Thursday 12th June 2025
Blog Page 558

In Vogue

Lucas Jones
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In Vogue

Vogueing is having a moment. Again.

The last time saw Madonna’s 1990 hit “Vogue” soar to the top of the charts in America and was supposed to herald a period of greater exposure for the New York ballroom community. It didn’t. Now vogueing has a new lease of life thanks to programmes like RuPaul’s Drag Race and extensive usage in fashion campaigns and advertising. No longer the domain of the underground, vogueing is rapidly reasserting itself as a valid artform, but as this happens it’s worth dwelling on the origins of this iconic dance and its potential future. Is vogueing just going to disappear again, or is it here to stay?

Developed by the African American and Latinx LGBTQ+ communities of New York during the 1980s, vogueing is a dance that mirrors the poses found on the front cover of Vogue magazine, hence the name. Dance sequences don’t tend to be prepared; they are improvised to a pounding beat. Vogueing, like any other art form, has changed dramatically since its conception. Where the icons of the 1980s elegantly strutted and posed, modern voguers are more like acrobats. The arena for vogueing competitions is the ballroom, but ballroom isn’t just about vogueing. The balls were created to appreciate the talent of poor, LGBTQ+ people of colour in New York and have been thriving there in various forms since the 1920s. To put it far too briefly, queer people gather in groups called houses, which often act as family units for people who have lost their own. These houses carry elaborate, iconic names like Xtravaganza and LaBeija, and the balls are the battlefield on which they compete for notoriety. Voguing is just one of the ‘categories’ in these balls, others include attempts to serve ‘realness’ or runway walks.

Originally underground to the point of being invisible, ballroom has a history of informing popular culture in return for virtually nothing. In 1990 “Vogue” was the song of the summer, and the voguers of New York were supposed to get the opportunities that they had been denied for years. On the surface it seemed to be a total success for ballroom; vogueing was mainstream and dancers like Willy Ninja became international dancing sensations overnight. This success was, however, tainted by the link that was established between vogueing and Madonna. When Madonna’s summer hit faded out of the limelight, so did vogueing. Vogueing had mainstream appeal, but it failed to forge an identity of its own before the song sank below the waves of popular culture. Vogueing would not have another big break until most of its creators had died of AIDS, and the iconic dance would forever be tied to Madonna’s name and image.

As vogueing hits the mainstream again it is worth reflecting on how we can avoid repeating history. The worrying aspect of vogueing’s current fame is the lack of understanding of its origin and nature in the media. This misunderstanding inevitably leads to appropriation, which is particularly harmful in a situation when those performers whose artform is being exploited are from extremely marginalized communities. How is it that Dolce & Gabbana’s fashion shows start with a vogueing performance when some of the dance’s leading lights literally have to beg to be paid for their performances? If the link between the dance and the community that founded it is broken it makes vogueing the property of everyone, and while this is what many of vogueing’s founders want it to be, it also opens the door to appropriation. As people outside the ballroom community learn how to vogue it detracts from the very few opportunities available for the people within it. Drag Race has the potential to forge a similar cultural link to vogueing as Madonna, where people assume that because Drag Race presents an idea or art, it must be at its origin.

That being said, the situation is improving. Ryan Murphy’s ‘Pose’, and other programmes such as Viceland’s ‘Our House’ are helping to combat this lack of understanding by displaying the origins and development of vogueing, as well as its importance to the ballroom community. Videos of the most iconic balls that are available on Youtube regularly gain thousands of views and social media allows people who are passionate about vogueing to follow the best dancers as they develop their styles of performance. Ballroom legends like Leiomy are getting a huge amount of work nowadays, and as the world becomes more open to trans rights there is definitely room for optimism. Even Drag Race, for all its faults, does work in the ballroom community’s favour. Constant references to ‘Paris is Burning’ from Ru and the contestants are guiding more queer people towards educating themselves on ballroom and its influences, and without the show it is safe to say that many people wouldn’t even have heard of vogueing. It is, naturally, up to the viewer to educate themselves further on how queer, AfricanAmerican and Latinx communities have influenced popular culture, but it is also evident that Drag Race and other popular TV shows are providing a good base from which to educate ourselves on the contributions of the balls to popular culture.

Vogueing never expected to be popular. It isn’t a dance form that has been developed over hundreds of years, and it doesn’t have prestigious schools to educate the performers of tomorrow. The current generation of voguers learned their craft in the balls of Harlem and New York, something which lends an almost incomparable authenticity to the dance. The original idea for vogueing was the imitation of modelling poses that the LGBTQ+ community of New York could never hope to strike on real covers, and in that sense vogueing almost loses its meaning when it is appropriated by white models, actors, and actresses who are imitating a career that has always been open to them. Vogueing’s future is anything but certain. LGBTQ+ culture is having a moment in the sun, but we shouldn’t forget that these moments are always fragile, fleeting and fickle. Even if vogueing can cement itself in popular culture, history has shown that it may not be the inventors of the iconic dance form who benefit. The ballroom community will still have to fight injustice and inequality, but there may finally be room for these performers to step into the spotlight they deserve.

Photo: RuPauls Drag Race UK © @RuPaulsDragRaceUKBBCThree

Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Protest Art

William Atkinson
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Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Protest Art

Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. Any art fan should celebrate that. Not just because it represented a profound triumph for free expression against the forces of authoritarianism and censorship, but because the thing was a bloody eyesore. The grey concrete was awful enough, but then the Berliners went and covered it in sodding graffiti.

Still, we should definitely celebrate. Because the fall of the Wall wasn’t just a monumental, wonderful moment in human history. It also makes an important point about art and protesting. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. And it starts with how artists have tidied up what the former GDR left over.

What’s remaining of the wall is now the world’s largest graffiti gallery. Some of the murals are great. Dmitri Vrubel’s ‘Fraternal Kiss’ of Brezhnev snogging East German President Erich Honecker is iconic and endlessly imitated. Birgit Kinder’s mural of an old Soviet Trabant car breaking through the wall is a powerful reminder of those who desperately tried to flee the East. Even though I’m generally sceptical of the value of graffiti, I can’t help but love them. Perhaps it’s my rampant Berlin-ophilia and an innate love of all things cheeky, but I think they’re a wonderful reminder of how far the city and her people have come in thirty years, and just how precious freedom can be.

But as much as I like the murals, they do make me uneasy. They’re certainly a brilliant celebration of free expression on an infamous example of its denial. But they also remind us just how useless all the East Berliners’ graffiti was when the wall was up.

Spray cans didn’t bring the wall down. The Stasi saw to that. Instead, amongst other things, it was a complex inter-relation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Hungarian economy, a grocer’s daughter, the limitations of Marxist thought and a dozen other things. It wasn’t some east Germans defacing a wall. Symbolically powerful as it was, protesting through art made little or no difference.

What was true of graffiti in the old East Germany is the same of protest art today. We’ve seen a lot of it in Britain these last couple of years. I’m reminded of a photographic project by Swedish artist Jonas Lund in London earlier this year called “Operation Earnest Voice”. It was designed as an “influencing office” (whatever the hell that is) in the interests of reversing Brexit. You can agree or disagree with the politics behind it, but you can’t quibble with the truth that the whole thing was utterly pointless. The project may have been intended as a protest, but it ended up preaching entirely to the converted.

And that’s the trouble with modern “so-called” protest art. It fills the Royal Academy and competes for the Turner prize, but its actual impact is minimal. Why? Because it’s “protesting” to people who agree with it. Does anyone seriously believe that the high-ups of the London art world are Brexiteering Trump fans, with sidelines in supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and cutting down the rain forest? I didn’t think so. At least the Wall’s graffiti was standing up against something, however futile. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their opinions, contemporary protest art instead represents a collective self-indulgence on the part of an art world with homogenous political beliefs.

So, here’s a truly radical idea. Let’s cut the political posturing and protesting and go back to just trying to produce something beautiful. Simple as that. How hard can it be?

After all, the seemingly impossible does sometimes happen. The Berlin Wall came down, for example.

The Early Roots of Film

David Alexander
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The Early Roots of Film

The Parisians screamed. And it seemed a perfectly reasonable response. After all, packed into a musty early cinema, they had just witnessed the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 The Arrival of a Train, where the titular locomotive had screamed towards them with a shocking inexorableness that must have recalled the Montparnasse derailment of the previous year, when an inbound train had smashed through a Paris station and fallen front-first into the street below. How could the audience be sure it wouldn’t happen again? “Because this was a film” doesn’t mean much when film hadn’t existed before.

Even if this story is little more than urban legend, it points dramatically to a fundamental truth about cinema. Well before Dorothy was dreaming technicolour dreams of a world beyond Kansas, and far preceding any gimmicky fetishization of ‘3D’, there was the shock and awe generated by twodimensional, monochrome motion. Movement was the basis of film.

Photographer, romantic, and, in the words of the jury that acquitted him, sometime dabbler in “justifiable homicide”, Eadweard Muybridge took pictures of things in motion. He used the 1870s to advance knowledge of animal locomotion, most famously with his The Horse in Motion series, created in order to determine conclusively whether all four feet of a horse left the ground at the same time while it was running. It was in the 1880s, though, that he produced most of his work. Over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, to be precise: people going up and down staircases; dogs walking; horses drawing carriages; dancing; juggling; and, most famously, and most thrillingly, the flowing, arching and splashing of water being thrown (never seen in slow-motion before). Forget Edward Bellamy’s contemporary, utopian Looking Backward. Muybridge was giving us a real vision of the future. And just look how it moved.

While Muybridge continued churning out his stills, far away, in the crisp air and hard autumn sun of the high Victorian north of England, Louis Le Prince was producing his masterpiece. All two seconds of it. 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene, believed to be the oldest surviving film in existence, is a ‘short’ film in the more extreme sense of the word, and it doesn’t have much of a plot. Four figures move – some walking, some surely dancing – around a garden in Leeds. Perhaps unexpectedly (and I love you, Leeds, but still), this northern suburb captures the ebullient essence of cinema. There’s an epilogue here which isn’t quite so happy or glorious. One of the dancers died ten days after being filmed, and Louis Le Prince would disappear in 1890, possibly having killed himself. But for those brief two seconds of footage, the prospect of permanent existence in the perpetual moment of movement creates what certainly looks like pure joy.

Let’s push on a little further. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter released The Great Train Robbery and included a finale shot to blow the Lumière Train right back out of the station. Innovative technically, the short film follows a fairly standard narrative (bandits rob train; receive comeuppance), until, right at the end, and unrelated to the preceding action, one bandit faces the camera directly and fires his revolver at the audience. The message is pretty clear: cinema is dangerous, because really, deep down, isn’t all its violence quite thrilling?

If watching a firearm blast off in our faces wasn’t traumatic enough (and recent Joker debates suggest we still aren’t quite used to it), then how would we manage with deeper cinematic evil? Władysław Starewicz’s 1913 The Night before Christmas introduced the Devil to cinema, and the first thing to notice was how he travelled around. Arched around his witch/ lover, he spends most of his time flying over snowy Russian hamlets, intermittently descending, hooves first, onto rooftops. Starewicz had used motion to astounding effect before, transforming dead insects into duelling lovers in 1912’s The Beautiful Leukanida. But here was something more intriguing yet. The Devil, biggest and most recurrent ‘villain’ in history, and for much of the cinema-going world (and certainly contemporary Russia) a lot more than just that, was being brought to life. That he was less a transcendental embodiment of pure evil, and more of a prancing and preening, scheming and screaming malcontent, was beside the point

Early film didn’t have the luxury of time. It didn’t really have the use of language or colour either. So, it made movement its raison d’être. A wise decision. Motion shocked and moved, thrilled and horrified audiences, and all four reactions were addictive.

The Farewell Review

Mattie O'Donovan
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The Farewell Review

Seemingly all of us either have or yearn for an affectionate but caustically witty grandmother such as Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), the endearing matriarch found at the centre of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. Indeed, the film will make that painfully clear to its audience, for as will quickly become apparent, Nai Nai is terminally ill and unaware that she is dying. Her family in China have gone to great lengths to hide the truth from her, much to the consternation of American-grown granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina). A comically fabricated wedding sets the wheel in the motion for the extended family to return home one last time to say their goodbyes in every way but words.

Such an absurd premise would, with a less skilled hand at the helm, have suffered from a cloying soapiness. Thankfully Wang, whose personal experience serve as the basis of the story, has evaded this in favour of a script filled with personality and an assured trust in her cast’s chemistry to carry the day. Shuzhen’s performance is terrific; wondrously genial and protective of her kin, there is an often hard to swallow serving of dramatic irony in seeing her fuss over the health of her children and Billi. Her interactions with the wider ensemble cast vary between scenes of the utterly solemn to heart-warmingly silly- a particular favourite of the latter involves Nai Nai’s confusion at a stilted and awkward wedding photo-shoot, in which the prospective bride Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara) struggles to appear intimate.

Memorable characters abound within the family circle, from Nai Nai’s oblivious live-in partner Mr Li to the younger cousin Bao, forever playing games on his phone. While certainly archetypes, there is a warm sense of the rank and file of the family, and a cultural sensitivity to familial dynamics that do not feel forced, but quietly earned. We are made to understand why certain relatives choose to maintain this lie, either to maintain harmony or out of a dutiful role to not scare Nai Nai. Through Billi’s perspective, we are afforded glimpses into what the family really feels throughout, often to poignant effect.

Speaking of Billi, it is refreshing to see Awkwafina, following on from her bit-roles in Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians, take a more central and realised role here. Billi’s wrestling with the lie underpins a wider thematic clash of eastern and western values about individualism and family ties. The film’s handling of this is mostly subtle and intelligible, though there are occasional lines of dialogue that are perhaps too on the nose.

Affecting and yet emotionally measured, The Farwell is the sort of intimate affair of film that, despite being about death and estrangement, manages to remain rewardingly charming. It would be a disservice to say that the film is carried dramatically by the novelty of its premise, but rather its observational wryness and the richness of excellently chosen cast. It certainly has excited me for Lulu Wang’s projects to come.

Comfort food of China

Sophia Zu
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Comfort food of China

When my parents and my older brother arrived at the Los Angeles airport in the spring of 1997, their worth became one-tenth of what it had been in China, thanks to the currency exchange. They lived in a basement. They had envisioned the United States to be a sprawling metropolis of lights and cars and Hollywood sparkle, so they were surprised by the sleepy silence of suburban California. In China, the concentrated buzz of cicadas matched the voices of vendors on the streets, yelling out prices for steaming bowls of tofu and rice. In America, talking too loudly at a restaurant or anywhere, really, earned you under-the-breath cursing and stares. 

For my mother, who grew up in the humid valleys of Chongqing, California’s dry air tortured her skin. She’d always been attracted to the melodrama of monotone—in college, she told me that her favourite activity was “listening to Simon and Garfunkel while watching the rain.” The constant sun, the golden oranges and the Californian glow grated on her sensibilities, it weathered away her spirit. Her opinion carries a great deal of weight in my family so my parents moved to Vancouver on a whim, hearing from neighbours and strangers that it was a beautiful part of the world. 

My parent’s immigration story and my love affair with food are one and the same. Before Ramen shops and Hot Pot joints began to crowd the Vancouver streets, my mother, craving the dance of the Szechuan peppercorn across her tongue, would drive 40 kilometers to the only restaurant in Vancouver that cooked mapo tofu the way she liked it—tender, hot, and excruciatingly spicy. There is nothing more painful than the desire for the food from your home. While others may crave their grandmother’s bouillabaisse or chicken marsala or clafoutis, my mother craved tripe and coagulated pig’s blood, swimming in chili peppers that dyed the tips of her chopsticks red.

Food has occupied a central position in my life since I was born. My family is Chinese, a culture whose fascination with the culinary arts has transcended eons—each city, village, hamlet specialize in dishes cultivated from the spices and crops native to their soil. As a child, my holidays were shrouded in a mist of freshly-blistered shishito peppers and steaming pork belly whose skin caramelized into an ear-shattering crisp when consumed. No food was too exotic; I loved pig ears crunchy with cartilage, the rich butteriness of bone marrow which seeped into garlic toast, and pig brains stewed in a broth of peppercorn and chilis served with sesame oil. Most of the dishes hailed from Chongqing, a large metropolis in the southwest of China, perched precariously over rolling mountains and lakes, and my mother’s hometown. Food was her love letter to us, a postcard of her childhood she painstakingly recreated, time and time again.

The defining feature of Chongqing cuisine is its colour—red. Nearly every dish sits atop a bed of red chili peppers, sautéed until bursting with fragrance. For a city so hot and humid, the food is even hotter and more steam-inducing. This summer, I travelled to China for the first time since I was ten. I drove out of the Chongqing for the annual Tomb-Sweeping festival, where we visit the graves of our ancestors, and as the smog gradually thinned into a wispy blue sky, colour began to re-enter the world in the form of sickly-green pastures, golden mud-choked rivers that reflected the glaring sun, and newly-formed, glowing-red mosquito bites. Under whispering bamboo trees, I ate and I wept, visiting distant family members whose lives could not have been more different from mine except for this wild addiction to a warm, burning pain lingering on the backs of our tongues.

Review: Lincoln College Hall

Hattie Blackman
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Review: Lincoln College Hall

Lincoln College likes very much to boast about its reputation for the best food in Oxford – something which had me, an unashamedly pretentious foodie, rather excited before my arrival. And they certainly seem eager to cultivate this reputation, strewing the menu liberally with ‘rissolés’ and ‘supremes’ of various cuts of meat. I am unable to comment on these quintessentially Lincoln dishes, being a vegetarian – and therefore, sadly overlooked, it seems, by the catering system, which require vegetarians to sign up for food when others don’t (disastrous, for a poor organiser like me). 

But perhaps it seems outdated to talk about vegetarianism – now, it would seem, a rather old-fashioned term, redolent of fusty dishes such as stuffed peppers (another Lincoln staple, although a surprisingly well-executed one in my experience. The same cannot be said for the mushroom vol-au-vents, another 70s vegetarian throwback wheeled out as one of a series of intensively mushroom-based dishes). It’s World Vegan Day this Friday: perhaps I should mention Lincoln’s vegan food. Well, to do so is to mention Lincoln’s vegetarian food – only substitute the prodigal amount of cheese for an equally prodigal amount of vegan ‘cheese’, which always seems slightly reluctant to melt, and lies sadly and lethargically on the surface of the dish (a quality of the stuff that has always seemed to me, perhaps prejudicially, as somewhat mimetic of the more uptight attitudes associated with a vegan diet). 

Don’t mistake this for bitching: I love cheese, even – almost – as much as the menu planners love cheese. And, as the stuffed peppers testify, some of the Lincoln dishes manage to come at least slightly closer to elegance than much food served in a canteen would. But the food here is a rather strange mixture of such aims at old-fashioned smart dinners, and some decidedly (but often wonderfully) lowbrow food: at the last formal I went to, I was served macaroni cheese with a side of sweet potato fries. Sinking a fork into the plateful of creamy, sweet, tangy stodge was an immensely comforting experience, if somewhat incongruous with the candlelit and oak-panelled setting. So, in summary, the Lincoln hall food is rather miscellaneous – sometimes seeming as though it suffers from a misguided self-consciousness about its own reputation (I’m looking at you, vol-au-vents). Often, too, though, I am reminded of why this reputation exists – just make sure you like (fake?) cheese. 

Who’s afraid of Derrida?

Lewis Roberts
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Who’s afraid of Derrida?

This article is a complaint to my academic discipline, English literature. It is, not to overstate the matter, one of my great loves, but it is fickle and frustrating, as are many such loves. Specifically, it is frustrating by its deep self-doubt and attendant reliance on the outdated and equally fickle subject of continental philosophy.

For those who are not acquainted with this issue, I am referring to the fact that when searching for evidence for their theses on literary texts, critics and scholars find themselves repeatedly quoting Derrida and Foucault and suchlike without redress to the fact that these thinkers have been superseded (at least in the UK and the US) by analytic theories. It is an interesting phenomenon, whereby we find esteemed practitioners of very modern and cutting-edge theories such as Trans Theory and Thing Theory, referring to Europeans of note (in the former case, Freud, and in the latter, Adorno) as if the similarity between their novel point and the existing continental philosophy somehow acts as proof.

Bertrand Russell, the Oxford philosopher often credited with developing the school of analytic philosophy which relies on exemplification and scientific analysis to discern philosophical ‘truths’, was reacting against the idealist school of thought pursued by Hegel, and in Britain, F.H. Bradley. It was at this moment that I believe the problem came for scholars of literature. At a very similar time to Russell’s railing against idealism (the 1910s and 1920s) literature turned towards it.

Gertrude Stein called the young writers left behind by the First World War ‘the Lost Generation’. An associate of hers, T.S. Eliot, who many (rightly, in my opinion) call one of the greatest poets to ever write, wrote his Harvard PhD thesis on F.H. Bradley and his ‘Doctrine of Experience’. That is to say, he found himself, found some solid base, in continental philosophy. Henri Bergson, whose philosophy of lived time (durée) versus measurable clock time (temps), is known by all respectable students of Eliot as a deep influence on The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Therefore, I posit, that without Eliot and this post-war flaneurism, we would not find academic books still relying on these same philosophers. Eliot and his circle set the academy on a route towards speculation and idealism instead of analytical thought.

One of my favourite academic texts is Patricia Parker’s masterful 1979 work Inescapable Romance, a study of Renaissance poetics. Her main thesis on the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser takes Derrida’s infamous concept of différance as an analogue to the expansiveness and dilation of Spenser’s writing. It is a fantastic thesis, which elucidates and clarifies Spenser’s poetics in a way that pierces to the core of Elizabethan thought. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend it heartily if you ever intend to understand Spenser’s Faery Queene.

So, reader, I am sure you are wondering why I am so outraged. Well, because it throws my subject into question. If so many of our most important contributors are guided by out-of-date schools of thought, what do we do?

My view is that the competition between, on the one hand, the anger we feel towards the Freuds and the Derridas of the world, and on the other, our wholehearted acceptance of them is what supports our discipline; it is, if you’ll excuse me, a dialectic. There is a significant amount of push and pull between allowing the discipline to be consumed by such abstract thought and rooting ourselves in an analytical stricture that we kid ourselves we always follow.

Indeed, the joy of studying literature comes from the coalition of art, in the literature itself, and science, in the analysis thereof. So my advice, dear reader, is go forth and pontificate. Read your Derrida as closely as you dare; try Althusser if you’re feeling lefty. These philosophies were constructed for their beauty and many are truly gorgeous. For all I know, you might even enjoy it.

Metamorphosis, Money, and Moldovan ice cream

Cora MacGregor
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Metamorphosis, Money, and Moldovan ice cream

It’s probably unsurprising that while The Guardian hails Ian McEwan’s latest novella as a “comic triumph”, it is dismissed by The Telegraph as “an over-stretched dinner-party joke”.

Consisting of just under a hundred pages of embittered, Kafka-esque allegory, in which the Brexit mania of the current Tory leadership is transformed into the pheromonal impulses of a cabinet of metamorphosed insects, it is near impossible to read The Cockroach apolitically.

The satirical bite gluts itself on the current theatre of Westminster and Europe, but at times it seems at risk of being poisoned by its subject. The evident urgency to publish the novella while still relevant is reflected in an occasional clumsiness of style – it lacks the easy eloquence which normally characterises McEwan’s writing. It hasn’t escaped the risks of such swift composition (references to events of the past month suggest the editing process was severely truncated) and the suspicion is that McEwan’s personal resentment at times displaces his control over the prose. A propensity for paragraphs constructed almost exclusively of short, tautologous exclamatives gives it the flavour of an angry and sometimes tedious tirade.

Beyond superficial lapses in style, however, the satire is impeccably managed. Cleverly rendered, yet imprecise parallels ensure there is sufficient distance for the humour to be effective: Brexit is replaced by a bizarre economic policy, Reversalism, the implementation of which will mean money flows backwards; the character correspondent with Boris Johnson is more a metamorphic amalgamation of the past three Conservative leaders. No doubt any allegory closer to the reality of the situation would be too depressing to be comic. Its lack of ambition is also refreshing: this satire isn’t trying to direct or change anybody’s attitude towards Brexit; it’s simply a sympathetic expression of the fury and frustration shared by many in the country.

It is shrewdly observant of all elements of the situation: one of its funniest moments is the “fierce debate on Moldovan ice cream”, an example of the many highly pressing concerns which the EU is kept from by the insolubility of the British problem. As in Nutshell, McEwan balances the apparent absurdity of the fictional conceit with piercingly accurate and often hilarious cultural references and insights: from the manipulation of the Me Too movement to mockery of politicians’ post-truth rhetoric. The Cockroach is limited, but it’s fully aware of that fact.

If you’re going to read it, do so soon, although frankly, unless you share McEwan’s sentiments on the matter, you’re unlikely to enjoy it. McEwan is derisive, if not unsympathetic towards his supposed detractors and he leaves little room in the text for an alternative viewpoint. The Cockroach doesn’t offer the sort of commentary or insight that allows some satires to endure. However, it is comic relief in the darkest sense. McEwan seems to recognise the futility of his satirical weapon, but uses it nonetheless, not so much wounding Brexiteers, but taking a stab at populism and comforting Remainers, with a sense of solidarity and a pantomime of resistance. To appropriate a comment from Atonement, written of a political climate almost unrecognisable today, The Cockroach’s subject is “the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

The Unscheduled Life of a History Student

Sofia Henderson
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The Unscheduled Life of a History Student

I round the corner. The door is in sight. I make awkward eye contact with the person coming the other way down the path and it takes approximately three tries for me to get through the barrier with my Bod card. It’s another day in my life as a History student: I’m in the Rad Cam.

Taking yourself on a study date to the library every single day is a staple in the life of a historian at Oxford. In fact, it might be the only staple. I’m a second year and this term I have two contact hours. One lecture, one tute. And they’re on the same day. It may seem like a dream, but the lack of contact hours we get as History students can make our degrees more difficult.

I can lay in until 10:30 if I want to, but starting the day off with literally nothing to do except read for the same essay you’ll be doing every day for the entire week is both daunting and demoralising.

Oxford is always intense, and balanced with hours upon hours of time spent by yourself reading books at a limited revolving selection of study spaces, the term is over before you know it and all you can remember from it is all the time you spent staring at the same pages over and over, hoping the words would just enter your brain.

Having this little contact time takes a toll on your mental health. Many students are already anxiety-ridden; this makes being left entirely to your own devices for eight weeks particularly difficult. There’s a reason why History students are often found panic-writing their essay after having an entire week to do it, and it’s not because we’re lazy.

It becomes easier than ever to isolate yourself. Your non-historian friends are out for most of the day getting the most out of the £9,250 a year they spend on their degree. Your day isn’t neatly arranged; there’s nothing to fit your lunch or snack breaks around and there’s nobody to encourage you to keep reading a little longer.

I knew before I came to Oxford that I’d be doing an essay or maybe two a week, and that, as History is more of an independent degree, most of my time would be spent reading. Still, I thought I’d have things to go to. Nobody tells you that you’ll only get one hour of academic interaction a week.

Of course, the tutorial system is unparalleled. In Trinity, I was lucky enough to be given one and a half hour long tutes, one-to-one. It was amazing to be able to focus so much on my individual work and I got so much out of such a personalised and focused approach. History, though, is about discussion, and I missed out on interacting with my peers in an academic setting.

History at Oxford is great because of just how much choice there is available to you from the beginning. An individualised approach can be greatly beneficial, especially when studying for more in-depth ‘optional’ or ‘further’ subject papers. Still, there must be a way to balance this.

Perhaps the History Faculty is struggling, but there is no doubt that Oxford has enough money to be able to provide their students with more contact time. We do already help fund STEM. Only recently has studying world history become a course requirement, and undergraduates still have to study one British history paper in first year and another in second year.

In comparison to other top universities, the selection is dismal. Sometimes, even European history papers fail to venture further than France. I love History and becoming a historian is constantly rewarding and fulfilling. However, I can’t help thinking History as an undergraduate degree has become an afterthought.

It may be what Oxford historians have done for centuries, but I can’t help but feel I could be doing a lot more academically with my time than spending hours freezing in the Rad Cam.

Novelty Music is Real Music

Megan Whitlock
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Novelty Music is Real Music

To call the summer of 2018 memorable would probably be an understatement: there was the heatwave, the subsequent hours spent in beer gardens, and, perhaps most significantly, the World Cup. For a couple of weeks, to venture out and not hear some rendition of ‘Three Lions’ was a rarity. The whole country appeared to have briefly suspended all anxieties about Brexit and climate change to group together and sing “football’s coming home.” It didn’t matter about your background (or even if you cared about football that much…), if ‘Three Lions’ cropped up on a night out, chances were that you were singing along. So, what is it about unconventional ‘novelty’ music that creates such a community spirit?

For chart-targeted music to be successful, it must resonate with a mass audience. It must be both palatable and marketable to consumers without losing any of its illusions of ‘raw’ and ‘real’ authenticity. The pressure to create a catchy song that encompasses all these qualities is exacerbated further by the motivations of the music industry. It may be cynical, but there is an undeniable expectation that big artists signed by big labels must make big money. The result is that much chart music runs the risk of losing its originality in its quest to follow the money-making formula. A generic love song is more likely to appeal to a wider audience than a song, for example, about being a “working man from Lancashire” and wanting a chippy tea.

The latter is, of course, the focus of popular Lancashire band The Lancashire Hotpots’ leading hit, ‘Chippy Tea.’ Sing the lyrics to anyone in Oxford and be braced to receive a few blank stares, yet in the Northern county the song graces festivals and football matches alike. So, what do ‘Three Lions’ and ‘Chippy Tea’ have in common? My guess would be less people’s predisposition to write these songs off as ‘novelty’ music, and more to do with the way they make us feel when we sing them.

The initial reaction when people discuss ‘novelty’ music is often, as Dickie from the Hotpots explained when I got in touch about this topic, to think of the negative connotations – “mention novelty music and you can already see people curling their noses.” There is an assumption that it is inherently less serious than chart songs and valued less than music we more commonly associate with ‘art.’ Yet, by definition, ‘novelty’ is not restricted to comedic connotations. Specifically, it is defined as something ‘new, original and unusual,’ all qualities that are perceived as valuable by wider society. If the music is new, original and unusual, then it also must be affecting listeners in new, original and unusual ways. There are hundreds upon thousands of famous love songs in the world, but only one that proudly describes the definition of a Lancashire ‘barmcake’; the Hotpots’ creation is both unique and clearly targeted at a more specific audience. Consequently, the effect of such local novelty music replicates the summer 2018 feeling of singing along to ‘Three Lions’ with a bunch of strangers in a pub (albeit on a much smaller scale). It creates a respite from generic chart hits and an original sense of identity for those who resonate with the song, allowing these people who understand to unite together, have a laugh and sing along.

The Lancashire Hotpots can be described as more of a folk band than anything, “documenting the lives and stories of people in a specific locale”. Though their songs have a comedic undertone to them, they are cleverly pieced together in such a way that provides those in-the-know with a specific local identity. It is this local identity and that songs trying to reach a wider consumer market just cannot manage to give. However, in times where people are experiencing increasing anxiety about the state of the world and political divisions threaten to isolate us, simple things such as having a communal identity to relate to and the ability to have a laugh have become increasingly important. We are a nation of storytellers, and telling the stories of real people in real places in a way people can understand – similar, as Dickie pointed out, to grime artists telling stories about life in the inner cities – is infinitely valuable in developing our personal culture and uniting our communities.

Whilst nobody is ever going to argue that the likes of ‘Three Lions’ and ‘Chippy Tea’ are in the same class as the masterpieces of Mozart or ballads of Beyoncé, this certainly isn’t because they are less valuable. Instead, they are incomparable; their value comes from them serving an entirely different purpose and, if the summer of 2018 is anything to go by, serving that purpose well. As for Lancashire lads and lasses, local bands such as The Lancashire Hotpots represent a piece of home and lift your spirits no matter where you are listening from. It may be sentimental, but nothing can quite top that.

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