Much (more) time is lost

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Created by Bart King

Am I wrong to be disappointed? Then again, it's 1 a.m., I've been working on the adjectival use of the accusative case for the past four hours, alcohol sends me to sleep, I cry about dead ants, and the last time I saw a naked man was on a Channel 4 documentary about hernia operations... I should probably be glad to be rated above PG.

**NEWSFLASH** One of my housemates is rated PG. I feel happier now.

Much time is lost

Your Bra Is

Convertible Satin Ice Strapless Bra

What Kind of Bra Are You?

You are

Stretch Satin Thong

What Panties Should You Be Wearing?

I think they match surprisingly well, don't you? I'm also told by two separate quizzes that I should learn Swedish and that I should date a Swede... Spooky! Apparently, my Muppet character is Miss Piggy, my power colour is red and my ideal degree is a Master's in Fine Art. Who needs the Careers Service when you have Blogthings?

A dress no one else can wear

The BBC reported last week on the case of Shabina Begum, whose school has won its appeal against a ruling of unlawful exclusion for barring her from wearing a jilbab in school. Legally, I suppose it all makes sense; after all, she knew the school's policy and chose to attend there nonetheless. What I would like to see, instead of a challenge to the school's acting on its policy, is a challenge to the policy itself.

Those who criticise Shabina Begum for her actions tend to do so on the basis that leading Muslims advised the school that their uniform policy satisfies Islamic requirements. But she is quoted by the BBC as saying that "I feel it is an obligation upon Muslim women to wear this [the jilbab], although there are many other opinions." Those who criticise her decision are denying her a freedom of religious interpretation and expression, suggesting that mainstream opinion (and, let's face it, in most faiths that means "male opinion") should govern her, rather than any sense of personal spirituality and understanding of her own religion. This is, frankly, ridiculous. Mainstream opinion, for example, argues that drinking alcohol in moderation is perfectly acceptable within Christianity; some groups, however, choose to avoid it entirely on religious grounds. They are not being difficult or unreasonable, but expressing their own understanding of what their faith requires in a way which neither distorts nor goes against the spirit of that faith.

It seems to me that much of the criticism of Shabina Begum is a smokescreen to hide the fact that commentators simply don't like the idea that a Muslim woman is actually choosing a way of dressing which seems to them to pander to patriarchy and male supremacy. But, as I've argued before, I see the difference between Muslim views on dress and those of "modern" Western society as being one of degree, rather than of inherent content. As such, while I question the cultural background which makes such distinctions between the sexes apparently necessary, I nonetheless believe that Shabina Begum has the right to stand up for her own understanding of her faith, and applaud her for so doing.

As the fond Mother gratefully can give

Yesterday, of course, was Mothering Sunday, an occasion marked by a visit from my mother, since work has kept me pinned to the desk in Oxford this year. A few days' break was therefore much welcomed and we had a wonderful weekend, including a visit to Christ Church, where we saw Peter Rabbit (really, not even any alcohol involved), and a proper cooked breakfast at Brown's Cafe in the Covered Market which I think has provided me with a nice reserve of fat for the next few weeks. There was also a French Market on Broad Street over the weekend, which was particularly great since I'm never brave enough to speak French without the security of mum as a translator for the ones with odd accents.

Amongst its other beauties, Christ Church has some wonderful stained glass, and I've become particularly enamoured of a dragon in one of the windows. I told my housemate P that I would quite like the dragon to be my next boyfriend - after all, he'd be very protective, probably have interesting perspectives on the world, and all that. P's response was "yeah, but you know what people would say - 'What's he doing with her? What is he thinking?'" So maybe the dragon and I are doomed from the start by social pressure. People can be so narrow-minded at times.

Singing with my choir Sunday morning was fun, especially since all the women in the church were given a bunch of flowers for Mothering Sunday. Though the pressure this places on a 26-year-old lacking, as yet, even the slightest sign of parental status is quite significant! The sermon involved a question-and-answer session with the children: "So, who do we think about particularly on Mothering Sunday?" - "Jesus!" pipes up one of the munchkins. I do wonder whether there isn't some truth in the idea that Christianity is a little bit patriarchally-centred. Later: "The little boy whose mummy put him in a basket on the river, who did he grow up to be?" - "Jesus!" (same munchkin, I think). I guess that, 90% of the time, "Jesus" will be the correct answer to a Sunday-School teacher's question...

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Inner Space

Inner Space

in an octagonal tower, five miles from the sea
he lives quietly with his books and doves
all walls are white, some days he wears
green spectacles, not reading
riffling the pages – low sounds of birds and their flying

holding to the use of familiar objects
in the light that is not quite

Tom Raworth

That's one of my favourite poems. I think it's one of the best things I've ever read. I thought of it because I've just read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. I picked it from my shelf a couple of hours ago thinking to read a chapter before bed. I read it all, and now I'm too excited to sleep. It made me think about how good things are often so simple. Things like - walking around the yard in my pyjamas as midnight because I like getting my feet cold when I can't sleep, and not worrying about being thought odd for doing so. It's not being thought odd that's a problem, in fact, it's when people feel the need to control what they see as oddity. Or think that you do something odd to annoy or attract attention. I hear people say of children "ignore him - he's doing it for attention" - as though wanting attention were a bad thing. It's a bad thing if it's done at the wrong time or place or in excess or because it's hiding other problems. But children are as entitled to just plain old attention-because-I'm-bored-and-fed-up as anyone else. If I want attention from my friends, I go and visit them, or phone them, or we chat online. Kids can't always do that stuff. So they attract attention in different ways. I think children deserve to be treated so much better than they are. I was reading the BBC website about child abuse, and that's an extreme form of what I mean. But I also mean - why should children have to wait outside for the bus to school in the rain and then stay in damp clothes all day? And why should children be forced to spend social time with other children just because they're all the same age? We wouldn't expect adults to put up with it. Children are more important than adults in so many ways, especially because what you say or do to a child can stay with them for the rest of their life. I remember being told as a child that I had been rude to ask to try someone's chocolate bar, and would not be given any chocolate as a punishment. My parents insist it never happened, yet I can see where I was (entrance to Swansea Market) and what the chocolate bar was (Double Decker) very clearly. And up until recently, I still found it difficult to ask someone for a try of something they're eating.

Apologies for this navel-gazing, Reader. My housemate tells me that blogging is narcissistic. Maybe it is, but I do it mainly because I enjoy it. I'm always a little surprised when people tell me they read what I write. Though I pretend to be cross with them for not looking more often!

The book also made me think about other things, including my previous post. Because in the eyes of the main character, biblical stories boil down to lies - a metaphor or a parable describes something in terms of something that it is not, which he sees simply as untrue. Call me stupid, but I'd really never thought of it that way.

****

It's been the week for strange news from home - today brought the announcement that my mother's ex-head of Faculty when she was a teacher has won the Lottery. Which is nice, and one feels oddly excited while knowing that in fact it has no personal effect whatsoever. But the infinitely sadder news was that an old schoolfellow of mine, having just married her long-term partner, woke up the next morning to find him dead beside her. And again, she's not someone with whom I've kept in touch, so there's no real personal meaning, and yet I feel so terribly sorry for her.

Okay, this is turning into a late-night ramble of little interest to anyone but the narcissistic author, so off I toddle.

"I’m strong and holy, I must do what I've been told."

I'm reading a book, The Dark Side of Christian History. I'm sure you can make a guess as to the subject matter, and the text isn't really any more subtle than its title. But it's made me think, nonetheless. Christianity bases itself, quite solidly, on the Bible as its foundation. Whether or not you believe in the Bible as the Word of God, it should be pretty uncontentious that this is the coherent text of what Christians accept as the truth, right? Uh-uh. No banana. Not only do Catholics disagree with other denominations about which books are canonical, but according to Ellerbe's book, a writer in 450 stated that there were about 200 different gospels circulating in his diocese alone. The Gnostic gospels, for example, place very different emphases on ways of believing and worshipping God from those of the four now-canonical gospels. They encourage a closer and more direct relationship between the individual and God - which, of course, wouldn't suit the need for power of ecclesiastical authorities. All of which leads one ot think that the Bible - or at least the Christian scripture - is, in fact, no more than an arbitrary selection of texts based on the desires of a power-hungry, anti-Semitic, male-dominated Church.

Food for thought, especially at Lent.

After all, if the Church is nothing but an artificial edifice, whose laws and doctrines were created as a matter of political expediency, what on earth am I doing as a member of it? I've long been worried by aspects of modern Christianity which I would have hoped had died out at around the same time that heliocentricism became accepted. Its ingrained prejudices, for example, and its inability to recognise that discriminating against Jews, Muslims, homosexuals or women for religious reasons is still anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic and sexist. There's no Get Out of Jail Free card to be had by hiding behind religion in these matters, as far as I'm concerned. Our churches are full of infighting and squabbling, we can't hold on to members without playing guitars and promising them that gays go to hell, we won't ordain women as bishops because... erm... well, just because the man in the beard said so - and I've genuinely spoken to people who would rather children stayed in local authority care than were adopted by a gay couple, or who think AIDS is God's punishment on the "homosexual community", or that unconverted Jews go straight to hell. And I don't believe any of that.

So, who's right - them or me? I can only conclude that, considering the history of Christianity, they are right, at least in an historical sense. Because they can quote the Bible ad nauseam and show theological positions and traditions to support their arguments. And all that can be argued by the brave souls on the other side is that we have to move on from the ancient cultural context of the Bible. In other words, if Christianity is strictly Bible-based, then liberal views can't be supported in a Christian context.

I think maybe I've just convinced myself out of a religion...

Green Resistance

Odd day, today. Lack of sleep was a big problem - it went like this: Wednesday is tutorial day, so Tuesday evening is spent designing and finishing off the tutorial worksheet. Tuesday evening at about 11, sheet was finished. More work, however, needed doing on materials for next week's class which needed handing out today. By 1 a.m. this also was done. Saved. Happy. Opened tutorial worksheet in order to print out copies. Realised had saved next week's jottings over worksheet. Cried. Just a tiny bit, but I was very tired so I guess it's excusable. So, at 3 a.m. I finally went to bed. Tutorial went well today, though, so I guess I shouldn't grumble. Especially not since it's Lent and I'd go to hell for sure.

Anyway, so, since two of my housemates are big Green people (ha ha, yes), I was encouraged to go on a demo which took place today in Oxford, protesting against the University's plans not to renew its contract for green electricity provision. I won't go into all the ins and outs of it, see here for more info, but it was quite an inspirational event and very well attended, especially considering the usual level of student apathy here (which includes me, I hasten to add).

You see this egg?

A change of style is due, I think. You may not have noticed it, but up until now every single one of my posts has been entitled with a quotation from the works of T. S. Eliot. Yes, I am that much of a Tom fan. But finding appropriate words, even from the master of the appropriate word, is becoming more and more difficult. So, it's goodbye to the master (although this post's title is a final homage). From now on, I'm going to find interesting poetry quotations from around the world and the timeline... and if you write in telling me the poet and the poem, I might even send you a Kinder Egg.

I once won a Kinder Egg during a lecture series on Gothic literature, for the feat of remembering the name of a rhetorical term. "Occupatio", I think it was. Anyway, Dr. Jon Mee (for it was he) promised me a Kinder Egg; forgot to bring one the following week; brought one the week after but I wasn't there; the week after that, he, I and the egg were all in one place, but he'd sat on it. The week after that, I got a new egg. And it tasted all the better because I'd earned it...

Deny the voice

It's Lent. That time of the year when those of us who are bound to superstitions invented hundreds of years ago by big, beardy men are compelled to give something up. The traditional thing is chocolate, which I have duly foresworn for forty days. I've also given up complaining, however. Immediately upon taking this decision, bad things started to happen. The culmination of this is that my favourite DVD won't play, I have a mouth ulcer which makes eating almost impossible, and my housemate has used, and failed to wash, both my non-stick pans when I really want to make scrambled eggs. I state these things merely as facts, you understand. No complaining here. God has a cruel sense of humour.

Thou hast nor youth nor age

A disturbing discovery, today. I think I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of the TV series Alias, right? Well, my super-duper favourite character in Alias is Jack Bristow, the heroine's father, played by Victor Garber. Jack (see photo, left) is the object of many a secret fantasy of mine. He's certainly what my housemate, S, would call a "silver fox" - a hideous term which apparently denotes gentlemen of the older generation who still have that certain je ne sais quoi (roughly translated in English = "Phwoooooaaarrrr!")

Anyway, this preamble is merely an introduction to what happened today. I was idly searching the internet for information about Alias - whether there would be a new series, all that stuff - when I came across the fact that Gorgeous Garber was, in fact, the lead in the original Godspell, and in the movie made of the musical, playing (would you believe it?) Jesus. I discovered a pretty good photograph (see right), which shows him with worryingly big hair and lacking, I think, most of Jack Bristow's gigantic sex appeal. I love Godspell - it's certainly head-and-shoulders above Lloyd Webber's stuff - but Victor? Surely not!

I'm traumatised. There's no other word for the effect this has had on me. The thought of sexy Victor dancing around in clown trousers with a ginger afro and clearly weighing less than a sparrow on a diet just doesn't do it for me, in the slightest. And next time Jack draws his big, shiny gun in Alias, I'm not going to be able to help hearing that immortal Monty Python line - "He's not the Messiah: he's a very naughty boy!"

If the weather is foul

Last week's weather was just a bit bemusing. First there was sun, then rain, then sun, then hail, then snow, then sun, then snow. And all in one day. Our garden was all white and blankety for a little while, but yesterday the flowers were blooming in the sunshine.

Finished working on my first text for the OED, a fifteenth-century English chronicle. I love medieval spelling, if only because it occasionally throws up gems such as "the cuntesse" (countess), the "Arsbishop" of Canterbury and, in a moment worthy of Blackadder, the "duke of Ostrich". It also entertained with accounts of the king of France dancing around dressed up as a wildman, only for his pitch-covered costume to catch on fire, and a lovingly detailed description of a certain king of England being killed with a red-hot poker inserted into his Archbishop. I warn anyone who intends to piss me off in the future - don't; I know exactly how to do the red-hot poker trick now, and I'm not afraid to use it...