The college rowing season got off to a belated start due to the cancellation of the Christ Church regatta, but needed no time to warm up. Oriel’s rule of torpids was guillotined by two superior crews. Especially in the mens torpids Oriels dominance has been staggering, having been head of the river for 34 of the last 36 years (and in one of the years they weren’t head they were penalty bumped 4 places). Their humanity was proved not only by Magdalen who bumped them early on, but also by Pembroke who rose from 4th to 2nd position and will consider themselves serious challengers come Trinity term to Magdalen’s head of the river title. Christ Church also looked strong, moving from 10th to 4th in mens division 1 during the week whereas Worcester had the most torid torpids starting out 5th in division 1 and ending up 3rd in division 2. In the womens racing Oriel falied to regain their headship being bumped on friday by a St Catz crew who had already bumped Queen’s. The performance of the Christ Church women complimented that of their men, moving from 6th to 3rd. New college were the other big climbers, from head of division 2 to 9th in division 1. These climbers were helped by the freefall of the post-grad Osler/Green partnership who shipped 7 places from 4th to 11th.by Jeremy Kelly

Oxford stormed to their fifth consecutive Varsity victory, with Oxford A taking the win by over a lap from Cambridge A at the sunny Rye House Raceway, London. With Harvey having put the kart on pole, Noble started the race and pulled away from the rest of the field, building up a comfortable lead over the Tabs. After the driver change, Harvey was left with the simple task of bringing the kart home. Dix and Yarwood chased hard for Cambridge, but could not match Noble’s initial pace, falling to a distant second. The final spot on the podium was taken by Oxford’s Gaskell and Senior, whose superb race saw them earn half-blues. Oxford’s Duhig and Bratt were engaged in an extremely close battle until contact between them, and the subsequent black flag for Duhig saw the end of their challenge for honors. By the time Tan and Seretis took to the wheel, there was little that could be salvaged. Despite this, Oxford veteran Davis and his teammate Wootten enjoyed a solid race, taking an excellent fifth place. Meanwhile, Cherwell reporter Kenber enjoyed his first taste of 2-stroke kart racing, gaining a respectable 15th place. He said ‘It was good fun but quite tricky. I span out eight times during the race, and got shunted a lot.’ The teams’ focus will now return to defending their overall position at the top of the national championship, which continues in the coming weeks.by Nikos Seretis

A massive plastic bag sculpture was laid out in Christ Church’s Peckwater Quad this weekend, as part of an ongoing campaign to raise environmental awareness.

The six foot letters, each made from around 60 bags, were the work of JCR Environment rep Ed Parker. “I reasoned that if you collected plastic bags from the cupboards of your friends, you’d have enough to build, er, a massive sculpture”, he said.

He aims to end the use of plastic bags by Christ Church students, by the end of his tenure. Parker stressed the scale of the environmental problem.

He said, “If every Oxford undergraduate said ‘yes’ to one plastic bag a day, that would be 4.5 million bags a year.”

The sculpture was well received by students, porters, and even tourists. Parker admits his initial plans were grander: “I wanted to carpet Tom Quad in plastic bags. Then I remembered how big it was.”

The college has wider plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050. In the short term, funding has been allocated to give every student a ‘bag for life.’

by Oscar Cox Jensen

Real Emotional Trash is a pithy summation of the music Stephen Malkmus has been making for the last sixteen years. As part of 90s legends Pavement, he wrote songs that acknowledged the noble truth that good pop is both infantile and profound. 2005’s Face the Truth saw him re-ignite some of the old attitude; this disc represents a musical reinvigoration, as he triumphantly manages to raise his musicianship without losing his dishevelled charm.The guitar here is simply excellent, each riff, lick, and solo apparently pathologically refined during the album’s tortuous recording process. The most obvious comparison is Television’s classic Marquee Moon, which, as the discerning listener will know, is no faint praise. Malkmus’ talent seems limitless: he can solo with laser control like Tom Verlaine, chug like Pete Townshend, he even rocks it like Jimmy Page on opener ‘Dragonfly Pie’. Thankfully, he hasn’t forsaken either his wackiness (‘Hopscotch Willie’- the surreal story of a framed mobster), or his wry melancholy; “Sometimes it feels like the world’s filled with feathers/ Table-bottom gum just holding it together…”, which stops the album descending into a festival of fret-onanism. The Jicks are a fantastic band, turning their talents to blues-rock, folk-ballad, and goofy Velvet Underground style pop, but all with an individual flourish. The title track is the group’s shot at Marquee Moon/’Paranoid Android’ glory, and while it doesn’t quite make it, its 10 minutes still glide like the proverbial marshmallow boat on the chocolate river.  You’d like to think that this album would get massive press and sell a million, but sadly Malkmus is no longer 21 and the plaudits will go to the supple youngsters that the industry slathers for. Never mind, whether you’re already a fan or not, this should be an essential purchase for fans of guitar rock.Four stars.By Richard Woodall

In the autumn of 1797 a person from Porlock knocked on the door of a remote farm on Exmoor. He received no answer. He knocked again. Finally this nameless visitor’s efforts were rewarded, and a figure appeared at the door, tousle-haired, I imagine, his fingers stained with ink, a look of pained desperation on his face. Their conversation is not recorded. The event may not even have happened. But the figure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, blamed the mysterious visitor for interrupting him in a moment of opium-fuelled inspiration, and by interrupting him, forever ensuring that the lyrical Kubla Khan would not be finished.Coleridge himself was one of the creators of the Romantic movement, and, in many ways, the origin of the image of the poet, fragile, brilliant, his genius half a step away from madness. The year before the event described above Coleridge had begun to take Laudanum to relieve the pain he constantly suffered from his various aliments, his toothache, his neuralgia. As he began to rely more and more on the drug, he increasingly began to attribute the flashes of poetic inspiration to his highs, and conversely, the periods of writers’ block to his lows. His dependence increased; in an age where no stigma was attached to opium use, and addiction scarcely recognized, the poet descended in a drug-induced haze which was to plague him for the rest of his life. Coleridge was not the first great artist to live on the edge, nor to be haunted in his life by the spectres of his own personality. Virgil was said to be so terrified of public adulation and attention that he would dive down alleyways to avoid anyone he knew on the street. Raphael’s serial love-affairs culminated in his death from, according to his biographer, a night of too strenuous passion. He was thirtyseven and had caused such shock waves in the art world as no-one else save Michaelangelo would for centuries. Bembo, a Cardinal and poet, wrote on his tomb, ‘Here is famous Raphael; while he was alive nature feared to be outdone, but when he was dying, she feared she herself would die.’The cult following that grew up around such figures – in the Renaissance around Raphael, and, later, Caravaggio, in England in the late eighteenth century around Coleridge and Keats (especially after his death), and in the nineteenth century around Baudelaire – gives the lie to our smug belief that celebrity adulation is a modern phenomenon. This image we have, and maintain, of the artist as a troubled genius, however, is very much a product of the romantic period, with poets such as Byron and Shelley devoting much time to surrounding themselves with an aura of mystique and danger. Even today we are ready to forgive a great artist much. If Kingsley Amis hadn’t written ‘Lucky Jim’ and ‘The Old Devils’ he would simply have been an unremarkable old soak and misogynist, and his friend Philip Larkin, without his poetic output, a rather creepy old librarian. As soon as they become artists though, they achieve a celebrity standing, and traits which would be barely tolerable in a friend, become, in the public mindset, and even in the mind of the individual artists, necessary for their creative power.This martyrdom of the troubled soul has long since moved beyond the exclusive realm of poets and painters. Just as eighteenth century opera-lovers followed the affairs and arguments of their favourite divas in the gossip rags, so we find more ink spilled about pop-stars’ tantrums and conquests than about their work. As celebrity becomes an end in itself, and fame is the ultimate height to which everyone, regardless of talent, can aspire, we are in danger of losing sight of exactly why we excuse Amis his drunken rants; we are in danger of reading his biographies, and not his novels.The fame can be beneficial. A retrospective of Derek Jarman’s films is currently being held in London for example. The first open- ly HIV-positive personality, who finally succumbed to AIDS in 1994, produced a massive amount of independent films, effectively creating art-house cinema. ‘Sebastian’ (1976) was the first gay film which reveled in its homosexuality, which actually acknowledged the freedom and fun of being gay. It’s in Latin. And it’s terrible. But, as E. M. Forster said in his posthumous forward to ‘Maurice’, before the Seventies the idea of a gay story with a happy ending was inconceivable. While Forster brought forward the agenda in his powerfully moving novel, Jarman more explicitly brought homosexuality into the public eye through his films and his lifestyle. While ‘Maurice’ is much better than ‘Sebastian’, Jarman’s life captured the imagination of the public more than the dusty, Cambridge intellectualism of Forster.The manipulation of celebrity then can be crucial, as long as the artist remembers that his fame is intimately wrapped up in his art. We respect the posturings of novelists because we love their books, and because we recognize their insight in the human condition, not because we feel that their opinion is worthy thanks only to their media status. Media attention is a great leveler. Centuries ago highwaymen could be more famous than kings; now child-killers can take up more newspaper headlines than prime ministers. When Anne Enright criticized the McCanns in a column nobody paid any attention. A week later she won the Booker Prize, yet the spotlight was shone not on her novel, but on her opinion of two Derbyshire parents. It is not an especially insightful comment, but it is one ignored again and again by the fame hungry, that the media circus, like Fortune’s wheel, rises and falls, entirely beyond the control of the subject of the glare.And this glare distracts us also from the recognition that, despite Amy Winehouse, despite Baudelaire, despite Kirk Cobain, genius is not dependent on madness. Some of the greatest figures in art have been the most stable, the most boring. Consider what little is known of Shakespeare’s life, consider just how dull Gregory Peck was when not in front of the camera. Consider how little you would actually enjoy a conversation with J. M. Coetzee, no matter how much you hero-worship him. It is a harsh reality to except that geniuses, people you idolize, can be boring, dull rude. I love Coetzee’s novels, yet given an opportunity to meet the man I would be very wary. Reality blows.What the existence of incredibly talented yet personally uninteresting people teaches us, more than anything, is that the froth, the drugs, the sex, the scandal, is not innately connected with the genius. Looking at trends in modern music, we find so many of the old heavyweights returning to the fray, keen to cash in on their name and fame. Yet, Led Zepplin, The Rolling Stones and The Who, all still touring, or at least still playing, are not, as was once the case, in the headlines because of their lifestyles. As Bob Dylan’s current renaissance illustrates, really great performers and artists don’t need the drugs, don’t need the booze, don’t even need God to create fantastic music. They have been accused recently of becoming boring, and of selling out. But in reality their keenness to conform to the image-driven stereotype of rock and roll youth was as much as a sell-out; now, content in their old age and relaxed lifestyles, musicians like Cohen and Dylan are showing the younger generation how it’s done. With substance over style.That is not to dismiss the importance of the style. In music especially style and performance are key, whether the singer or band in question is breaking down musical barriers or constructing very real walls on stage. Yet without the talent the veneer can’t hold itself up; it crumbles under its own weight. That seems to be the problem with many who are venerated as famous. Without the inner reserves of actual ability, the media turns elsewhere in search of hype. Their fame reveals itself to be as vapid as their personalities.As for real artists, it is a truism that those who see farther, and do greater things, do often live on the edge. It must be acknowledged though that they are a select few, that not every poet needs to be high, not every headlining band needs its front-man to kill himself, not every artist must bed-hop constantly. These people appear to be living the dream. They are living fast, living hard, living dangerously, and producing works of genius. But in the long run, when the printing presses of ‘Heat’ have been melted down, their work will have to stand up to inspection on its own merit. The madness will be forgotten. The genius will remain.
By Tim Sherwin

If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, is it a duck? Yes. So if there is something that looks like a barrier to applying to Oxford, and seems to act like a barrier to applying to Oxford, is it a barrier? Not always. The £10 application fee for undergraduate admissions quacks because it is a barrier. But we should be wary of throwing out babies out with the bath water. Or, to hideously combine these already out of control metaphors, rubber ducks with the bath water. There are some extra processes built in to applying to Oxford, like aptitude tests and interviews, that look like a barrier to applying, seem to act like a barrier to applying, but aren’t a barrier to applying. So why don’t they quack?The short answer is that some perceived barriers benefit applicants: they allow Oxford to gain a much greater understanding of a student’s potential, so the University can confidently choose the very best from the brightest. Working out who is really, really good, rather than just really good, when everyone who applies has perfect grades and a treasure chest of extra curricular achievements, is a challenge to say the least. Few universities benefit from this challenge. Oxford needs different admission processes to meet this challenge.By barriers, in the context of admissions, I mean things that block the progress of students of greatest potential, whatever their background. For Oxford to admit the best from the brightest, it must invest in extra stages to get rounded pictures of applicants. After all, academic potential cannot be accurately represented by a series of past achievements printed on a piece of paper. Therefore the University invests more time and energy than other higher education bodies rigorously interviewing applicants. The interviews allow tutors to stretch potential students’ thinking, to analyse their motivations, and to assess whether they will respond successfully to tutorial teaching. Candidates will not receive adequate care and attention from tutors if there are ten people being interviewed per place. To ensure tutors can conduct meaningful interviews, aptitude tests are used in some subjects to help short-list candidates to approximately three per place during interviews. This also prevents students with no chance of getting an offer wasting time and money coming to Oxford. This guarantees that the University admits the very best from its talented pool of applicants.Charging £10 to apply to Oxford quacks, waddles and swims like a duck, and is one that should be shot. The fee is a barrier that discourages students from applying to Oxford, because they see the application as a costly gamble. By charging students to apply, this university encourages a false assumption that life here is more expensive than everywhere else. Considering the relatively small sums it raises, compared to the millions the University invests every year into its access work and bursaries, there is no reason why the University should undermine its good work on outreach by demanding that prospective applicants buy the opportunity to be considered by Oxford.It is inevitable that this fee will go – Oxford is the last remaining University to charge for this – but its demise is also desirable. I believe applications will increase as more talented students apply speculatively; after all, it won’t cost them anything to do so. This will help our work widening access and making sure Oxford University admits the best students, whatever their school, and whatever their background.
James Lamming is the Vice President of OUSU.

Enter the elephant, a towering colossus, gigantic in strength, lording over the beasts of the forest. Enter his opponent: the bee, a piddling nonentity. The expression ‘squashed like a bug’ was devised for such moments. Yet Lucy King, a DPhil student from Oxford University, has shown that in the combat between elephant and bee, it is the latter which will claim the laurels. The bee is our biblical David. His insectile slingshot? His ‘buzz’.Oxford researchers made this groundbreaking discovery after installing hidden loudspeakers in trees where elephants regularly find shade. They played either buzzing sounds recorded at beehives or a control sound of white noise. While the white noise affected only under a third of elephants, within just eighty seconds of implementing the buzzing noises as much as eighty four percent of the elephant families had fled, many at a run. How do we explain the elephant’s terrifying fear of bees? Although elephants cannot be stung through their thick hides, the water around their eyes is vulnerable to stings, as is the sensitive inside of their trunks. The age old aphorism raises its trunk again: the elephant never forgets, so once stung, he will never risk battle with the bee again. But why are researchers wasting their time driving off elephants with imitation bees, if not for the comedy value? How can we benefit through this unveiling of the elephant’s Achilles Heel? Although, in Africa, elephants are a major asset, they also regularly embark on crop raids on local farms, and the economic damage caused to small-scale farmers can be crippling. Meanwhile, farmers, often resort to the shooting, spearing or poisoning of elephants. There is thus a real urgency in finding a practical solution. It is here that Lucy King, Oxford and the bees step in. Bees may just provide the perfect low cost deterrent method and a successful step towards achieving peaceful human-elephant relations. Thank science for that.
by Katie Duval