The ISIS Hilary Term 2015 by The Isis

THE

ISIS Hilary Term 2015

Opera Vera Following a sell-out debut run in Covent Garden, Opera Vera are now touring their criticallyacclaimed production of Mozart's 'Le Nozze di Figaro'. Please see www.operavera.co.uk for details of forthcoming performances.Â

EDITORIAL For five weeks, we called out to Oxford: “O tell us the truth about love.” The rubric for our short essay competition, using past questions from the All Souls College entrance exam, also invited entries on rational dress, gender in academia and suburbia. But as essays were pouring in, it was possible (we assure you) to stay glued to the editors’ inbox for days at a time seeing nothing but responses to Auden’s plea for amorous enlightenment. Oxford students, and The ISIS in particular, are sometimes accused of being cynical, arrogant or intellectually pretentious – more interested in ruminating on lofty questions of theory and glum conceptual analysis than delivering genuine insight on their surroundings and their lives. But really, they just want to talk about love. And as demonstrated by this editorial and the magazine in general, we are no exception. The winner and runner-up of our essay competition both offer bracingly lived and human accounts of love, and while the focus is not always on romance, a fascination with how we form, nourish and protect our deepest connections resurfaces throughout the magazine – in the support given to student parents by their friends and college communities (p.46), in the way those held at Campsfield detention centre are brought together through telling each other stories (p.10), or in the reflections of international porn actress Stoya on how the porn industry colours our view of sex (p.37). For many years, The ISIS was adorned with the strapline “a social view of Oxford life”. We may have broadened our focus from Oxford since then, with articles that transport the reader to the cinemas of Tel Aviv (p.18), the Church of Scientology in London (p.44) and the stage of a sham faith healer (p.25). But in this issue, we seek to honour that commitment to offering a social view of life – and most importantly, always a view of life. We have tried, in our events and our online presence this term, to build a community around the magazine that is open to everyone at Oxford – not just those with certain interests, certain affiliations or certain identities. We would like The ISIS to be a place where everyone can come to share their view of life. We have often wondered what we needed to do in order to bring the magazine to such a diverse community. Turns out: All you need is love.

Daniella Shreir & Raphael Hogarth Editors

CONTENTS U N T OL D S T OR I E S 7. Charles Troup – Haunted by Kindness Dinner with an Armenian Ultranationalist 10. Francis Martin – The Freedom Bird Storytelling at Campsfield detention centre 12. Tom Graham – The Third Culture Artistic science and scientific art 14. Francesca Carington – “I’ll Show You What a Woman Can Do” The rise, fall and revival of an ‘Old Master’ 16. Jake Weisman – Out of the Knesset and into the Wild West Making light in Israeli cinema 18. Noah Lachs – All Quiet on the African Front A troubling blind spot in the British press

B RO UG H T T O H E A L 23. Gil Reich – Phage The antibacterial arms race 25. Barnaby Dowling – Prophetic Fallacy The “prosperity theology” of a “faith healer” 28. George McGoldrick – The Pilgrim’s Way 30. Emily Frisella – “Go Home and Sit Still” WWI and women’s colleges at Oxford 33. Miranda Hall – Alpha Course Orange Squash with Oxford’s evangelists

B ODY P OL I T IC S 37. James Waddell – In Conversation with Stoya Porn from the inside 40. Rebecca Choong-Wilkins – Bloom’s Devilled Kidneys A literary recipe 42. George Grylls – Glassy-Eyed A polemic against glass buildings 44. Tom Graham – Window-Shopping for Enlightenment A tour around London’s ‘Church of Scientology’ 46. Jessica Sinyor – Beyond College Families Student parents at Oxford and Cambridge 48. Mirren Kessling – Klein Blue

E S SAYS 51. The ISIS Short Essay Competition 52. Timna Fibert – “O Tell me the Truth About Love” (W.H. Auden). 54. Callum Kelly – “O Tell me the Truth About Love” (W.H. Auden). 56. Mina Odile Ebtehadj-Marquis – “Is it Possible to Dress Rationally?” 58. Naomi Vides – “O Tell me the Truth About Love” (W.H. Auden). 60. Lily Faust – “O Tell me the Truth About Love” (W.H. Auden). 62. Daniel O’Neil – On Reading an Evil Book Reflections on Mein Kampf

UNTOLD STORIES

HAUNTED BY KINDNESS Dinner with an Armenian Ultranationalist Charles Troup

y friend and I met our host on a street corner in Gyumri, a dour and dusty city in western Armenia. He was beefy and broad-shouldered, with watery eyes and sharp features rounded slightly by fat. He strode over to introduce himself, and though he did not speak English, succeeded in inviting us back to his house for dinner. His name was Lernik. We obliged and were ushered into a taxi which, after a clipped conversation with the driver, Lernik drove. Gyumri was ravaged by the Spitak earthquake in 1988, and its halting restoration is ongoing. Once out of the city centre, plains of rubble stretched out either side of the long straight road along which we sped. “Spitak,” said Lernik, noticing us gazing at the wasteland. Then, pointing at himself, “Mama”; then “Hay-soos”, finger to the sky. After 15 minutes we turned off, and a suburban avenue emerged from the landscape. His house was

small but cheery, with a wooden porch draped in ivy. His brother-in-law was waiting for us by the door, and warmly invited us inside. Five thousand Russian soldiers are stationed in Gyumri, which sits on the border with Turkey, and just as we seated ourselves in the kitchen a group of them walked by the window. I had expected their presence to be a source of tension in the city, but Lernik scrambled for a freezer-bag full of cigarettes which he rushed out to offer them, returning visibly inflated with admiration. A large bottle of vodka was produced, and we tried to make conversation. At one point I excused myself, and as I left the room heard Lernik mention “Karabakh”. Nagorno-Karabakh is a region between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the ongoing dispute over its administration is one of numerous post-Soviet “frozen conflicts” in the Caucasus. It is landlocked inside

Azerbaijan, although the Azerbaijani state has not exercised political authority there since 1988 and most of the region’s inhabitants identify as Armenian. The deadlock over the de facto independent republic is one of the main obstacles to a rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey, who staunchly support Azerbaijan. This was something I’d wanted to discuss, and I asked Lernik if he was in the army when I returned. My friend looked paler. “I think more of a mercenary,” he said quietly. I glanced over at Lernik, who had stripped down to a string vest and had a knife in his hand; with it he sliced a pomegranate which he placed carefully on the table in front of us. He looked bemused by the question. “Soldat?” Then, drawing a finger slowly across his throat, “Azerbaijan! Turk!” When this failed to elicit anything from us, he opened his palm and made heavy pressing motions towards the floor. “Musulman.” We never ascertained the exact nature of Lernik’s activities in Karabakh. An official ceasefire was reached in 1994 but both nations maintain a military presence along the contact line and militia groups are also known to operate within the region. Sporadic violations of the ceasefire have seen military casualties on both sides and International Crisis Watch also report

occasional kidnappings and civilian deaths. We never worked out from Lernik whether money had changed hands, nor could we agree on whether this changed the moral character of his involvement – whatever it was. The arrival of Lernik’s family interrupted our speculation. His wife, aunts, and English-speaking sister burst through the door and greeted us boisterously. His elderly father, solemn and silent, nodded gravely. Amongst the party was Lernik’s six-year-old son Martin; the meal, we discovered, was to mark his first day at school.

His return was announced by the sound of bullets bouncing down the stairs When we moved into the main room we discovered a long table already groaning with food. As we helped ourselves to barbecued lamb wrapped in thick lavash flatbread, the family asked us anxiously about our time in Armenia and our impression of its people. Lernik sat opposite, ensuring our plates were always full and our shot glasses brimming. Dissonance lingered amidst the convivial scene. I thought at the time about another meal being shared, in

a house in Azerbaijan, by the family of someone Lernik had killed. Perhaps. Once we’d finished eating we were ushered upstairs and seated around an old computer on the landing. Lernik disappeared downstairs and returned with cigarettes and Armenian brandy. He brought up his Facebook profile and asked us to add him, disappearing again as we browsed his photos. We saw a map of Greater Armenia in the second century BC, stretching far into modern-day Turkey; a cartoon of the Armenian lion leaping onto a Turkish fox as it crossed the border; and Lernik’s profile picture, with him standing atop a rocky outcrop holding an AK-47, his black clothing bearing none of the heraldry we later saw on Armenian army uniforms. His return was announced by the sound of bullets bouncing down the stairs. He’d brought us a handful as a gift but he kept tripping drunkenly over his feet. He gathered them again and began popping them out of the magazine. “Here,” he said smiling, pushing the empty clip into my hands. The bullets, he gestured, were for him: “Azerbaijan. Musulman.” Later he brought out a rusty flick-knife from his bedroom, its pewter handle emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. “Old. USSR. For you” The weapon was appalling and poignant, and I tried to return it discreetly to his sister when she finally came to offer us a lift back. “No, he wants you to have it. He is a good guy. We want you to have it. We will never forget your visit.” We piled into the car; Lernik propped up between us in the backseat. He was reeking by this point and his drunken platitudes were barely comprehensible. We were family. We were his brothers. We would always have a home in Gyumri. When we were dropped off he followed and, oblivious to our efforts to shake him off, tailed us all the way back to our hostel. As we hastily wished him goodnight, he told us to expect him at ten o’clock the next morning to pick us up. We were shaken, and it was only once we were in bed and the adrenaline had subsided that we realised how much we had drunk. We left very early the next morning to catch the first bus out of the city, stopping on the way to throw the magazine and knife into a bin. I have struggled to make sense of this encounter ever

since. Reflecting on the whole, long trip – in which we went on to the remote mountainous regions of Georgia, and then along Turkey’s south-eastern border with Syria – this dinner stands out, seeming to promise something profound. I desperately wanted to find a lesson, comforting in its solidity, and to extract from my confusion something ordered and enlightening. The evening was the most dramatic example of something that returned to disorientate us frequently: the disparity between deep nationalistic hatreds in the region, and the astonishing kindness that was extended to us. In all of the cultures we moved through - Armenian, Georgian, Kurdish, Turkish - hospitality is celebrated, valorised, taught to children. Often it seems this co-exists with the hostilities bound up with rejection of ethnic or national outsiders. Lernik, I concluded, embodied this tragic doublethink. Recently however, I began to see how the ease with which we travelled was founded upon our even greater degree of difference. The adversarial nature of south Caucasus nationalism is not abstract; the violence of recent history makes the threat feel tangible. Georgia was invaded. Kurds face ongoing political oppression. The genocide of 1915 stains Armenian collective memory. My friend and I were non-threatening because we were alien. National identities have congealed around deep networks of historical, political and material conflict, and the more I think back to our travels the more I see how we glided through them as well-meaning but blinkered voyeurs. I will never understand Lernik, and vivid as our meeting was I certainly don’t know him. Every dictum I’ve tried to formulate rings hopelessly hollow. How can I say why he hates or if he will change? I’m not even sure what he’s done. More than this, whenever I try to turn my revulsion at his views into judgement my remove from his life feels too much like privilege. I am haunted by his kindness to me, then feel haunted by the pain he may have caused. Wherever I stand is an insult to someone. The truth is that I didn’t learn anything. If nothing else, I was reminded how often we reduce one another to bewilderment. We become radically, bafflingly different. Sometimes – in fumbling, mutual incomprehension – we have dinner together.

THE FREEDOM BIRD Storytelling at Campsfield detention centre Francis Martin

hunter was walking in the woods when he saw a bird with feathers of gleaming gold. It began to sing, but instead of a beautiful tune it squawked: “nah nah na nah-naahh”. The huntsman was irritated that such a beautiful bird had such an ugly song, and he threatened to shoot if it were to repeat the mocking call. The bird opened its beak: “nah nah na nah-naahh”. Campsfield House in Oxfordshire detains over 200 men who are waiting for a decision on their legal status in the United Kingdom and facing the possibility of deportation. Half a dozen of these men and two professional storytellers are sitting in a circle in a small room off the main yard. They have come to hear traditional stories from around the world, one of several activities available to punctuate the tedium of detention. There is a man from the Punjab who is around 60 years old, but the other men are all in their late twenties or early thirties. The storyteller on his feet is a small man with a white pointed beard, a maharaja moustache and a topi on his head. His face is lively, his eyes playful and voice energetic. The huntsman raised his bow and loosed an arrow – but missed. “Nah nah na nah-naahh” the golden bird replied. The hunter gritted his teeth in anger and loosed another arrow. The bird was struck in the chest, and fell to the ground. The hunter dropped it into his bag, slung it over his shoulder and started for home. He had only gone a hundred paces when he heard a noise from the bag: “nah nah na nah-naahh”. We all crow along with the bird’s ugly song. The man from the Punjab doesn’t speak English, but he joins in with the two-tone nasal whine. The storytellers have brought a drum and he holds it throughout the story. He plays it at apposite moments: when we sing the bird’s song, when the hunter releases an arrow or when his target falls to the ground. He can’t follow the details of the story, though at various points the storyteller stops and asks for translations of important words such as “hunter” or “golden bird”. Music and this minimal translation are enough to hold the group together. The hunter was furious, and hurried home. He put the bird down on a block of wood, took up a meat cleaver and cut it into a hundred pieces. Then he threw the pieces into a pot of water and placed it over the fire. He was just sitting back, pleased with himself, when a noise came from inside the pot, distorted by the water but unmistakable: “nah nah na nah-naahh”. At an earlier session I watched a Brazilian man sing a lullaby accompanied by a drummer from Bangladesh. They spoke no common language, and would never

come together outside of the storytelling sessions, as the social groups in the centre are defined by nationality and language. Through stories and song, the two men were able to share something aside from the fact that they were both incarcerated for an indefinite period in Oxfordshire. The hunter dug a deep hole and threw the contents of the pot into it before piling the earth back and stamping it down. Very faintly, he heard the cry: “nah nah na nah-naahh”. Incensed, he dug the ground up again, took the hundred pieces and placed them in a box bound with strong rope and weighed-down with rocks. He took the box to a river, and threw it into the deepest part. It sank, and there was silence. An Iraqi man has heard the story before. When he was a child, during the First Gulf War in 1990–91, his uncle had told him a story every evening. The stories offered some escape from the bloody strife of everyday life in Iraq, allowing him to live for a little while in worlds populated by heroes and villains, the former rewarded with happily-ever-afters whilst the wicked never prospered. He says he doesn’t often think about those stories his uncle told over 20 years ago, but is glad to be reminded of them now. Three days later, some children were playing on the banks of the river. They spotted the box bobbing on the surface, ropes and rocks washed away by the flow of the water. They hauled it to the bank and prised it open. In an explosion of golden feathers, one hundred birds burst from the box. The huntsman, who happened to be nearby, saw the gilded flock rise into the air. “Ah,” he said to himself, “I now know who you are. You are the Freedom Bird, for you cannot be suppressed.” We discuss the story in small groups. Each of the six men agrees that freedom is more important than comfort and security. Immigration detainees are given a bed and food is provided, and at 11 o’clock they are locked in their cells and the lights are turned off. For an hour and a half on a Wednesday afternoon, stories offer a brief respite from this routine. The project is three years old, but its funding has not been renewed and this is one of the last sessions. When four o’clock comes, a guard – who has been sitting by the door throughout the session – motions to escort us out, back down the long corridors and through the heavy gates, the security scanner, the fences crowned with razor wire. As we leave, we say goodbye to the detainees as though for the last time: by next week they might have been released back into British society, or have been deposited in a different continent. Or we might find them when we return, smoking a cigarette in the yard, eager to hear more stories.

THE THIRD CULTURE Artistic science and scientific art Tom Graham

n the 1920s, the physicist Neils Bohr was redefining the atom. The classical model depicted the atom’s inner space as a nanoscale solar system, with electrons orbiting the nucleus. Yet this metaphor could not explain all the data. Puzzled by his results, Bohr found inspiration in an unlikely place – cubism. Cubism removed the certainty, solidity and constancy of matter. An artist presents a scene from many viewpoints at the same time, but the observer glimpses each individually. In quantum theory, an electron can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but will always be measured as one or the other. Bohr saw that the inner space of his atom was, in some senses, a cubist one. As he put it, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” His insight was both scientific and artistic, and perhaps drawn from a deeper union of the two. Bohr was exceptional. Since then, science and art have drifted apart. Half a century ago the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow coined the phrase “the two cultures” to describe the schism between the two branches of academia. In his eyes, the scientists had “the future in their bones” and were morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we have”, whereas “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” F.R. Leavis, a fellow scholar at Cambridge, reacted by calling Snow “as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be”, leaving the matter even more entrenched than before.

same way that Freud did… so little is known about neuroscience, that there is so much scope for imagination.” AXNS is made up of graduate students from areas of neuroscience and art history. The catalogue for their first exhibition, Affecting Perception, is headed by a quote from Albert Einstein: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” Like Bohr, Einstein saw beyond the traditional dichotomy of art and science. Affecting Perception was held in Oxford and included work from 12 artists with a variety of neurological disorders. Each artist’s work was paired with a description of the neuropsychiatric context. The resonance between them showed ways in which art and science can enrich one another. Some artists are actively engaging the neurological aspect of their work drawing on their hallucinations, for example. But for others, such as William Utermohlen, knowledge of their disorder can frame how we interpret their art. Utermohlen studied at the Ruskin and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1995; he continued producing art until 2000. Neurodegeneration places emphasis on time and identity. His self-portraits are harrowing: they chart his cognitive decline, but show his feeling remained intact. He painted the 1997 self-portrait on the day he agreed to donate his brain to science. A saw encroaches from right; the face spells dumb horror at the loss of comprehension; the slackening lower lip is child-like. The brushstrokes in his 1998 self-portrait are frustrated and coarse. A red slash separates head and body, suggesting the severance of body and mind. Through time, his eyes lose focus and understanding, but there is a lucid, subjective communication through his art. For us, it is a window into his mind, but it was also a mirror for Utermohlen himself, to try and grasp what was happening to him. Such art may help the viewer empathise, but it can also indicate the workings of the mind behind it, just as a piano’s sound reveals its tuning. The autistic artist George Widener finds comfort in numbers. There is a theory of autism that suggests that neural hyper-functioning renders their perception painfully intense, and that this leads them to develop a limited but highly secure internal world. Widener’s art seems to support this theory: it shows a mind finding peace in symmetry, determinism and repetition. He can calculate the day of the week for any given date over hundreds of years. In doing so he finds patterns in history; he notes, for example, that disasters tend to happen on Fridays.

“They are shaping the thoughts of a generation” More recently, John Brockman has heralded the rise of a “third culture” of neuroscientists and psychologists. They, he argues, are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and will “shape the thoughts of a generation”. Neuroscience has certainly made great progress in characterising the neurons that make up our brain, the synapses that connect them, and the patterns of activity that correlate with behaviour and emotion. Yet how this translates into conscious experience remains a mystery. Art is becoming an increasingly popular platform to explore this unknown. Rachel Stratton, one of the founders of the collective AXNS (Art x Neuroscience), observes that “neuroscience is entering the popular sphere in the

He also looks forward: he extrapolates to form fantasy future calendars, finding mathematical rhythms that reflect and balance each other out through time. He glues hundreds of napkins together, like a quilt, and paints on them. It is intricate, and quite hypnotic. Kipling cake colour-schemes frame tremendously detailed cityscapes that seem to flit between solid structures and rolling codes. Super-imposed, there are slot-machine numbers, hinting at some kind of cosmic game behind the patterns. Widener seems to believe the future is already written, waiting to be discovered in the numbers. Palindromes – numbers that are the same backwards and forwards – are a favourite of his. On 20 February 2002 at 8.02pm, he commemorated the moment by holding his breath for 20.02 seconds – “I was in touch with it.” His piece Megalopolis 2112 is dedicated to the next palindrome to come. Perhaps at the heart of “the two cultures” is the question of creativity. Feeling and imagination are seen as the domain of the arts; science is objective and functional. Creativity, for some, is sacrosanct, an expression of our sentient selves that is apart from the material world and its physical laws. Jason Padgett’s condition refutes this distinction. He was a self-described jock with little formal education until he was concussed in a mugging. He woke up with conceptual synaesthesia. Now he perceives graphic representations of geometrical structures and formulae embedded in everything around him. In spite of having no mathematical qualifications, he sees what others know. This may be illuminating the mechanisms behind perception, as if the curtain has snagged and he now glimpses backstage. Aspects of our surroundings – colour, motion, form – are processed in separate neural streams before being melded together again into our seamless visual perception. Light becomes sight, imbued with meaning.

Perhaps Padgett’s melding is now imperfect – he sees the stitches. His art is painstaking: a discrepancy of a fraction of a millimetre can spoil it, in his eyes. A single piece can take many months, and the results are inhumanly perfect. The reductionist paradigm of neuroscience – breaking the whole down into parts we can control and analyse ¬– has taught us much about the brain. But, in some ways, it falls short. Conscious experience is beyond the range of reductionism, falling into the domain of the artist. Paintings like those by Utermohlen, Widener and Padgett capture a layer of reality that 20th-century science ignored. By studying these artistic explorations, neuroscientists might better understand the holistic properties of the mind. They could look to Widener’s art for a theory of autism. Utermohlen’s portraits might help them understand the mental landscape of neurodegeneration, better equipping them to provide therapy. Correlating Padgett’s brain damage with the nature of his art may shed light on the processes that generate perception. Perhaps more enticingly, it also raises the possibility of being able to artificially induce savant syndrome and access such abilities – in any of us. Science and art are re-entering each other’s orbits. “The two cultures” are being bridged, through the third. For now, although feeding each other ideas and insights, they remain distinct. We are seeing science-influenced art and art-influenced science, but could they be combined to reflect a new aesthetic – a true fusion of art and science? In one room of the Affecting Perception exhibition an electroencephalogram recorded a spectator’s brain activity, converting and playing it through a bowl-like speaker that held a thick, milky liquid. Still, at first, it seized into life, spasmodic and alien. This was consciousness, transmuted: a perfect expression of the third culture.

“I’LL SHOW YOU WHAT A WOMAN CAN DO” The rise, fall and revival of an ‘Old Master’

Francesca Carington brated painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes, which now hangs in the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples. The Biblical narrative recounts how Judith, with the help of her maidservant Abra, saves her people by decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes when he tries to seduce her. The story has remained a popular subject throughout art history, though typically artists chose to focus on what follows the beheading. Cranach’s Judith proudly presents the viewer with Holofernes’s severed head. Botticelli’s heroine walks serenely from the scene of the crime, the Assyrian general’s head held aloft by Abra behind her. In shifting the focus of the paintings from the act to the aftermath, these depictions shy away from representing Judith’s agency, instead making her a symbol of female vice or virtue. Artemisia dealt with the subject of Judith a number of times. In other versions, she too depicts the two women shortly after the crime. However, her most striking and visceral treatment of the Judith story is in the painting that emerged in 1612 at the time of the rape trial. It unusually shows the actual act of beheading, which empowers the subject as instrument of her own fate rather than as a moral symbol. Artemisia’s Judith hacks through her enemy’s neck with a sword, a look of cool detachment on her face, as her maidservant, Abra, forcefully holds him down. Holofernes fights desperately for his life and clenches Abra’s garments with his fist. His eyes roll back in terror and blood gushes out from his neck, staining the silk sheets beneath him. Holofernes’s futile resistance demonstrates Judith’s strength as she overpowers her adversary. The sleeves of her delicate gown are pushed up to reveal strong, almost manly arms; the femininity represented by her clothes is pushed aside by the brute force required for the gruesome deed. Judith’s face, half-cast in shadow, is strikingly similar to that depicted in Artemisia’s self-portrait. The resemblance has led

n January 2014, an important self-portrait by the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi came up for sale at Christie’s New York. The canvas was the star lot of the auction, with an estimated price of three to five million dollars. Gentileschi was one of the leading artists of the Italian Baroque. Raped at the age of 17, she defiantly took her rapist to trial then went on to paint expressive canvases depicting both the suffering and triumph of biblical and mythological women. In the painting at Christie’s, the artist depicts herself as a lute-player dressed in a sumptuous low-cut blue gown, her starkly lit face gazing seriously back at the viewer from a black background. It is one of only three extant Gentileschi self-portraits. Yet astonishingly, the painting failed to sell. Unusually for a girl in the 17th century, Artemisia was first taught to paint alongside her brothers by her father, the Roman artist Orazio Gentileschi. Her talent quickly eclipsed that of her brothers, and so Orazio arranged for her to be mentored by one of his artistic collaborators, Agostino Tassi. However, her father’s choice of tutor proved to be disastrous. In 1611, Tassi raped the teenage Artemisia. Tassi agreed to marry Artemisia, which in the eyes of 17th-century Roman society would have exculpated him and his crime. Nevertheless, Orazio chose to press charges in 1612 after it was revealed that Tassi already had a wife. Artemisia took part in the prosecution, but she was tortured with thumbscrews as she desperately tried to defend her reputation. At the end of the widely publicised trial, Tassi was found guilty of “presumed defloration and suborning of witnesses” and sentenced to five years of exile from Rome. However, the corrupt Roman legal system failed Artemisia once more and Tassi’s sentence was revoked. The court transcripts are still available today, preserved in the state archives in Rome. It was during the trial that Artemisia produced her most cele-

historians to argue that she imagined herself in the role of the Biblical heroine. In doing so, she brought symbolic retribution to the men that wronged her. Whether or not you regard the picture as Artemisia exorcising her personal demons, its visual power is undeniable. Her use of chiaroscuro, strong contrasts of light and shadow, drowns the background in darkness and throws the figures in the foreground into sharp relief. She places human drama at the centre of her painting. The heroine’s worth lies not in her symbolic function but in her physical and mental strength. Although she remained unrecognised by art historians until relatively recently, Artemisia was highly successful during her lifetime. Her career, which at the time of her rape had already shown signs of great promise, flourished in its aftermath. Shortly after the trial, she married one of the witnesses, Pierantonio Stiattesi, and they moved to Florence, where she enjoyed huge success as a court painter. In 1616, she joined the Accademia del Disegno as its first female member, an accomplishment that wasn’t repeated for another fifty years. Her patrons included Cosimo de Medici and even Charles I. Artemisia fell into relative obscurity towards the end of her life. Her reputation as a leading Baroque painter, long overshadowed by the famous rape trial, was only resurrected by feminist art historians towards the end of the 20th century. She received an honourable mention in Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ – the essay that essentially spearheaded feminist art theory following its publication in 1971. This paved the way for Guerrilla Girls, a feminist group founded in 1985 with the intention of waging war on sexism in art. They used Artemisia as one of their literal poster-girls, superimposing the famous gorilla head onto Gentileschi’s painting Susanna and the Elders, and questioned why her works had largely been ignored by art historians. It was then that she caught the public’s imagination and became the subject of

several books. She was even the focus of the controversial 1997 French film Artemisia, though it insultingly portrayed her and her rapist Tassi as lovers. The question remains whether Artemisia’s newfound fame extended beyond the silver screen and into the art market. George Gordon, an expert on Old Master paintings and co-chairman of Sotheby’s, argues that her painting failed to sell at Christie’s simply because the estimate was too high. The same painting was in fact sold at Sotheby’s in 1998 for £380,000. Perhaps Christie’s overestimated the growth in Artemisia’s appeal over the last 20 years, hoping her new-found recognition within critical circles would be enough to place her in the million-dollar bracket. As Gordon explains, female Old Masters tend to perform well at auction, in part due to what he terms the “Linda Nochlin effect”. The explosive force of feminist art theory in the ‘70s and ‘80s was reflected by the success of female Old Masters in the art market. All the same, Gordon maintains that Artemisia’s popularity “surely has to do with art history, but it’s not out of balance… because her evident brilliance justifies it.” However, he does caution that “although art history and the art market ‘enjoy’ a relationship, it is not always a direct one”, hence Christie’s misjudgement of Artemisia’s appeal. For Gordon, “Artemisia Gentileschi was an outstanding Baroque painter, and her paintings fetch strong prices – but not obviously more than those of her peers.” Ultimately, the art market is a fickle place, governed by shifts in buying trends based arbitrarily on whatever periods or genres happen to be in fashion. With Old Masters currently being neglected in favour of contemporary art, Artemisia is not alone in failing to reach her reserve prices. But the value of Artemisia’s painting should be measured by its impact not its monetary worth. In a letter to her patron in 1649, Artemisia wrote: “I will show your most Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” Perhaps we’re finally ready to let her.

OUT OF THE KNESSET AND INTO THE WILD WEST Making light in Israeli cinema Jacob Wiseman

man stands in a vast, dusty desert set against a sparsely clouded blue sky. He raises his eyes from beneath his hat. “Howdy,” he calls. “Howdy,” responds another man approaching. The director is unafraid of tense eye-level close-ups as the two stand opposite one another in strong stance. The new arrival reaches into his breast pocket. Our hero flexes his hand at his hip. This scene talks like a western, walks like a western. But there’s a twist. The speech is in Yiddish and both characters are ultra-orthodox Jewish men. Step forward the world’s first Hasidic Western: Der Mentsh, directed by Vania Heymann. Jerusalem-born Heymann is one of Israel’s most exciting young directors having worked on music videos for Bob Dylan and Asaf Avidan and adverts for Pepsi and American Express among others. Heymann’s shot of a cigarette extin-

guished on a piece of gefilte fish captures something of a film in which the western fizzles into the ultra-orthodox world. In this fantasy arena where there is as much gun-slinging as there is beard-stroking, the bounty hunter role is played by an assassin, employed by abandoned women whose husbands have refused to grant them a gett (Jewish divorce), leaving them unable to remarry. “You are my last option,” Maydelleh, the hitman’s employer, tells him, where in reality the matter would be settled in a Jewish court of law. Heymann creates a world that takes a deftly comic step away from rabbinic reality and towards the lawless Wild West. The film, currently in production, represents an emerging trend in Israeli cinema. Traditionally, the most internationally acclaimed Israeli films have focussed on the political situation. The 2008 Oscar-nominated animated film Waltz

with Bashir is a notable example, telling the story of a traumatised ex-military film director looking to recover a lost memory of the 1982 Lebanon War. Der Mentsh is part of a new culture surfacing in Israeli cinema, one that is distant from conflict, and one that is capable of producing a Hasidic Western. What’s more, the movement is gaining traction. It is not an underground bubbling of indie films, but stepping onto the world stage. In 2013, Quentin Tarantino dubbed the Israeli thriller-cum-horror Big Bad Wolves film of the year. Perhaps this came as a result of the Tarantino-esque torture scenes that paid homage to Reservoir Dogs, but its distribution in more than 15 countries demonstrates a broader recognition. The film tells of a series of murders that bring together a bereaved and vengeful father with a police investigator, leading to the capture and torture of the suspected killer. The film is drenched in absurdist black comedy: “Smells like barbecue,” says one torturer to another as a blowtorch is applied to the skin of their subject. The absurdist humour in Big Bad Wolves speaks of the futility of vengeance. In Israel, such a notion is deeply political. It implies both accusation and judgment, but it does so at a distance. Israelis are familiar with explicit conflict; their young filmmakers comment on conflict, while allowing their audiences space from it cinematically. According to Pablo Utin, Chair of the Israeli Film Critics’ Association, the new generation of filmmakers is looking to engage with Israeli society in a way that is separate to the conflict. “First of all, they are making works of cinema, works of art. But they still have a level of engagement with the conflict. They are trying to reconnect with society through cinema that can be enjoyed in a different way than political or war films.” He tells me that the reason for political dominance in Israeli cinema is twofold: first, Israeli media takes a more active interest in films that deal with the conflict directly, often spawning waves of media comment; second, the expectations of international audiences. Israel’s political situation so often dominates the international press, which foreign audiences want to see reflected in its films. “On the international circuit, when you go to see an exotic film about another place, you are always looking for it to tell you something about that place. But what you are really looking for is what you already know. No one wants to see a romantic comedy from Korea. They want to see something that is considered more ‘Korean’. The same is true of Israeli cinema: people want to see the army, the conflict, the Holocaust or the religion. For the international viewer, this is what Israel is about. And so we get stuck with the same kind of films.” Meanwhile the work of Israeli filmmakers has often become embroiled in political controversy internationally. In 2014, British director Ken Loach called for a cultural boycott of Israel, while the Tricycle Theatre briefly refused to host the Jewish Film Festival as a result of its funding by the Israeli Embassy. Politics dominates cultural export. Utin explains that Israeli filmmakers have responded by look-

ing towards Israeli society: “They’re trying to create art that can be seen as good cinema, and not defined by conflict. However, this new generation of filmmakers are still highly politicised and want to talk more about what this conflict is doing inside Israeli society. These are individuals commenting on the vulgarity of Israeli society and the need for more art and culture. Even if you are not seeing a violent film, you might be looking at a violent society. In Big Bad Wolves the film seems like a thriller, but the directors are always commenting, always inserting their self-reflective voice that discusses where society is headed. This type of cinema expands Israeli society: it tells you it is about more than the kibbutz, the Holocaust, the ultra-orthodox and the conflict.” The move away from political realism by young Israeli filmmakers, viewed in this context, looks to make light for itself. It seeks to create an Israeli cinematic identity that does not lie in the shadow of its politics, but stands in its own light as film. These filmmakers defy both audience expectation and their country’s traditional cinematic output, creating an artistic space that is distant from, yet engaged with, the political arena. This emerging trend is fuelled by a need to forge a cultural identity. A by-product of this approach is Israel’s flourishing feminist cinema. While the 2015 Oscars betray a male-dominated landscape, with only men in contention for Best Director, women directed five out of the seven films nominated for Best Full-Length Feature at this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival. “Even the two films that are not directed by women are very feminist,” jokes Noa Regev, the director of the Jerusalem Film Festival and CEO of the Jerusalem Cinematheque and Israeli Film Archive. One of those two films is The Kindergarten Teacher, in which a young boy’s teacher discovers his poetic talent. The film becomes the story of her efforts to protect his poetic spirit against militarised surroundings, and her struggles in a society dominated by conflict parallel those in a society dominated by men. The film has received international distribution, and Regev believes its feminism is the key to its success: “Feminist films are offering an alternative to the chauvinist discourse that war presents, although I think war and chauvinism have a lot to do with one another. The Kindergarten Teacher is, in its own way, a reaction to the political situation. While it does not address the conflict directly, it offers an alternative to the mainstream socio-political tapestry.” This new Israeli cinema, in its struggle for identity beyond conflict, is finding a common ground with feminism. They share a search to give voice to those marginalised by tradition. “A lot of hope comes from what I see in Israeli cinema,” Regev tells me. “I think it is very optimistic for the world.” Israeli cinema that has been for so long in the shadow of conflict is stepping out into its own light. It is creating a space where films and filmmakers take centre stage. The films might be dark, but perhaps in the filmmaking there is cause for optimism.

ALL QUIET ON THE AFRICAN FRONT A troubling blind spot in the British press Noah Lachs

sk somebody what they know about the Second Congo War and you will receive one of two responses. Either there will be a look of blankness accompanied by a comment like “I didn’t even know there was a first Congo War” or the respondent’s eyes will drift as they struggle to gather vague fragments of Afro-centric information. Muffled phrases like “child-soldiers” may be gleaned from subjects ashamed of their ignorance. However, the public is not fully culpable for its cluelessness. Much of the blame belongs to the British press. The Second Congo War involved 5.4 million deaths, millions more displacements, and intervention from nine different African states, along 25 distinct armed groups. There have been innumerable rapes, the plundering of one of the world’s most luxurious mineral deposits, and the establishment of the largest UN peacekeeping operation to date (MONUSCO). Why did the years of the conflict (1998– 2003) not flood the pages of the British media, and why is the extant precarious aftermath so rarely reported on? It is necessary to view Congo’s recent conflicts through the frame of its history. Twenty-three years of Belgian colonial rule led to 10 million Congolese deaths. King Leopold II enforced the violent exploitation of natives: families of workers who did not procure sufficient rubber were held hostage; workers who still failed to satisfy the incumbent quotas had their hands cut off or their villages razed. Colonial oppression set in motion a spiral of brutality that has yet to be halted. Both Congo wars spark from the embers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Post-genocide, Congo, at that time called Zaire, absorbed much of the Rwandan Hutu population – the perpetrators of the Tutsi slaughter. Many fled fearing reprisal killings at the behest of the new Tutsi government. However, the Hutu exodus did not allay Rwanda’s security concerns. Political Scientist and Rwanda expert, Dr Golooba-Mutebi explains that this created

a “looming threat of Hutu insurgents close to its borders”. This invoked the new Tutsi-led government to instigate regime change in Zaire and implant Laurent Kabila as ruler of what would become the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The violence that enforced this change constituted the First Congo War. A political instrument of Rwanda, Dr Golooba-Mutebi explains that Kabila’s role was to “make the DRC inhospitable for the Hutu ‘genocidaires’”. Kabila did not achieve this and became less and less complicit with the Rwandan government. In 1998, backed by its Ugandan allies, Rwanda set about ousting its former puppet. This culminated in the Second Congo War. Rwanda bolstered anti-Kabila rebel groups within the DRC, blurring the line between civil war and foreign aggression. Namibia, Chad, Angola and Zimbabwe viewed the actions of Uganda and Rwanda as an aggressive violation of Congolese sovereignty and also decided to intervene. Kabila perceived Rwanda and Uganda’s claims to be protecting their security as deceptive bluster, serving to legitimise their pillaging of the Congo’s mineral-rich East. The lack of British media attention to the Second Congo War is symptomatic of its political relationship with the region. Comparing French and American coverage with that of the British press highlights this. Between 1998 and 2001 (the year in which Kabila was assassinated), Le Monde featured 641 articles on the war, whilst the New York Times boasted 269. The British papers The Guardian and The Times trailed behind, publishing 191 and 106 respectively. These articles were seldom found outside the “World” sections. A similar trend is reflected in broadcasting. In the first week of January, the BBC’s website posted two DRC-related headlines, both dealing with the shooting and recovery of a Northern Irish missionary. Unlike France 24, they did not choose to cover the two other fairly major incidents of that week: huge clashes between Congolese rebels and

Burundian troops, and a controversy involving the taxation of a hospital for rape victims. The broader extent of French and American journalistic activity corresponds to the nations’ respective political interests. The Clinton administration, reeling with guilt for its inaction during the Rwandan genocide, supported Rwandan claims. American foreign policy turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the Rwandan-backed rebel groups in light of Rwanda’s voiced security concerns. American guilt is enduring; Clinton was quoted in March 2013 saying: “If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost.” France backed Rwanda’s Hutu-majority government and is responsible for arming and training many of the forces that went on to commit the Tutsi genocide. Since the genocide, Franco-Rwandan relations remain tense. In 2014, Rwanda’s Tutsi President, Paul Kagame, accused France of playing a “direct role” in the mass killings of 1994. Lacking France’s historical-political links with the region, and America’s genocide-induced guilt complex, Britain exercised a foreign

policy that was largely ambivalent. While Britain remains politically disinterested, its media remains uninterested.

While Britain remains politically disinterested, its media remains uninterested The bloodshed and human rights abuses of the Second Congo War often overshadow the ongoing corruption and plundering of resources set in motion by the conflict. In 2012, the DRC produced more than 90 per cent of China’s cobalt – an element necessary for the production of the modern mobile phone. Compound this with the DRC’s bounteous supplies of other minerals including tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold, and the potential for mass exploitation becomes very clear. Currently, armed groups are usurping much of the revenue from Congolese resources. Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi facilitate trade with the

international market by way of allowing exports to transit through their countries. It is no coincidence that during the conflict’s peak in early 2000, Uganda and Rwanda became the largest exporters of diamond and copper on the world market. By supporting anti-Hutu rebel groups within the DRC, Rwanda claims to be eliminating a genocidal threat to its Tutsi majority. Others perceive what a UN report in 2002 termed “mass scale looting”. Dr Golooba-Mutebi nuances this latter point: “In talking about who is ‘looting’ Congolese wealth, one should not lose sight of who is buying the minerals.” In 2001, Afrimex was one of 12 UK companies scrutinised by a UN “Panel of Experts” for mineral exploitation in the DRC. Global Witness, an NGO that works to uncover corruption and exploitation, asserts that “the company had bought minerals produced in very harsh conditions, including forced and child labour”. They also suggest that Afrimex “made payments to Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie-Goma ” – the violent rebel group controlling the mining area. Contrary to Global Witness advice, Parliament has not introduced legislation to criminalise companies like Afrimex. The height of government action in this case was to recommend Afrimex to take a course of “due diligence”. The EU Corporate Social Responsibility Report reveals the laxity of UK law: “By UK law… the director of a public limited liability company must consider the long-term consequences of all decisions.” This ruling, were its consequences remotely palatable, could be deemed comic for its sheer vacuity. One would assume the press would be quick to criticise the government for this, yet the media seldom mentions mineral consumption and exploitation. Looking forward to 2014, we gain some understanding

as to why the British press neglects to report on mineral exploitation. Dr Golooba-Mutebi affirms that “certificates of origin have rendered export of conflict minerals by Rwanda and Uganda extremely difficult”. As a result Western, Chinese, and Lebanese traders seek alternative methods of amassing Congolese resources, as Dr Golooba-Mutebi puts it, “on the cheap”. Among these is British oil company Soco International, which has been exploring for oil in one of Africa’s oldest national parks. Virunga, situated in the DRC’s North-East is home to a quarter of the world’s 880 remaining mountain gorillas, and more species of mammal than any other national park in the continent. Global Witness suggests that, in order to gain unimpeded access to this region, Soco paid off rebel groups and local MPs. Activists have been beaten and stabbed and park rangers spied on. In the words of Global Witness’s Nat Dyer: “Soco is threatening Africa’s oldest national park through an oil project marred by bribery, intimidation and violence.” On the day that Global Witness released its report on this case, The Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, BBC, ITV and Channel 4 said nothing. Soco International is represented by Schillings, the same law firm that, for many years, silenced doping accusations made against Lance Armstrong. Before such formidable firms, the British press cowers. Freedom of expression has saturated public discourse recently; much focus is on the risks posed by radicals opposed to what is framed as a principle upheld by western legal systems. However, a greater threat may be found within these systems – in the form of English libel law. Nat Dyer laments: “Congo has lost out on huge amounts of resources because of opaque deals.” If political interest and legal threat were subtracted from the equation, perhaps the press could add some transparency.

BROUGHT TO HEAL

PHAGE

The antibacterial arms race Gil Reich

n 1896, Cambridge graduate Ernest Hankin could be seen furiously paddling a small canoe through the Ganges of India. Under a glaring sun, he measured decay in corpses recently consigned to the holy waters. Hankin describes collecting samples from these bodies: fighting off snapping turtles, plunging needles into cold muscles and taking readings, “before even the relatives of the dead had the time to recover from their astonishment”. These semi-cremated corpses in the river suggested to most world scientists that the water was unfit for drinking. Despite this, Hankin found fewer bacteria than expected and subsequently reported that there was some substance in the river which had significant antibacterial properties. He even recommended that the river be used for drinking water to a greater extent. A travelling writer, Mark Twain, observes Hankin’s experiments: “We happened there just in time to be at the birth of a marvel – a memorable scientific discovery… [Hankin] added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this [river] water; within six hours they always died.” What was curing the cholera remained unknown un-

til 20 years later when a French microbiologist named d’Herrelle revealed the existence of a special kind of virus. Though they look like any other virus under a microscope, similar to a cut gem with spider legs, these viruses exclusively infect and kill bacteria, steering clear of animal cells. They hijack the bacterium’s inner machinery and inflate it with newly synthesised viruses. The cell is filled with a huge number of new viruses – imagine 5,000 tennis balls growing inside of a person. The intruders ultimately erupt from the bacterial host, killing it in the process. Unaware of the precise mechanism as we are today, d’Herrele named the viruses “bacteriophage” – bacteria eaters. Bacteriophage, often simply referred to as ‘phage’, have a large potential for medicinal application. The range of bacteria they target is wide, from those that cause food poisoning to cholera, and yet individual strains are very specific to certain bacteria. As a result, they do not kill the useful bacteria in the body in the way antibiotics do. “It is becoming more and more clear that antibiotics aren’t really good for you,” says Dr Sorek, researcher

of Microbial Genomics at the Weizman Institute in Israel. “When you take antibiotics you change the gut microbiota (bacterial flora). Over a long period of time some adverse effects can occur. Phage hold the promise of antibacterial treatment that is much more targeted. Seldom do they infect two species. That is why they are promising in terms of therapy.” And yet, phage has never entered the medicinal mainstream. A committed communist, d’Herrelle relocated to the USSR after his initial findings. There, he continued his research into phage therapy, dedicating one of his books to Joseph Stalin. However, his research was disrupted when his student and friend, George Eliava, was executed after romantically pursuing the same woman as the chief of the secret police. Because of his association with Eliava, d’Herrelle’s book was banned, and he fled to France, where he died unknown and unacclaimed for his work. In 1928, antibiotics were famously discovered by Alexander Fleming due to a lucky accident. D’Herrelle’s phage were all but forgotten by most of the world. However, isolated from western medical advances due to Stalin’s iron curtain, phage therapy continued to be used in the USSR. Soviet soldiers were issued with ampoules of phage to put on burn wounds. To this day, phage can still be bought over the counter in the former Soviet state of Georgia and are used like we might use antiseptics. Christopher Smith, CEO of Phage International Inc., runs a clinic in Georgia despite being based in San Francisco. When asked how he got involved, he explains how he and his wife were in Georgia in 2003, adopting a baby girl. “Our daughter got sick with a

strep infection and the doctor treated it with phage. That doctor is now our clinic’s doctor.” So why hasn’t phage therapy made it to the USA? “When I spoke with venture capital firms, no one knew what it was and you couldn’t convince anyone to invest.” This reluctance to invest reflects a larger worry for pharmaceutical companies: phage are difficult to patent and therefore unlikely to return a profit. Furthermore, while antibiotics are still viable, there’s no need for phage. But there is no guarantee they will be viable for much longer. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria infected 2 million people in the USA last year, and one in every 100 of these people died due to the infection. Many scientists predict a nearby future resembling a pre-antibiotic era, making every routine surgery life-threatening. Of course, nothing prevents bacteria evolving resistance to a certain phage like it does to a certain chemical. “This happens constantly,” Chris says, “Someone comes to us and they have a drug-resistant infection and it’ll be resistant to [the phage] commercially produced.” However, unlike an antibiotic, phage can evolve too. They are dynamic biological elements, finding a new attack path every time a bacteria puts up a wall of defence. A ‘superbug’ could create a ‘superphage’. The prey and predator are caught in an evolutionary arms race, much like the international one that prevented phage from being in use today. But if phage loses the upper hand in this arms race as it did in the last, researchers can always follow the lad of the Hankin experiments of 1896: simply go down to the river and scoop up some more phage.

P RO P H E T I C FA L L AC Y The “prosperity theology” of a “faith healer” Barnaby Dowling “You’ve got cancer of the stomach? Are you ready to burn that cancer out? Here it goes in the mighty... Devil back off – back off devil! Hallelujah!” – Peter Popoff, 1986 n 1986, Peter Popoff was exposed. The American faith healer and “televangelist” had enjoyed great popularity in the early ‘80s, publishing several books and hosting a national television show. He regularly performed faith healing demonstrations in large, sold-out auditoriums. Popoff somehow knew the names, addresses and maladies of attendees, many of whom would miraculously get up from wheelchairs or throw away their crutches. Ira McCorriston, former controller of the Peter Popoff Evangelical Association, alleged that the organisation was taking $1.25 million a month in mail donations, solicited through the 55 televisions stations and 130 radio stations on which Popoff regularly appeared. To James Randi, Popoff’s rapid success was suspicious. A wellknown magician and debunker of psychics, Randi committed himself to unmasking Popoff. In 1986 Randi and a private investigator attended one of Popoff’s shows in San Francisco, incognito and armed with a radio scanner. In a subsequent appearance

on The Tonight Show, Randi revealed what they had recorded: Popoff’s wife Elizabeth was feeding him information through an earpiece. Her voice can be heard as soon as the show begins: “Hello Petey, can you hear me? If you can’t, you’re in trouble...” She could also be heard using racially abusive language and laughing at sick audience members. “It turns out that God’s frequency – I didn’t know he used radio – is 39.10 MHz,” said Randi. “And God is a woman, obviously, and sounds exactly like Popoff’s wife.” In 1987, Popoff declared himself bankrupt. Mail donations had fallen to $200,000 a month. He could no longer sustain what had become a very expensive media industry. His career, it seemed, was over. “I believe that there is someone watching me right now, a woman: you have several thousand dollars’ worth of credit card debt and you’ve just struggled with it. You’re paying exorbitantly high interest rates. I want to tell you if you’ll use the miracle point of contact, the faith tool I’m talking about today, you could see those debts wiped out, obliterated. God is telling me right now in my spirit that you can see those debts cancelled.” – Peter Popoff, 2012 Infomercial

The cable television explosion of the late ‘90s facilitated Popoff’s resurrection. He became one of a number of televangelists preaching “prosperity gospel” – an exploitative doctrine equating poverty with sin and promising wealth in exchange for tithes to particular ministries. As part of his revival, Popoff bought time slots on the Black Entertainment Network. In a 1998 report Hannah Rosin, then writing for The Washington Post, pinpointed the televangelist’s business strategy: “The preachers are turning to what they see as a reliable audience for the prosperity gospel: the black community.” Rather than hiding them, Popoff exploits his own experiences, flouting his ongoing “persecution” in a bid to connect with his viewers. With money flowing in once more, Popoff has expanded his audience. According to Randi, Popoff made $10 million more in 2008 than during the zenith of his career in the ‘80s. Financial data is not available after 2005, after which he changed his ministry from a business to a religious organisation. However, in 2005 alone, Popoff’s organisation grossed $23 million. He and his wife took $600,000 each, and currently live in a house valued at $4.5 million. Now aged 68, and showing no signs of slowing down his operations, Popoff has a global reach – he will appear on UK satellite television 33 times this week and regularly makes personal appearances in eastern Europe. Ole Anthony is the founder of the Trinity Foundation, an organisation that prosecutes fraudulent ministers and warns the public

about them. “The public as a whole has a short-term memory on the subject,” Anthony says. “It has been our experience that for a short while after an exposé of a particular ministry, donations to that organisation will drop for a time; however, their donations soon return to normal.” Despite the hard work of religious watchdogs and sceptics such as James Randi, even dramatic exposés tend to fade from the public’s consciousness. “Every time he [Popoff] said I would get an amount of money, that exact amount of money I got in the mail, or I got a phone call saying go pick it up. The exact date, the exact amount, and it totalled about $105,000. Not only did I get back what was stolen, I mean, my heart was healed through his words.” – Andrea’s Testimonial, from Popoff’s website Popoff has always preyed on the most vulnerable. Since the economic crash in 2008 he has been pushing “God’s divine power of debt cancellation” particularly hard. Popoff’s core audience comprises the sick, the elderly and the unemployed; his message is hammered into them through relentless repetition. “One reason people are easily fooled into giving money to a charlatan,” says Anthony, “is desperation. Almost everyone has experienced some sort of tragedy or hardship and in general, people who are suffering will give.” Beneath the mysticism, a more straightforward type of deception is Popoff’s bread and butter. He offers to give anyone a free vial of miracle water, claiming, somewhat disconcertingly, that it

originates from a stream near Chernobyl that was miraculously saved from contamination. These gimmicks are used to build up mailing lists of potential donors. When I ordered my free water, it came with a long typed letter, punctuated with what looked like handwritten personal notes from Popoff, such as “God has chosen you to have a part in this.” On closer inspection, however, these are also printed. Also enclosed was a letter asking for a donation and a handy freepost envelope. Popoff likens cash donations to the planting of a seed, and kindly asks for any specific prayer requests I might want to make. A mainstay of prosperity theology, “seed-faith” donations, are Popoff’s main source of income. “They lead people to believe that if they give or plant their “seed” into a particular ministry,” says Anthony, “they or their loved-ones will be blessed either financially or physically with wealth and health.” The letters I receive are long and rambling, quoting scripture to reassure me that wealth, health and prosperity are on their way, so long as I do as he says: “THIS FIRST STEP TOWARDS AMASSING THIS GREAT FORTUNE... IS RELEASING YOUR SEED FAITH.”

Since the 2008 crash he has been pushing “God’s divine power of debt cancellation” The letters grow more stern as time passes and I don’t reply. I’m told that it’s not too late, that a windfall of over £27,000 will be sent to me, but I must “Obey God in sowing a seed of £27.” In total I have received two “anointed mirrors,” one “gold bracelet” four “prayer cloths” and a “blood red victory bag”. Each object comes with elaborate powers and its own divine backstory – God has told Popoff to send them to me and informed him of the complicated rituals (many of which involve seed donations) that I must

undertake to see miraculous results. None look like they cost more than 50p. The urgency is startling and even though I know these letters have been generated by a computer, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Popoff has taken a personal interest in me. “I am a single mom trying to hold on to and find what faith I have and have lost. I have an array of emotional, spiritual, and financial drama that only Satan himself can claim as handiwork. I too have been in contact with the infamous Rev. Popoff. He has squeezed some money out of me as well. Desperate for support from the high, I went along with it because I so badly wanted answers… I was anxiously waiting his letters. But all I was getting was one after another with promises and sure things but only if I was obedient to God by sowing a seed. Saying that God would take me out of this position I was in. The latest letter promised a miracle beyond dreams before New Year’s Eve. Don’t see that happening either because I have not sent him money lately.” – Extract from a letter to the editor of Christian Issues, signed “Lonely, broken and lost” Former employees of Popoff have bemoaned his objectionable practices. One disgruntled worker recently posted an anonymous complaint online, saying: “It was my job to enter prayer requests and donations into a database. These entries into the database would generate a letter to be sent back to the person who wrote in.” The computer-generated letters appear to be handwritten by Peter Popoff himself. “High-dollar donors are placed on an “A-donor” list and receive thank you phone calls and occasional personalized solicitations for more donations,” says Anthony. Despite being a proven liar and an undoubted fraud, Popoff, the evangelical equivalent of a fake Nigerian prince, is allowed to promise material wealth in exchange for donations on British television. Ofcom’s rules state that religious programmes must not exploit the susceptibilities of the audience and has found some of Popoff’s material to be in breach of this. No steps, however, are currently being taken to remove him from the air.

THE PILGRIM’S WAY George McGoldrick The Pilgrim’s Way is a series that grew out of an interest in religious journeys, in particular the idea of faith being something that you find through the completion of a physical activity. The route that runs from Winchester Cathedral to Canterbury is best known as the path followed by the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. My initial intention in photographing it was to capture a sense of an old Christianity, a road untouched by modernity. I found the opposite. The path itself retains the ancient ambience, but the towns and villages it intersects do not. Interacting with the modern towns seemed somehow at odds with the idea of the journey as a chance to seclude oneself and focus on thoughts of God. Instead, I became more closely focussed on the lives of others. I came to understand that the point of the exercise is not an introspective journey, but one of empathetic interconnection with the people around you, strengthening the paths that link our immaterial souls, as we walk those which link our physical bodies.

“GO HOME AND SIT STILL” WWI and women’s colleges at Oxford Emily Frisella

uring the First World War, enrolment at Oxford plummeted. In 1914 Oriel had been home to 133 undergraduates; in 1917, only ten remained. Over the course of the war, 14,561 members of Oxford University enlisted and by 1918 approximately 20 per cent of those men were dead. As the town grew into a centre for military training, medicine, and refugee relief, the emptying university buildings were repurposed as hospital space. Despite the disruption caused by the war, enrolment at many women’s colleges increased over the following years. At St Hugh’s enrolment more than doubled, rising from 45 students in 1915 to 107 by 1919. Women students, who could sit exams but not yet earn degrees, became the most academically active in the university. Women who volunteered to join the war effort were

initially rebuffed by government and military officials. In 1914, when Dr Elsie Inglis presented the War Office with a plan for a system of hospitals across Europe that would be staffed by women, she was asked to “go home and sit still”. Instead, Dr Inglis contacted other European governments and founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia and France. Many of the students and faculty members who left women’s colleges at Oxford during the war found work at the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee, organisations that were willing to take on women nurses early in the war. For the students who remained in college at Oxford, the war could feel eerily close. Infantry battalions and Royal Flying Corps cadets were accommodated at the nearly-empty men’s colleges and used University Parks

as a training ground. Cutting through the parks on the way to a tutorial, St Hilda’s student Doris Dalglish was struck by the sight of dummies ready for bayonet practice, “nice, fat, well-stuffed sacks into which a man may dig the blade again and again”. Lady Margaret Hall was considered briefly as a potential convalescent home for men recovering from shell shock, but its proximity to the military drills in the parks quickly ruled it out. The 3rd Southern General Military Hospital, established in the autumn of 1914, was initially housed in New College and the Examination schools, but in March 1915 the hospital expanded, requisitioning Somerville to house more wounded soldiers. The resulting search for a new space for Somerville’s students was riddled with questions of propriety. Oriel agreed to host Somerville’s students and faculty for the duration of the war, but the provost faced criticism from

Doris Dalglish was struck by the sight of dummies ready for bayonet practice, “nice, fat, well-stuffed sacks into which a man may dig the blade again and again”

those who felt it was inappropriate for women to take up residence in a men’s college. In fact, college administrators had chosen to rent the St Mary Hall quadrangle at Oriel because it was easily separable from the main body of the college. After investigating Somerville’s temporary home, the Oxford Mail reported that the passage between St Mary Hall and the rest of Oriel had been walled off with “a purpose and determination that were worthy the mediaeval bricking-up of a nun”, describing the new barrier as “the most forbidding venture-no-further kind of wall ever seen”. Somerville’s Principal, Emily Penrose, emphasised to her students the paramount importance of proper social conduct. The presence of women at Oriel, after all, was quite a cause of alarm to some: historian Judy Batson writes of one episode in which “an elderly man outside Oriel exclaimed in horror when he caught sight of a young woman entering a college gateway with flowers in her arms”. During her first term at Somerville in 1914, Lucy Maria Wood established a reputation as one of the college’s more rebellious students. In the spring of 1915, she left Somerville to train as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment), then took up a posting as a nurse in Cambridge. Wood was promptly dismissed for “indecent conduct” after she was spotted wearing jewellery and makeup on duty, and still more scandalous, riding on the back of a man’s motor bike. Undeterred, she found a position in a French military hospital. After having their college displaced by a military hospital, Somerville students seem to have felt more compelled than others to choose war work over academic work. Early in 1914, Grace Proctor took a yearlong leave to work for the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Wives Association. The same autumn, Charis Barnett left college to work first as an interpreter and then train as a midwife, eventually taking up a volunteer post at a Quaker-run maternity hospital in Châlons-surMarne. Vera Brittain, a Somerville graduate and the author of Testament of Youth, trained first as a VAD in England then after hearing of her fiancé’s death in 1915 applied for a posting abroad. Somerville students were leaving for war work at such a rate that H.A.L. Fisher, the president of the Board of Education, addressed the college directly in his 1917 speech encouraging women students to remain at Oxford. Fisher’s conviction that women’s education was critical to the success of postwar society shows the growing impact of the war on attitudes to women in the university: “Women training for the high profession of teaching,” he told students, “are in a very real sense equipping themselves for a valuable and expert branch of National Service.” In fact, women were equipped for all sorts of “valuable national service”. During the war, women were permitted to study medicine at Oxford for the first

time, in part because of the military’s growing demand for trained medical staff (though the university set up a separate dissecting room for women to avoid any indecency or embarrassment over the discussion of bodily functions). Dr Anne Manuel notes that during the same period, “women started to lecture at the university, something that had not been considered before, and started to make names for themselves as academics.” Even so, some male faculty members still refused to lecture to women students. While the war brought institutional changes, social mores were harder to challenge. Celebrations broke out in Oxford when news of the 1918 armistice arrived, but for propriety’s sake, women students celebrated separately from the few male students remaining at Oxford. Somerville held private dances and dinners within the confines of St Mary Hall, but the bricked-up archway separating the quad from the rest of Oriel would not stand for long. The Somerville Log Book describes the events that came to known as “The Pickaxe Incident” as follows: “On the night of Thursday June 19th 1919 certain members of Oriel JCR expressed their desire to return to St Mary Hall in a somewhat unusual but practical manner. After prolonged bombardment on the intervening wall a breach was effected through which several undergraduates jumped into the quad.” Classics tutor Hilda Lorimer, “roused by the commotion”, put on her hat and confronted the Oriel students. According to Somerville secretary Vera Farnell, “Miss Lorimer’s appearance and her words – ‘Gentlemen have the courtesy to return to your own quarters at once without

The war brought institutional changes but social mores were harder to challenge delay’ – routed revellers, who turned and fled.” By this time, Somerville’s principal Emily Penrose had reached the quad. After consulting with Oriel’s provost, Somerville’s SCR agreed to “guard the hole throughout the night” in hour-long shifts, though, Farnell noted, “the hours went by without a sound.” Penrose worried that the incident might “get into the papers”. News coverage might tarnish the college’s reputation, suggesting that Somerville women were somehow mixed up in indecent behaviour. The first women students at Oxford faced pressure to perform to both social and academic standards, to prove that women too deserved a place in the world of academia. They got one step closer to this recognition in 1920, when women were first formally admitted to degrees at Oxford. In the following year, Vera Brittain, one of the few students who returned from the war to finish her course at Somerville, graduated with a degree in history. Brittain struggled with the return to university life, but her studies gave her time to come to terms with the calamity of war. “I was beginning to suspect that my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed,” she wrote. “It’s my job now, to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening to other people in the days to come.”

THE ALPHA COURSE Orange squash with Oxford’s evangelists Miranda Hall

ot questions about life? #tryalpha #htbchurch “Christianity is cool!” retweets @alphacourse, the Twitter account for the evangelistic course which has allegedly ‘saved’ the Church of England. On their Instagram, you can find a stream of attractive men in their early 20s with man-buns and Carhartt jackets, gazing pensively through the comic sans slogan: “Is there more to life than this?” There are now 33,500 Alpha courses in 163 countries around the world, including one in Oxford, which anyone can attend in search of the answer to life’s biggest questions. The course usually takes place over ten weeks, but in Oxford it is compressed to seven to fit with

the term dates: “a crash course in Christianity” as Aidan, the team leader, calls it. On Tuesday of second week I anxiously circle Westgate shopping center and LA Fitness trying to find “the Catacombs” where the first Alpha session is taking place. Eventually, I am buzzed into a room with brightly-painted gospel quotes on the wall and about 13 people with plastic cups of orange squash standing around talking. Logan, a Canadian in his 50s with tanned skin and twinkling eyes, offers me a glazed donut. “When my wife was pregnant she couldn’t get enough of these things!” he tells me, grinning. “I’d take her to the Krispy Kreme drive-thru and

she’d finish them so quick we’d have to go right back round again!” As I venture further into the room, everyone I pass smiles warmly and shakes my hand. I end up talking with a PhD student studying climate change and a Bulgarian pastry chef who looks a lot like Gareth Gates.

plastic flowers on each table and inspirational quotes flashing across the walls were drowned in a mass of grey suits straight from the City. Randomly arranged into smaller groups, we sat down for a free dinner of shepherd’s pie followed by ice cream. The exact speech Gumbel made after dinner at HTB on that occasion is now being replayed to us in the Catacombs. He is incredibly charismatic and I am immediately drawn in by his narration of his early life: his Jewish parents, his staunch atheism and distrust of the Christians he met on his Gap Year with their “weird, cult-like smiles”. The change came when, mortified by the conversion of his best friend at university to Christianity, Gumbel opened the New Testament in an attempt to prove him wrong. He ended up reading it cover to cover in two days. When he reached the end, he says, “I knew without doubt that it was all true.” “I used to think Jesus would be a real bore,” Gumbel says with a smirk. “But it would be so much fun to be at a party with Jesus!” He paints a picture of the Son of God as the life and soul of the party, forgiving everyone’s sins and turning buckets of bathwater into wine: “Chateau Lafite ’45… BC that is!” Aidan and Logan roar with laughter. He then goes on to prove that Jesus was the Son of God using logic and “the science of textual criticism”. This is supported by a brightly-coloured table with lots of numbers and dates. For the next ten minutes, he uses the word evidence a lot and then the video comes to an end as “Alpha TV” spins across the screen to a cheery jingle. As we leave the Catacombs, Rachel and Aidan encourage us all to bring any of our friends along next week. Walking back to my college in one of the world’s most elitist institutions, I am suddenly very conscious of the irony of my preconceived ideas of Alpha as an ex-public school club. When I first made small talk with the other members of the group about the obvious thing we had in common – living in Oxford – it felt like we were talking about two entirely different cities which happened to have the same name. While its upper echelons may be dominated by Old Etonians, the group at the Catacombs were proof against the idea that HTB is in any way exclusive. With their “church-planting” operation across the country in working-class parishes and Alpha courses in 80 per cent of UK prisons, HTB has certainly moved out of its comfort zone. The Week Two talk, “Why Did Jesus Die?”, is focused on the idea of Sin. Nicky has been replaced by Tony who has a goatee and an unbuttoned denim shirt. He opens by telling us that he used to be in a band called Hear’Say. It isn’t until the end of the talk that someone tells me I heard this wrong: he was in a Christian rock band called Pray4Rain, who list Hear’Say as one of their major influences. Although Toby isn’t the pop sensation I believed him to be, I find out that a number of celebrities have been on Alpha

“Some people have even met their future husbands or wives on Alpha!” As we arrange ourselves in a circle to begin the discussion on chairs designed for five-year-olds, Aidan welcomes us all and expresses how pleased he is to have such a diverse group on this course. Alpha’s church, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), has frequently been criticised for targeting rich widows and hedge fund managers who contribute to the £12 million Alpha makes every year. Nicky Gumbel, (founder of HTB) and Archbishop Justin Welby (a former member of HTB) are both Oxbridge-educated Old Etonians, and the course was strongly influenced by Anglican cleric, E.J.H. Nash who set out to evangelise “top boys at top schools.” Andrew Brown, columnist for The Guardian and the Church Times, praised HTB’s achievement in “preserving the confidence of the public-school officer class that it has a duty to lead, but dropping the surrounding pretensions”. However, in this group, I’m possibly the closest person there to the HTB stereotype. Our group leader is from a family of working-class farmers in Northern Ireland, and among the others there is a Bulgarian, a South African, a Lithuanian, a Canadian and a student from Taiwan. It occurs to me that for someone coming to a foreign country and knowing no one, a course like Alpha (in addition to revealing the meaning of life) is probably a good way to meet people and become part of some kind of community. Aidan tells us that he hopes we will all become intimate friends over the course of the next few weeks, and perhaps see each other outside the course. “Some people have even met their future husbands or wives on Alpha!” he adds with a cheeky wink. Members of the circle eye one another uncomfortably. As we all pass around a pack of Tesco mini-sausages, Rachel, Aidan’s assistant, plugs her laptop into the plasma TV and the face of Nicky Gumbel, the founder of Alpha, appears on screen. I’ve seen Gumbel speak once before, when I went to the first session of an Alpha Course held at Holy Trinity Brompton in London. Passing through a car park full of flashy sports cars, around 400 of us were ushered into a giant marquee while the speaker system blared the UK Top 40. This congregation really did conform to the HTB stereotype of wealthy, white, West Londoners. The cheery

Course, including Geri Halliwell and some members of Mumford and Sons. Gumbel once interviewed Tony Blair in front of the HTB congregation and, as I flick through the Alpha Handbook, I notice Bear Grylls’ Mud, Sweat and Tears on the “Suffering” reading list between the Bible and C.S. Lewis. Toby gets us to think about what Sin means, asking the live audience to rank God, himself, Simon Cowell and Hitler on a “scale of goodness”. He talks about guilty pleasures and temptation: his own obsession with fantasy football and his friend, Clare the Cocaine Addict, who found God and went to teach in Africa after having a religious experience at an HTB service. As usual, Gareth, the unexpected philosopher of the group, is the first to speak in the discussion after each talk. “Perhaps I am just advocating the devil here…” he starts with a sly smile and goes on to explain how he finds it impossible to read the Bible as literally as the talk suggested: “I’d have to entirely dumb myself down.” Mostly, he struggles conceptually with the question of whether God is a separate intellect to Jesus. One education student suggests an analogy for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity that she finds helpful: that H2O can take the form of water, ice or steam. Most of the group seems to like this and another girl suggests one involving a washing machine: “It could even work with a hoover!” Gareth looks unimpressed. Aidan and Rachel smile and nod. The conversation becomes more heated as we discuss how we might begin to define sin. “But in what form could morality possibly exist without the belief in a God?” wonders Logan, eyes twinkling fiercely. Susie, the

Environmental Studies PhD student, speaks for the first time. Fiddling nervously with a frog-shaped purse, she talks about her issues with the sense of guilt built into the Christian doctrine that we are all sinful. As a bisexual, she says, she is very conscious of a discord between her personal beliefs and the morals dictated by Scripture and the Church. The response is very cryptic. “I’ve been in a relationship with God for a long time and I know he wants to meet you!” Rachel tells Susie: “If you come to God, he can make you sparkling clean again. Don’t think of it as giving something up but as a gain!” She offers to pray for her soul in the coming week

“If you come to God, he can make you sparkling clean again” “How fantastic to have so many diverse opinions in one room!” Aidan says as we all leave, beaming around the group. I wonder how many more sessions are going to be dominated by me, Gareth and Susie expressing our “diverse opinions”. While it advertises itself as “an opportunity to explore the meaning of life”, Alpha is designed to convert agnostics into true believers. At an estimate, in Britain alone and in less than a decade, a quarter of a million agnostics have found God through Gumbel. We’re scheduled to be speaking in tongues by Week Five and so far all Aidan and Rachel have done to convert me is nod sympathetically and offer me mini-sausages.

BODY POLITICS

STOYA

IN CONVERSATION WITH STOYA Porn from the inside James Waddell

“I was like ‘Porn! Wait, I get to pick who I have sex with? Okay, sounds like fun!’”

or some, the word “pornstar” now reeks of ‘70s tack, evoking fake tan, muzak and pizza delivery boys turning up at Californian poolsides. Everything, from the colours to the body parts, is enhanced to the point of hyperreality. Stoya is a pornstar. But she is a pornstar unlike any other. Even in the first moments of our conversation over Skype, it was clear that her darkly striking good looks belonged more in autumnal Brooklyn than in the Golden State. Her website bio confirms: “After a brief stint in Hollywood, California, Stoya moved back to east coast skyscrapers, preferring the brash, concrete reality of the east to the 24/7 sand and glam of the west coast.” Her body has the wiry power of someone who “took a lot of dance lessons”, and bucking the LA trend, she has kept it that way, turning down the offer of free breast implants from her employers – twice. The porn she makes is unconventional too, with conspicuous delight and ebullient giggling replacing sultry moaning, to the extent that one early partner, Mick Blue, initially thought he was being made fun of. Although she is the first to point out that “I’m Caucasian, I’m symmetrical, I meet the Western cultural standard for ‘attractive’, or at least one of them”, she has defied much of what the porn industry had decided was sexually attractive in women – and then became one of the most successful pornstars of the decade. But the differences with the buxom bimbo stereotype go far beyond appearances. As well as acting in adult films, Stoya is a writer for Vice, the New Statesman, The Guardian, and The New York Times, writing with frankness and lucidity about sex, the porn industry, art, and where the lines between them are drawn. From the outset, Stoya vehemently distances herself from the “societal narrative” that porn is something you “fall into”: “I came from a middle-class background, my mum was a secondwave-ish feminist in that politically charged ‘70s era, and I was steeped in that. I absolutely made a choice. I almost skipped into it. I was like: ‘Porn! Wait, I get to pick who I have sex with? Okay, sounds like fun! What do I want to want to do with my life later? Do I want to be a politician, no; do I want to work with young children, no; okay pretty much no horrible ramifications, let’s go!’” She did, and she was almost instantly an unprecedented success. At a time when “alt-girl”

stars like Sasha Grey were in their heyday, demand was high, and her rise to fame was meteoric. Within two years of trademarking the name “Stoya”, she had not only won the Adult Video News “Best New Starlet” Award, but had lent her name to a silicon sex toy moulded from her own vagina (the “Stoya Destroya” Fleshlight). At least some of her phenomenal popularity was down to her striking authenticity, or at least her talent for naturalism – not a quality that had been characteristic of much mainstream porn up to that point. When new acquaintances – and journalists – tell her that they want to meet ‘the real Stoya’, she tells them that if they’ve seen her work, they already have. “I don’t have sex with people on camera who I wouldn’t have sex with anyway... The thought process is: would I do this? Yes. So let’s do this on camera.” Is there a ‘Stoya’ persona at all? “Acting – speaking as someone who doesn’t know anything about acting – seems to have this connotation of becoming a different person and inhabiting a role. I come from much more of a live performance perspective; I took a lot of dance lessons and still perform as a dancer, and that’s how I approach my work too. So, I am really doing these things as me, but it’s naturally going to be turned up a few notches, not because I take the ‘me’ hat off and put the ‘Stoya’ hat on, but simply because the level of observation is higher and I’m just aware of that.” But, eventually, deflecting porn stereotypes had to work both ways. As she carved out a niche as “not your average pornstar”, the persona of the darkhaired, pale-skinned intellectual began to grate too: “I feel the need to mention that academic language and complex theory is not a language that I have gone to the land of college and become fluent in. I can understand it, of course, in the same way that a person who’s got a year of Japanese under their belt would be able to understand Japanese, but I can’t create in terms of that academic language. So when it comes to my work being ‘political’, I think that has to have a lot to do with intent, and my intent when I started performing was just: ‘woo, fun!’” Despite this, she talks about

porn with connoisseurial enthusiasm, dissecting its trends, fads and modes. Is porn like art, then? “First, we have to stop talking about porn as if it’s all one thing. I use this comparison a lot when people talk about ‘sex work’: ‘food work’ would be an absurd phrase to use to describe everyone from Gordon Ramsay, to the migrant workers who do the picking of the vegetables, to the waiter, to the person washing dishes in the back, and the guy doing the restaurant’s marketing. So in a similar way, porn covers the same spectrum that you get between Hollywood and independent films – you have this broad range. You have different companies that have built up different audiences and cater to those audiences. I mean, until recent history most pornography was, even at its biggest, made by small companies that had maybe 40 employees in a small office, and it’s only in the past few years with the rise of companies like Manwin, who have been buying up all these smaller filmmakers that we’re actually getting ‘Big Porn’. But anyway, compared to those companies that had 40 employees, that were the more mainstream, established companies, you had independent studios, where it’s stuff like Shine Louise Houston’s Pink and White where they do the Crashpad series, or Courtney Trouble’s ‘Indie Porn’ revolution, which are very much artworks. So to answer your question, I think that there’s lots of different things called porn, some of them have more qualities that we would associate with art than others.” Either way, “ultimately, porn is also at its root very commercially driven in a way that art is maybe less so.” Even if Stoya loves her job, it’s still just a job: “We call sex work ‘selling your body’, but then we don’t call it selling your body when you’re working in construction, even though you’re very clearly being paid for the use of your body for a certain period of time, for a certain task. In construction there’s a significant amount of physical wear and tear that’s happening to your body. So I would say actually, if we’re gonna put the label of ‘selling your body’ on one or the other, I would go with the construction industry.” After the 50 Shades of Gray revolution (“I downloaded all three books, and stuck it out to the bitter end... the saddest and worst fairytale ever”), the dangers of “physical wear and tear” from BDSM sex do not just apply to sex workers, but to an ever-wider population, a trend of which Stoya is suspicious: “If you suddenly turn up in the bedroom with a crop and you’re suddenly flailing someone willy-nilly, you can seriously dam-

age their internal organs! You can do major physical damage, but also if you think you’re sorted by just saying that ‘bicycle’ is your safe-word and holding that up as the one thing that makes things safe, and there aren’t conversations and getting to know each other first, that navigation of boundaries then enables the people that you’re engaging in these activities with to think ‘oh, you didn’t say bicycle. It’s because you’ve gone deep into emotional-trauma-land for some reason so, ya can’t, and someone needs to call a stop to this.’ So it’s both physically and emotionally very dangerous when it’s approached in this superficial way.” Surely, I ask, when even Stoya’s more “naturalistic” brand of porn still shows, through directorial sleight of hand, feats of sexual performance that are not only impossible but potentially dangerous (anal sex requires more than the 30 seconds of foreplay that are shown, for example), isn’t that risky miseducation too? For the first time, Stoya seems uncomfortable: “I argued for a very long time that porn is entertainment and should not be used as a guide to having sex. But, it’s true, I have finally come to the realisation, that sex education is so fucking shit all over the entire western hemisphere and definitely beyond that, that entertainment is the only thing that people are getting rational sex education from. And so while I do maintain that it is not porn’s job to provide context, at the same time, until certain governments or educational institutions want to step the fuck up and provide some context, the people who are willing or able to do so coming from entertainment and sex work kind of have to... This is a big cultural problem that shouldn’t be in porn’s lap. But the fact is, it kind of is, so what can I do? But it still shouldn’t be entertainment’s problem!” This is a complex stance taken over a complex problem – legislating for and taking action within an industry as thornily multivalent as Stoya’s can often entail such seemingly paradoxical standpoints. But Stoya doesn’t shy away from contradictions. She is sex worker and thinker, sex symbol and feminist, anti-academic and writer. Despite these apparent paradoxes, one thing she certainly is – is about as far from the ‘70s “pornstar” kitsch that initially leaps to mind as it’s possible to get. As the interview comes to a close and we chatter about social media, she is the epitome of the millennial generation. Acutely sensitive to cultural zeitgeist, cannily aware of personal brand, and fiercely independent – in every sense.

BLOOM’S DEVILLED KIDNEYS Rebecca Choong-Wilkins James Joyce’s Ulysses chronicles a day in the life of its antihero, Leopold Bloom. Bloom’s journey through Dublin on 16 June 1904 is one of the flesh. He eats his way through the day in carnal contemplation. His culinary meanderings mirror the wider, thriving digestive system of a city that is consuming and excreting the lives of its inhabitants. Bloom is no exception to this. During lunch he pictures himself being ingested as the pie his friends Goulding, Collis and Ward are devouring: “Steak and kidney, steak then kidney, bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.” Disintegrating into monosyllables, the sentence crumbles into the chomp chomp chomp of mastication. Kidneys crop up 29 times in Ulysses. They form the first meal of this colossal tale. As Bloom gets up to make breakfast for his wife, the Rubenesque Molly Bloom, kidneys are “in his mind”. Phallic and sensual imagery is scattered through this interior monologue. And these spicy devilled kidneys capture Bloom’s appetite for the meaty and corporeal which characterises Joyce’s masterpiece.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish. The coals were reddening. Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. *** He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round him. No. On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way. He said softly in the bare hall: —I’m going round the corner. Be back in a minute. And when he had heard his voice say it he added: —You don’t want anything for breakfast? A sleepy soft grunt answered: —Mn. No. She didn’t want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.

INGREDIENTS 4 lambâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s or pork kidneys 2 finely chopped onions 1 tablespoon plain flour 1 dessert spoon smoked paprika 1 dessert spoon mustard powder 1 dessert spoon cayenne pepper Knob of butter 1 dessert spoon English mustard 1 dessert spoon cherry or redcurrant jam 1 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons sherry 1Â˝ tablespoon cream Chopped pickled chili, parsley or capers

1. Halve the kidneys lengthways, removing membrane and cutting out white cores with scissors. Pork kidneys have a meatier taste which can be softened with a 20-minute soak in milk. 2. Sift together the flour, paprika, mustard powder and cayenne pepper, adding a pinch of salt and pepper. Thoroughly dry the kidneys, then toss them in this mixture. 3. Add the butter to a hot frying pan and soften the onions a little. Then add the kidneys, allowing them to brown a little, roughly one or two minutes on each side. 4. Mix the mustard and jam into the pan and then add the sherry. Once this has reduced a little, add the cream at the last moment, stirring thoroughly. Serve on freshly toasted ciabatta or soda bread, scattering over some finely chopped pickled chilies, parsley or capers for added piquancy.

G L A S S Y- E Y E D A polemic against glass buildings

George Grylls

he vogue for christening new additions to the London skyline with cheerful nicknames began with the “Gherkin” in 1999. Ever since, architectural practices seem to have taken these nicknames as an affirmation of their work, or rather a tool to secure affirmation. A panoply of skyscrapers with equally friendly names have sprouted in the wake of Foster’s corporate helter skelter: the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie. Yet what these nicknames hide, or perhaps satirically highlight, is a pernicious epidemic in architecture. It is not the height of these buildings which is grotesque, rather their uniform adherence to one unpleasant material: glass. The Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie are merely the most conspicuous examples of a wider trend for unadulterated floor-to-ceiling glass. Some of those who once embraced this style now abhor it. Ken Shuttleworth, one of the architects of the Gherkin, recently described his Frankenstein thus: “The Gherkin is a fantastic building. But we can’t have that anymore. We can’t have those all-glass buildings. We need to be much more responsible.” In London the Gherkin was the catalyst for ‘glass architecture’, but the Shard was its apogee. It is the physical, figurative and titular hero of glass architecture, its name a piercing reminder of its material. Around it, glass has encroached on the urban landscape like a virulent anaesthetic, not only in London, but across the world. Glass architecture is an evolution of the International Style, whose name is indicative of its worldwide success. Its forerunners were the Bauhaus architects of Weimar Germany. Having emigrated to the more opulent USA, their commissions drastically increased in size. Terrifyingly beautiful towers of functionalism such as the Seagram Building prompted a global glut of ersatz recreations. Gleaming prisms now bespeckle many of the world’s super-cities. Those countries with relatively newfound wealth, particularly in the Middle and Far East, have become the greatest endowed. Marrying the ethos of the Bauhaus and the rigours of Le Corbusier, the International Style is a term loosely applied to these Modernist buildings of the 20th century, which embody simplicity, elegance and functionality. Draw a skyscraper in Pictionary and it will be of the International Style. Its success was perhaps its own perversion; imitated so widely it became dull and occasionally horrifying. Architecture has since suffered an anxiety of influence, both in the thrall of the International Style and trying

desperately to diverge from it. Note how the silhouettes of the four London skyscrapers listed at the start manipulate themselves into a ‘quirky’ shape in order to compensate for their derivative glassy façades. Perhaps the Gherkin’s pixelated triangles of blue and green lend it originality, but the Walkie-Talkie’s bloated sides smack of desperation. The International Style’s most prolific architect was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the final director of the Bauhaus. His most influential building was ironically never built – a radically pure glass masterpiece that predates the International Style’s later boom. His entry to the 1921 Berlin Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Competition was so simple it only needs three adjectives to describe it: glass, steel and sharp. The Shard is its elongated refinement, 92 years in the offing. But the corporate use of the Shard is simultaneously the pollution of a crystalline ideal. As a member of the radically socialist Novembergruppe, Mies van der Rohe had been dedicated to the utopian marriage of Art and the people. Glass was an appropriate material to encourage openness and cooperation. William J.R. Curtis, in his seminal Modern Architecture since 1900, rails against the appropriation of Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse design: “It is a sad irony of ensuing history that the pure glass prism should have started off as the symbol of a new faith and ended up as the banal formula for the housing of big business and bureaucracy.” Glass’ growing presence in architecture is also due to advances in glass manufacturing. It was not until the 1950s that the Pilkington Process allowed continuous streams of glass to be produced cheaply. Yet only 60 years after glass became available for widespread use as a primary building material, we have learnt that it is unsuitable for this task due to its poor insulating qualities. Of course those grand corporations, which can afford to hire a ‘starchitect’ to build their crystal tower, can equally afford to pump sterile air around their offices to combat the effects of radiation. Such wasteful expenditure of energy is increasingly subject to restrictions. In the UK all new private sector buildings from 2019 must be ‘zero carbon’. Amazingly, so fervent is the desire to build in glass that the current fashionable solution is to design angular glass buildings with wonky protrusions rather than embrace a mixed-material approach. The theory is that by imbuing your building with growths it shades itself, preventing radiation (e.g. the proposed Zig-Zag building, complete with twee nick-

name). The results are more often akin to acute elephantiasis. The Viet Café knows all too well about glass’s unpredictability. The next-door-neighbours of the Walkie-Talkie were able to fry eggs in the 70°C ‘death-ray’ that the building’s concave glass created in the summer of 2013. Somewhat unbelievably the ‘Walkie-scorchie’s’ architect Rafal Viñoly’s previous Vdara building in Las Vegas had similarly taken inspiration from Die Another Day, reflecting and concentrating a sunbeam that was able to melt lounge-chairs. Yet my gripe against glass is much more aesthetic than technical. There is no textural quality to glass; it is not exciting to look at. The emphasis is not on viewing the glass building, but the view from out of the glass building. However, when glass is adjacent to glass, surrounded by glass, the original purpose is distorted and the emphasis is shifted to looking in. Maybe the glass on a building is no different to the glass of a phone screen – a tool with which to inspect other people’s digital and physical lives. Indeed, glass is increasingly being used in residential buildings. We are edging ever closer to the totalitarian, nightmarish city-state in Evgeniy Zamyatin’s dystopic novel We, constructed entirely of glass. Overusing glass is obviously counterintuitive. In an urban context, one glass building impinges on the views from another. Glass is thus most effective away from the city. Mies van der Rohe’s most enduring and universally worshipped legacy to glass is the Farnsworth House of 1951, a privately commissioned country retreat in rural Illinois. The sheer glass walls are intended to create harmony with its carefully chosen setting in the shade of a

large Black Maple (now sadly deceased) with sweeping views down to the Fox River. Mies van der Rohe said of his project: “If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside. That way more is said about nature – it becomes part of a larger whole.” Glass cities cannot hope to achieve this, so urban reconstruction must become reacquainted with traditional materials – brick, wood, stone, concrete – as well as embracing possible materials of the future such as plastics and cardboard. Architecturally successful cities are not dominated by the hegemony of one material but rather the cocktail of many. Glass currently predominates because it pays to have a view – the Walkie-Talkie bulges at the top to maximise floor space on the ‘more desirable’ and hence more expensive higher levels. Such architectural pandering to corporate clients is lazy and impinges on the public’s aesthetic experience of the city. Instead, an architectural concept commonly associated with the exteriors of buildings should be applied more often internally. ‘Denial and reward’ allows the viewer to catch glimpses of a building on approach to it, whilst withholding the full panorama until the most opportune moment, as if creating a cliff-hanger for the rewarding finale. The individual eventually tires of looking out on totally uninterrupted vistas yet developers still stick religiously to the mantra of glass and views, glass and views. When everything is available, nothing becomes precious. Glass is dangerous. It is subtle enough for us to become immune to its increasing ubiquity, yet total exposure is irrevocably damaging. Mies van der Rohe’s most famous aphorism is: “less is more.” So it is with glass architecture.

WINDOW-SHOPPING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT A tour around London’s ‘Church of Scientology’ Tom Graham

“D

iscover your true potential,” beckoned the golden, beatific faces on the screens lining the building. Rain dribbled, with the occasional whip of wind, as I looked up: “The Church of Scientology” emblazoned in gothic script over a shield. After some pirouetting indecision, and a furtive glance up and down the street, I went in. The hall was grand, and empty. The decor was bizarre: retro-futuristic and toothpaste-white. Marble pillars framed the reception. They recognised my hesitation and materialised beside me – friendly, but quite intense. Questions came fast, and disarmingly did not follow my answers. Before long I had filled out a few forms, given them a friend’s email and number, and another man, Bill, was wagging my hand enthusiastically. I was pretty sure we were wearing the same roll-neck, which seemed portentous, but the tour had already begun. Bill had the fitful eloquence of someone who memorises soundbites. He was well drilled: this was American salesmanship. Firm handshake; guiding hand on shoulder; a little bit of “between you and me, buddy…” But the eyes jarred. They bulged, as if something was pushing them out from behind. Belief, probably. He’d clearly been trained to ask a lot of questions, but really he wanted to talk about himself – to convince me of a version of him. Since becoming a Scientologist, his IQ had gone up by 40 points – to 160 – and the severe asthma that had troubled him since childhood was “as good as gone”. His eyes searched mine for scepticism as I made politely admiring noises. He saved his trump for last: he no longer needs to work anymore and can spend all his time volunteering at the Church because his company – Bill’s Gutters – now runs itself. Drops of sweat were trailing down his bald head like millipedes.

– The Master himself. The cables started to look like strings. Bill asked me whether I was religious. I felt a tightening anxiety as he collected information about me. I said no, and he made a joke about all that baby Jesus being born on Christmas day stuff being pretty far-fetched.

Questions came fast and disarmingly did not follow my answers Bill made a lot of jokes, and they were hit-and-miss. He laughed a lot too, for a strangely long time, and I felt like I had to match him laugh-for-laugh because he never took his eyes off me. He made one joke about all those immigrants coming over here, taking our jobs, shagging our wives, and I wondered what made him think I would like that. It can’t have been the roll-neck. The pitch seemed to be winding down at this point – the 20 ways to happiness; the eight dynamics of life; the three components of the self – and we paused to admire a room of glass cubicles in which people were practising therapy (‘auditing’) on teddy bears. Bill treated this like the most ordinary thing in the world. Some people were getting quite animated; others were taking a more comforting approach. Bill told me they were projecting their “reactive selves” onto the teddy bears, effectively giving themselves therapy, and that different styles work for different people, although they encourage them to keep it calm. He spoke quietly and then gently guided me away, as if we had been overlooking a nursery. Bill set me down in front of a film while he fetched a personality test. It was an extraordinarily badly acted clip about “dianetics”, which sounded a lot like therapy, but “definitely isn’t”. There were sunsets, nature shots, twangling instruments, and an All-American voiceover. Bill returned and I tore myself away: the test had 200 yes/no/maybe questions which veered from the mundane – “Do you often sing or whistle just for the fun of it?” – to the frankly extreme – “Is your life a constant struggle for survival?” My answers were taken for processing and Bill invited me to their New Year’s Eve party. I said sure, maybe, thanks, then something about my dog, and I left. My results are probably ready by now. In spite of it all, I am curious.

The decor was bizarre: retrofuturistic and toothpastewhite We went up in the lift – to the top floor. Others came in and out; everyone was very nice indeed. We walked past the library where banks of people were listening to headphones, the cables of which wormed into holes in the desks, as if feeding into a hive intelligence. They were listening to the founder Ron Hubbard’s writings

BEYOND COLLEGE FAMILIES Student parents at Oxford and Cambridge Jessica Sinyor

h… actual parenthood. Not college parents.” There is some confusion when I first speak to Geraint Kiff, a third-year undergraduate at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Geraint studies languages, occasionally dresses as his college mascot (a squirrel), and is the father of an 18-month-old girl. He laughs when he realises that I don’t want to speak about his 18-year-old college daughter: “No, that’s fine, that’s fine.” Geraint found out that he was going to become a parent the week after Freshers’: “It was a bit of a comedown, as you can imagine.” He had been having a casual relationship in the summer before his first year of university; finding out about the pregnancy was a “huge shock”. The relationship had broken down before Geraint’s daughter was born and the birth was followed by a prolonged court battle, at the end of which he was given the right to decide whether to take the baby on himself or put her up for adoption. “I opted for the latter.” He is positive about his decision, describing the adoptive parents as a “lovely couple”. In a student body that is increasingly diverse, Geraint is part of a growing community of student parents. However, many of these student parents, unlike Geraint, study alongside raising a child. Because institutions are not required to collect this information, the exact number of student parents is unknown, making it impossible to put effective support in place. Student parents are invisible on campuses: those I speak to all describe the difficulty of tracking other parents down. They all share similar feelings of isolation and being overlooked. Education specialist, Dr Marie-Pierre Moreau, tells me that even university support services “don’t really know about student parents”. Universities remain geared towards undergraduates whose sleep is more likely to be interrupted by a noisy fresher than a crying baby. “The culture of university hasn’t been changed,” Dr Moreau continues, “We still think of the typical student as white, middle-class, carefree and careless, in all senses of the word ‘care’: the student who doesn’t have any cares but also doesn’t have any caring responsibilities.” The attitude of some university authorities is not only one of disregard, but one of disdain. Dr Moreau recalls that “one head of support services thought that student parents were not responsible, and all had six children with six different fathers”. Another said that, “if you had a dog, you wouldn’t expect the University to become a dog-walker”. Institutionally rooted prejudice and ignorance of this kind undoubtedly marginalises student parents. Consequently, they remain below the radar, and the vicious cycle of isolation and anonymity is perpetuated. The feeling of being ignored is familiar to Ash Mohanaprakas. Ash discovered she was pregnant after her first year at Ox-

ford. “There’s not much in the way of support for student parents, mainly because no one really knows about them or any of the issues they face,” she says. Pregnancy was not part of Ash’s plan; in the conservative community in which she grew up, if you wanted children, you “got married” “My parents wanted me to finish my studies, graduate and get ahead professionally before I got married and thought about family life.” Living in a draughty single room in a shared student house and scheduling her prenatal appointments around seminars, Ash was determined to complete her degree. However, once Jithu was born, her situation became increasingly difficult. Now married and back in Oxford, Ash was only able to secure childcare for two days a week. Her finances began to spiral out of control. Ash could not apply for jobseeker’s allowance because she was a student, and having taken time off her studies, she was precluded from receiving a student loan. With disbelief she tells me that childcare was not covered as an emergency under the University Hardship Fund at the time with the reasoning that “childcare is planned”. It was not only Ash’s finances that suffered, but her academic work too. “A lot of my essays were very poorly prepared because I couldn’t take a baby into the library, and I could only go to the library on the two days a week when Jithu was at childcare.” Essays were written in the middle of the night and hurried translations were produced while Jithu napped. The pressure to succeed academically took its emotional toll on Ash; she describes how she was “at first filled with guilt” at leaving Jithu in childcare in order to study. Having Jithu at college was no easier; there was a complete lack of basic facilities. She points out that “there are no changing places in colleges so you end up standing the baby up or going to a friend’s room or having to dash back home. You can’t really be out and about as a student in your own university.” There is understandable anger in her voice as she recalls the fact that while each student paid four pounds on their bills automatically for a punt, there was no possibility of having changing tables installed in the toilets. “Everyone was quite supportive, but at the end of the day it was just me and it felt a bit like I was drowning.” Determined to graduate on time, Ash took Jithu with her on her year abroad to the Azores. This was a particularly memorable episode of her academic career, which Ash describes with characteristic understatement as “a bit traumatic”. The organiser of the language course didn’t pay Ash’s landlady enough money, so she, her husband, her parents-in-law and her then one-year old son had their water and electricity cut. “I had to go to the police,” she remembers, before admitting with a wry smile: “It improved my Portuguese.”

Despite the struggles and obstacles – emotional, academic, financial and practical – Ash graduated with a 2.i this summer. Speaking to her, Ash’s resilience and resolve remain undimmed by the relentless exhaustion and anxiety of studying while raising a child. Ash confesses that she “could not have been happier” seeing her son at her graduation. However, the difficulties she encountered reflect the wider student parenting experience.

Throughout our conversation, I get a clear sense of Megan’s incredible tenacity: “I had worked for this for so many years. I wanted to go to Cambridge since I was 14 or 15. It would have taken quite a lot to make me drop out.” In addition to completing her degree, Megan ran two half-marathons and was the student parent representative for the Cambridge University Students’ Union during her time at the university. She describes having a child in an academic environment, surrounded by thousands of teenagers, as “the most ridiculous clash of worlds”. While university culture caters to those who can live carelessly, studying and parenting seem to jar, with complex and alienating effects for those who do both. For Megan, however, this mismatch had some advantages. She smiles as she remembers how the undergraduates provided a pool of enthusiastic babysitters, and proudly recalls her son’s popularity among her friends when she took him to college: “They said he was really good for welfare, almost as good as a cat.” Megan’s gratitude for the encouragement she received from the students around her chimes with Ash’s experience of her housemates’ acceptance when she announced her pregnancy. I am also reminded of Geraint’s praise for the reaction of his peers when he found out he was going to become a father. He describes how he at first kept the news quiet, before deciding to “open up about the situation; the response I received was an overwhelmingly positive and supportive one. If I’m honest, the conversations I had with my fellow students helped me in terms of coping.” All three parents are unanimous in acknowledging the importance of their relationships with other students in juggling the balance between BA and baby. While these are only three experiences of parenthood at university – all at Oxford or Cambridge – it is striking that the students echo each other in praising the vital support of their fellow students. As Megan tells me, “There are bound to be difficult times – even when you’re studying just as a student. There are always going to be very low points when you question what the hell you’re doing there. That combined with having a kid makes it really difficult. But it was the people that kept me going, to be honest.”

They said my son was really good for welfare, almost as good as a cat Colum McGuire, NUS Vice President for Welfare, describes feelings of alienation stemming from “limited childcare funding available, complex student support arrangements, inaccessible teaching practices, and little or no time to take part in student life”. It is these issues which make student parents particularly vulnerable to dropping out. While Ash is raising Jithu with her husband, single student parents like Megan Goldman Roberts are at an even higher risk of leaving their course. Megan took her then three-year old son with her to Cambridge. She describes how she “vaguely” considered dropping out: “Getting a bad essay grade and having a bad parenting day is always difficult. You think, ‘what is the point in me doing this?’” Combining a Biological Natural Sciences degree with being a parent was, she says dryly, “fun”. “The university expects an awful lot,” she remarks, noting, “Life is much easier now that I’m working full-time.” The frenetic pace of Megan’s university life meant that her social life suffered. She would drop her son off at school before running to maths lectures at 9am: “I was never around for that chitchat at the school gate.” The pressure to socialise with other parents was exacerbated by Megan’s determination to make friends with other undergraduates. She regrets not having been able to enjoy the “spontaneity aspect” of ‘careless’ student life. “A lot of stuff gets organised at the last minute, but I couldn’t do that. I found that quite difficult and isolating.”

KLEIN BLUE Mirren Kessling This is a paint originally mixed by artist Yves Klein and paint supplier Edouard Adam. Registered with the French intellectual property office as “International Klein Blue” in 1960, its abbreviation is IKB. Whereas traditional binders such as oil reduce and dull the intensity of the pigment, the unusual resin binder used in IKB preserves the pigment’s richness. The colour was made iconic by Klein’s Anthropometry performances in the 1950s and early ‘60s, for which he covered female models in IKB and instructed them to drag their bodies around paper like “human paintbrushes” to the sound of a live string ensemble, before an audience of around 100 spectators. In this contemporary update, I used my own body to create the shapes. For the first piece, I covered my breasts and adomen in ink and printed them directly onto paper, simultaneously preserving the details of my skin and hair, and distorting natural body shape. In the second, the shapes were printed indirectly, my body pushing paper onto ink such that points of pressure and contact can be seen in the final work.

ESSAYS JUDGES Professor John Davis, Dame Margaret Drabble, Stephen Fry, A.C. Grayling, Zoë Heller, Andrew O’Hagan, Lynne Segal, Nancy Sladek, Sir Peter Stothard QUESTIONS 1. “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden). 2. Is it possible to dress rationally? 3. Should we celebrate suburbia? 4. How would your subject be different if women had always been equal in power to men? We called for essays of no more than 1000 words on these four questions, each taken from past All Souls College entrance examinations. This section contains the winner, runner-up and other shortlisted entries. We also include one further essay on Mein Kampf, submitted independently of the competition, which it seemed somehow inappropriate to ‘categorise’ in one of the magazine’s themed sections. “These were all of a quality high enough to win any normal competition, but this was a race whose runners were all thoroughbreds of the highest pedigree. Awful cliché it may be, but it was heart-breaking to put them in any order, let alone to select one as a winner.” – Stephen Fry

“O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE” (W.H. AUDEN).

Timna Fibert, Winner

t the end of the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie and Darcy finally kiss. They’re in a carriage so the approach is somewhat unstable, but the music swells and their lips finally meet and the series ends on a still of their faces that fit together like puzzle pieces. The perfect end to a bumpy (but not too bumpy) ride. The love story is a strange kind of narrative. Human beings fetishise endings – endings give meaning to what has gone before, and, more than that, they provide us with a way of moving on. So Aristotle’s theory of Catharsis (the outlet and purgation of emotions stimulated by the power of spectacle) depends heavily on endings. By this theory, everything within a narrative is present because of the ending. Everything happens because at some point, everything must stop happening. And when it stops happening, we feel freer, because we are still alive, in spite of the inevitability of ‘closure’. But love is not an ending. Love is not closure. Lizzie and Darcy’s kiss always bothered me because it looked so unnatural to freeze the frame there. There’s no way they could have sustained that kiss for a long time. They would have bumped heads. But that’s what the narrative did: it took an untenable position and extrapolated it out into eternity. I can’t tell you the truth about love, because love is just another one of those things that has to end. Love is another narrative, and as such, it isn’t about truth. It’s about aesthetics. In Frank Kermode’s book A Sense of an Ending he writes:

deaths – and that lovers desire the end of their relationships? This seems an insupportable conclusion. Nobody wants love to end. Nobody who really loves. On the contrary: often we feel as though even the most painful experience of love is better than no love at all. Heartbreak is perhaps the most intolerable of all human experiences. To desire it, to be drawn to it, fascinated by it? Kermode argues that, “when we survive, we make little images of moments which have seemed like ends; we thrive on epochs”. The process of surviving mini-deaths helps us believe in our own immortality, shows us that we can survive, that we have always survived. The same is true of love: we ‘kill’ it a thousand times so that it can live, so that it never has to die. The course of true love never did run smooth because if it did, the story would be no good to us. So we attack our relationships, we want them to change, dramatically, violently, so that they can survive in a new form, changed but intact. In our stories, love is composed of moments. Lizzie and Darcy’s kiss is that ultimate moment, the climax of love. On the other end of the spectrum, Othello exclaims that, “if it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy”. And he ends in killing his love, and himself, and he dies “upon a kiss”, and he and Desdemona lie onstage entangled in a violently erotic tableau. If only he had killed himself right at the beginning, his should have been a comedy that died in marriage, like Pride and Prejudice. Instead he attempts to recapture connubial bliss. His death imitates his life, because he desires to reclaim the interpretation of his story through its ending. He wants to make his life back into a love story, and he dies in the service of that narrative, attempting to reclaim a moment and a wife that he himself destroyed. In our desire for immortality we stray into the afterlife, and before we realize it, we find ourselves in hell. Othello survives past the living moment of love, and becomes a ghost in the plot of his own romance. And he haunts it in his bitterness, and it becomes a horror story. It becomes about pain, and then we really do long for death, we really do long for ending. So, my truth about love: love is a series of deaths, and one of them will be real. We can never tell which it is, but one day we will push too hard and love won’t be worth living anymore. This is just a story about love, just an interpretation obsessed with endings. Obsessed with endings but unsure how to end, because not everything’s been said. That’s the problem. When there’s still always everything to express, why would we choose not to express it? Perhaps I should have ended 50 words ago, but instead I am rushing on to the limits, and the arbitrary end.

Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest’, in media res, when they are born; they also die in medics rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of the chaos we see around us. If independent concepts exist, we cannot see them. We can only see ourselves, and the way that they relate to us. The (happy) love story is a tale of fidelity. It excludes most mental transgressions, it excludes tiny everyday annoyances – these do not fit into the story, so we do not tell them. Mitchell and Webb once did a sketch about a film director who bewailed the loss of realism in modern cinema: “You can watch the whole of Ghostbusters and no-one brushes their teeth.” There are some things that narrative can leave out as irrelevant. Is it ‘untruthful’? No. It is simply a story, and a story cannot reflect everything. A story is only an interpretation. What has been established so far is that people desire the end of narrative, and that people apply narrative to themselves and to their own lives. Does it not follow, then, that in creating personal narratives, people actually desire their own

“This entry had much elegance, sophistication, and thoughtfulness. Focussing so strongly on endings, I liked the hesitation about how and when to end it. It was clear this could go on, and on.” – Lynne Segal “Smart, well-argued, quite academic look at love. It escapes the boundaries of the academic however and honestly engages love itself.” – Stephen Fry “The precariousness of passion is well caught, as is the movement of the bumpy carriage.” – Margaret Drabble 53

“Beautifully paced and locally realised contemplation of all the forms of love we know. Very well structured, witty and compelling.” – Stephen Fry “It shows wit and warmth, and the writer demonstrates how much more potent storytelling is – even in an essay – than merely lecturing” – Andrew O’Hagan “Callum Kelly’s essay stood out for me because he simply covered so much material and, I felt, in a highly nuanced and sophisticated way.” – Lynne Segal 54

“O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE” (W.H. AUDEN). Callum Kelly, Runner-up

harsh words and harsher blows, because honestly, nobody else will ever love you the way I do. It’s words left unsaid, because it’s kind to be cruel; it’s false hope and dreams, indulgent words and white lies to hide the truth that reality, unvarnished, hurts. But take the rough with the smooth, and love is hopeful. It’s the boy who sees his epidermal rolls as unsightly eating his first full meal in weeks; it’s the child who always preferred robots to dolls, short hair to long, jeans to skirts, learning that they are not abnormal, atypical or alone; it’s the fresher who never really got what was so great about ‘hooking up’ after an entz feeling like they don’t need to try it, go on, just once, just to find out what they’re missing – because they love themselves. It’s not Narcissus and the river, but it’s love, all the same. A little old lady enters and takes the seat near the window where she and her husband used to meet every Sunday, after church. Their love of God brought them together – a match made in heaven – and in a half-hour or so she will leave, pick up a bunch of tulips from the florist’s and leave them lying with her husband, because he always loved them, and she loves him still, and not all love is ‘till death do us part’. No one knows that more than Mum of Two and Hubby Number One, who still meet here occasionally despite the differences to let the kids love both of their biological parents as much as they love the new father in their life. Outside, a group with a bucket collects money to show some love for those families whose sons loved their country enough to lay down their lives in its defence. Love is compromise, love is sacrifice. The truth is that love is humdrum. It’s there, in every waking moment, from the first cup of tea in the morning to the last tucking-in at night. It’s the notes passed between sweaty palms in lessons, the kisses, tender or sensuous or both, the rings, the hand-fasting, and the vows. It’s the hours put into that bestseller that’s been on the boil for years, the hobby that became a career, the pastime that whiles away an otherwise dull weekend. It’s gifts on birthdays, Christmas, or ‘just because’; it’s remembered anniversaries and last-minute meal plans, it’s ‘nobody picks on my little brother but me.’ But love is not boring. Sometimes we notice love, other times, it hides itself away. But if there is one truth about love, it is that if it were gone, it would surely be missed. Love, like the world, goes round. One day, we may find out if there’s a connection.

icture a café on the High Street. A little place that serves coffee, loved by its owners, who bought the shop in 1985 having retired from their high-paid jobs in the city, because it’s what they always wanted to do, really, low income be damned. A couple sits in the corner; students, who met at a club last Hilary and have been inseparable since, embodying (in their minds) the traditional, Hollywood kind of love. To their circle of friends, who haven’t seen them all term, the couple’s eros has had negative effects on their pre-existing philia – the philosopher among them loves his C.S. Lewis. A few tables over sits a family in the nuclear mould. Of course, the parents show the deepest agape towards their children (there will be tears when the eldest leaves the nest) but at the moment the father would love little Jimmy just that little bit more if he would just. stop. whining. The daughter, all of class 4B knows, loves Mark Smith, football captain – at least from the safe distance of the other side of the classroom – but has recently been finding herself with strange feelings about Becky Roberts with whom she shares a bench in Chemistry. In a few years, their shared Chemistry may become, well, chemistry. And she will learn, hopefully without too much difficulty, that that love is okay too. There’s the stressed finalist staring at textbooks about subjects which he thought he loved, three years ago, before collections and gobbets and dissertation title submission sheets manifested themselves; he will leave the café and return to the daily grind of submitting applications, where he will try to convince faceless Bosses in suits and ties that he loves the work they do and would love to be a part of it, and that it isn’t just the idea of a five-figure salary that he loves. They say it’s the heart that is the organ of love. Sometimes, it’s the brain, especially when hard decisions are involved. But the week will pass, and he will be there after Friday’s college bop, singing the traditional song about bashing St. So-andSo’s down the road because in 200 years there’s been no love lost between them, and because he loves his college crest, colours and creed. The radio changes songs. “I love this one!” someone says, but reflects silently that it may be because it was played at every school disco since they were five, and really it’s a kind of musical Stockholm Syndrome. “I love your shirt!” another voice gasps, but the lingering on the words betrays covetousness, envy – I’d love to have it. Because love is not the open door certain film studios want us to believe; sometimes love is cruel. The couples staying together despite the

IS IT POSSIBLE TO DRESS RATIONALLY? IS IT POSSIBLE TO DRESS RATIONALLY? Mina Odile Ebtehadj-Marquis, Shortlisted

f I were to dress rationally, I might wear beige. But beige is an ugly word and an uglier colour. If I were to dress

in winter. If I were to dress rationally, I might never wear miniskirts at all. Because my body, when dressed irrational-

rationally, I might do so in the wartime way. But I am as happy to ration my fashion as I am to don beige – that is, not at all. Abandoned on a side-table, my dictionary gripingly declares that a rational dresser is logical, reasonable and sensible, and that the rational number, when expressed as a decimal, has a finite or recurring expansion. “Fine,” I say. “I can appreciate the recurring expansion of my wardrobe (though, sadly, not my closet space), and I understand the finished finite finality of the right pair of shoes. Whether these are rational things (I confess, I do not study Maths) remains uncertain.” The rational dresser would never wear white to a funeral. The rational dresser would never wear white to a wedding. But the rational dresser in India would wear white to a funeral. So the rational dresser dresses not simply for the context but also for the continent. If I were to dress rationally, I would never wear miniskirts

ly, invites irrational threats. Because my body, when dressed irrationally, is irrationally threatening. If I were to dress irrationally I might wear my shirts low and my skirts high. If I were to dress irrationally I might offend people. The rational dresser is sensible – “sensitive”. Were I to dress irrationally, I would not only be illogical and unreasonable, but also insensitive. I ought to button up my shirt and pull down my skirt, lest I disturb any sensitive person who might see me. Men think they know what they want. Men, I think, want me to dress rationally. I think men want me when I dress irrationally. Too bad for them that I do not dress for them. I cannot definitively say whether or not it is possible to dress rationally. But I can say this: “It is not possible for me to dress rationally. I cannot but be irrational, so long as anyone would have me be otherwise.”

“This is a strange, brief, eccentric essay on an off-beat topic, contrary, provocative, and fun. Some entertaining word play.” – Dame Margaret Drabble “A short and sweet and pleasingly infuriated vamp on rational dress. Funny and convincing.” – Stephen Fry “For elegance, brevity and humour, [for me] Mina Ebteadj-Marquis beats a fine field.” – Sir Peter Stothard

“This is a novel approach to a very tricky topic, and makes the reader think hard, as the best essays do... The divorce arms race is a telling and chilling image.” – Dame Margaret Drabble “Very interesting reflections of love and mathematics and nature. Highly original.” – Stephen Fry “This was an ingenious attempt to think differently about a clichéd subject. It gives oxygen to the idea that love is unknowable.” – Andrew O’Hagan 58

“O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE” (W.H. AUDEN).

Naomi Vides, Shortlisted

he science of love: instead of The One, there’s a distribution of Ones, everyone in the world has a number that tells you how compatible/suitable/ loveable they are to you. Above a certain threshold we call it love. There exist algorithms to optimise your chances of ending up with a One; for example, if you want to have a maximum of ten partners in your life, dump the first four then marry the next person you find who is better than all of the first four – statistically, this gives you the best odds. The behavioural patterns in a couple nearing divorce mimic those of countries in an arms race… really you can model anything, but I don’t think any of this really gets to the heart or the truth of love itself, so let’s talk more abstractly. The concept of truth, I think, is best understood as mathematical truth; a logical and sensible truth, because that is the only idea of truth I have come by that has never caused me hesitance or doubt. And so through a mathematically inspired argument, I will attempt to tell you the truth about love. Firstly, let’s talk about infinity and nothing; specifically infinities that are uncountable and nothings that are null sets. Take a collection of ideas. If there are so many of them, that not only can I not give you any form of a guess as to how many there are, but I also can’t find a way to order them to even begin the counting process, then we’ll call our ideas uncountably infinite. If I pick out just a few of these ideas, and I can count them from beginning to end, then we’ll call these ideas a null set, in the sense that they are inconsequential in comparison to the initial collection and, although they may have merit in themselves, they are effectively irrelevant in the big picture. So love, from all the wise and thoughtful people that have spent a long time thinking it through, seems to be a lot of things and throughout all of the past, the present and the future, could probably be described as an uncountably infinite lot of things. For example, love, I’ve been told, is like a rubber band, and a butterfly, a plant, a puzzle, falling asleep. But just as it’s as flexible as a rubber band, as delicate as a butterfly, as evolving as a plant, it is also as unmoving as a rock and, just as it is as confusing as a puzzle and as mysterious

and our fault is not in the attempt, but the medium. Maybe other forms of expression like art, music or movement may come closer, but in the inherent subjectivity of art I believe we would arrive at the same conclusion. And of course, love may indeed be different for different experiencers but if we are searching for the truth, it would seem sensible that this be the universal bit of our definition. Love as a belief or idea, a god-like entity, seems to fit slightly better, so let’s approximate as such. Here’s my proposed model: love exists but the fact that love exists is unprovable. Love can be defined, but it would take an uncountably infinite collection of thoughts and ideas to do so. Like an irrational number, we can describe it constructively, we can optimise it and approximate it, but we can never write it down from beginning to end. By definition, it cannot be captured by any poem or and painting, and any attempt at telling you the truth about love is doomed to be but a null set of the whole definition and is therefore irrelevant. To complete the argument, we delve deeper into the abstract, the king of maths: logic. Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem says that if we start with a consistent set of axioms (a group of assumptions that don’t contradict each other) then out of the set of all things that are true given those axioms, not all can be proven. More simply put, there exist truths which we can prove to be unprovable. Let’s choose our axioms to be life itself and the ways of the world and assume them to be consistent (as if not, then nothing makes sense and there’s no point in much at all). The truths we can derive are all the things that we know: culture, science, religion. Some have been proven; some are yet to be and by Gödel, there some that are true, but have not and will not ever be proven. So let’s ask ourselves which truths the unprovables will be? Which beliefs in life are we least likely to find true reason for? It seems obvious that it shall be the set of truths uncountably infinite in definition; those on the opposite side of the spectrum from maths and science, truths like happiness and love. So in conclusion, the truth about love cannot be told in the finite or even infinite time we have left, never mind

as sleep, it’s as clear as divine inspiration. It’s as unstoppable as war, but as powerful as peace, as subtle as a whisper but as earth-changing as a gunshot. In essence, the way love has been materialised is riddled with contradictions, and so although there may be some close to perfect similes out there, I believe that almost surely (for all apart from a null set), we can discount these answers and instead take from them that language, as it stands, is insufficient to describe love,

a 1,000-word essay, and I will leave those more creatively minded, those who have experienced more of love and life to continue on the quest of doing so, because all I can prove is that love is (maybe) unprovable, unknowable, and would suggest, that rather like chasing infinity, the reader does give up and chase love instead of the truth about it, and trust me that mathematically you’d be far more likely to be successful.

“This essay bravely tackles a momentous subject, with much feeling… Tante Sonja is well registered, well recorded.” – Dame Margaret Drabble “Highly poignant memories of a Holocaust survivor. Immensely sensitive, intelligent and moving.” – Stephen Fry “This one is the best for me, mainly because it is written with such quiet passion and with a sense both of the personal and the historical.” – Andrew O’Hagan 60

“O TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE” (W.H. AUDEN).

Lily Faust, Shortlisted

ove cannot be just another Holocaust story! Or so my readers will surely exclaim in disbelief when I reveal that I wear love on my index finger. The ring is a symbol, I suppose, a small token of remembrance; it is a silver band which encloses a Star of David, purchased in the Jewish quarter of Vienna. Yet the trinket is painfully insufficient, for the lives of our dearest cannot be engraved upon mere metal. Indeed, the ring is a recent acquisition, purchased upon the tide of bad news. For grief has a way of washing in unexpectedly and submerging the present moment. The news was delivered unexpectedly via phone call: “She passed away in the hospital. At least now her troubles are over.” My father continued speaking, but the sounds buzzed in my ears as unfamiliar syllables blurred into each other in a shapeless haze. Tuning back in, “At least she outlived her persecutors.” That she did. A triumph, to say the least! You see, my darling Sonja had the misfortune of being born an Austrian Jew in 1926. She was sent to Belgium on a children’s transport upon the outbreak of the war and lived with her family in hiding under Nazi occupation until they were apprehended by the Gestapo. In the summer of 1944, she was deported from a holding camp to Auschwitz, where she lingered until the end of the war, enduring starvation, slave labour, and all attempts to destroy her will to live; finally, her ordeal was put to rest when the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers. However, for decades after the war, Sonja kept silent about her experiences. My grandmother and Sonja were the closest of friends for over half a century, each raising their children among the post-war boom in New York. Yet Sonja did not wear her life story on her sleeve, despite the concentration camp number tattooed there. From the time I first met her, as a young child, she appeared vibrant – strong, charming, and loving, exactly as my beloved and deceased grandmother Sylvia had been. Our relationship was instantly familial. She took great joy in the simple pleasures of my childhood, from exhibiting new concepts learned in school to family visits to New York, which always included a visit to see “Tante Sonja”. As I grew, I underwent various stages of imagination and by the age of nine I was nursing the ambition of becoming a writer. Sonja took my youthful passion with great enthusiasm. Perhaps she grew wistful in the twilight of her life and perhaps she embraced my sheer precocious curiosity, but in any case, after years of silence, Sonja engaged me on a project: I was to be the first to document her life story. My role seemed paramount, for I came to understand writing as a task combatting the ephemeral nature of life; it is regulated by a race against the clock to capture fleeting moments and record them in (hopefully) eternal words. To that extent, Sonja’s story held the utmost importance, both as an individual record and as part and parcel of the history of our people. Preservation of her

story seemed to be an obligation that I was undertaking, in line with the Jewish mandate to never forget our history. However, the truth is that my notes sat gathering dust on the shelf for years; the recorder had been unsure of how to assemble them. Yet Sonja’s death added poignancy and urgency to the matter, which appears as a great irony, because fundamentally, Sonja’s story was not one of death, but one of life. It was not the filth, terror, or hopelessness of Auschwitz which resonated. Rather, I was moved by the fact that Sonja conquered the odds through a combination of not only luck but also love of life. In her own words, she managed to maintain her sanity specifically due to her love for her books and her love for her step-mother. Now, those who survived the camps rarely did so alone. Critically, Tolstoy and Balzac were Sonja’s friends during the war years. She relied on either procuring books or recalling her favourite novels to preserve an intellectual outlet. Further, she was able to maintain her relationship with her step-mother, Blanca. Upon the first selection at Auschwitz, an adolescent Sonja was pointed to the right to join the line of labourers and Blanca, who was approaching middle age, was pointed to the left, to the trucks headed, as suspected, to the gas chambers. Sonja begged the guard to spare Blanca, arguing that “her mother” was still in good health, and miraculously, he let both Blanca and Sonja both go to the right. Even in the direst circumstances, Sonja’s legacy confirms that love is found in celebrating life. Looking forwards, I do not know if any of the words I write will ever be able to do justice to her memory. Undoubtedly, Sonja’s passing represents the end of a generation – the transition of a people’s memory and its lost millions from those who experienced the Shoah firsthand to secondhand listeners and historians. But the traditional Jewish injunction to remember continues. Coming from a secular Jewish family which has shed many of the trappings of religion but placed an almost sacred emphasis on cultural heritage, the duty to listen and record the stories of survivors remains crucial. Sonja’s experience is extremely far removed from my own, yet my love for Sonja brought me back to my family’s roots lost in a haze of death and refugee flight to a new land – to America. And my love for her is akin to my love for my grandmother and for my people. To the extent that these notions are larger than life, well, I can try to make sense of the splendorous feelings of love by looking towards my relationship with one deeply cherished individual. Finally, I know that love is combined with a sense of noble purpose. The truth of the matter is that love cannot be encapsulated within a single dimension. It is a multifarious creature, living in stolen moments of time, from childhood dreams to contemporary recollections. Within my own transitory existence, it inhabits a vanished world, one which I wear upon my finger every day.

ON READING AN EVIL BOOK Reflections on Mein Kampf Daniel O’Neil

itler wrote Mein Kampf at the fortress-prison at Landsberg am Lech, a roughly Abingdon-sized town in the Bavarian countryside west of Munich. He had been incarcerated there for his ill-starred attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in 1923, and, feeling the need to at once set his doctrine down on paper and at the same time defray some of his legal expenses, he set about dictating his memoir-manifesto to Rudolf Hess. Even before Mein Kampf was published, members of Hitler’s inner circle expressed their doubts about the book’s literary merits. Ernst Hanfstaengl, the son of a major publisher, said his family wanted nothing to do with it. Otto Strasser, another close associate, described the book’s draft as a “veritable chaos of banalities, schoolboy reminiscences, subjective judgements, and personal hatred”. Mein Kampf was also met with mixed reviews in the English-speaking press. The Scotsman’s reviewer described it as having “hardly a dull chapter”, and the Adelaide Advertiser called it “an amazing book”, later going on to serialise it. By contrast, the London Times described it (rather generously) as “not always coherent”, while historian S.H. Roberts dismissed it as “confused taradiddle”. Churchill thought it “turgid, verbose, shapeless”. Even Hitler’s comrade-in-arms Mussolini panned the Führer’s book as a “fat, boring tome” that he had never managed to finish. In one of his bizarre wartime radio broadcasts from Rome, Ezra Pound, while admitting he was “behindhand in readin’ Mein Kampf”, told his American and British listeners that in Hitler’s book they would see history “keenly analysed”, and might find in its pages an admirable “political system in which you can’t pass the buck”. Bernard Shaw was also unnervingly enthusiastic: “epoch-making”, he gushed, a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations, written by a man “who can teach us a lot”. “Of course he’s mad on some points, but who isn’t?” Shaw’s indulgent sympathy for dictators did not, it seem, stop with his apologia for Stalin. *** Mein Kampf is in some respects not unlike a work of particularly salacious pornography. It’s hardly a book one wants to be seen reading on a train, and when I requested it from the library stack, there was a moment of discomfort, during which the librarian felt compelled to assure me that she didn’t think I was a Nazi. Yet its author’s generally uncontested status as history’s most evil man serves to cast a certain pall of mystique over the book. Writers have

found that they can titillate audiences simply by invoking Mein Kampf’s name – consider, for instance, the stir Karl Ove Knausgård caused by giving his recent autobiographical saga the title My Struggle (Min Kamp in the original Norwegian). It is part of the grisly cultural inheritance that gave birth to what Saul Friedländer describes as Nazi kitsch, in which the Third Reich, in all sorts of popular cultural forms, become associated with “fascination, terror, and ecstasy”, an exciting, transgressive “frisson”. But what does the reader of Mein Kampf actually encounter between its swastika-embossed covers? Muddle, in a word; poisonous muddle, in two. Even an aspiring fascist hoping for a stirring, intellectually coherent master statement of the Führer’s doctrine would be disappointed by Mein Kampf: ludicrously bloated and astonishingly self-indulgent, Hitler’s memoir instead stands as an unintended testament to the perils of the unedited autobiography. The reader is struck first by the book’s totally unjustifiable length: in its original two-volume German-language edition, Mein Kampf runs to almost 800 pages. Then there is the total lack of structure: the “Providence” that purportedly guides Hitler along a preordained trajectory from provincial obscurity to world-historical greatness takes a winding road indeed. This is the perverse, self-aggrandising Bildungsroman of a noxiously bigoted pub bore: plodding autobiographical narrative will be interrupted by hectoring lectures on, say, the value of propaganda or the failings of the Austro-Hungarian parliament, only to veer back to plodding autobiography immediately afterwards. (One can almost hear the ‘Now, where was I?’) Hitler presents his hatred of the Jews as a rational doctrine bitterly arrived at by reason, against the instincts of his heart. In a particularly bizarre passage, he claims to have been unconvinced by the first anti-Semitic pamphlets he encountered in Vienna, with their cheap arguments and tawdry rhetoric. “From a feeble cosmopolitan”, he writes, “I became a fanatical anti-Semite.” The Damascene moment, as presented in Mein Kampf, comes in the form of a nauseating fantasy-encounter with a shade-like Jew in Vienna’s Innere Stadt (“Is this a Jew?”, before correcting himself and turning to the ‘real’ question: “Is this a German?”). Vienna is in this respect his political alembic: he arrives a fresh-faced, down-at-the-heel country lad, and leaves it a fully-fledged anti-Semitic demagogue. Yet the path to power was anything but smooth: at every turn, he confronted the fools, the deceivers, and the traitors

who would attempt to thwart him. An episode from Hitler’s period as a corporal during the First World War captures this well: during a period of recuperation in a military hospital in Germany, Hitler is horrified to find a young officer boasting that he had deliberately injured himself on a tangle of barbed wire in order to avoid returning to the front. “This poisonous wretch went so far as to flaunt his cowardice as the product of a valour greater than that of the honourable soldiers dying hero’s deaths”, Hitler fumes. When he patriotically reports this malingerer to the nurses, he is laughed off. Hitler, his skin already “crawling with disgust”, becomes apoplectic: the infirmary’s administration “must have known exactly who and what he was, and indeed did know. Yet nothing happened”. Hitler does not write so much as rave: one almost feels compelled to wipe the spittle from Mein Kampf’s frenzied, hate-filled pages. His prose is disfigured by the sort of Wagnerian histrionics he so tiresomely employed in his speeches: Hitler declares, for instance, that he was not merely born in a small town in Upper Austria, but rather, that “destiny elected Braunau am Inn to be my birthplace”. Similarly, when war breaks out in 1914, Hitler recalls that he “sank to [his] knees and thanked Heaven with an overflowing heart for the good fortune to have been allowed to live in these times”. Particularly in early chapters, a picture emerges of a strange and rather unlikeable man, awkward around women and without any real friends, whose idea of human interaction was to lounge about the dosshouses and cafés of Vienna and Munich, periodically launching into vituperative monologues on whatever topic happened to take his

fancy at that particular moment. We see what Ian Kershaw called the “emptiness of the private person” beneath all the rhetoric. The Hitler of Mein Kampf, Hitler even at his most stylised and most self-curated, is ultimately an example of what Nabokov called the “total type” of philistine, the man who consisted of nothing but “pseudo-ideals” and petty prejudices. After the passage detailing the encounter with the spectral Jew in Vienna, Hitler’ perceived ultimate consummation of his burgeoning race-hatred, I would choose as the second key passage Hitler’s lesson on the value and utility of reading. Lesser mortals, Hitler complains, have not mastered the knack of assimilating printed information as well as he: They lack the art of separating the valuable in a book from the valueless, that they may then keep the one in their heads forever, and…to not lug the other around like so much useless ballast. Reading is not an end unto itself, but rather a means to an end.

Such is the total philistinism of Adolf Hitler. He conceives of himself and his mission in world-historical terms, but in truth he is more like a parody of the parochial Austrian anti-Semite of the early twentieth-century. Adolf Hitler, the man, the Führer, the cipher. *** As befits its bizarre and unpleasant contents, Mein Kampf has a rather tortured publication history. Even before the war the book was at the centre of some unpleasant legal wrangles: one American translator sued another for copy-

right infringement in 1938, and Hitler’s publishers sued a third American translator the following year. In an ironic twist, one of Mein Kampf’s British publishers had to cease production of the book when its author’s own air force destroyed the original printers’ plates in 1942. The right to print and distribute Mein Kampf was part of the unsavoury farrago of intellectual property that the state of Bavaria acquired at the close of the Second World War, when it took control of Franz Eher Nachfolger, hitherto the official publishing house of the Nazi party. Since that time, the Bavarian government have jealously guarded their copyright, frequently sending their intellectual property lawyers forth to block publication of the book, even in translation. However, these proprietorial rights are time-limited. In accordance with modern German copyright law, copyright may be held for seventy years after the author’s death, and for Adolf Hitler, we reach that point at the end of 2015. Theoretically, from New Year’s Day, 2016, anyone, no matter how malign their agenda, will be free to publish and distribute the book. I do not believe that the vomiting forth of Mein Kampf into the public domain in the near future puts us in any danger of a neo-Nazi revival, or that Mein Kampf has any power today to endanger our society. The lapse of the book’s copy-

right will likely make little impact on the size of its readership, which is at any rate miniscule. It is difficult to ascertain precisely how widely read Mein Kampf was even during Hitler’s 12 years of supremacy in Germany: though it came to function as a sort of secular bible of the Nazi movement, and a copy of the book was given to every newly-married couple, anecdotal evidence suggests that relatively few outside the Party faithful took the time to actually read it. It is also not as if getting hold of the book is even particularly difficult at present. Buying a physical copy may be nigh-impossible in Germany, but curious Germans may access the full, unexpurgated text of Mein Kampf in PDF format elsewhere online at the click of a button. I sympathise with some of the arguments of those who would see it banned. But we cannot afford to imbue Hitler’s ideas with the seductive allure of the forbidden. Prohibition fuels the persecution fantasies of extremists: it allows them to imagine themselves oppressed, to strike a pose of moral righteousness. We must open it up to the light of day, and allow Mein Kampf to reveal itself for what it is: a sad, badly-written work of interest only to the historian. In Christian Hartmann’s words, Mein Kampf is a “rusty grenade”, and it is the task of the conscientious reader to “remove the detonator”.

I M AG E C R E D I T S All printed with permission Cover & Back Cover Image – Many thanks to Richard Mosse & the Jack Shainman Gallery p.4-6 Anahi Ojeda p.7 Felix Frank p.8 Beth Kirby p.10 Linus Bill, George McGoldrick p.11 Linus Bill p.13 Joseba Eskubi p.15 Tomas Fernandez p.16 Linus Bill p.18-21 Richard Mosse p.22 Anahi Ojeda p.23-24 Amy Thellusson p.25 Maurizio Strippoli p.26 Jean-François Juteau

p.27 Betânia Liberato, Denise Mats p.30-32 The archive at Somerville College p.33 Anthony Gerace p.35 Monika Betlej p.36 Anahi Ojeda p.37 Ada Hamza p.38 Used with permission from Stoya p.43 Anahi Ojeda p.44 Linus Bill, George McGoldrick p.46 Anahi Ojeda p.47 Flora Thomas p.51 Anahi Ojeda p.57 Morgan Canavan & Anthony Gerace p.58 Emir Sehanovic p.63 Jean-Francois Juteau p.64 Brock Davis

1â&#x20AC;&#x201C;27 June 2015

Join the Kingston Writing School and the British Council at our third annual International Creative Writing Summer School, this year in Athens and Thessaloniki. www.britishcouncil.gr/events/international-creative-writing-summer-school-2015 www.kingston.ac.uk/writing/

S TS TA OFYF A EDITORS Raphael Hogarth, Daniella Shreir DEPUTY EDITORS Miranda Hall, Ed Siddons, Thea Slotover, Huw Spencer FICTION EDITOR Alexander Hartley SUB EDITORS Barnaby Dowling, Noah Lachs, Ella Richards, James Sewry, Jessica Sinyor, James Waddell CREATIVE DIRECTORS Holly Isard, Daniella Shreir CREATIVE TEAM George McGoldrick, Naomi Polonsky Emma Simpson, Andrew Udell Lara Bryan, Mirren Kessling WEBMASTER Andrew Udell BROADCASTING DIRECTOR Martin Lohrer BROADCASTING TEAM Leah Abrams, Robin Finetto, Sophie Hall-Luke, Jack Saville EVENTS DIRECTOR Helen Stevenson EVENTS Beth Davies-Kumadiro, Adam Porter, Frances Timberlake BUSINESS Peter Cihon, Max Jewell, Arjun Ramakrishnan OSPL Chairman: Mack Grenfell Managing Director: Emma Lipczynski, Finance Director: Harriet Bull Secretary: April Peake Directors: Jonny Adams, Kalila Bolton, Matt Broomfield Rory Cox, Ella Richards, Minyoung Seo

Fiction & Poetry

The Ballad of Mohamed Bouazazi “The Spring of Nations, for the second time, Turned out to be melodious bel canto.” - Czesław Miłosz, A Treatise on Poetry (1957).

More, Bouazizi had been known for giving fruit for free to orphans who could not afford that vital luxury.

A time of schism, scandal, shock, dreams and killing drones, a whistleblower in the west, theocrats and thrones.

And Sidi Bouzid was a tough, hardscrabble town to live in but Bouazizi loved his home and didn’t want to give in.

Panic spurred a country’s quest: “Defendant, what is terror?” “Terror is not America: hate is a foreign error.

Out in midland Tunisia the poorest foot the bill and Bouazizi must have felt like social overspill.

“Today’s discoveries are done in labs, not libraries; a military superpower does as its people please.”

One day police, who liked to taunt and flaunt authority, rolled by and wrecked his livelihood so everyone could see.

And so I make this song to mark an age of overturning when power wavered, banners waved, and citizens were burning.

They smashed his cart and dashed his hopes. They broke the camel’s back. They beat him and they got away with unprovoked attack.

Mohamed Bouazizi lived in Sidi Bouzid, strapped for cash and hope: his poverty had Bouazizi trapped.

So Bouazizi found a can of oil and lit a flame and burned out in a public space. Now ‘martyr’ is his name.

He kept a cart, sold fruit and veg, supported his relations, did all he needed to survive injustice’s privations.

Not right away: he slowly died in hospital, of burns, as hope can die, a victim of unbearable concerns.

The president, Ben Ali went to well-wish Bouazizi (bad politicians like to think recovery is easy).

Yet freedom spreads: like dominoes dictators, tilting, fall – and revolution’s pendulum swings like a wrecking ball.

Ben Ali smiled politically but Bouazizi stayed unconscious, in a coat of burns no tyrant could invade.

Meanwhile, each spring will spiral on to autumn, nature crinkling time’s edges. When you turn this page, inspect your hand: it’s wrinkling.

And revolution spread across Tunisia and soon torches in Tunis lit the clash of protest and platoon. Streetfighting, supercharged with hope, went juggernauting through the country with a passion even trained troops could not subdue. With curfews, strikes, and Molotovs, twenty-eight days on from Bouazizi’s immolation, the dictatorship was gone. Ben Ali fled Tunisia with tonnes of gold in tow to settle in Saudi Arabia, where rights are rare as snow. There money speaks, as money does in every monied state; there statues and the statute books agree that money’s great.

Andrew Wynn Owen

Sally Snake Eyes And after it happened, I went to Sally Snake Eyes, & she sat me down, and said, Babe, it’s okay, it’s a natural thing, & she held me in her bed feeding me spoonfuls of milk. She kissed each barren follicle on my head, and I felt the hair begin to grow back. When she had finished, she took flags from my toy soldiers, reached for my cologne and scrubbed my fingernails. & a week or two later I saw L again for the first time since it happened. The berries had stained her teeth blue, and her lips, but she was getting on, seemed happy, I guess we both had cracks to paper over. I said my piece. No tricks? she said, No catch? Just dinner? The tightness in my chest opened up to the light. Yes, I said. Just dinner. So we went together.

Alexander Hartley

Descartes Descartes thought the sky was made of spirals, spangled whirlwind scrawls, a tide of starlight, oily brushstrokes crowding in the midnight, currents sweeping past the moon. His rival, a Mr Newton, won; the Lumières jeered, and though the sciences were an art those days, the pictures Descartes saw were just a phase, an early Van Gogh in the wrong career.

Rowan Lyster

Zoos

tell Genevieve Cooper about the world every Tuesday at three. She lives at the top of a hill outside of town and everyone assumes that she has some nurse up there who helps her out, but that isn’t true. She’s lived there since her husband died when she was in her forties and she didn’t want to be downtown anymore. I grew up with her babysitting me and she was the one who once insisted I go on a date with the woman who would later become my wife. She was a counsellor to our family, a confidante, a sage. She moved from the city because she didn’t want to be reminded of the little shops she and her husband used to go in, and the restaurants they used to eat at. I understand that about her. I understand a lot of things about her. She’s in the second chair from the window when I walk in. The cottage, dark and warm, seems to invite me inside and I’m reminded of the same feeling I used to get after coming home from a particularly brutal day at school during my teenage years. Genevieve’s eyes pretend to scan the world outside, but they hardly see anything now. She wouldn’t admit the decline of her health for years, but being well known in a small town means that people start to notice the small changes; the postman begins to wonder why the stamps are being put on upside down. Eventually the town authorities arranged my weekly visits. Everyone agreed that it was better than putting her in a home. Nobody wanted to see the woman who had watched them grow up locked away in a place where her days were scheduled and her meals regulated. “Danny? Is it you?” “It is, Gennie.” I cross the room towards her. I’m always tempted to make a joke about whom else she is expecting, but a part of me is afraid to hear the answer. I’m not sure if I’m more worried about knowing that she has someone else coming in, another friend of hers, an additional member of our previously private club, or hearing her admit that no, no one was coming. I sit opposite her. The chair faces towards the fire and not the window, so I can’t even pretend that we’re looking at the same things, noticing the same funny little habits of the animals scurrying out of the starting rain or the far-off cars beginning to slow as they turn their windshield wipers on. “So how are things?” I ask. She moves her head slowly in my direction and the grey light from outside catches her white hair like the flash of headlights on a dark night, coming around a bend with no warning and no time to react. I blink. “Fine,” she smiles. “Just fine.” She moves slowly as she speaks and I’m reminded why the people of our town have always been so drawn to her. Her composure is reminiscent of a polar bear, strangely appreciative of her surroundings. I never get the impression that polar bears are unhappy as I do with lions. Lions seem to be constantly thinking about their former lives, whereas polar bears are more accepting. They endure their state of captivity with grace. Or is it indifference? Genevieve touches the ends of her hair thoughtfully.

“Now, you tell me, are you still working at the farm?” The only time I have ever been to a farm was in high school on a trip to the country when the teacher chose me as an unwilling volunteer to milk a cow. To my teenage horror, she remarked at how skilled I was with my ‘gentle, steady technique’ and I had spent the following years being mocked with lazy jokes from my fellow classmates. I have no intention of working on a farm again. “Yes,” I reply. “The farm is going very well.” “This winter will be a harsh one.” “That’s true. That’s true enough.” She shifts in her chair. “Mr. Harding’s store probably needs a lot more help these days. Don’t you help out there on weekends?” Mr. Harding died twenty years ago from a bee sting. “Occasionally.” “Good. That’s very good of you.” We sit there for a while in silence, just dwelling together. I think of how this is enough for Genevieve Cooper and I envy her for a moment. I try and see her as she used to be, surely running errands with a smile, cooking a different dinner every night, keeping up with the news of the town. Her mind slows a little more each day now and her eyes don’t help her see the world anymore, but still she is content to simply sit next to another person with no agenda and no benefit. I wonder when I will get that back. “Oh—how rude of me,” she says. “Would you like any tea? I believe I’ve just put some on…” Knowing that she has not put any on, seeing as she is not permitted to own an oven, but rather has her meals delivered daily by different volunteers, I politely decline the tea, admit that I am not really a caffeine drinker. “I see. You know, last week James came through on the train and I think he was a little ill. Would you go by and see him next week?” I have no idea who James is or was, but I tell her it would be my pleasure. “So how’s your lovely wife?” She turns her head slightly in the direction of my voice. My flinch goes unnoticed by her blind eye. This question always comes at some point in our talks and yet it never fails to cause my throat to constrict. I swallow and answer the same way I always do. “She died, Gennie.” “Well, that’s nice to hear.” Her smile remains the same way it was when I walked inside. She continues to stare out the window, unaware of the rain and the storm sure to follow. For a moment, I wish I could see the scenes playing out in her mind, the imaginary world in which she lives. I wonder if it is a sunny day there. I wonder if she sees us walking there, up the hill to her house like we used to. I nod, realise she can’t see, and reply, “Right.” “Well, good. You need to make sure she rests, Danny boy, what with a baby on the way.” She nods contentedly as she talks, looks in my direction as if something caught her eye.

Maybe she felt some shift in the air; maybe she could faintly hear my heart beat a little faster. “So what’s new out there, Danny? You are my eyes, after all.” She laughs at this. So I tell her that the cows are still grazing in the fields outside and there is a town Christmas party being planned. I tell her that the milkman was late today and the Girl Scouts are running smoothly in their first year coming to our town. These were real aspects of her prior world, the one that she can remember, and so I keep with these patterns and traditions. It seems wrong to steal memories from an old lady, especially when those memories are the ones of my dreams, the shadows that scatter each morning I wake. She nods as I talk and then adds, “You really must bring your wife by again.” I sigh. “I will. I promise.” “I’ll see you next week then?” “Next week. I’ll be here.” “I look forward to it, Danny.” I get up and walk to the door, but turn back as she calls to me. “Danny?” “What is it, Gennie?” “I’ve just had this horrible thought.” Her face is slightly crumpled and I watch as some truth breaks through. There’s no way for me to know which reality it is that torments her, but I move towards the chair and place a hand on her arm. She covers it with hers. “You’re probably just remembering a bad dream, Gennie. Sometimes that happens to me. I don’t remember it until much later in the day. But that’s all it is—just a dream.” She nods, unsure. “Yes, Danny. Yes, that must be it.” I pat her hand and stand up. “Are you all right?” “Yes,” she says. “Yes.” I move towards the door. Thinking again, I spin around and plant a kiss on the top of her head. “Aw, Danny. You’re too sweet. You will break hearts when you’re older, for sure,” she says, staring blankly at the windowsill, back to normal. I walk down the large hill and into the city centre. I dodge the few buses taking the last of the office workers home at the end of the day. I haven’t driven a car for years and I take a breath as the blare of horns starts in the afternoon traffic. I walk to a café and order a pot of tea. The café is closing in half an hour but I like putting off going home. I sip the cold tea and wonder if I should ask the barista to warm it up. I glance up towards the hill from where I’ve just come. I try to imagine my nice friend, Genevieve Cooper, sitting alone by the window, believing herself to be looking out at a world much different than the one in which she lives. I think of her waiting for me every Tuesday at three o’clock and I wonder for a moment if she really does wait for me. Or does she just happen to be sitting there at the same time each week, pleasantly surprised when I walk through the door?

Charlotte Pence

Coleridge Called from Venus (Last Night’s Dream)

The yellowblue was chanting loud, And sulphurbubbled steam did scream Through all the shifting waves of mist Above an algid stream. Both dank and ocean claimed the land, When, coiling through the acrid sludge And beaming through the sullen soil Mr Worm did trudge. A SWAN came in with purple wing And, retching lungs, he heaved the smog, Such pain then felt his bill so worn; A jaundice in the fog. The curdled eyes were met and set. The two with spite their gaze then bled; The two with caring calm instead. SWAN snapt forth his head. WHO WOULD THINK THAT LIFE COULD BE Proclaimed the first to be of three— The SWAN looked down and on the ground He Mr Worm did see. The form vermiculate, unmoved, Drew in the haze of bitter aether, Weighing with his stare the ice Of fear that lay beneath. The curdled eyes were met and set. The two with spite their gaze still bled; The two with caring calm instead. SWAN dragged back his head. HEED ME CYGNUS HEAR ME CALL THERE IS NO LOVE BEYOND THE PALL OR WAITING HAND TO SHOW TO ALL THE LIFE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN And then arose that comatose— The EARTH. Beyond the verdant husk, A worn, cyaneous rotund Saw Mr Worm esq.

Daniel Etches

Evening I said hello to all the cats I met but didn’t stroke them. My lipstick went off and the colour bled mauve in my mouth. Time to rinse the sun from sticky fingers. Streetlights burned and I crossed the street to stop the cars from speeding. I bowed my head to hide from the haloes of flies, but they bit my nape instead. These things always get you in the twilight.

Emily Oldham

Thoughts on the Death of my Father (Nappies aren’t supposed to be for grown-ups. Grief, not crusts, whips hair into curls. He does his dying, is gone; still the nurse’s day drags on.) What if it had been my mother?

Rebecca Sandler

The Man with the Backpack The man with the backpack stands next to us on the train every morning pretending to read his book. We spend the seven minute journey to school trying to make him laugh or sigh, or, if we put on a really good show, glance up from his fake reading with an incredulous look. It’s an entirely involuntary motion, a flash of eye contact between a balding man in his mid-forties carrying a bag so antisocially large that it takes up at least two valuable commuter standing spaces in the busy train vestibule, and a group of teenaged girls. What? his face seems to say, half-irritated, half-amused. We crave this look. The day my acceptance letter arrives, I’m embarrassed to admit how quickly my mind jumps to the man with backpack. He’s the first person I tell, actually, after my parents—my decision to break the good news to my friends on the train is heavily influenced by the prospect for spectacle such an announcement holds. Their shrieks of excitement and celebration are the perfect way to inform the man with the backpack that I am off to study English at Oxford. It isn’t so much a desire to show off (not just a desire to show off) as a need to update him on the situation; he knows which college I have chosen, has heard about the ordeal of interview, can probably even quote lines from my personal statement—I can’t just leave him hanging. The man with the backpack also knows the names of the teachers we love and the teachers we hate, as well as the ones I dismiss as “nice but ineffectual”, my euphemism for what I identify as their intellectual inferiority. My general air of youthful arrogance must be exasperating not only for my teachers but for the man with the backpack—but perhaps he understands that such levels of unmitigated confidence are inevitably unsustainable. Maybe he knows that what he is witnessing is a thing that can not and will not last—the peak and subsequent last days of my Rome, of the cosy, sheltered little empire which has spawned this arrogance. Perhaps this understanding is the reason for the strange sort of sadness in his smile upon receiving my good news. It’s not the smile I want, but it is a reaction and at seventeen I live for the reaction of a man whose name I do not know and to whom I have never spoken. That’s not to say that the man with the backpack is a stranger. We know lots about the man with the backpack. We know that he has a wife with a backpack, who also wears thin, wire-framed and, if we’re being honest (and of course we’re being honest as we’re seventeen and secretly consider ourselves the definitive authorities on fashion in the Chichester area) unfashionable glasses, who gives

him hasty kisses as they part on the platform every morning. Although we never really see him do it, we know that the man with the backpack likes to read—we imagine that he does finish the books he holds in his hands every day after we have left the train and he is all alone. As we point out to each other, it would be an expensive and quite frankly culturally wasteful endeavour to buy book after book just to hold and pretend to read during our seven minute train journey. We’re self-obsessed, yes, but not stupid. We’re seventeen. The man with the backpack is a varied and often controversial reader; we find his choice to read Twilight on a train full of school girls psychologically revealing (surely expressive of a desire to connect with us, his train friends, or perhaps a desperate grasp at the youthfulness with which we consciously taunt him on a day to day basis) and consider his propensity to read what we regard as commercial thrillers disappointing, though not altogether unexpected.

***

The train that used to take us to school was the Southampton to London line; for seven years we inserted ourselves into this man’s life, a small seven minute distraction between Chichester and Barnham, playing a part in his morning routine. We’d wonder about his job—such a big backpack surely contained something, but why he would have to lug this large something to and from the workplace every day remained a source of annoyance and mystery to us. I think that’s what he was—something mysterious, and yet familiar. We knew of him, but not about him. We wanted his attention, but I don’t know what we would have done if he had actually spoken to us one day, if he had participated in the conversations that were always really for him. I think we would have hated it. He would no longer have been the man with the backpack. He would have had a voice, an opinion, a mind and a reality other than the one with which we endowed him every morning at 8:08 on Platform 1 at Chichester station. He would care about more than my opinions, and, at seventeen, the loss of my greatest and eternally silent fan would have been too much to bear. I think he knew that.

Lucy Brookes

THE

ISIS Hilary Term 2015