept that there are limits. Even for them.
Milton, one of the fathers of freedom brazenly excluded some from this fundamental right:’ When I speak of toleration and free expression, I don’t mean Catholics. Them we extirpate’ Professor Stanley Fish, the American culture critic is incisive in his analysis of this complex subject. Everyone, he says, in the free speech zone understands what is permitted. Opinions are not weightless, they enter society and have to deal with its needs too.
There is always going to be ongoing tension between freedom and restraint. Most of us know we cannot publicly deny the Holocaust or cry ‘Fire!’ in a packed theatre. Delicate decisions on what is acceptable or not are made all the time. A picture of Brooke Shields, aged ten, nude, made up and oiled was withdrawn in October 2009 from view by the Tate Modern, a good call, I think.
BNP’s bulldoggish Nick Griffin, a white supremacist, hater of Jews, Muslims and mixed race families was invited on to the nation’s most prestigious TV programme. He, who would deny millions the vote, is an emblem of democracy and BNP violent thugs who assault black and Asian Britons become beneficiaries of free speech doctrine. I say the BNP should be interrogated on news programmes but an appearance on Question Time is a privilege which the BBC now bestows on fascists. It sickens those of us who expect better of the corporation.
Then the visit by the ghastly Dutch MP Geert Wilder who overturned the order banning him from entering Britain imposed by ex Home Secretary Jackie Smith. He curses the Koran, damns and insults European Muslims, is a fearless xenophobe. Invited by a UKIP MP, they both celebrated their victory for freethinking. So why then didn’t Wilder accept any of the invitations from Muslim intellectuals to debate his ideas in public? Because he, like many others of his ilk only wants to incite Muslims into behaving like ‘savages’. How disappointing it must have been for him not to have a fatwa to take back home. I agree that he should be allowed into Britain but to see him feted as a hero in parliament was an affront. Does this mean free passage for other proscribed hate makers- rabid imams, anti-Semites, homophobic black rappers? If not, it only confirms outrageous double standards.
David Milliband exerts outrageous political censorship when by rejecting the judgement of two senior judges who demand disclosure of information that could prove our intelligence services colluded with the US and others to torture captured Muslims in the ‘war on terror’. No twitter storm was whipped up over this gross cover up.
There was though over the scientific study on toxic dumping in west Africa by the company Trafigura whose lawyers tried to get an injunction to keep the information secret, including debates on the scandal in parliament. The gaggers were duly defeated but commercial confidentiality remains an effective weapon used by big business to keep us in the dark. Lastly, the scientist Simon Singh (a good friend) is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association which objects to his attacks on the profession. Many of us are silenced by the might of libel law. Money, as Orwell wrote, ‘controls opinion.’ Singh wants more ‘freedom to criticise fairly and strongly’ on the blogs and scientific writing. I agree but too many bloggers are mad or malicious. So what to do about them? Not easy.
Libertarian ideologues like journalist Brendan O’Neill have no such moral conundrums: ‘offensiveness is part of life; the politics of inoffensiveness is a threat to free speech and open debate’ Yes, until people’s deep feelings are roused as were Fry’s by Moir. Words do violence to humans, more sometimes than sticks and stones. They can disable you to the point of insanity.
Don’t get me wrong. More and more freedom is what we must strive for, but without any sensitivity leads to anarchy and dehumanisation. But freedom is precious and needs to be protected from dictators and censors, and sometimes from itself.

The big question: Is smoking cool?

By
Sarah Ventress And Charlie Alderwick
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YES

Charlie Alderwick argues that there’s no doubt about it

I shouldn’t need to try very hard to make the case that smoking is cool. You all already know. Some deep, guilty part of your mind is already persuaded that smoking is cool. Smokers and non-smokers alike are perfectly aware of the cigarette’s status as the ultimate symbol of devil-may-care attitude. Smokers are aloof, self-assured, mysterious rebels and no amount of grim photos of rotting lungs on cigarette packets will change the fact that if you smoke, you’re a cool cat. Or at the very least, one step closer to being one.

Let’s think about the various guises smoking has occupied in the past. Pre-Christopher Columbus’s, Tobacco was taken in large doses by native Americans, who valued its use as a hallucinogenic drug. And who are we – us vapid, modern consumers – to argue against the spiritual benefits of such a practice?

But if ritual visions aren’t your bag, you might be lured to the dark side by the notion of channelling smoking’s crucial role in old-school Hollywood glamour. “Greta Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich and DiMaggio”, all icons of Golden Age elegance as listen in the song Vogue by Madonna (a pioneer of ‘cool’ herself, and no stranger to the odd puff on a cigar) and all of whom, I’m sure would have held their cigarette and blown their smoke in a special, slightly arch way that screams ‘I am an opulent member of the glitterati. Who cares if my lungs are full of tar?’. Cumbersome health questions about the wisdom of smoking began to emerge half way through the 1990s, yet in spite of this, smoking has since become Absolutely Fabulous…

1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s of course provided us with the perennial image, now a cliché, of Sophisticated Smoking (at its best with cigarette holder – to avoid the yellowing of fingers, or worse, fine silk gloves), with Cruella De Ville (both cartoon and Glen Close versions) also opting for the long, thin holder – perfect for emphasising villainous, flamboyant gestures.

These figures of incredible grace and impeccable style have really only changed superficially, with today’s equivalents (Kate Moss and co.) still lighting up on a regular basis in their edgy Shoreditch haunts.
For something a little more masculine, pipe-smoking usually ups the sartorial score. Pipe smoking is rarely ‘cool’, as such, but inevitably gives one an air of being very distinguished and everso clever – after all, in taking up this noble habit, you would be following in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh and J R R Tolkien.

Having provided you with many examples of iconic smokers in the public sphere, I’d like to return to my original point. Despite the prevalence of smoking amongst the easily-glamourised factions of society – aristos and punks, millionaire entrepreneurs and gangstas, supermodels and hookers, etc. – the reason you know full well that smoking is cool, is your own experiences growing up. From the 15-year-old rebels in your school, who would sneak a quick fag in after P.E., to the lofty and artsy types in Oxford who devote as much time to their poetry/guitar as to their studies – smoking is an element of their uniform that is here to stay. If you fear for the health of your circulation, or if carcinogenic substances make you feel a little nervous, then you just don’t value your image enough; live fast, die young.

NO

Sarah Ventress begs to differ…

It’s getting cold, the frosty mantle of winter is drawing in and you’re standing on a square foot of pavement with twenty other people, blue hands shivering as you take a drag. Take a look at yourself. I’m not even going to bother talking about the health risks that come with smoking – because they speak for themselves. No, the fact that smoking isn’t cool is all about image.

If you frequently find yourself doing ludicrous things with condoms and fire alarms, hanging out of windows, freezing your arse off outside pubs, asking Big Issue sellers for a light and generally going to extraordinary lengths to light up, the chances are you’re losing a bit of credibility. 

The days of elegant smoking have been and gone, along with a lot of the ‘smoking is cool’ brigade. The Marlboro man died of lung cancer. Fewer and fewer celebrities are lighting up. If your only company outside in the rain is going to be a washed up Kate Moss, maybe you’d be better off inside. There’s also your long term image to consider. Yes, OK, smoking might not look too bad at twenty-one, but imagine yourself in a few years time and it’s a bit more Dot Cotton than Dietrich.

And then there are smoking areas, the playground of the socially inept. Making friends as you shiver uncontrollably, with your trusty cigarette as a social crutch, leads to some worrying choices of companions. You may be, like, totally bonding with someone who was in Cambodia at exactly the same time as you, but at the end of the day you’re still in a metal cage on Park End Street being herded by a fat man wearing much warmer clothes than you.

When you combine all these factors with the prospects of lung cancer, impotence and all the other health warnings they plaster on the front of packets, it becomes clear that smoking just isn’t cool. Inevitably it all comes down to the fact that if you’re not cool to start with, adding bad breath and yellow fingers into the equation probably isn’t going to help. Just a thought.

Disco for Health Care Reform?

By
Martin Parlett
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As Nancy Pelosi stepped out last night beginning her victory cry with ‘Oh what a night!’ as a tribute act to The Four Seasons, Democrats, and a single Republican, had voted 220-215 to send the gavel down on the side of the ay’s, propelling the health reform legislation, along with the public option, to the Senate for consultation. Pelosi’s instigation of disco, through a paralysed grin, offered an eerie image of the momentary nature of this triumph. Undoubtedly a landmark for President Obama too, he was notably cautious to reveal what the final legislation would look like when it arrives on the Resolute Desk.

For anyone observing, the journey towards this narrow victory has been far from smooth or gracious. Members of the minority party have already been found to be playing tantrum with the issue of health insurance coverage. As a number of Democratic congresswomen stepped forward to request unanimous consent to extend their support for the bill, Republican men, and a couple of women too it must be said, stepped forward to steamroll their expressions of affirmation with a mono-tonal barrage of ‘I object!’ (see the link below for video). This was filibustering in its laziest form. With a single present participle phrase, the GOP attempted to stonewall the chamber.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/07/i-object-tom-price-tries_n_349587.html

The image was prophetic. No sooner had the bill received the 218 votes required to pass, the Grand Old Party began to flood every network with diviners of impending doom for the legislation at the hand of the upper chamber. Sen. Joe Lieberman, that weathervane of public opinion, has already thrown his hat in the filibustering arena in order to ‘cripple’ any like-minded legislation. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is meanwhile adding his softly spoken support to Lieberman’s threat. The unfortunate fact is that this strange duo is probably right. The health care bill from Congress is unlikely to retain its commitment to the public option, and is, in Graham’s drawling passive aggressive pronouncement, ‘dead on arrival’.

You have to wonder, though, whether these political figures understand that their language is severely off-putting. Speaking of inanimate bills, printed on paper, in terms of invalidism and fatality, ignores the central issue of sustaining and protecting human life at the crux of this debate. The 96% of Americans who would be covered under private and public health insurance options under this plan, must be the driving statistic in the weeks and months to come, not inappropriate metaphor which dehumanizes the lexicon of medicine.

A Travolta style dance move must be given in tribute to Rep. Joseph Cao (R), who stepped across the aisle last night to cast a lonely vote in favour of the Democratic bill. His bi-partisan recognition that faction must give way to conscience, should serve as a guiding beacon for the Senate’s future considerations. Accusations are already flying that Cao is a Democrat in the closet; a mutineer in the ranks. Maybe, or perhaps he’s just a Republican who refuses to to dance the robot…

And finally, that today the UK remembers the contribution of human life, past and present, in protecting the foundational values of freedom and democracy, serves as a sobering bass note for anyone observing the rigmarole of the increasing politicization of the patient in the American debate.

 

Review: Marriage of Figaro

By
Robin Thompson
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‘No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible’, declared poet W. H. Auden. Therefore Beaumarchais’ eighteenth century play, ‘Le Mariage de Figaro’, set in Count Almaviva’s castle in Seville, is the perfect story for Mozart’s world famous opera.

Whilst both Beaumarchais’ play and Mozart’s opera became hugely popular, they were initially not so well received by people of authority (thanks partly to the appearance of the name of Figaro, a mere valet of the count, in the title of the work). French King Louis XVI described the play as ‘atrocious’ and banned its performance, and Joseph II of Austria insisted that Mozart remove several political references before the opera was performed.

Yet today, the work is one of the most popular operas, and its performance in Oxford’s renowned Sheldonian theatre is sure to be a hit.

The cast comprises of some of Oxford University’s finest singers both past and present- Christopher Borrett, playing Figaro, now sings with the Monteverdi choir, and Robyn Allegra Parton (Susanna), formerly choral scholar at Worcester College, is on the young artists’ programme at the Royal College of Music. The count, played by George Coltart, has stage presence which befits his position, and both his advances on Parton’s Susanna and her struggle to fight him off contain almost tangible emotion.

Director Max Hoehn strives to create a ‘period feel’ in the Sheldonian, with a raised stage enhanced by a painted backdrop. And he insists that whilst not wanting to sound ‘frilly’ and despite the serious moments in the plot (its references to droit de seigneur and feudal attitudes), it is important to put across the humour Mozart intended in the music. This is particularly on display in the performance of the count’s page, Cherubino, played by Claire Eadington- Cherubino’s boyish charm is particularly evident in Eadington’s rendition of the aria ‘Non so piu’.

The orchestra, too, is full of the university’s best musicians, selected from various ensembles. And whilst, at the time of writing, they perhaps lack the cohesion that a pre-formed orchestra would display, they offer an enthusiastic yet well balanced support to the fantastic cast.

Certainly not to be missed- an ambitious project by an exceptionally talented cast that will be enjoyed by experienced opera-goers and newcomers alike, nearing the quality of an opera house yet with the prices of student theatre. This production is an ideal introduction to the world of opera, sensible or not.

Performances on November 10th and 11th, Tickets available online at

http://www.figaroinoxford.co.uk

 

Review: A Serious Man

By
Josh Rosaler
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For some strange reason, Hollywood movies often seem to come in pairs: Volcano and Dante’s Peak in 1997, Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998, The Truman Show and Ed TV in 1998, to name a few. Now, in 2009, the Coen Brothers’ most recent project, A Serious Man, seems to be competing with Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY for preeminence in the more highbrow category of existential horror.

The films are strangely similar given that they were made and written independently of each other. Both are stories about timid and cerebral men who struggle helplessly as their lives unravel in the most excruciatingly depressing ways. It feels as though either story might have begun with the protagonist awaking in his bed to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect, as each film seems dedicated to little more than the goal of watching its subject squirm beneath capricious and overpowering forces in the world around him.

The protagonist (‘victim’ is perhaps a better description) of Kaufman’s script is Caden Cotard, a local theatre director in Schenectady, NY, who has little passion left for his work or for life and whose wife – who coyly admits that she sometimes fantasises about Caden being dead – absconds to Berlin with his daughter to become an enormously successful artist. Caden soon learns that he has been awarded a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, but his efforts to produce a play that will stand as his lasting mark cause him to become disconnected from the world outside his mind, and his life takes a bleak turn for the surreal.

In A Serious Man, The Coen Brothers choose to sacrifice Larry Gopnick, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university who’s about to come up for tenure and who is happy with the way his life is going. Until, that is, Larry’s wife Judith announces that she plans to leave him for Sy Abelman, his unctuous and more successful colleague in the physics department. Passive like Caden, Larry lets Sy and Judith coax him into moving out of his own house and into the local motel, accepting their rationale that it would be better for the sake of Larry’s children. But Larry’s situation continues to deteriorate as he discovers that his children have been stealing money from his wallet, that his brother is slowly going insane, and that the university’s tenure committee is receiving anonymous letters attacking his character. Larry desperately seeks the advice of the spiritual leaders of his Jewish community, who offer him only indifference, clichés and irrelevant digressions.

It’s hard to shake the feeling with either film that there’s something mean-spirited about the manner in which the filmmakers slowly and painfully dismember characters whose only sin is meekness. Watching either film, I found myself with the uncomfortable choice of having to disdain the characters for shortcomings that I regard as excusable, or subject myself along with them to the film’s assault through my identification with them. Like two of the Coen brothers’ previous works, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man left me feeling duped with the frustrating sense that attempting to understand the film would somehow be construed by the filmmakers as indulging the same kinds of illusions of meaning that contribute to the characters’ downfalls.

I was left with the question: Why make a movie like this? Neither one, it seems, is intended primarily as satire or social commentary, as both films seem to be above passing any sort of judgment on the world that victimises their characters. Perhaps even the Coen brothers themselves would ask of us: Why see a movie like this? A former physics major myself who one day hopes to enter academia, I can’t help but wonder if I should be afraid of ending up like Larry. And then I return to the words of a wise man who once said, ‘No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

A Serious Man is released on November 20th.

Review: Steampunk

By
Will Small
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The Steampunk exhibition at the History of Science Museum has been running for a few weeks now, and we’ve seen glowing reviews emerge left and right. It’s true, the exhibition’s combination of shiny brass-and-neon sculptures with their fascinating real-world inspirations is really very interesting. It could just be quite a bit better.

Don’t get me wrong – every single one of you people reading this article should go see this exhibition as soon as possible. It’s free and it’s short, so it won’t be a drain on either your wallet or your timetable. What it does, it does very well. It just doesn’t do enough, giving only a brief albeit fascinating glimpse into the steampunk aesthetic movement.

Let’s start with the name ‘Steampunk’. It’s an odd word, and whenever I enthuse about it to my uninitiated friends, I get odd looks. The ‘Steam’ part is easy enough to explain. The distinctive steampunk aesthetic is one of modern devices animated by antique technological systems. Gears, clockwork and the steam engine replace electric motors and fibre optics. Brass and cast iron replace plastic and aluminium. Think Jules Verne and HG Wells, without the dense prose and dubious characterisation. This part is what the exhibition does very well. Art Donovan’s ‘Electro-Futurist’ clockwork-encased neon lamps are worth the trip on their own. Kris Kuksi’s terrifying cathedral-tank (yes, really) appealed tremendously to my inner military geek. I was also deeply and pleasantly unsettled by Molly Friedrich’s ‘Complete Mechanical Womb’, which, all things considered, has a remarkably self-explanatory name. It’s a womb including baby.

I digress. The ‘steam’ part of the steampunk exhibition is very well done.  What about the ‘punk’? Time for a history lesson perhaps.‘Steampunk’ isn’t just an aesthetic movement, it’s a literary genre. There’s a lot of debate about how far back the genre goes, and whether Jules Vernes et al are part of the genre or just inspirations, but steampunk literature in its modern form didn’t become popular until the publication of The Difference Engine in 1990 – a novel set in a dystopian London, part of an alternative history where Charles Babbage actually finished his giant steam-powered calculator and ushered in a clockwork digital age. The Difference Engine was written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.  William Gibson, as the speculative fiction fans among you probably know, wrote another famous novel – Neuromancer.  Neuromancer kicked off the ‘cyberpunk’ genre, where amazing futuristic technology becomes a tool in the hands of oppressive, faceless corporations. The link isn’t hard to spot.  The ‘punk’ in cyberpunk comes from the rebellion and resistance of the protagonists, who refuse to submit to de-humanisation. The ‘punk’ in early steampunk was well, basically the same idea. Jules Verne, meet Charles Dickens.

Times change. Steampunk fiction has moved beyond its dark beginnings, and your heaving platter of clockwork goodness doesn’t have to come with a side order of grinding oppression anymore. It’s entirely possible to marvel at the cool brasswork without worrying about the destruction of individuality in the face of industrialisation. It would just be nice if the Steampunk exhibition mentioned any of this at all.  In the second room, where they keep the real-world inspirations, they actually have a big chunk of the actual Difference Engine itself – and no mention at all of the novel that makes it relevant to the exhibition. We steampunk fans may not have to be angsty haters of the establishment anymore, but I would have appreciated a little more context. So go and see the Steampunk Exhibition. Revel in the retro, but don’t forget – steampunk can go so much deeper than this.

Steampunk is at the Oxford Museum of Science until 21st February. Admission is free.

Review: And Another Thing…

By
Sam Pilgrim
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Douglas Adams’ dissatisfaction with his last published novel was well known. Mostly Harmless, the fifth and final part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ‘trilogy’ was, he said, ‘very bleak’, and he often spoke of his plans to amend the story with a further book. Alas, in 2001, Adams suffered a heart attack and died, leaving behind a grieving widow and millions of frustrated fans.

Eight years later, however, and those fans have been provided the opportunity to re-enter the Hitchhiker universe, in the form of And Another Thing… by children’s author Eoin Colfer. Well-known for his Artemis Fowl series – featuring a young criminal mastermind who battles and then befriends the high-tech

fairy society living beneath our feet – Colfer is no stranger to strangeness. An expert in combining the genres of fantasy, comedy and science fiction, he appears to be perfectly qualified to take the Hitchhiker baton and run with it.

Unfortunately, while Adams was content to stroll leisurely along with the story, Colfer tries to go too quickly, fumbles the changeover, drops the baton, and ends up tripping over his own shoelaces. Thanks to this increased pace, Colfer doesn’t really leave himself with much time to build up anything closely resembling a plot. This is despite And Another Thing… being more than twice the length of the first Hitchhiker novel.

He opts for an inexplicably odd tale featuring Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, as well as Thor, the Norse god of Thunder. A lot of time is also devoted to the Vogons – grotesque, foul-tempered aliens who continuously try to wipe the last remaining humans from the sky – as well as Ameglian Major cows, who literally ask to be cooked and eaten. None of these ever played more than passing roles in Adams’s books, yet for some reason Colfer decides to formulate a story around them. But there is only so much an author can get out of a suicidal bovine species, resulting in a lot of repetition and very little substance.

To try to hide this from the reader, he scatters wacky words and names with reckless abandon: some of them nod to the original series, but many of them are his own invention. But where Adams would seamlessly weave a few lines of relevant (or totally irrelevant) detail about the exotic species and characters into the story, Colfer either leaves them unexplained and undeveloped, or drops into our lap the occasional ‘guide note’, a stodgy block of facts that brings everything to a standstill.

And herein lies the problem. Colfer claims his intention was never to imitate Adams’s style, but it still feels like a fake Rolex, or a poor quality translation off Babel Fish (the website, not the actual creature from the Hitchhiker universe). There’s something cheap and tacky, and to be honest, slightly pitiful about the whole thing. The first five novels were characterised by Adams’s ability to mix flashes of comic genius with bizarre, baffling, colourful nonsense. Unfortunately, Colfer completely forgets to add the first ingredient and instead fills the book with a murky, gelatinous porridge of charmless oddities.

It truly is a shame – there was life left in the Hitchhiker series. Now, I fear, it has been killed off for good.

 

 

Does he look happy?

By
Jack Hextall
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The interview gets off to a bad start. I want to talk to Stewart Lee about his ultra-dry delivery and the layered ironic nature of his stand-up, but for some reason I tell him that a friend of mine didn’t find his new show very funny. ‘Why not?’ he asks. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say. In fact it’s strange that you’re even bringing it up’. But he warms up when I ask him if he thinks there’s a limit to the awkward straight faced non-comedy that he increasingly uses.

‘No. I’m not required to deliver a punch-line every thirty seconds so there are other things I can do. For example if you were trying to write a piece of music and you decided not to use rhythms or tunes or anything with a harmonic relationship with anything else, as well as being limiting, it actually opens it up; you can do absolutely anything. You could argue that people like Jimmy Carr who do an hour of one-liners are much more limited than me. I’m allowed to do anything, so I don’t see there being an end point to it.’

And what about alienating the audience? ‘Ideally I would get to the point where no one liked it. You want to shake people off as much as possible. There might be a commercial end point to it, but not a creative one. For most of the musicians or poets that I like, there probably aren’t more than five thousand people who like them worldwide, but if you take ten pounds a year off all those people then that’s a living.’

I’m surprised that Stewart Lee is bothering to answer my questions; he normally interviews himself. Scathingly. Preceding the arrival of his recent TV show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, he decided to do the complete opposite of favourable promotion. ‘Time Out and The Guardian wanted me to write about myself’, he explains, ‘So I asked if I could just slag myself off in the guise of a journalist. I thought it’d be funny to create a wave of negative advance publicity crit. I just didn’t want to sell myself, it’s a bit embarrassing’.

The resulting pieces are hilarious in their own right. Lee, writing as critic Tim Out for Time Out, calls himself ‘shambling and pie-eyed’ while as Leeanne Stewart in The Guardian he writes that he is ‘a limpet-like figure, a kind of laughing gastropod, attached undetected to the barnacled hull of a whole host of more successful comedians’ careers’.

This attitude is consistent to Lee’s style­-he has never had mainstream commercial success and he doesn’t appear to want it very much. ‘In the modern world you’re supposed to be a personality and let people know all about you so they’ll watch your work but I’d rather no-one was interested in that’. As such he isn’t exactly great material on talk shows. He was encouraged to go on 8 Out of 10 Cats and got approached afterwards by a man at a gig in Ireland, who said, ‘You were so bad on that program I tried to sell the tickets I’d bought to see you, but no-one would buy them. I tried to give them away but no-one would have them, so I came anyway.’

Lee claims he doesn’t have the speed or shared common direction needed to be a success on one of those shows. He admits this is a skill that he’s impressed by, but doesn’t have much love for the young mainstream comics of today.

‘There’s a complacency you seem to get from a lot at the moment. When I got into comedy 25 years ago it was an alternative to the mainstream, whereas now that has become the mainstream. Rock music and alternative comedy ought to be things that your parents or people my age don’t like, and the reason I don’t like comedy or music by most young people isn’t that it offends my sensibilities, it’s because it’s normally really conservative and predictable, and shit.’ After this he cackles uncontrollably, his only laugh of the interview.
He seems to have a lot of contempt for television, probably due to fact that his latest series was offered to him, then rejected outright a year later, then offered back to him shortly after that for no reason.

‘It tells you that there’s an insane randomness to being on TV or not. It’s like weather systems or water flowing over stones; it doesn’t mean anything.’
It helps explain why he’s been so keen to try so many other art forms. In 2001 he both finished a novel, the critically acclaimed The Perfect Fool, and performed Pea Green Boat, a show about Edward Lear’s The Owl and The Pussycat and his own broken toilet. Then in 2005 came Jerry Springer: The Opera, the critically acclaimed West End show which he wrote with Richard Thomas. The show was on the receiving end of a damning campaign from Christian Voice, a far-right set of extremists who managed to get 60,000 people to complain.

‘They’re a group who used Jerry Springer to get into the mainstream media and I don’t think many of the people they got to complain would have if they’d known what they stood for. They’re against Islam across the board, homosexuality, giving a survival cancer vaccine to teenagers, the legal stature of rape within marriage, weird things. You had to cross picket lines to go to work, and when you finally get to the dressing room there are letters from people saying ‘go to hell’, it’s a bit exhausting. ‘

Lee’s first gig was as a student at the Oxford Union in 1988, and he’s returning to Oxford with a new show on the 26th November. What can we expect? ‘There are three routines. One’s about coffee shops, one’s about Top Gear, and the other one’s about the advertising of cider. It’s just three jokes really.’
If that’s not enticing enough, he’s keen to say that it’s being put on independently at the Regal and that it will be cheaper than all his other gigs.

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