I live here!!
Posted on | November 19, 2008 | 1 Comment
I’ve been living in California for almost four months already, but it was only last Sunday that the fact that this really is my home now hit me full and hard. It was one of the most iconic images of the area - and of the US - which did it: the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Wow!
To see pics of the bridge, Point Reyes, Muir Woods and other places I saw with my wonderful friend Ollie during his visit from England, click here.
That historic night….
Posted on | November 5, 2008 | 5 Comments
I had intended to take a whole series of photos on election night, showing the reactions of people around me. By the time the actual event took place, however, I was so caught up in it myself that I no longer felt like an outsider looking in - and consequently failed to take many shots! Instead I was cheering, smiling and crying along with the rest of the party. The (rather blurry) shots that I did take can be viewed here.
It was a pleasure to see young Americans finally proud of their own country - and to feel proud of being here myself.
On being 26….
Posted on | November 3, 2008 | No Comments
The time has come when I have to admit that I am truly an adult (according to age at least) and the era of early-twentiesdom has been and gone. Does this matter? Not really, but it still makes me feel strange. I’ve decided the reason for this is the future perfect nature of age. The future perfect tense is ‘will have x’: hopefully by 36 I will have had children; by 40 I will have achieved tenure at a good academic institution; by 80 I will have enjoyed a good long life etc. etc. When I was a teenager I looked to no further than my twenties, and had lots of future perfect hopes regarding that apparently far-off time. Actually if I think of my younger self looking at me now, I realize that I’m doing pretty much what her daydreams consisted of - and more. But as I’ve got older, more external expectations concerning what one should be doing at what age have affected me enough to worry occasionally about the stage I am at in life: does it matter that I don’t have my own home at the age of 26? That I am a student once again and will be one until my early 30s? That it will be a long time until I receive a salary, let alone a decent one? My overall conclusion is that these things don’t really matter at all (and could even be celebrated), although it’s good to be aware of them, at least as alternatives by which to judge whether or not I’m doing what I want.
I am doing what I want…but I still feel strange being 26.
I’m pleased to know that others too have been preoccupied with reflections on their life and achievements upon reaching the seemingly insignificant age of 26: you can see Sam’s own 2006 blog post for an example. This is clearly serious stuff!!
If you’re interested in seeing how I celebrated this momentous occasion, click here.
It’s Pumpkin Time!!
Posted on | October 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
I’ve just a marvellous time picking out pumpkins for our porch along with Penny and Maria. So much fun!!!
The Queen’s English
Posted on | October 22, 2008 | 2 Comments
What is it about an English accent? During the past week or so I’ve experienced a spate of praise and expressions of cuteness regarding my BBC voice and English vocab: one time I was made to repeat the word ‘tattoo’ several times; another time great laughter ensued when I called a popsicle a lollypop. I guess such reactions are all complimentary, although they are subtly mixed: on the one hand, my voice seems to grant me automatic authority (particularly with undergrads); on the other, it makes people think of me as sweet and cutesy. This mixed response seems to reflect attitudes towards the British in general: authoritative yet also endearingly antiquated (one professor recently described how the generic Oxford scholar would apparently sit down and look at fragments of Simonides whilst delicately eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea. I let out a rather loud ‘ha!’ noise….). It’s also striking, for this is a state full of accents, particularly Asian and Hispanic - yet it’s the imperial sound of Queen’s English which retains some sort of ambivalent status more than almost any other.
On a different but related note, I find I’m constantly getting confused about how to express various basic words and phrases, as a result of differences in both vocab and stress between US and UK English. The word ‘garage’ is a case in point: pronounced in a UK English manner, with the stress on the first syllable, this seems to become incomprehensible to most people here. It will be interesting to see how my voice changes (or doesn’t) over the next five years….
A little note of incredulity
Posted on | October 10, 2008 | 5 Comments
I’ve just been browsing various news sites after hearing of the verdict on ‘Troopergate’, and came across this snapshot of political views recently given by various supporters of McCain.
What amazes me most about the quotes given there (e.g. “I don’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s an Arab”, from one Minnesotan woman) is that they reveal how great a chasm in terms of political views and knowledge exists between much of the rest of the US and this little bubble that is the Bay Area. Almost every house here has an Obama poster in the window; the republicans who do live in the area are like the democrats in generally being very well informed of the political background and policies of the presidential candidates. Once again, I think: what a huge country of extremes!
101%
Posted on | October 10, 2008 | 2 Comments
Disgruntled comments about grade inflation abound in the UK, where the once elusive A grade is now so common at GCSE and A Level that it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between the mediocre, good and excellent. Here in the US the situation is both similar and more extreme. Unlike the UK University marking system, whereby anything over 70 is extremely good (so a mark above 80 is truly exceptional), at Berkeley and by all accounts most other American institutions the standard boundaries are 97-100 for an A+, 95-96 for an A, 90-94 for A- etc. etc. So when I got 95 for my first short paper of the semester (on the subject of Greek mercenaries!), I was ecstatic…until I was advised by a fellow student to quiz the professor on exactly where those marks went. Another, more extreme example: my mark of 99 in a midterm exam on archaic Greek poetry caused me smug elation until the professor praised those who had got over 100%, who had enabled her to enter the class average as an impossibly high number.
Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it’s difficult to see how the subtle shades between degrees of academic quality can really be demonstrated by such a system, at least on paper. Such a situation is of course ironic, since marking out of a 100 should be able to do just that. The tendency to ensure everything is above 80 - and correspondingly to expect that it will be - also seems to reflect an aversion to failure through low numbers, even if really an 80 is just the same as an English 50. This could be linked to what can happen on such sites as ratemyprofessors.com, through which students have increasing power over their teachers’ employablity. That’s good in terms of keeping teaching standards high, but a friend of mine has suffered dearly from giving out a few low grades: the students’ reaction was indignation rather than acceptance that more effort was needed.
The British have sneakily got round some of these problems by sticking to the 1st/ 2:1/2:2/3rd/fail system alongside the 70+, 60+, 50+ etc. grade boundaries. The numbers of students achieving a 1st or 2:1 is higher than ever, and of course there’s no going back now, as employers these days expect a minimum of 2:1 on a graduate’s CV. But at the same time, as the range of numerical marks is kept lower, it is still possible to distinguish an exceptional from an excellent, a very good from good, and a good from a mediocre (when mediocre now would have been a 3rd in the past!). This system has a lot of problems, but at least it uses numbers 1-80!
How Berkeley Can You Be?
Posted on | September 28, 2008 | No Comments
The annual ‘How Berkeley Can you Be?’ parade is a brilliant example of the self-consciously individual and liberal nature of much of this town. Don’t get me wrong: I think that’s fantastic! Nevertheless, sometimes the rivalry for the most idiosyncratic house/car/outfit can be rather amusing…. I had a great time watching weird and wonderful people go by.
Politics politics….
Posted on | September 28, 2008 | 3 Comments
I followed US politics pretty closely whilst I was still back in the UK, but now that I’m actually living in the US I have surprised myself in becoming so greatly concerned with the run-up to the election . I’m not an American citizen and I don’t have a vote (though boy do I wish I did!), yet the forthcoming election matters to me more greatly than either of the last two English ones. This became particularly clear to me a few days ago, when a former student’s question of “would you stay in the US if McCain becomes president?” prompted me to have a bad dream in which exactly that happened. I have a great emotional attachment to the outcome of this election, in the sense that I fundamentally believe that on it depends the future of people across the world as well as within America.
There’s another aspect of electioneering here that has had a big impact on me, although in a very different way: the nature and extent of advertising carried out by the two sides. The sad and terrifying truth is that the majority of Americans gain their political knowledge and even views from the seldom unbiased accounts that appear before them on the TV. In the UK the amount of broadcasting time which each of the three main parties can claim before an election is strictly limited - and rightly so! But here TV advertising is such a crucial part of campaigning that each party had a new ad ready less than 12 hours after the first presidential debate on Friday - and perhaps even before it took place, as this quote from yesterday’s NY Times article, ‘The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won’, suggests:
“Mr. McCain’s campaign actually declared victory as early as 10 a.m. Friday, hours before the debate took place and even before he had agreed to take part in it. In what aides said was a mix-up, The Wall Street Journal posted an advertisement on its Web site 12 hours early that showed Mr. McCain proudly looking into the distance. “McCain Wins Debate!” read the text.”
Maybe in such an enormous country strict control on types of politcal advertising is impossible, and some might argue that, in the true democracy that America claims to be, there shouldn’t be such control in the first place. But there’s a lot to be said for a monitoring body that attempts to keep published information reasonably accurate and each party’s advertising slots equal.
Highs and Lows
Posted on | September 10, 2008 | 2 Comments
I think that this picture, which I took near the old ferry house in San Francisco last weekend, encapsulates much of what is both good and bad about the Bay area. On the right you see one of Louise Bourgeois’ spiders, an example of the investment in public space and art that is evident here. The trolley on the left, however, is not some sort of art installation, but rather that of a homeless man, containing all his worldy goods (later I saw him hanging his clothes out to dry over it). The number of homeless people in this part of the US - and particularly in Berkeley - is shocking, although at the same time not so surprising, given the mild weather, tolerance and eccentricities of the place. It’s funny to be somewhere where I often think “Wow, they’ve really got things right here!”, and yet be just as frequently confronted with such manifest signs of things not being right. What’s funny is the way in which the various homeless folk have by and large been accepted by the town, and indeed the eccentric reputation of Berkeley owes itself far more to them than to anyone else. Art and homelessness somehow seem to be equally significant in terms of the area’s identity.
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The bridge in all its glory
Date: 17/11/08
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Ollie's visit!
Date: 08/11/08