Trinity Term: a summery haze of afternoons spent languidly out on the lawns, the gentle lapping of the river against the side of an ambling punt. Long days followed by long nights locked troglodytic in one’s room as finals and prelims creep ever-closer.
As the clichés shake off dust for yet another year, I ask readers: who among us would pass up the chance to be a stereotype for the evening? And what could be more quintessentially Oxford than turning up, pitching one’s rug, unclipping one’s woven picnic basket, quaffing its contents, and enjoying first-rate student drama, whilst the sun sets gently over the spires and towers of Oxford? Yes, I am talking about that stalwart of aestival festivities: the Trinity Lawn Show.  
The Merton and Magdalen shows are generally considered to be the biggest and for time immemorial, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare have been the playwrights of choice for our al fresco thespians. Tradition, you might have noticed, sticks fast in Oxford, and accordingly this year’s programme of lavishly eye-catching costumes and received-pronunciation includes Love’s Labour’s Lost at Merton, and All’s Well That Ends Well, performed against a backdrop of Edwardian splendour in the Magdalen College President’s Garden.
An adaptation of Waugh’s  embodiment of Oxonian life, Brideshead Revisited, is also coming to Oxford. Astoundingly, this will be the first time our dreaming spires have seen a production of it, so dig out your favourite Aloysius lookalike, adorn yourself with a scarf tossed jauntily over one shoulder, and get ready to see the hallowed lawns and gargoyles of blissful Oxford transformed, before your very eyes, into the hallowed lawns and gargoyles of blissful Oxford!
Such is the mythology and protocol surrounding these unique productions that the lawn play is something budding actors and directors aspire to do. But for all the joviality and light heartedness that characterise these shows, serious work and thought underpins each line. It is all too easy to overlook the obvious difference in acoustics between theatre and garden, and losing words in amongst the hedgerows and the chaises longues is a real risk.
So expect actors who have thus far successfully restrained their inner Brian Blessed to erupt magnificently into glorious fountains of camp.
The highlight of each performance is undoubtedly the gala night on the last Saturday of the run. I will warn you all now though, tickets sell out incredibly quickly, primarily because the chance to drink champagne, nibble canapés and don black tie in an exclusive setting at a non-exclusive price is an offer few can refuse.
So keep your eyes open for news, as these romantic and rosy-coloured summer nights spent chuckling at fellow students who strut around in period costume are the cherry atop a sumptuous Oxford cake of which everybody will want a bite.

For those keen to start watching immediately, Noughth week offers a ‘powerful evocation of the British sex trade’ in the form of Edinburgh Fringe sell-out A Thousand Pieces, at the North Wall Arts Centre.  For another light hearted start to Trinity, there’s Manon at the New Theatre, by the darkest of ballet choreographers, Kenneth MacMillan.
First week’s highlights will include an angry King Lear at the OFS. Then there’s His Dark Materials at the Playhouse.  A triumph when it appeared at the National in 2004, we are excited to see how it transfers to Oxford. Bear the Imps in mind too,  still at the Wheatsheaf on Mondays from First week.
For Second week there’s Betrayal by Harold Pinter at the BT: inspired by his affair with Joan Bakewell, it’s considered one of the Nobel Prize winner’s greats. In the late slot, a production of The Little Mermaid, based on the Anderson fairytale, plans to divide the audience with a fishing net! And at the OFS we have Fatboy, the tale, naturally, of Fatboy and his wife Fudgie and their rise to become king and queen of the world… Sunday also sees the Experimental Theatre Club’s annual Playday  – a place for people to put on plays in a ‘safe environment’. Sounds ominous.
Third week will be offering us All’s Well that Ends Well at the Magdalen Garden Show, one of the great delights of a sunny Trinity.  This years stars such as Roseanna Frascona and Hannah McGrath will light up Shakespeare’s blackest of comedies. Then there’s Collaborations at the Playhouse – four contemporary dances, based on John Donne’s ‘no man is an island’. The Oxford Revue also infiltrates the Playhouse on the Monday of this week.
At the Keble O’ Reilly Much Ado About Nothing is being shown in a ‘pretty madcap’ way, going from cafe, to street, to quad.  One insider told the Cherwell that they plan to ‘parade around Keble gardens and juggle whilst improvising Shakespeare with rubber ducks’.  Right.
This week has clearly been deemed crazy week, for Twelfth Night at the OFS will include performers breaking into slow motion and transfixed in dust, made, we’re told, out of light.  And the BT has The Love of the Nightingale with an all female cast playing around with stuff from Greek myth and elsewhere.
Fourth week: Even the directors call The Pitchfork Disney (BT) a warped play. And from the description it sounds it: ‘twenty- eight year old twins locked up in their home eating chocolate and sedatives’. But at the Keble O’Reilly this week we will be considering profound questions in This is India, which looks at cultural collisions as British Sara settles into a family in India.
Fifth week has A Real Doll at the BT. This is the sex doll, Alicia, who becomes the companion of Jeffry until an electric shock brings her to life. He discovers that love cannot be ordered from the internet. Then there’s the great Renaissance play The Changeling at the OFS, showing Beatrice as she succumbs to the assassin De Flores. For all you Disney aficionados, The New Theatre has Beauty and the Beast this week.
Having languished with English for five whole weeks, Sixth week is a chance to change into French by watching Phèdre at the BT.  The Cherwell’s going to tell you all about watching plays in foreign languages soon – so watch this space! This week also has Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at the Keble O’Reilly – ‘Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!’
 The OFS has Tick Tick Boom, a musical presenting a composer falling into oblivion, while Oriel Arts Week heralds a production of The Spanish Tragedy, a bloody and darkly comic play by Thomas Kyd. In Seventh week the BT offers Caroline Bird’s Uncivil Partnership about a female string quartet playing at an unconventional wedding. But it is the Keble O’Reilly which finally offers us a play by Trinity Term’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere’s Fan.
 Last week we burnt books with Doctor Faustus, this week we shall drown them with The Tempest by acclaimed director Asia Osborne.
Krishna  Omkar returns to Merton‘s garden show for Eighth week with Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Tim Hoare and Matt Ryan will certainly offer us something splendid this week with Trojan Women. The final week of term is not likely to slide away quietly amid our exhaustion.

Californian rapper Andrew Nielsen—alias MC Lars—is the architect of post-punk laptop rap. Lars was a visiting student at Corpus Christi between years at Stanford University and has returned to the town many times whilst touring.
His new album, This Gigantic Robot Kills, sees MC Lars maintaining his unique style of ‘nerdcore’ whilst also diversifying from his usual comedic rap.
Although he has moved from recording beats in his bedroom to laying them down in professional studios, his style of commenting on pop culture and life events in a knowing and amusing way has not changed.
Dan Gallacher caught up with him at his gig at Oxfords O2 Academy.

To readers who don’t know MC Lars, how would you describe your music?

It’s post-punk in that it takes the ideologies of bands like post-first generation punk bands who used different sounding music with DIY messages. It’s laptop rap because it’s hip-hop I do on my computer. I tell people it’s the Beastie Boys with a little Chemical Brothers and some ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.

You started your own record label, Horris Records, how much of a challenge has this been?

This Gigantic Robot Kills came out of a partnership with Horris Records and Oglio Records, under the guise of Jaret from Bowling for Soup’s new label Crappy Records. It was a challenge putting the album together but these guys helped me with the final tweaks and mixes. I’m all about giving away music for free, but with their involvement we are going the brick and mortar retail route and are kicking butt on both fronts. Bowling for Soup took me on tour in 2005 and are working on a new CD, staying in the pop-punk game. They are very great guys.
 
You’ve played in Japan, Australia and the UK. Do you worry some of your lyrics, like ‘Hyphy’, or ‘crunk’, get lost in translation?

People always ask us ‘what does hyphy mean?’ Crunk is pretty universal I’ve found, but there’s always that cultural clash when you bring up subcultures to different people. The Internet has kept everyone pretty much informed though, so the cultural divide has shrunk in the past few years.
 
BBC Radio 1 are celebrating thirty years since The Sugarhill Gang released ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which they see as the first ever Hip Hop track.  Would you agree?

‘Rapper’s Delight’ was the first hit rap single, but the first rap song was ‘King Tim III (Personality Jock)’ by the Fatback Band, which came out a few months before ‘Rapper’s Delight’…but of course that Sugarhill song was the epic hit so Radio 1 is right to give it its proper respects.

Anyone who’s heard your music or seen some of the T-shirts you wear will know your weren’t a big fan of George Bush, how do you think Barack Obama’s doing after his first few months? Is Obama punk rock?
 
Obama is punk rock in that he’s a self made man. Bush was an example of old world politics and conservative ideologies. I guess we’ll have to see how Obama does, but I definitely voted for him and definitely believe in him.
 
You lived and studied in Oxford in 2003.  What was your favourite Oxford haunt?  Did you discover any hidden gems that the readers should check out?

My favorite places in Oxford to hang out were the Radcliffe Camera and the Cellar on Cornmarket Street. George and Danver was always awesome too!

A lyric in your new song ‘Hipster Girl’ states ‘Donnie Darko makes no sense’ yet my housemate tells everyone he understands it. Is he talking rubbish?
 
It’s a very complicated plot. If you’re willing to accept the fact that physics, logic and the linear progression of time can be changed however you want arbitrarily, then it makes sense. I just don’t like how Jake Gyllenhaal is so surly and dysfunctional.

And what’s next for MC Lars?

 I’ve got an Australian tour, a US tour, then I’m back to the UK, and then hopefully will be getting to work on the new album!

Alain de Botton is the closest Britain has to a celebrity intellectual; his learned Harrovian tones have become a regular fixture on prime time television and his books regularly top best-seller lists. Embracing popular media has earned de Botton a considerable readership, which is unsurprising given his preferred subjects’ broad appeal: his work, like his latest offering, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, tends to analyse aspects of everyday life.

However, de Botton’s ‘philosophy of the everyday’ has divided critical opinion, receiving glowing praise from some while suffering searing criticism from others.  But if critics dislike him, academics hate him. He explains: ‘Academics don’t like me at all… they told me that my book on Proust was the worst they’d ever read.’ But this doesn’t trouble de Botton. Although often classified as such, he rarely considers himself an academic: ‘I don’t see myself as a philosopher, my background is in the history of ideas.’

‘But why work?’ I asked. He explains that work provides us with a purpose and orders our lives, but other reasons stick in my mind: ‘I enjoy the interested, not disinterested, pursuit of knowledge… and I still have lingering questions over my own career. I had a curiosity that I might discover something about myself.’  

Despite his reluctance to accept the ‘intellectual’ label, his analysis is littered with references to academics: Freud, Rousseau and Weber to name a few. But it always remains accessible. For example, he explains what he believes we need for job satisfaction: ‘We want the job to feel meaningful… We [need to] have increased the pleasure or decreased the suffering of other individuals. But we don’t all need to be firemen or nurses; this can constitute reuniting someone with their luggage or sanding their banister.’

Sounds good to me, if a little obvious. I’d expect to be bored listening to a balding Cambridge graduate talking about United Biscuits, but I found myself engaged. Although he is talks about mundane subjects, often dressed up in pompous language, it’s near impossible to disagree with him. That being said, he does skirt over important issues with alarming casualness – financial security appeared in his analyses only as an afterthought.

Not only did de Botton’s explanation of his latest work have the ring of truth about it (kind of), it was often marvellously entertaining. ‘Offices are rather erotic places’ is one sentence I’m sure I won’t forget any time soon.

De Botton’s witty insights do make him an entertaining author, but for some, his playful, intelligent brand of self-help falls short this time round. He often sounds like he has never had a proper job, and hence his claims of personal career crises sometimes smack of insincerity. But, nevertheless, he also seemed capable of making sense of the rather more woolly areas surrounding work. Issues like meaning, satisfaction and the provision of order. So despite those reservations, I left content, thinking that he’d done a pretty good job of it.

In receiving the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and Saturday, has joined the ranks of Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Muriel Spark and Seamus Heaney.
McEwan describes his own style as ‘vaguely unprepossessing’, but you can sense he thinks more of it than that. Yet who could blame him? Here is a man who is frequently described as perhaps the greatest living writer of modern fiction. A little smugness is therefore at least permissible. McEwan exhibits no false modesty, nor claims it when he says that in the 1970s, his ‘intellectual maturation’ represented ‘an explosion in [his] mind’.
He is, however, at least thoughtful, and his status as a fiction giant whose literature revolves around the macabre sides of ‘psychological and social phenomena’ was bound to induce some form of pretension.
The upside of this is that he can spin a good-sounding yarn. The downside shows itself in his apparent characterisation of his fellow students at Sussex as ‘intellectually infantile’ compared to his ambitious dreams and cerebral pursuits — he dismisses his classmates with the casual remark that they were ‘filled with rather different ideas about how to spend their time.’
Starting out in North Africa, McEwan describes his first recollection of being fascinated by a book, the children’s novel ‘The Gauntlet’, in which a young hero slips on an old glove and is hurled back in time to the middle ages. His description of this odd experience as a catalyst for his love of fiction appears to stem more from a desire to create a neat and tidy chain of events than from a genuine desire to present the truth. But it chimes well with McEwan’s self-confessed obsession with the bizarre coincidences that appear to hold such potency in the lives of every ordinary and extraordinary man.
More likely his discovery at a precociously young age of Iris Murdoch, and his childhood upbringing which included considerable familiarity with a North African Library, kindled an imagination that has never left him.
All this was realised in his degrees, his BA in English Literature from Sussex and his MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Oxford boasts of its tutorial system of one tutor to only one or two students, but in his MA course, he was the sole student on a course with two tutors; a remarkably privileged education.
Otherwise, McEwan was quite reticent about influences on his writing and reading of his own work. He claimed that the filming of Atonement had absolutely no impact at all. When asked about the influence of Oxford (he lived in the North of Oxford for many years), he first denied any connection and then, when pressed, decided that it is at least, ‘a nice place to work’.
He didn’t seem to be able to identify any non-literary sources of influence on his work, or the creative processes of his mind. The only one that he did let on was when he mentioned that ‘happiness doesn’t sell books’; it is easy to forget that even literary giants have bank accounts that exert a very real influence on their writing style.
Meeting McEwan gave the impression that he puts a lot of himself into his work: a sense of confidence bordering on arrogance on the one hand, but also an obsession with, and a perceptive affinity for, psychological analysis. Self-important, thoughtful and even slightly cynical would go well to describe both the man and his writings, which he is set to expand shortly with a book about ‘a short, fat man who was possessed of a disposition that was utterly irresistible to women. At least, that’s what he thought, and thinking seemed to make it so’. Given his excitement for the project, I have no doubt it will constitute an important addition to his canon, and further justify McEwan’s selection for this prestigious accolade.