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Marika Hackman and queer sexuality in music

Lily Tidman
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Marika Hackman and queer sexuality in music

Bolshy, brazen and unapologetically sexual – in Oxford, the first group of people to spring to mind from this description is likely to be a post-crewdate rowing/rugby club tearing up the Bridge dancefloor. How about in music?

Discussions of the objectification and empowerment that coexist within women*’s expressions of sexuality in the music industry have proliferated in recent years, and platforms such as Cosmopolitan have increased popular awareness of sexual pleasure from a perspective not necessarily imbued with the male gaze. Although efforts are often made to make these discussions more inclusive, women*’s sexuality in mainstream music is still overwhelmingly filtered through a heteronormative lens. Increasingly, however, there are exceptions. Amongst many others, a standout is Marika Hackman’s third studio album, Any Human Friend.

Over the years, Hackman’s sound has metamorphosised – from ethereal folk on EPs Sugar Blind and That Iron Taste in 2013 to snarky, petulant grunge on 2017’s I’m Not Your Man. Her sound transforms again on 2019 album Any Human Friend, an indie-pop powerhouse which testifies to her determination to not to be contained or constrained. In the past, she has expressed frustration with her music being pigeonholed, but clearly does not shy away from calling a spade a spade herself. A brief glance at the track-list is enough to reveal one of the core themes of the album: sex. Specifically, queer sex.

Gritty, unapologetic and at times lyrically uncomfortable for the casual listener, Any Human Friend rides an emotional rollercoaster through the year after the end of a long-term relationship and the trysts, triumphs and trials that come with it. The album explores topics including detachment and commitment in sexual relationships (‘come undone’), frustration with feeling like someone’s experiment (‘conventional ride’), and masturbation (‘hand solo’). Aside from horny, there are songs for every term-time mood – from sardonic self-pity (‘send my love’) to watching your mates go off the rails on a night out (‘blow’) and desire to find genuine connection (‘any human friend’). Sound familiar?

Although the themes of the album feed into contemporary conversations on gender, equality and sexuality, this is accomplished in a way which is fundamentally personal and honest. Partly out of tongue-in-cheek intention, mostly as a side-effect of its subject matter, the record challenges stereotyping of women* as polite and accommodating and reclaims ideas often used to put them down. Merchandise for the album has included a t-shirt with fried eggs for boobs (catch me rocking this in the Rad Cam) and a pair of big ugly y-fronts with ‘Attention Whore’ stamped on the waistband (catch me rocking these if you’re lucky). Hackman is not afraid to bare her soul, and other parts too – the album cover, inspired by a photography series focusing on new mothers, features her in mock-maternity underwear and holding a piglet in lieu of a newborn. The photo is unedited and, in tune with the album, a refreshing expression of vulnerability, imperfection and all the blips and blemishes being human entails – take it or leave it. At its heart, that’s what Any Human Friend is about. In an interview with NME, Hackman says she wanted to create a space where people could see and embrace all the messy, unpleasant and confusing parts of themselves and not feel ashamed.

Sure, we’ve come a long way from the days when a young Mary Lambert was excited to hear Weezer’s Teenage Dirtbag on the radio, thinking it was a lesbian love song, but it’s still harder for queer people to find music which speaks to their everyday experience. Especially stuff which doesn’t feel gimmicky or superficial. Although increasing LGBTQ+ representation of all kinds in music should be welcomed, the emphasis on marketability and gaining “woke” points can leave many queer people feeling a little alienated by what is perceived as simply band-wagoning or pride-month-esque rainbow capitalism.

I was introduced to this album by one of my housemates when it was released in August; since over half us identified as LGBTQ+, its confessional refrains soon became part of the furniture. I remember a conversation about the lyrics of ‘all night’ with a different housemate, a queer person nearly a decade older than me. Almost bashful, she said she couldn’t remember ever hearing a song where a woman was so sexually explicit about other women. Hackman writes first and foremost from experience, rather than explicitly as activism, and perhaps it is precisely this – rather than straight artists’ support and queer cameos in music videos, however well-intentioned – which helps the LGBTQ+ community feel seen in popular music.

It may not have made it to the Brits or Grammys but, for me, this album deserves a special mention for its openness. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be something to remark on. However, in a society still dominated by heteronormativity, the simple act of honesty can have disproportionate consequences for those whose narratives are not always heard. Let’s hope Any Human Friend becomes one of many pieces of creative expression where openness on the part of all women* – including regarding sexuality – becomes unremarkable.

Oscars 2020 Roundup

Clementine Scott
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Oscars 2020 Roundup

It is difficult to argue that the winners of Academy Awards in a certain year still represent that year’s greatest achievements in cinema. Debates still rage about whether nominations are representative of the diversity of the film industry, both in terms of gender (it is a bleak truth that in 92 years only five women have ever received a Best Director nomination) and race (though the years following the inception of #OscarsSoWhite did show signs of progress, it is still too soon to know whether the hashtag will translate into lasting progress in diversifying the acting nominees, especially when only one 2020 nominee is a person of colour). Even with the steady diversification of the Academy’s voting body in the last few years, this step arguably does not tackle the deeper-set reasons for racial and gender bias in the film industry. Moreover, just last year, the forgettable Green Book managed to secure Best Picture, despite its racially sanitised fairytale narrative and the uncomfortable real-world controversies that surrounded it, and despite the presence in the nominations of auteur magnum opuses such as The Favourite and Roma and more acute political satires such as BlackkKlansman and Vice.  These are not an indication of the industry’s best storytelling talent.

However, the Oscars may not be accurate or particularly meaningful, but this does not necessarily mean they are not relevant as a lens through which to examine current developments in Hollywood. If the two most influential events to happen in Western cinema in the last decade have been the #MeToo movement and the unstoppable rise of streaming services, then this year’s nominations can be meaningfully analysed in the light of these events. Regarding #MeToo, a pessimist might argue that the nominations cast doubt on whether the movement has led to greater respect for women in the industry, when films such as Joker and The Irishman that explore the extremes of male emotion (often at the expense of women) lead the nominations pack ahead of those such as Little Women that unapologetically tell the stories of women and particularly their desire for professional recognition and respect. Furthermore, should Once Upon a Time in Hollywood earn Quentin Tarantino his first Best Picture or Best Director win, this could be viewed as redemptive, given that the film is Tarantino’s first independent of the Weinstein Company and following the revelation that the director ‘knew enough to do more than [he] did’ about Harvey Weinstein’s abuse. With the advance of streaming, it has similarly been asked whether such a fundamental change in the way we consume films is heralding a change in what constitutes an award-worthy film; Roma’s origins on Netflix were commonly cited as a reason for its Best Picture snub last year, and thus it will be interesting to see whether The Irishman or Marriage Story can succeed where it failed (especially considering that the directors of those films, Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach respectively, are white Americans, unlike Roma director Alfonso Cuarón). With these ideas in mind, the traditional category-by-category Oscars analysis is still worth writing, even if artistic merit is not always the main factor being considered.

BEST PICTURE

What’s striking upon first looking at the nominations for the night’s most prestigious award is just how male they all are. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and 1917 take place in the respectively very male-dominated worlds of 1960s Hollywood and the WWI trenches (additionally, the latter film features only one, very brief, female role), and Joker and The Irishman both deal intimately with male anger and violence (to the extent that the Oscars were lampooned on SNL for their capacity to nominate ‘white male rage’ films) – even Taika Waititi’s tonally jarring dark comedy Jojo Rabbit has as a central theme the toxic masculinity of the Hitler Youth and Nazi militarism and a young boy’s attempts to make sense of it, though it also does tackle the experiences of ordinary Germans under Nazism more generally as well. The notable exceptions to this rule are Little Women and Marriage Story, with its unflinching depiction of both its male and its female lead as deeply flawed over the course of their divorce, but the lack of a Best Director nod for either of these films probably prevents them from winning the top prize (although this did not keep Green Book away from Best Picture last year). With regard to who will receive the accolade, at the start of the season, the money initially lay with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; this is the ninth of the proposed ten films Tarantino will ever make, so the Academy’s desire to award him Best Picture before he retires may work in his favour, and moreover the film’s aesthetic homage to a bygone era of Hollywood seems designed to appeal to the Academy voting body. However, 1917, with its pathos and directorial splendour, also stands a chance, given its prestigious wins at the Producers Guild of America (PGA) and Directors Guild of America (DGA), both statistically strong indicators of Best Picture winners. Though these two films are probably the strongest contenders, it would nevertheless be an emphatic decision on the Academy’s part if Best Picture went to Parasite, the critically acclaimed (though not yet released in the UK) class satire and the first Korean film to gain a Best Picture nomination – a win for Parasite would not only indicate a more internationalist outlook from Academy voters, but would also redeem their failure to award last year’s only foreign-language Best Picture nominee, Roma.

BEST ACTOR

This category is surely Joaquin Phoenix’s to lose – critics were divided over the direction, story and social impact of Todd Haynes’ villain origin story Joker, but a uniting factor tended to be Phoenix’s unhinged, wildly oscillating central performance. Furthermore, voting for Phoenix would appeal to the Academy’s tendency to redeem themselves for failing to award the right person on earlier occasions (see Al Pacino losing for The Godfather Part II but later winning for Scent of a Woman); in this case, a win for Joker could be seen as making up for Phoenix’s performances in Gladiator and Walk the Line losing to much more forgettable performances. This being said, it would certainly be refreshing to see Antonio Banderas win and thus for the Academy to reward a subtitled performance in a foreign-language film (this has only ever happened on six occasions), while this reviewer is personally rooting for Adam Driver’s performance in Marriage Story, which ranges from excruciatingly awkward reunions with his estranged son, to the devastating release of pent-up fury at his wife, to an affecting eleventh-hour rendition of Being Alive from the musical Company.

BEST ACTRESS

Coverage of Cynthia Erivo’s Best Actress nomination have revolved around her status as the one person of colour nominated for an acting Oscar this year – while a shocking statistic when one considers the snubs to the likes of Lupita Nyong’o in Us and Constance Wu in Hustlers, this should not overshadow the fact that Erivo is a strong contender for the award, having stood out for a powerful performance as the abolitionist Harriet Tubman in a film that was otherwise criticised for being sentimental and formulaic. Also criminally underreported is a striking achievement of Erivo’s: should she win either this award or her other Oscar nomination (for Best Original Song), the Broadway actress will become the youngest person, and only the sixteenth ever, to win the prestigious EGOT award combination. In an ideal world, Erivo should have a strong chance, though doubt is cast upon the matter by Renée Zellweger’s nomination for her portrayal of Judy Garland, which should appeal to the Academy’s love affair both with a strong comeback story (Zellweger returned from a six year hiatus in 2016) and with portrayals of real-life showbiz figures (echoing Rami Malek’s win for portraying Freddie Mercury last year).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

The nominations for this category read like an ode to a dying breed: the big-name, usually male, movie star. Whoever wins on the night will have done so because they have appealed to a sense of nostalgia in the (still mainly white and male) Academy voting body, but Pacino and Pesci perhaps exemplify this more than the others; The Irishman is essentially a celebration and culmination of the decade-long body of work in the ‘gangster’ genre of those two actors, along with co-star Robert de Niro and director Martin Scorsese, and its use of de-aging technology on septuagenarian actors is surely the epitome of nostalgically reviving a bygone cinematic age. However, Pacino and Pesci do have the curse of being nominated in the same category for the same film, so this award may just go to Brad Pitt. His role as a stunt double in 1960s LA and real-world status as one of the last ‘true’ movie stars will appeal to the same wistfulness about a bygone era of macho Hollywood as that which stands Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in good stead for many of its other nominations.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

With her career currently going through a renaissance with acclaimed turns in films such as Little Women and the series Big Little Lies, Laura Dern seems to be in the ‘right place’ to win an Oscar, and seems worthy of it, with her turn as a family lawyer in Marriage Story executed with a balance of tenderness, obsequiousness and vitriol, and climaxing in an impassioned monologue on the double standards to which mothers and fathers are respectively held. Some of Dern’s competition were nominated for slightly more predictable performances, notably Johansson and Robbie, but Florence Pugh deserves special mention – having shown her versatility over the last decade in films ranging from Lady Macbeth to Midsommar, she has finished the decade with her first Oscar nomination, and there certainly could be worse surprises on the night than her beating Dern for her reimagined depiction of the typically shallow Amy March as creatively repressed and living in her elder sister’s shadow. 

BEST DIRECTOR

In the words of Natalie Portman at the 2018 Golden Globes, ‘here are the all-male nominees’. This category’s nominations are deservedly overshadowed in most of the press coverage by Greta Gerwig’s snub for Little Women, despite the directorial ingenuity shown in the film’s use of a non-linear timeline and the new feminist meanings extracted from Alcott’s classic. It serves as an indication that merely diversifying the voting body is not enough, and that instead a deep-set bias about the necessity of women telling stories about women needs to be overturned – it is no coincidence that the only ever female-directed Best Picture winner was a male-led Iraq War epic, surely as typically masculine as films get. Furthermore, many may argue that Lorene Scafaria, Marielle Heller and Melina Matsoukas, directors of Hustlers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Queen & Slim respectively, were snubbed both in this category and for Best Picture. With regard to which one of the male nominees will instead receive this award, Tarantino is again in the ‘last chance to win’ zone for his penultimate work, but in this reviewer’s mind, 1917 is the strongest film directorially, with its claustrophobic views of the trenches and intimate focus on its two leads, as well as its one-shot approach. There is also a possibility that Parasite’s fate will echo that of Roma from last year and win Best Director while losing Best Picture; while this would be a success for Korean cinema, it would indicate a concerning trend of Best Director being a ‘consolation prize’ for foreign-language cinema not deemed worthy of Best Picture. In any case, a man will win the Best Director Oscar in 2020, and the Academy will have proven that it has a long way to go in terms of being representative and respectful of women’s contributions to cinema.

South African victory should not make ‘Root’s England’ complacent

Amy Hearn
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South African victory should not make ‘Root’s England’ complacent

Joe Root and his England teammates lifted the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy on Monday afternoon, after some inspired bowling from Durham’s Mark Wood sealed a comfortable 3-1 series victory. They seemed, for once, a settled side; there were half-centuries for each of England’s top six across the series and four bowlers took ten or more wickets. With both Dom Sibley and Zak Crawley averaging over 30, top-order instability began to feel like a thing of the past. Ollie Pope was a joy to watch and Ben Stokes was, well, superhuman. ‘Root’s England’, Jonathan Agnew called them, afterwards. It was a well-deserved snippet of praise for a captain who has finally, three years into the job, started to take control of the side and make it feel like his own.

But with the sun setting over the Western Cape, one question remains unanswered: where next for this England side? Quite literally, Sri Lanka. The two-test series beginning in Galle on 19 March is their first trip to the subcontinent since Root’s men toured the same country in November 2018. England were 3-0 winners in that series, their first in Sri Lanka since 2012, but winning is by no means a certainty this time around. The series is worth the same amount of World Test Championship points (120) as the one England have just contested in South Africa. But with only two test matches to be played, each will have twice as much impact on England’s standings in the Championship table. There is so much more at stake for Root’s men this time around. Already 214 points behind table-topping India and only a third of the way into the competition, if they lose this series, it is unlikely they will reach the final scheduled to take place at Lord’s in June 2021. But this is not just about Sri Lanka; there’s a five-match series away to Kohli’s India on the horizon and so to lose this, their first of two critical encounters on the subcontinent, would be ominous indeed. The next two months are make-or-break for this England side.

Moving forward, their focus has to change. South Africa served Root’s men well; with the exception of the third test at St George’s Park, the wickets offered the bowlers bounce and good carry. They won the final test in Johannesburg with a five-man seam attack. The four-match series saw the resurgence of Mark Wood (12 wickets at 13.58) and continued reward for the dependable Stuart Broad (14 wickets at 19.42), while Sam ‘makes things happen’ Curran got the breakthrough for his skipper on more than one occasion. Root’s men did it all, for the most part, without their leading wicket taker Jimmy Anderson, who suffered a broken rib at Newlands, and the electrifying Jofra Archer, side-lined with a shoulder injury. All looks rosy in the seamers’ garden; England’s fast-bowling cartel is, you might say, in full bloom. The ECB has even been sowing seeds for the future; it was reported just this week that they have awarded the first Pace Bowling Development Contracts to Olly Stone (Warwickshire), Saqib Mahmood (Lancashire) and Craig Overton (Somerset).

This is all well and good. England is a ‘bowler’s paradise’ and there is no doubt that the home international summer will bring even more success for our crop of fast bowlers. Competition for places in the playing XI will be higher than ever and England’s attack will knock over the West Indies and Pakistan with ease. But the standard of opposition England will face on the subcontinent (India and Sri Lanka currently sit first and fifth in the World Test Championship table; Pakistan and the West Indies fourth and eighth) is far higher than that which they are due to face at home, in favourable conditions. And with the same number of Championship points up for grabs in every series, no matter its length, Root and his men simply can’t afford to rest on their fast-bowling laurels. After all, fast bowling won’t win you test matches in India and Sri Lanka.

With two of their remaining four series due to be played on the subcontinent, spin must be England’s focus from now on. It is the key to success in their World Test Championship campaign. The 3-1 series victory in South Africa proved that life will go on at the top of the order without Sir Alastair Cook and showed there’s ‘strength in depth’ in the fast-bowling department, but it didn’t solve the spin-bowling question. It is a question England have been trying to answer since Graeme Swann’s retirement in 2013. England’s first-choice option, Jack Leach, is known and loved among England fans for his heroic batting performances and glasses-cleaning antics, rather than his bowling. He has been a steady performer (34 wickets at 29.02 so far) but illness has kept him out of the side since the first test in New Zealand. In any case, England will need two or three spinners at the very least, if they are to win on the subcontinent. Leach alone will not be enough.

There are options aplenty; they could go back to Hampshire’s Mason Crane, who made his test debut in Australia, or there’s the young Lancashire leg spinner Matt Parkinson, selected in the touring party for South Africa. But, as was the case with Adil Rashid, Joe Root and the England management seem to have little confidence in either player. Crane hasn’t featured in an England squad since the Ashes defeat Down Under and Dom Bess, called up when illness swept through the England camp ahead of the first test at Centurion, leap-frogged Parkinson into the XI at Newlands. Bess went on to take 8 wickets at 25.75 in the series but is yet to really prove himself on the international stage. England would desperately love to have Moeen Ali back in the side, but there is a question-mark hanging over his future in test cricket, as he continues to take time out of the five-day game for personal reasons. He has also signed a deal with the Multan Sultans in the Pakistan Super League, which takes place during England’s two-test series in Sri Lanka. What that means is, right now, Moeen Ali isn’t an option. Joe Root and the England management must learn to trust the options they do have instead. But victory on the subcontinent is a tall order, and if Root is doubting his options, then I can’t say I blame him.

Tributes to Kobe Bryant: The player and the man

Paul Wang and Thomas Mckeown
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Tributes to Kobe Bryant: The player and the man

CW: Sexual Assault

A transcendent icon

81 points in a single game; the most in the modern era. 60 points in his farewell game at the age of 37. 5-time NBA champion. 2008 NBA Most Valuable Player.

These achievements are enough to disarm even the fiercest Kobe critic, but it is not the accolades that make him truly great. It is something much more intangible; it is something that can be felt every single time he steps onto the basketball court. It can be explained in two words: Mamba Mentality.

Lamar Odom, Kobe Bryant’s former teammate, alluded to Kobe’s invincibility in his Instagram tribute – “I just knew if he was in a helicopter crash he would have been the one to survive. Somehow he would have jumped out and landed on his feet” – pointing out how Kobe always, always found a way. It is not what he achieved that is so impressive; it is how he achieved it. Whereas other NBA superstars score 50+ because they want to, it felt like Kobe did it because he had to. His relentless desire to reach the pinnacle of his sport, and beyond, meant that passing the ball was not an option. He had to shoot an impossible fadeaway over three defenders, and he had to make the shot.

Some criticise him for being strong-willed to the point of selfishness. Others point to how he gets into conflicts with even his own teammates because he is so demanding. While these would be considered faults in any other player, Kobe somehow turns them into his greatest strengths. He thrives because of his selfishness, not despite it. He demands the best from everyone around him because he has no other choice: failure is not an option.

While the oft-quoted truism “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” serves as inspiration to many, Kobe takes it a step further. He holds the NBA record for most regular season missed shots and wears it as a badge of honour. The sheer physical endurance, and mental will, required to shoot 50 shots in 42 minutes, as he did in his last NBA game, is something 99% of the league will never possess.

He is not a 6’1”, 147kg giant like Shaquille O’Neal. He does not possess the athletic ability, both in terms of strength and speed, of a LeBron James. In fact, despite having a father who also played in the NBA, Kobe does not have hereditary shooting pedigree of Steph Curry. Therefore, what truly makes him great is his mentality – one that is almost unparalleled in the history of sport.

His 4am workouts have now become basketball folklore, perfectly epitomising his unrelenting attitude. If an average professional is someone who works hard in training, then a basketball great is someone who puts extra hours in when others are resting. However, Kobe has transcended even this definition of greatness: he admitted, in 2018 (two years after his retirement), that he still rose at 4am to work out. How many great, never mind average, athletes would do that when there is seemingly no goal to work towards?

Kobe’s choice of the number 24 jersey, which he wore for the latter part of his career, can be considered a metaphor for his motivation. The player he is most like is none other than Michael Jordan, possibly the GOAT (greatest of all time) of basketball, who famously wore number 23. It is clear, both on and off the court, that Kobe looks up to Jordan and wishes to emulate his success. Kobe’s 60-point swansong is analogous to Jordan’s ‘flu game’, an NBA Finals game in which Jordan posted impressive numbers despite badly suffering from illness. Kobe, in response, massively outscored every other player (no-one else on the court even reached 20 points), even though most of them were in peak physical fitness in their 20s.

Although his impact on the world has clearly transcended basketball – it is common for people who know nothing about basketball to shout ‘Kobe’ as they toss something into the bin – the saddest part of this tragedy is that he will never be able to achieve Michael Jordan’s post-retirement success. Kobe was working closely with his daughter Gianna, who also tragically passed in the helicopter crash, to raise the profile of women’s basketball. Just like a young Kobe, she was considered a precocious talent in basketball circles and would undoubtedly have benefitted from his guidance.

Ultimately, his story is one that has been tragically shortened and thus he will not be able to achieve his true off-court potential. However, he, like his idol Jordan, has massively transcended the world of sport and that is perhaps the greatest compliment one can give to Kobe Bryant. RIP.

A complex legacy

In a world where public figures are so often boiled down to polarising characterisations of good or bad, inspirational or toxic, charismatic or despicable, it seems impossible to adequately pay tribute to a man like Kobe Bryant. At some point or another in his life, Kobe embodied every one of these characteristics on or off court.

Bryant was undeniably one of the biggest stars of his generation. His 20-year career spent at the Los Angeles Lakers yielded 5 NBA Championships, 2 Olympic gold medals and worldwide renown from obsessive die-hard fans to casual would-be basketballers, shouting his name as they threw balls of paper into the bin in their kitchen. But no matter if you were a fellow elite sportsman or a 5-foot-7-ish white kid from Ireland with little to no sporting talent such as myself, Kobe also crucially came to represent something else entirely: a universal mentality. Unwaveringly competitive, inexhaustibly hard-working, it was Kobe’s work ethic and competitiveness which undoubtedly drove him to greatness and ignited a similar set of principles within those who admired him. ‘Mamba Mentality’, a mantra which would become the title of Bryant’s 2018 autobiography, represented a single-minded focus and commitment to achieving your goals. For Kobe, this meant practicing in empty gyms at 4 a.m. before training. This meant commanding his teammates to put the ball in his hands every possession, putting up unprecedented numbers of shot attempts per game, even playing through injuries to ensure success; when Bryant tore his Achilles in April 2013, he refused to leave the court until he’d shot the free throws earned from the foul which caused the injury. He converted both, earning the Lakers two points before leaving the court. He wouldn’t return from the Achilles injury until that December. The Lakers ended up winning the game – by two points.

However, this single-mindedness also drew the ire of many. As a team-mate, Kobe could be – and regularly was – brutal. During practice sessions, Kobe would regularly become frustrated and vulgar towards his team-mates. During timeouts, Kobe did not make ‘suggestions’, nor did he listen to his coaches. He told his team-mates to “get the f**k out of his way” (as he said mid-game in 2014) and proceeded to dominate the ball. His excellence and star power were clear for all to see; but all the same, right from his unprecedented decision to join the NBA aged 17 straight out of high school, Bryant’s brazen self-confidence was unparalleled.

However, as much as discussions of sporting excellence have dominated the discourse of Kobe in the days following his untimely death, it is perhaps his personal life that is the most complicated thing to reflect on of all. It would be remiss not to mention the case in 2003 which, notably, did not derail Kobe’s career. While married and with a daughter, Kobe was accused of rape by a 19-year-old woman. The accuser’s medical examination revealed lacerations “too many to count” around her genitals. “I recognise now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way as I did”, stated Bryant following charges being dropped against him by the accuser, who had in turn been accused of promiscuity, gold-digging and mental instability during the trial.

Bryant later established a charitable foundation alongside his wife Vanessa in 2010 and, 13 months ago, Kobe launched the Mamba Sports Academy. It was while travelling to a game in heavy fog for the Academy’s girls basketball team that a helicopter containing Kobe, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and six family friends crashed into the side of a mountain, killing all passengers and the pilot.

It would be no exaggeration to say that I loved Kobe. My early teenage years were mostly spent watching old Finals games from the Lakers’ championship three-peat between 2000-2002 and simulating them on my Xbox, and my later ones were mostly spent refusing to go out, locking my door and Mamba-ing out yet another essay so that I could make it to, and survive at, Oxford. Certainly, Kobe’s work ethic and his gleeful undertaking of the role as a family man, as shown in the endless stream of now-viral videos of his interactions with his daughters, were genuinely inspirational. But I, nor anyone else, should refuse to ignore the difficulty in summarising Kobe Bryant’s legacy. His one-track mind led to clashes with the people he worked with throughout his career and, amidst the seemingly infinite outpourings of love and admiration, the spectre of his sexual assault case still looms large. In the wake of a death which has stunned the world, perhaps the most fitting way of remembering Kobe is as a man who was unashamedly and unreservedly himself.

Violent Music – Acaster’s ‘Perfect Sound Whatever’

Kavya Deshpande
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Violent Music – Acaster’s ‘Perfect Sound Whatever’

Perfect Sound Whatever is comedian James Acaster’s part-memoir, part-encyclopaedic recount of the records that made 2016 the Greatest Year for Music of All Time, and how an obsession with them guided him out of the difficulties of 2017. 

One morning in 1958, Louise Bourgeois woke up and addressed a diary entry to herself. “How much violence do you have in you today?” she demanded, before going on to list the means by which she could find out. Did she feel like cooking or cleaning or repairing? Did she want to buy something? Could she discern a new interest that had not existed last week, or one that had and was now ready for discarding? “What,” she asked, “Makes today a new day?” 

One morning in 2017, I woke up with very little violence in me. I did nothing that day, or in fact for the rest of that week. It was only when the next week sank in the same way that I realised something was wrong. In some far-down recess of the brain, a pipe had burst. Damp was climbing. I had no choice but to move out and hope the situation sorted itself. 

I checked into a different mind, one where it felt good, even medicinal, to never go outside. I ate sharing-size bags of crisps and stared at vacuous YouTube videos until the nerves in my temples sizzled. I let myself do this because tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow I would find a new interest. When those tomorrows arrived, I remained in bed reading articles online about the interests of other people, better people, people whose enthusiasms led to activity. Painters, academics, musicians who sweated away short lives playing small clubs and succumbed to liver-failures in small flats. Even in these latter cases, I thought it was nice that they had, at the very least, left their beds every morning and returned to them only in the evening. I thought it would be nice if I tried that. Tomorrow, perhaps.  

I used to believe that once the violence leaves you, it never really comes back. There are bursts of activity, a few consecutive days of getting things done, but in the end the water always settles. The idea of having preoccupations the way you used to – not so much developing an interest in as giving your whole self to something, allowing it to smuggle you from B-side to footnote to forum until you emerge a cleverer, passionate, more alive person – becomes inconceivable. 

In Perfect Sound Whatever, James Acaster presents a counter-argument. Acaster, experimental stand-up, panel-show misanthrope and veteran cowbellist of Kettering’s underground music scene, began his 2017 in a similar absence of violence. Newly-split from both his girlfriend and agent, fresh vulnerabilities joined forces with ancient insecurities to wear him down. He used to leave his hotel room and explore the cities he performed in. He used to obsess over music. He used to play the cowbell in Kettering’s finest amateur outfit. Now, he had lost the ability to engage with anything. 

Unsure of how to exit this new state of mind, Acaster devised a project that would help relieve his symptoms. He had, for some months, nursed a suspicion that 2016 had been the greatest year for music of all time, and now he was going to attend to it. He wanted to simulate the sensation of discovering a record, falling in love with it, and folding it into your life until fragments of lyric or tune became a part of your emotional topography. 

This was a feeling Acaster needed, but was not willing to wait to chance upon. He was going to siphon it from as many albums made in the year 2016 as he could physically listen to. He chased it to the ends of the internet, finding it in the bilge water of music-sharing websites, in soundtracks to imaginary films and debuts by kids with cheap microphones and empty garages. He designed it himself, releasing a compilation of grunge covers of short-lived bands from his hometown – often old friends – that he loved as a teenager.  Somewhere along the way, his project lost its artificial quality. Acaster purchased over 500 records from 2016, and from the way he writes about them, it isn’t hard to believe that he gained something from every last one. 

I remember reading articles in which those other, better people described their interests, and feeling the impassable distance between me and them. At the time, I leant on this material as a reminder that there was still another world, an absorbing, textured world, that I could check back into when I felt ready. 

What I wish I had at the time, however, was Perfect Sound Whatever. It is an admission and exploration of a pathology that those afflicted often find too precise to address. It is also a dispatch from the other side of this feeling. A war story. With quiet humour and relentless sincerity, Acaster proves that violence lost can always be wrested back.

What Light Through Yonder Theatre Breaks?

Emily Capon
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What Light Through Yonder Theatre Breaks?

This week, we saw the death of theatre director Terry Hands, acclaimed for his founding of the Everyman in Liverpool among various other theatrical, notably Shakespearean, endeavours. This news came within hours of the RSC’s announcement of their winter season of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays, nearly forty years after Hands’ production of the Henry VI trilogy as artistic director of the RSC supplanted it firmly back into the public psyche.

Hands’ style of directing was distinctive, and often classic. His productions had a certain energetic hum that surrounded them, and in his more than 25 years as Director Emeritus and Artistic Director of the RSC, it became difficult to disassociate his productions from his latent directorial presence. He came to the RSC with a track-record of success, having founded the Everyman after graduating from RADA; he continued to wield his benevolent hands (pun not intended) over the theatre world when, after leaving the RSC, he saved Wales’ Theatr Clwyd from closure. His styles soon became trademark, as he made his way through Europe’s theatre circles. He had an almost unparalleled ability to pick out and persuading talent to his ends, mentoring the likes of Anthony Sher, Deborah Warner and Adrian Noble.

One of the most recognisable parts of his directorial style, though, is his idiosyncratic use of light, casting himself as lighting director in a number of productions. Hands made us light-sensitive as an audience; what were the possibilities of light in Shakespeare, and how could they enhance a performance? He seems to have tapped into useful directorial opportunities, noticing and exploiting the infinite variety of light’s possibility in Shakespeare’s plays.

Light, for anyone who has pored over an Arden Shakespeare, traipsing through theme after theme, is an image of notable significance. Romeo famously asks Juliet: ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’; if the window is the east, and Juliet really is the sun, how can a director make her so? The 2006 RSC production, directed by Nancy Meckler, has Juliet perched not on a balcony but on a precarious metal scaffold. The light that bathes her face is not warm sunlight but the harsh whiteness of stage lights, as we are denied access to the fallacy in which the two lovers find themselves in. To Romeo, his paramour has the soft warmth of the sun, but to us, she looks harsh and distant, lit with a clinical pale glow. In the 2010 RSC production, Juliet is offstage when Romeo’s dramatic love exposition begins; the visions of grandeur in Romeo’s mind can be indulged by the director, or gently mocked by way of deliberate omission.

The relative scarcity of specific stage direction or set instruction makes a Shakespeare play a useful tabula rasa upon which a director can build an effective, stylistically distinctive production. However, there are some specific light requirements that are vital to the narrative while being difficult for a director to work with. A distinction between night and day is a recurring feature, a technique that would have been especially difficult in the open-air amphitheatre styles of some Elizabethan theatres. The script for our case study, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, includes the time markers of morning, twilight, noon, twilight, night and dawn. It is, obviously, at the director’s discretion whether they choose to play to these distinctions, or whether they will allow the play to exist in its own isolated timelessness. Time disorientation works well for the two lovers’ tragic story; a refusal to acknowledge the passage of time gives the story a cruelly ironic sense of having time to spare, when in reality the events take place over only four days. If the director chooses to note these fluctuations in light, the play becomes more urgent, more visceral and more real.

There are over thirty stage directions in Shakespeare’s oeuvre calling for lights to be carried on-stage. Three kinds of lights are specified: tapers, torches and lanterns. Torches are the most common by far, and undoubtedly the easiest for an actor to use effectively on stage. However, the Elizabethan nomenclature of specific lights was inconsistent, so relative free-reign, even then, was given to matters of lighting for the productions. It is unreasonable to presume that a modern director will feel constricted to the confines of Shakespeare’s own light specifications, but some performance spaces necessitate a modicum of orthodoxy. The Globe’s primary light source is sunlight, making the only significant differentiation in light that between London’s night and day. Even the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, though artificially lit with candles, is illuminated uniformly throughout entire performances.  In such spaces, lights carried on and off stage were not a requirement, but a superfluity to the space: they were an exercise in aesthetics, rather than function.

Aside from the time markers mentioned previously, the use of hand-held lights in the plays are used traditionally to indicate dark, shadowy loci, where the presence of light indicates a lack it, as well as ceremony and metaphor. The extinguishing of these indicates a plummet into total darkness, in which Cassio can be ambushed and Lear can be left isolate on the heath. As Lear’s Fool says: ‘so out went the candle and we were left darkling’. The audience is trusted to suspend disbelief as we plunge, with the characters, into metaphorical darkness.

How, then, has Hands’ legacy of light been an influential force on the modern Shakespeare scene? The 2014 Park Avenue Theatre, New York, staged a production of ‘Macbeth’ that surpassed audience expectations not only of light but also of staging. The play’s cavernous space was transformed into a barren heath, complete with open flame torches lighting the audience’s way towards the steep, stadium seating. Strange and otherworldly shadows were cast on the faces of the (floating!) witches. The mass of candles at the end of the traverse stage that glowed hot in Lady Macbeth’s fieriest moments stood cold and dark when, hands stained with blood, she begs: ‘Oh light! Please take me! I deserve to die! / Now take me light! Now cover my darkness!’. Though elements of this production crumble under accusations of ‘style over substance’, it is exemplary in its manipulation of, or abject disregard for, Shakespeare’s original plans for light in his plays.

Nonconformist lighting techniques are not specific to tragedy; Shakespeare’s already farcical, unrealistic comedic scenarios can be made more so with lighting that removes us entirely from reality. The recent production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at London’s Bridge Theatre explores the dark sexuality that runs throughout the play, by keeping the in-the-round performance space mostly dark and shadowy, save select spots of bright lightness. In a play usually interpreted with the summer-gaze of cloudless days and soft heat, the Bridge’s chiaroscuro is a refreshing palate cleanser for some of its more sanguine adaptations. Sequinned and salacious, the play’s purple hue in the final scene gives it permission to revel in its unabashed campness, dragging the audience literally skipping into its midsummer fever dream.

One wonders whether Shakespeare’s verse benefits from these techniques; should we give in to purists, and have our open-air theatres lit exclusively by the sun and the odd taper? Some productions, like Park Avenue’s, undoubtedly suffer for stylistic diversity, sacrificing subtleties of language, style and blocking to make room for the enormity of these effects.  However, in order to guarantee our public appreciation for these plays for years to come, we have a duty to embrace and support attempts at stylistic innovation, rather than dismissing them as silly or superfluous. Done well, effects such as lighting can enhance audience enjoyment, and Terry Hands’ productions exemplified this. He used never-before-seen lighting techniques with consistent success, demonstrating how, even though Shakespeare doesn’t need to be modernised to the 21st century, we’d be happy to have him.

Cherpse! Tara and Ben

Cherwell Life
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Cherpse! Tara and Ben

Tara, New College, Biomed, 1st year

We met by the Ashmolean (very creepy at night) and went to the pub – we quickly established that we had lots of mutual friends to the point that we’d been in the same room multiple times before but never met. We then realised we had been to the same nursery and reminisced about simpler times before trying to figure out what on our profiles meant we were matched by the cupids, quickly realising it was a mutual love of football. Unfortunately he’s an Arsenal supporter so none of his opinions were valid. (Although as a Man U fan it was gratifying to talk to someone whose team was still doing worse than mine!) 

First impressions?
Felt like I recognised him from somewhere – turns out I did!

Did it meet up to your expectations?
Given that I had no idea what to expect, I’m going to say yes.

What was the highlight?
Definitely discussing that time we watched butterflies in the nursery garden when we were four.

What was the most embarrassing moment?
I spilled my G&T all over my arm at the start but I’m not sure if he noticed.

Describe the date in three words:
Very small world.

Is a second date on the cards?
I saw him later in the Bridge smoking area, so depends how you define a date I guess?

Ben, Oriel, PPE, 1st year

We met on the steps of the Ashmolean at 7.30. We were unsure where to go but having worked that she had eaten and I hadn’t. We ended up in Chequers for a drink and some food having wandered down Cornmarket Street. We first tried to work out why we had been matched up although football was the only thing that we could work out was on both of our forms. Once the conversation got going we worked out that we had quite a lot of mutual friends as we both came from London. Having realised this we eventually worked out that we used to live only a few streets away and had gone to the same nursery school. We spent most of the time discussing mutual friends and catching up on their lives. It was very interesting and a pleasant evening but I don’t think either of us really felt a spark and we finished our drinks and went our separate ways.

First impressions?
She seemed quite nice and easy to talk to.

Did it meet up to your expectations?
I really had no idea what to expect going on. I was slightly worried the other person might be very strange or the date would be awkward so it definitely went better than that. Other than that though I didn’t have any strong expectations and was just curious what would happen.

What was the highlight?
Working out that we had been in the same nursery school class of 10 or 15 kids but didn’t remember each other.

What was the most embarrassing moment?
Working out that we had been in the same nursery school class of 10 or 15 kids but didn’t remember each other.

Describe the date in three words:
Interesting, reminiscing, pleasant.

Is a second date on the cards?
No.

The Challenge of Maintaining a Legacy

Elara Oakes
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The Challenge of Maintaining a Legacy

January 2020 has brought with it the deaths of both Christopher Tolkien, son of J. R. R. Tolkien, and Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce. The coincidence of their deaths calls to attention their remarkably different ways of handling the literary legacies left to them. The role of a literary executor is an unusual one, and for Tolkien and Joyce it became a full-time job. It’s hard to know whether it would feel like a blessing or a curse to have your career determined by the responsibility of caring for your father or grandfather’s reputation. For Tolkien Jr, the weight of this responsibility could be felt literally in the form of the 70 boxes of papers left to him after his father’s death.

Managing a literary estate involves maintaining copyrights and dealing with unpublished work, letters and diaries according to the deceased author’s wishes. The decisions made by literary executors can easily become a source of controversy and outrage among fans and academics, as was the case – in very different ways – for Christopher Tolkien and James Joyce. 

Christopher Tolkien was the editor of his father’s posthumously published works, including The Silmarillion in 1977, a colossal work describing the history and mythology of Middle Earth. However, many lovers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were suspicious about how much of the work was truly J. R. R. Tolkien’s. Christopher dispelled these worries with The History of Middle-Earth, a 12-volume series published between 1983 and 1996, revealing the source material for The Silmarillion including original drafts, fragments, notes and other unpublished material. It also showed that practically everything Christopher Tolkien had published came directly from his father. In the statement released by the Tolkien Society on the 16th January confirming Christopher Tolkien’s death, Tolkien scholar Dr Dimitra Fimi said ‘He revealed his father’s grand vision of a rich and complex mythology. He gave us a window into Tolkien’s creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth.’ Christopher Tolkien traded in his job as a lecturer in Old and Middle English at Oxford to become the first and greatest scholar of his father’s work and was still publishing in 2018 at the age of 93. 

It’s hard to imagine someone better qualified for the job than the man whose childhood bedtime stories formed the imaginative world of Middle Earth, and who went on to become its cartographer, drawing many of the original maps for his father’s The Lord of the Rings. This is also a reminder of how personal the work can be, and it’s not surprising that family members are often extremely protective of the author’s legacy. 

This is the case with Stephen Joyce, who was well-known for keeping strict control over his grandfather James Joyce’s legacy. In 2006 he told The New Yorker’s D. T. Max that he was ‘protecting and preserving the purity’ of his grandfather’s work and ‘what remains of the much abused privacy of the Joyce family.’ His opinions on academics couldn’t be further from those of the late Christopher Tolkien. He saw academics as ‘people who want to brand this great work with their mark. I don’t accept that.’ He called them ‘rats and lice – they should be exterminated!’ He consistently refused scholars the right to quote from Joyce’s works or reproduce manuscript pages. 

Stephen’s war against Joyce critics included appearing at academic conferences, sometimes unexpectedly, and declaiming the irrelevance of their work. He destroyed family members’ letters and threatened to destroy James Joyce’s letters. He often claimed ‘I am a Joyce, not a Joycean’ and insisted on being addressed by his full name, Stephen James Joyce, as a reminder that he, not the academics he so despised, was the authority on James Joyce. Stephen’s opposition to the way his grandfather’s reputation was handled went beyond his hostility towards Joyce scholars. Every year on the 16th of June ‘Bloomsday’ is celebrated, commemorating the day on which the events in Ulysses occur. This is marked by festivals in many cities around the world and usually involves public readings. However, in 2004 Stephen Joyce threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit to prevent public readings. In order for the celebrations to go ahead, the Irish Parliament had to create an emergency legislation called the Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2004, modifying the country’s copyright law.

Stephen’s opposition to the celebrations may have had something to do with his belief that Leopold Bloom was not the main character of Ulysses: he claimed the 16th of June should be called ‘Ulysses Day’ and questioned why scholars write so much about Bloom rather than Stephen Dedalus. It’s immediately clear why he may feel a closer affinity to Stephen. It can be seen in the nostalgia of his claim that ‘Stephen Dedalus is, in a very important sense, Nonno’s character.’ His affectionate Italian name for his grandfather reveals how personal the matter of James Joyce’s legacy is for him. It also hints at the rejection of Ireland that comes along with this. He was resentful of what he called Ireland’s ‘shitty treatment’ of his grandparents and never forgot the rejection his family felt when the Irish government did not allow Joyce to be buried in his country of origin. It’s understandable that Stephen did not like Ireland claiming his Nonno as their own. 

This brings to light the problem of privacy in matters of an author’s legacy. While Joyce himself occasionally made fun of scholars, he never felt the same animosity his grandson did. He even said of Ulysses, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ Some may view Stephen’s overprotectiveness as an abuse of power, but it’s hard to blame him when his relationship to his grandfather’s work was tied up with feelings of loyalty and love for his family. 

Changes in copyright law and the dwindling distinction between public and private mean the literary landscape looks very different now than it did for Tolkien and Joyce. Descendants of writers who never had to worry about the internet and an increasingly commercialised publishing industry are facing the challenges they pose. Is it best to preserve the author’s privacy or put their diaries online for all to access? Is this a betrayal or a public service?

The same questions were raised in 2015 with the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman. An early draft which Harper Lee never intended to publish was being promoted as a sequel to her only novel To Kill A Mockingbird. The release of the book contradicted the ageing Harper Lee’s statements that she would never release another novel and suspiciously followed the death of her sister who acted as her literary executor. Before Stephen became the executor of Joyce’s estate, other family members published Joyce’s early draft, Stephen Hero, and a series of notes as a poem called Giacomo Joyce. There’s often a sense of guilt surrounding these overpublicised but underdeveloped early drafts and they’re often mysteriously described as ‘literary events,’ putting the emphasis on the publication rather than the content. Every review carefully avoids evaluating the writing and describes the characters, trying to keep up the pretence that the posthumously published draft is a sequel. They also avoid describing the uncomfortable sensation that you are reading something unfinished or something that violates the illusion the author tried to create in their lifetime.

The start of this year saw the death of a man who managed to continue the illusion of the world his father created. It also saw the death of a man who spent his life struggling to find ways to possess and protect the literary work of his grandfather. With the end of their lives comes the question of whether we should consider posthumously published work within the corpus of the original author at all. Although originally written by the elder Tolkien and Joyce, the influence of Christopher Tolkien and Stephen Joyce will be felt by all who read the works. 

SATIRE: Trump and I

Jack Womack
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SATIRE: Trump and I

I’ve been ill this week. Not the glamorous kind of ill, just a boring low-level kind of tonsillitis. The smallest sip of water is like a mouthful of rusty razorblades, but despite hamming it up for the GP, it is apparently ‘quite a mild case’, which doesn’t really give me a lot to work with.

Normally, I would fully embrace this kind of illness. Any opportunity to channel the sickly Victorian child within me is a welcome one, especially when it’s in order to maximise the attention and sympathies of other people. But with essentially just a ‘sore throat’, I’m aware this kind of performance risks appearing a little pathetic.

So instead, during the early stages of my throat misfortunes, I simply pretended not to notice it. Despite the pain getting worse, I continued going out and seeing people, my thinking being: if I was unable to be ill in an exciting way, then no illness for me!

Sadly, the laws of biomedicine had other plans, and eventually I was forced to admit defeat and see a doctor. A few days later however, a video on Twitter made me aware that I had an unfortunate ally when it came to my misguided ‘can-do’ attitude.

In a video clip played by Democrat Adam Schiff on the first day of the House of Representatives hearings for his impeachment, Trump tells an audience, “Then I have an Article II [of the Constitution] where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Though it pains me to admit it, during my week of illness I shared this misguided and deluded faith in my own capabilities. I truly believed I could do whatever I wanted and somehow cheat the bacteria festering within me. This messiah complex is something I was planning to work on anyway, but the resonances of Trump means I might start this process earlier than first planned.

A quick internet search reveals that Trump’s bragging of his executive power – exhibited by Schiff as evidence for the likelihood of Trump’s guilt – is an almost exact word for word replica of something else the President said, although in a very different context.

Trump’s longstanding involvement in American wrestling is well known, but his relationship with WWE owner Vince McMahon has had its rocky patches. After a business deal in 2009 which McMahon perceived to be particularly unfair, Trump told him, “I can do whatever the hell I want.”

The signs were there. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Wrestling and arrogance have always been key ingredients in the Trump personality soup, and both were on show in this big week for the President. His unsurprising acquittal by a Republican-controlled Senate came after his third State of the Union address.

            For Democrat Tim Ryan, the address was evidence that Trump’s WWE days are not fully behind him. He tweeted, ‘I just walked out of the #StateOfTheUnion. I’ve had enough. It’s like watching professional wrestling. It’s all fake.’

Demonstrating the new rule that politicians are better at satire than real satirists, Ryan hit the nail on the head. Media commentators always point to Trump’s background in business, his dishonesty and tendency to rip off his investors, as the strongest indicator of what kind of President he would turn out to be.

But this whole time, these commentators have been looking in the wrong direction. WWE has always been Trump’s spiritual home, a world in which ‘fake’ and ‘real’ have a fluid relationship with each other. Throw in the added similarity of a long history of sexual harassment, and Trump and WWE’s relationship also begins to look a little fluid.

            A document released in 2019 revealed a long history of sexual misconduct allegations against WWE, a revelation about as surprising as my tonsillitis diagnosis. When you throw together arena entertainment, corporate money, and spandex, it’s hardly surprising that a smattering of legal cases is the end result.

            Speaking of sexual harassment charges, Trump himself has a few of those on the go, so many, in fact, that it’s even proving a struggle to deal with them one by one. The New York Post reported this week that Trump wants New York journalist E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against him put on hold while he appeals former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos’ case against him. Court documents revealed that Trump’s lawyers argued the cases would also be a “distraction” for the public, as well as a distraction on Trump’s time.

I think Trump becomes one of the first examples of a man who tries to avoid their legal case for bad behaviour towards women, by arranging for a similar case to take place first. As a strategy, it’s hard to see the sense of it, but to quote the great man himself, ‘…when you’re a star… you can do anything.’ As I got progressively more ill this week, he might as well have been reading my feverish, scattered brain, high on my own delusions of power. Time for the therapy chair.

Hi, I’m an Oxford student and I have chronic indecision

Katya Alban
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Hi, I’m an Oxford student and I have chronic indecision

Everyone in Oxford seems to be an overachiever, skipping from committee to niche sports team with apparent ease. How can we deal with the reality of feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to enrich our essay-ridden lives?

Relative to the breadth of problems facing Oxford students today, indecision seems rather petty. What is so terrible about having a multitude of opportunities thrown at you left, right and centre? We are certainly fortunate that the kind of problems we are facing tend to be along the lines of which editorial position to apply for, whether or not we have time next term to take on the role of JCR president alongside rowing with the blues team, or if we are willing to prioritise networking at Spirited Discussions over watching the next episode of The Apprentice on Wednesday evenings.

Having all of these as options is wonderful, granted. But therein lies the problem. They are all too wonderful to choose from or narrow down.

Does anyone else remember striding through the freshers fair, notebook and timetable at the ready, noting down every possible society of interest (there were many), until you finally get to the dominos stall at the end and just want to sit there for a few hours and let your body and mind unwind to the taste of pizza? All the enthusiastic people at their stalls seem so convinced that their society is the best; that it provides the friendliest community, the best experience to put on your CV or, in the cases of sport, that it guarantees an enjoyable form of exercise. How is one supposed to prioritise these various considerations?

I for one remember genuinely considering joining the marine reserves, then swiftly reconsidering after a very enjoyable rock climbing session which I then wanted to commit to, all the while knowing I had already sworn allegiance to powerlifting, chapel choir, my role as treasurer on the English society and that other minor occupation: my English and German degree. I was also well aware that I would need to leave a few gaps in my timetable for one-off events, various applications and for downtime or clubbing (usually the former.) It always seemed to me that I could either be healthy and productive, academic and cultured or musical and refined, but none of these all at once.

And, to an extent, that was a fair conclusion on my part. As much as we would all like to be superhumans – congratulations to those of you who are, I would love to hear how you manage it – the reality is that it is unhelpful to set up impossible expectations for ourselves.

What has helped me to establish a more productive mindset is to get rid of these binaries, since ultimately there is no objective way of classifying, qualifying and rating any of our interests, or the effect they have on us. In other words, I stopped thinking about what would make me the most multi-talented version of myself and started to prioritise activities that I knew I would enjoy and that would offer me a refreshing change from academic life. For instance, the reason why I do powerlifting is because I love how immersed I have to be in the moment in order to lift safely and with good form; I can’t be worrying about my essay deadlines or how long Thomas is going to last in BBC’s The Apprentice, which unfortunately did become a constant concern.

Moreover, while being dependent on what can be cooked in a cramped student kitchen, a floor or house dinner party has the benefits of being nourishing, wholesome, and rejuvenating after a week of rushing around trying to meet deadlines. I now regard such events as important commitments in and of themselves, and I would recommend them to anyone who is feeling the effects of a lengthy and arduous term. Last term, I occupied my time by writing a supermarket review which, conveniently, could come in handy in any future wholesome cooking sessions. Most of all, it’s these wholesome domestic activities which I would advise students to prioritise in the middle of Oxford’s hectic and high-pressure environment.

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