Janua Caeli

I saw an interesting advertisement on the side of a bus when I was walking home yesterday. Mainly interesting for its use of statistics, which continued to perplex me all the rest of the way up the hill. Unfortunately, I cannot find that particular ad on the internet, to link in for discussion purposes. I realise that this is why we all have camera-phones nowadays. Or better Google-fu.

Anyway, the ad was for a new beer in the Steinlager range, "Steinlager Edge", and it concentrated on the concentration of the beer, which has 3.5% alcohol. The text of the ad went something like this:

Steinlager Edge: 3.5%
The chance that you'll keep pace with your mates, and outpace them the next day: 96.5%

The thing that I found curious was that 96.5%. Such an exact number. Obviously, 96.5% is the complement of 3.5% in making a whole, and the neatness of that symmetry appeals even before one can apply logic to find other reasons why it might make sense.

The ad implies that the drinker of Steinlager Edge wants to consume as many drinks, measured by can, as his drinking buddies, but skip ill effects such as hangovers, which might normally result from drinking this quantity. There's a lot about Kiwi drinking culture right there. You can tell that someone would want this, because that is what the ad promises. Or doesn't quite promise. After all, there's only a 96.5% chance.

The number does several things. The magic quantity, 3.5% alcohol, which the beer contains, is reinforced because its opposite is also provided. Every time a reader of the ad does that tiny bit of arithmetic, 100 - 96.5, the number 3.5% is more firmly etched in the brain. It becomes memorable because it's not just provided in the text, but is also an answer to a question implied in the text. Etc.

The number 96.5% also works in mysterious ways. There's a certain predisposition we have when encountering percentages over 90%. "98% fat free!" echoes in our brains, along with "I'm 95% sure." We know what this means. Just this side of reality. Then there's that 0.5% part. Any percentage with a decimal place suggests the kind of scientific precision that made percentages popular. Because before 99% was popular, there had to be experiments in which something happened 99 times and didn't happen once. There is a kind of hypnosis going on when we see a number like 96.5%.

In fact, that context tells us a lot more than the number does. 96.5%? What does that mean? In trying to find a totally literal meaning for this advertisement, all I can devise is that because the addressee is drinking beverages with 3.5% of a performance-decreasing chemical, he is 96.5% likely to have undiminished performance the next day. Does that make sense? Perhaps. But it doesn't work if you look at it too closely. How does it fit in with "keeping pace" in drinking? He/she will drink 3.5% slower? No.

The thing is, the number 96.5%, in advertising context, is interchangeable with 97% and 98% and 99.25%. I am reminded of Watership Down, and how, for rabbits, any number over 5 became "a thousand"/"lots". We do that too. 96.5% means "lots". Also "many". And we can believe "many". In the context of the ad, we can accept:

"You, drinking a slightly less alcoholic drink than your mate, are probably but not certainly going to be able to drink as much as they are (in liquid quantity) and feel better tomorrow".

Can you find fault with that? I hope not. But look at what I had to do to tighten it up. I took the statistics out. And what is it that made the ad memorable, powerful by force of association, familiar? The statistics.

That 96.5% does not have a validity commensurate with its precision. (Ooooh, syllables.) In effect, it means nothing. It's like the square root of minus one. It isn't really there in terms the average person can understand (myself included), but with it, you can accomplish many things. It is - just like the square root of minus one - an imaginary number.

Conclusion: When we look at that 96.5%, in a context we recognise, continuing a noble tradition, we believe it and don't believe it and believe it all over again. We know we aren't meant to take it literally. That's why we understand it. Isn't that weird?

Hello.

Noteworthy events since my last post:

-Our flat's meterboard caught fire.
-Paul and Ellen returned to New Zealand.
-We went without hot water for a week. To get at and repair our hot water cylinder, the various tradesmen who were enlisted to the cause had to open up a boarded up room in our house which we had never previously investigated.
-Christine and Robert had their retirement party.
-Joel and I had a movie night.
-The All Whites beat Bahrain to make it to the world football championship finals.

The retirement party followed up a yearly tradition of Christine and Robert, who were until recently the Vic English department's medievalists, and have been in the habit of having a medieval-style party for their friends and students around this time each year. Medieval recipes, lighting by candle only, music and poetry recitals by guests, etc.

It has been a less established tradition that there is a dramatic performance, often by the Old Icelandic class. Either last year or two years ago, Christine's class did Thrymskvitha, a comic poem about the gods with quite a lot of cross-dressing. They did it brilliantly, with all the lines in Old Norse, supplemented by captions on sticks. It was really funny. This year, our class decided to perform the story of Audun and the Bear.

We didn't really expect to carry off a performance as entertaining as the Thrymskvitha class. The clever part of our play came into the ending. You don't need to know much about the story of Audun and the bear - Audun is an intrepid Icelander who buys a bear in Greenland and takes it to King Svein in Denmark. And at the end of the story, there is a touching bit in which he repays a debt to King Harald of Norway by giving him a gift.

The bulk of our play was pretty funny too, if I say so myself. Edward was an extremely, extremely camp King Svein, Miriam was a very straight-faced and stubborn Audun, and the bear was Christabel, who kept trying to eat me (I was Svein's corrupt steward Aki). Towards the end of the play, Christine had moved to sit in the front row of the audience, and was totally caught up in the final scene with Audun and King Harald.

Then Miriam said to Harald (played by Brian), "And King Svein told me that I was to keep this armband, and only give it away if there was a noble person to whom I owed a very great debt. And I have found that person," and walked straight to Christine, with all the rest of the class (the five people who made it to the party, anyway) charging after her. We hauled Christine to her feet, absolutely dumbfounded, and protesting, "This isn't how the story ends!" and gave her all of the gifts that Audun has in the story - an arm-band, a sack of silver, a bear, a ship. With varying degrees of symbolic representation.

It had started off as my idea. I was particularly proud of the arm-band; it was actually a pearlescent spiral circlet from New Caledonia, but Audun's arm-band in the story is gold, so I had wrapped it in shiny gold paper so that it looked like an obvious prop. Gold paper to make it appropriate, and conceal the real value of the gift underneath. Then there was the obvious bag of chocolate coins, though Ed and I had gone to a chocolatier and mixed in some discs of high-quality chocolate. I had found a small white teddybear while out in town with Ellen and Meredith the day before, and Ed and I bought a cat-collar to put around its neck. Our last item was a real find - a toy ship made out of a nautilus shell with sails of cloth and a metal mast. It was gorgeous.

I think she was really pleased. She was certainly utterly surprised, and I was so proud of that. We had had a really hard time thinking of suitable gifts to give her, from our whole class, and I think that this was the best we could do. If it's the thought that counts, in gift-giving, we showed thought.

I also got to enjoy the results of giving Alex C a ticket to the Guillermo del Toro Q&A session on Wednesday. She squeed a LOT. It made me happy.

You haven't seen me, because I've been writing essays. There was that Iambic Spyglass essay for Chaucer that I mentioned. Then the week after that was spent researching a Morphology essay, then I took the next week off work to finish Morphology (heartbreakingly) and start Icelandic, went to Auckland for a weekend, mostly researched my Icelandic Saints essay, came home, went without sleep for two nights in a row in order to finish the Icelandic essay, finished it, and... yes. Essays.

This Chaucer essay will not DIE, but I have finally penned an introduction. It talks about Towers of Babel and yo-yos. Now could you all please promise me that I will suffer no penalties of disdain if I name this essay "The Iambic Spyglass".

Thanks.

I am unhealthily exhausted! Doesn't feel too bad. It is Friday night, 11pm. I have slept 2 hours since Wednesday, and I pretty much forgot to eat today (except for my boss's sugar supplies, and of course excepting the bowl of pasta I polished off five minutes ago.)

It feels so good to be in my own bed.

It also feels good, in a slightly smug/masochistic way, to know that I can do two all nighters in a row, do all the work required of me at my regular job, attend classes, get my assignment in on time, and rock for eight hours at Market Research.

Market Research was fun tonight as I went into "bounce" mode - trying to get everyone else enthusiastic by broadcasting my own enthusiasm in palpable waves - aided by sugar. Our boss brought out a sack of barley sugars and a pack of pixie sticks, and before the night was up, was howling with laughter and vowing never to bring us pixie sticks again.

She was in a similar condition to me as had just worked a previous 9am-9pm shift on the job, without any breaks longer than 5 minutes, and had also had to travel to and forth from Waikanae.

But at some point in the last year, Kristene has stopped seeming so irritating and inferior to Charlie. She's really rather neat now.

I love market reseach, by the way. I love contact and targets and team structure.

Also, a live wild mouse just fell on my foot and ran away. This may mean I will have to stop ignoring it and must find a way to remove its presence from our lives.

So, after I sent that email off to the ENLA students, professing my support of the Retain Old English campaign, I was swept up into a lot more campaigning, with a touch of conspiracy and internet drama.

Today and tomorrow, key English department staff are meeting to decide, among other things, the future of the Medieval English courses. We asked to make a short appearance at this meeting, to clarify our position and ask/answer questions, but this was deemed not appropriate. Unsurprisingly.

I am biting my nails a bit right now. If they make a decision that is not in favour of the Medieval courses, what else can we do? Not a lot. Keep writing emails, is all. It is somewhat disheartening that the input students have into the courses on offer is so very small, and that our powers seem to extend merely to the level of annoyance.

In other news, it was a productive weekend. Joel and I were meant to visit his family in Masterton, but on Thursday I believed I was coming down with a cold. Out of concern for Joel's grandmother's delicate health, we decided to postpone our visit. I was very chagrined to be totally healthy by the weekend. On the other hand, this was maybe a sign that I needed a rest, and that was what I gave myself. I studied, I sat on the deck in the sun, Joel took me out to brunch on Sunday, and I kept socialising to a gentle minimum.

Greatest accomplishments of the weekend:
-Beginning the design of Project Bauble, with a lot of help from

20thcenturyvole. I am grateful! I have no artistic talent, beyond ideas, but she just went, "Oh, you want an angel? Cool," and converted it to pixels. Huzzah.
-Going into a cleaning frenzy and creating a study space within my bedroom. This is quite an achievement. I have been shunning my room for the last couple of months, because I have no idea what to do with many of the items that adorn my floor. Yet I have compartmentalised them, as well as giving myself a desk and a bookshelf. Yay, yay, and yay.

Dear [Students heading a protest to retain Victoria's ENLA major]

I hear you are seeking input from all levels of students who might have a stake in the continuation of medieval English courses at Victoria, and in the possible appointment of a new medievalist in the department. I am an Honours student who has had the good luck to take Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and Chaucer papers at 200 to 400 levels. The 'good' part of the 'good luck' comes from how much it has benefited me. The 'luck' part of the 'good luck' comes from the pure chance that I will complete a full set of undergraduate and Honours courses in the last year that they have been confidently offered, while you do not have that guarantee.

The way that the cut-off point for the ENLA major and associated courses has been placed in the middle of your own studies seems awfully arbitrary to me, and I would like to offer you my sympathies. At the same time, I am hopeful, because it appears to give you a strong case for deferring such a cut off point: in the interim, and maybe indefinitely, should a new instructor be appointed. In this way, your bad luck could give us all an opportunity for good intention rather than good chance to prevail.

Admittedly, "us all" is a sweeping generalisation. It is easier to describe what I have received from the courses which are to be axed.

From Old English 215, I learned what terms like 'dative' and 'reflexive' meant when applied to my native language: where they could be applied, or why they couldn't. I began to grasp the continuum of History as laid out in a textbook of dates and rigid statements, and History as a biased story of events, recorded fallibly and passed on. I learned that saints' lives and Viking invasions can be funny. I learned how to use a 'foreign' glossary, which is not as easy as it sounds. Reading Wulf and Eadwacer, I learned how much power a translator of any language has, and how little certainty.

From Old English 321, I learned how much difference a 'silent edit' can make, and why anyone would argue over a comma that might be a full stop. This sounds embarrassingly soppy, but I really learned to take pride in my own status as a BA student because of the main assignment of this class, which was to take an Old English manuscript facsimile all the way to an edition with glossary, introduction, and notes. From high school to university, critical essays on literature are a known quantity, and although I have been proud of some critical essays I've turned in, I haven't remembered them. I remember the 321 assignment because it felt like something "real scholars" would do, something that required great precision, problem-solving, and background knowledge.

From Middle English 322, I learned to recognise the word 'what' in its many, many forms. I learned how a dialect could be traced as though it were a kind of biological strain, as it migrated, competed, mutated, or died out. I learned to recognise markers of one dialect or another, and more importantly, I learned how experts before me had identified these markers.

From History of the English Language 224, I learned to use the Oxford English Dictionary Online - which is a great example of something that high school students could probably benefit from and which I didn't access until my fifth year of university. I learned about the history of printing, and what 'Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe' really means to a diachronic student of language. And I learned what Middle English texts looked like to students who hadn't studied 215, 321, or 322; that is, I learned how much of an advantage I'd been given!

(That only covers the undergraduate courses... but I have not yet completed the Honours courses, and besides, I have probably worn out the word 'learned'.)

In particular, it was of enormous benefit to me to take some of these courses in conjunction with others run by the Linguistics department. I had an advantage in the "Danish and Comparative Germanics" linguistics course, because one of the 'Germanics' that I could compare was the Anglo-Saxon tongue. I also benefited a lot from taking "Middle English" concurrently with the Linguistics department's "Sociolinguistics" course, as they both dealt with the interaction between dialects of a language. I am taking the Linguistics "Morphology" paper now, partly because of the etymology knowledge given to me by the English Language papers, and the assignment I am working on right now focuses on the Peterborough Chronicle.

The sense of context, of how the work of scholars before me as well as the words of scholars before me have created the material that is our literary heritage, was one of the two greatest benefits of the English Language major for me. The other benefit was the ability to cross-train in Literature and Linguistics, learning to appreciate the knowledge one imparted all the more because I could immediately apply it to the other.

Having the benefit of timing, I am not as directly disadvantaged by the potential loss of the ENLA major as you are. In arguing for the retention of courses which relate to the history of the English language, I would feel a bit of a hypocrite if I could not give reasons that this would benefit me personally. The most obvious reason is that I would like other students to have the same opportunities to learn that I have had. The second is that I would like that cross-training potential to be there; when I investigate the prosody of noun+noun compounds or the different branches of the prefix for- in the course of Linguistics, I would love to be able to consult with historical-English experts in my own university. Indeed, I would like to be able to ask questions about these things within New Zealand, which looks as though it is becoming more difficult. The third is that Honours is hardly the end of graduate studies, but it looks as though it will be the end of medieval English language studies for me, in this university. That is a pity.

In general, I don't think I can over-emphasise the value of learning English as a language at university level. It is a common lament that grammar is no longer taught in schools. It is widely accepted that it expands one's mind to learn another language. It is necessary, through studying an unfamiliar tongue, to gain an appreciation of structures and patterns that are invisible in the language we speak every day. So, learning English from its roots provides the student with grammatical skills, the flexibility of a foreign language learner, and greater fluency in their first language, all at once. If I am proselytising, it is because I have experienced all of these benefits first-hand, with history and poetry included.

...And finally, I would like to call as my witness Thomas Jefferson, in his Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia:

...Anglo-Saxon is of peculiar value. We have placed it among the modern languages, because it is in fact that which we speak, in the earliest form in which we have knowledge of it. It has been undergoing, with time, those gradual changes which all languages, ancient and modern, have experienced; and even now needs only to be printed in the modern character and orthography to be intelligible, in a considerable degree, to an English reader. It has this value, too, above the Greek and Latin, that while it gives the radix of the mass of our language, they explain its innovations only. Obvious proofs of this have been presented to the modern reader in the disquisitions of Horn Tooke; and Fortescue Aland has well explained the great instruction which may be derived from it to a full understanding of our ancient common law, on which, as a stock, our whole system of law is engrafted. It will form the first link in the chain of an historical review of our language through all its successive changes to the present day, will constitute the foundation of that critical instruction in it which ought to be found in a seminary of general learning, and thus reward amply the few weeks of attention which would alone be requisite for its attainment; a language already fraught with all the eminent science of our parent country, the future vehicle of whatever we may ourselves achieve, and destined to occupy so much space on the globe, claims distinguished attention...

(Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, 4th August 1818, pages 440-441; http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefRock.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1 )

Yours sincerely,

Sara Berger, student

PS: Take that, Zombie St Olaf.

Imagine you manage a coven of baseball-playing vampires. The Cullen family is really strong this year and you want to bring in a ringer. Which currently active MLB baseball player do you sire?

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SSar: Middleman was so great today! It's like "vampire puppets" are now their own genre! There exist two episodes of TV about vampire puppets!
Joel: Actually, one of them really involved muppets.
SSar: What's the difference?
Joel: Kind of a mop, kind of a puppet...
SSar: What? Come on!
SSar: *knocks on Alex's door* Alex! Are muppets a subset of puppet?
Alex: They're not quite a mop... nor yet a puppet...
SSar: Not you too?
Joel: Ahah. I have frustrated SSar.
SSar: But he heard you.
Alex: Actually, no. I've heard Homer Simpson.
SSar: Oh.
Joel: I like it that Alex and I have a mystical unspoken understanding about such things.
SSar: It was just spoken.
Joel: Mystical, then.
SSar: You explained it.
Joel: Mystical things can have explanations! Look at the midi-chlorians!
SSar: *stares*
Joel: Actually, please don't look at the midi-chlorians.

Apologies for spellings of midi-chlorians.

( whining about unproductive study )

Also, we had a fun and pleasant movie night last night. I was not particularly wowed by Repo: The Genetic Opera, because although it was very pretty to look at and I liked the graphic-novel-style cut-ins, there seemed to be no substance to it whatsoever. The songs had lyrics of the most prosaic possible quality, the tunes were utterly unmemorable, and the darkness of the dystopia was simply gloomy. So I fled to wash dishes - but soon everyone else had given up on the movie and came to the kitchen to keep me company.

Reefer Madness was more fun.

June 13-17

*I went to Auckland
*I attended the first concert of Simon and Garfunkel's current world tour with

deepbluemermaid and helped carry the music when their equipment failed
*I studied even while on holiday
*I spoke with a childhood friend
*I bought a tea cosy. About to use that, actually.

June 18-19

*I played a heck of a lot of Plants Vs. Zombies, despite many odd bugs in the game
*I attended an indie fashion show in which two of my friends were modelling. It was neat and a little pretentious and gorgeous and there were many dance routines
*I went to a games night at

wih's house and learned to play Chrononauts and Settlers of Catan

June 20-24

*I went to Sydney with Joel
*We turned Saturday into two days
*We went to Taronga Zoo, getting into whisker range of the wallabies and enjoying a trained bird show which included owls, parrots, kites, and an eagle
*We saw Sydney Harbour by night and by day
*We ate on a boat. Actually, I was on boats a lot.
*We wandered through the Herb Garden at the Botanical Gardens and I can now tell you that the first oral contraceptive was developed by the aid of a plant called the 'air potato'
*I watched several episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena
*I went whale watching - twice
*I ran from the State Library to Darling Harbour in order to catch the whale watching boat, with the help of a tourist map
*I went to a museum with the combined themes of Opals and Dinosaurs and quizzed an opal expert for an hour
*I went to Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art
*I ate very good pizzas at reasonable prices (gasp) on the waterfront
*We went on a ferris wheel
*I found and bought a bead loom
*I hung around an aboriginal art store, chatting to the clerk who was writing a masters thesis in Japanese
*I admired leather masks imported from Italy
*I went to the Powerhouse Museum
*I had a bubble bath
*I discovered and bought a rare role-playing book, called Paranoia, for the use of

starzend as a GM
*I bought Chrononauts for Joel
*I had lunch with Joel's Sydney colleagues
*I was the recipient of a Very Nice Surprise from Joel
*We had been engaged for one year on June 22nd

June 25-30

*I attended a genuine business conference, with representatives from things like Meridian Energy and the Department of Corrections, wearing a name tag for "Veridian Dynamics"
*I bumped into four friends by accident on my very first day back from Sydney
*I made up a costume out of clothes from Farmers, went to a medieval party called the Feast of Fools, drank mulled wine, learned four or five dances, and followed a live ass around a hall in a procession for the Vespers of the Ass
*I went to the vege market
*I wrote a really nice letter to Joel's grandmother
*I advanced two levels in Starcraft

And now I am back at work in the daytime and procrastinating on an Icelandic essay during the evenings.

Hmmm... I am finding this all a bit much to write about in detail!

SSar: I not only love you, but I am desperately in love with you.
Joel: You don't need to be too desperate. You have me.
SSar: Ah, but there is a poignancy to my desperation. I long to love you as much as I did the last moment, and as much as I will in the next moment.
Joel: Awww.
SSar: You mean that made sense?
Joel: Not necessarily, but it was very sweet.

The holiday in Auckland proceeds well. I went to the Simon & Garfunkel concert with the sparkling

deepbluemermaid, and it lived up to expectations. A lot of the songs were very jazzed up, even 'I am a Rock', which I never expected to hear sung in any tone but sad/emotional. There was a highly corny moment in which the mikes cut out during 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', and the audience, most of whom were probably already singing along, picked up the tune and sang it strongly back to the confused-looking performers. Technological aids were soon repaired, and Garfunkel thanked us effusively for our generosity. I think it was staged. The songs I was really hoping for didn't come up - Cool Cool River and 50 Ways to Leave your Lover - but many did that I've enjoyed over the years. It was surely made more fun by having a companion along.

I've been getting a lot of sleep, unable to rouse myself before 11am. A habit I must break tomorrow, as I'm to put in a day of study at Auckland University's library. Actually, this will sound nerdy, but just looking at their catalogue intrigues and excites me. I may find some really good resources here, although the catalogue gives the the vague impression that Auckland Uni hasn't taught Icelandic studies since 2004. That is only a vague impression, note.

My accidental purchases include an orange and brown tea-cosy with silver beads (hey, I went out of my way to go to a craft show, and it was the only thing there that I could have wanted. When will people stop making those useless mosaic candle-holders that can't be re-used? I do disdain them so) - and - hey, OMG - Lindt is now making pear chocolate. With almonds. LOVE.

I had a lovely evening with Pip and Tim tonight. They have found a good one-bedroom flat in Grey Lynn, and they cooked me a fancy dinner, a sort of chicken-chorizo risotto, and custard baked in ramekins, and we had a nice, casual chat. Then they walked me most of the way home, through Kingsland to Eden Valley. The lights of the cranes around Eden Park are a startlingly vivid addition to the skyline.

Oh, and Mum found me fairy lights in an opshop! Hurrah! I do hope they work!

From Levelt 1989 (Speaking: From Intention to Articulation):

"It is also interesting that Motley (1980) was able to create a biasing conversational setting. In this experiment he used target pairs preceded by "standard" phonological interference (biasing) items. The target items were of two kinds. One kind is exemplified by shad-bock, which when preceded by appropriate interference items may lead to the slip bad-shock; this was the "electrical" kind of target. The other targets were "sexy" ones, such as lood-gegs and goxi-firl (the intended slips are obvious). The two target types were mixed in the list. Half the subjects were attached to fake electrodes and told that mild shocks could be given. The luckier half of subjects underwent no such threat, but had an attractive and provocatively dressed female experimenter. The resulting slips corresponded to the condition of treatment. In the electrical condition, "electrical" speech errors prevailed; in the sexy condition, "sexy" speech errors were dominant. Because all these speech errors were induced by phonological interference items, Motley concluded that the difference was an editing effect. When one expects things electrical, a phonological slip that produces such an item will not be filtered out by the editor, and similarly for sexy items. There is an attentional bias in the subject."

Linguists. Kinky.

I have an all-day exam on this stuff tomorrow. Gah to my lecturer for instituting this concept: get the exam at 9am, work from home, produce three essays of 1000 words each, submit by 5pm. On the other hand, I will spend the entire day buzzed on study tea. Beware.

It's been a very up and down weekend. I have a cold. I stayed at home and got study done while Joel went off to Tara's party, which was apparently awesome. This suited us both. I got a lot of work done on my project yesterday, thanks to four particularly helpful role-playing friends. Then I went to go up the hill, and missed my bus, because of seeing someone in the supermarket I hadn't bumped in to for three months.

Yesterday evening I turned on the stove's back right element, which is a temperamental bugger, and which promptly exploded, instantly burning a hole through the metal of my best saucepan, which I had placed on the element prior to turning it on. This shorted out the power for our whole house. (Luckily the flats above and below only experienced some flickering). An hour and a half later, an electrician was replacing a fuse dating from the 1960s in the fuse box behind the meter housing. (Joel and I had been keeping warm and amused by huddling together and playing Portal on our laptops).

It is still bloody cold. Snow in parts of Wellington yesterday, which is highly unusual. Today has a high of 11* and a low of 3*, which is considered Nasty. I am typing with fingerless gloves on (yay possumfurry gloves (although I was heavily dependent on the ones Erin made for me last week)).

OH and as I type this the light bulb in the spare room has begun dripping water again. You know this is a bad thing when you can hear the impact on a towel through a wall and several metres away. Sigh. To be discussed with landlord.

Okay now to be productive! Chaucer, Lehiste, Angantyr, Warren, here I come!

I just came back from Cardenio, a "reconstructed" "Shakespeare" play, which I thought I'd like. Sure, I would only understand 3/4 of the dialogue, but at least the whole audience would be in the same boat, since no one would have had a chance to read the play beforehand. Joel came with me.

I got so frustrated I left in the intermission.

Most of this was to do with a modern sensibility. The seducer, Don Ferdinando, tricks his first "love", Violante, into having sex with him, then tries to marry his best friend's beloved, Lucinda. While the first half of the play ended with no one wed and everyone unhappy, I just knew that we were going to have a perfect pairing of the two beloveds, Cardenio and Lucinda, as well as the less perfect pairing of the rapist and rapee. Plot confirmed by reading some reviews. I was bothered - not just by the plotline, which is a big problem - but by the laughter at the audience during the near-rape scene. I admit that a Shakespearean audience - or a Jacobean audience, given the play's history - would not find the tricking of Violante disturbing. But do we need to be a Shakespearean audience to appreciate a Shakespearean play? According to the doctrine, they're supposed to appeal to all ages. And I think I would have felt a bit more comfortable if everyone around me had also winced at a lady being borne off into the darkness screaming, "Wait! Wait!"

I fumed further when Cardenio, having seen that Lucinda is prepared to marry the evil Don Ferdinando WHEN EVERYONE WAS FORCING HER TO, went mad, talked foully of women, and started a round of self-harm. Go cry emo-kid. I also understand that this worked better with an audience 400 years ago, when the betrayal of women justified madness - at least in drama - but the plight of the women characters was so much worse than his, and their choices so far fewer, that it made me deeply unimpressed.

Admittedly, this ran true to a theme (the kind of thing that high-school students can write up with bullet-points and flow charts) about the flawed ideals of chivalry. The lord Don Ferdinando was the antithesis of noble behaviour and the exemplar of noble privilege. The supposed good underdog, Cardenio, was humming the right emotional key, but was utterly ineffective.

Then you had the comic relief, Don Quixote himself. Obviously, as the exemplar of chivalric ideals and as an illustration of gross distance between intent and achievement, he was the "other face" of the chivalric ideal of Cardenio and Ferdinando. And besides that, he was awesome. He and his servant were easily the best actors, and their scenes were genuinely funny. I admit, that part would have been neat, if it had genuinely been in a Shakespeare play. To have a "named", important character, who might be known by learned members of the audience, as part of the comic relief, would be very progressive and interesting. (His servant Sancho fit in perfectly to the Shakespearean model. There are mischievous, disrespectful Boys everywhere.)

Another reason for my discontent was that I found little art in the word-play. There weren't any good lines. Nor were there any that the characters gave real length and weight to that seemed to say anything important. Admittedly, not all of Shakespeare is quoteworthy. But doctrine also says that he is genius. I suppose you can't reconstruct genius. So a combination of prosaic dialogue, and the inability to understand 1/4 of the dialogue, rather bored me. Many lines and constructions I recognised from workmanlike snippets of Shakespeare, and that amused me - it was like seeing the "reconstruction" in action, all patchwork.

The motifs, too, were patchwork. People running mad isn't out of canon - there was a distinct call-back to King Lear, or maybe Troilus and Cressida - but never did it seem so unjustified. Women betrayed and given false reputations are canon - look at Much Ado About Nothing - but there still seems to be the possibility that they can be given redemptive justice, and that didn't seem to be the case with Lucinda - certainly not in a way that would satisfy a modern audience. Young people being forced into situations by their parents - look at Romeo and Juliet - this isn't new. It was as if they took several things Shakespeare had done and took away the humanism.

The review below

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0905/S00206.htm

mentions that the darker side of Cardenio touches on the "problem plays". Definitely. For me, Cardenio was a huge problem. If Shakespeare did write it, I'm glad it was lost to history. Or, I bet his version was more tempered by far. Either way, this one is a disappointment ranging to an abomination.

I don't think all that is why I left. I think it was more of a personal thing that I left half-way through. I take fiction far too personally. I can't watch awkward humour. I cried for an hour after the end of Memento. And so, instead of simply disappointing me, as it might have done a person with similar views but with more perspective, it made me furious.

I feel a bit better now after all this ranting. Now I'm going to hang out with Miriam and Steph and unwind by stomping through the dark and the freezing Wellington rain.

PS: Oh, I forgot to mention how pissed off I was by Sancho's jokes about Fiji and the South Island. Topical jokes are great, except not when you're reconstructing a 400-year-old play. I may be being a bit uptight about this, but you can't please everyone. So don't expect an audience that will appreciate a play that is not in their language and also pander to them with stereotypical North Island vs. South Island rivalry. We laughed at rape, clearly we're not in the 21st century.

SSar: ...but I'm staying for Jerome's show. Do you know Jerome?
Joel: Sure, he's a good guy.
SSar: Wait, *how* do you know Jerome?
Joel: I kidnapped him.
SSar: *very slowly, dawning remembrance and realisation* Yes. Yes you did.

Things are good lately. I am getting excellent marks at Uni, I haven't handed anything in late yet, work is steady and I feel useful there, and I live from paycheck to paycheck but there's a little bit of a margin which is reassuring. I even called my parents on Friday for an amiable chat.

I just had a nice weekend in which I studied, baked, went out for the Merchant of Venice with Joel and Meredith and had a lovely dinner, watched Battlestar Galactica, studied, and handed an assignment in.

For some reason, I'm really really stressed lately. I'm appreciating the good stuff that's going on, but I am noticing really high anxiety levels. So, people, what do you do to level off? I'm honestly not over-working myself at my paying job, but while my study demands are high, I can't really reduce them right now (it's near the end of the semester and I still have two presentations and a research essay to do.) Should I take more long hot showers? Throw myself into Project Bauble? Get really drunk and rant to someone? (Joking). I have managed to avoid caffeine and sugary drinks today at least - a week without caffeine shall do me good.

Anyway, right now I can't be bothered studying for my 5% test tomorrow so I'll translate one of the Canterbury Tales or let Joel beat me up at StarCraft.

Clearly we have an excellent landlord: I left a message on his phone at about 1:15pm about our electrical woes, and within the hour I had messages on my own phone - one from Kos saying, "Fine, call me with details for our records, I have dispatched the electrician", and one from the electrician, saying, "So when can I come to your house?" By 4:30pm our fuse was replaced and so was the faulty light fixture that was overloading the circuit.

Excellent. Also, a wonderful example of the powers of Specialisation and Delegation. I was blown away because at our last flat, every maintenance issue was either ignored, fought over, or when faulty repairs were carried out, Full House Management claimed that this was because the owner of the property had done it, not them, and they would contact him... more delays... etc.

I will fight tooth and nail to keep this flat. *note to self: do the vacuuming tonight.

Since going to see Star Trek my main concern is the scheduling of the NEXT viewing of this movie. I did six hours of Old Norse instead of seeing it on Sunday with Layne and Alex C (that would have been awesome...) and will probably be reading a ream of material related to Chaucer on Tuesday. I still hold out hope for Thursday.

I also plan to see The Merchant of Venice, probably with Meredith on an upcoming weekend, and I really want to see the performance of Cardenio (May 17th-23rd). Who's with me? Of course, you may want to stand well back when I beg the director for the academic notes on how they managed to 'reconstruct' a Shakespeare play in the first place.

Lately my entries feel very vague, summations at best. Let's see if I can be a bit more specific. I am typing away at Firreth on the table in the lounge. Next to me is a glass of water, a cup of study-tea, the Riverside Chaucer, and my Icelandic notes. (So much for my notion of having a week without caffeine: it died before it could even become a resolution.) I am enjoying having lighting from two different angles, as before the fuse was fixed, only one light in the lounge was working. Alex is making dinner in the kitchen, where a bowl of hamburger patty mixture is sitting waiting. When Clinton gets here to discuss the Sci Fi quiz, I will - gasp - make hamburgers. Until then I am procrastinating on reading the Tale of Melibee. To be fair, the Tale of Melibee is pretty long-winded.

I still seem to be juggling work, study, and a social life reasonably successfully. Work isn't very demanding lately, and my team leader seems to be in a good mood. There are new data entry people, and I am trying to endear myself to them by letting them ask me questions instead of having to trot across the office to ask Siyamala. I think I need to make more social connections at work.

I did have to ask for an extension this week, but I haven't handed anything in late yet. I felt so uncomfortable about the extension that I keep catching myself saying "I'm trying, I'm trying" spontaneously to thin air. Like, when walking up Allenby Terrace, or doing the dishes. This is possibly not a good thing. I'll feel better when the Chaucer assignment is in.

As far as a social life goes, I keep thinking I'll cut down on social time in order to get study done, but it isn't happening. This possibly is a good thing, until it happens that it isn't. Last week I went to two parties, had one overnight guest, went to a midnight movie, and dragged someone over to my house for lunch in between lectures.

I have made... nearly zilch progress on this year's main art project. Also I need to write about the Leonard Cohen concert.

Anyone want to go to Star Trek again?

PS: Oh gods, I just threw a spoon at Clinton and drew blood. I'm so sorry. Back to how I'm so good at socialising. =/ He says he's okay though.

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