I Wanna be a Twain Dwiver!
"The others are in the toilet. They need to piss off."
- My students
There is something deeply stupid about asking an eighteen year old to close their eyes and imagine their dream job.
Partly because any teenager not destined for intensive psychotherapy won't have made up their mind yet. And partly because engaging in a visualisation exercise to answer a simple factual question is perverse and counterproductive, a bit like getting drunk to think clearly.
But mainly because anyone whose ambition involves doing one thing for eight hours a day to make someone else richer...doesn't quite grasp what "ambition" is.
One girl wanted to be a genetic engineer - which gave the class the splendidly off the wall opportunity to talk about "Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine in complementary base pairing of deoxyribose nucleic acid meiosis". Oh yes, their scientific english is great - they just have trouble buying a box of headache pills in the chemist.
When I was eighteen I failed my english exams because I'd spent the previous two months reading about molecular biology - on the grounds that it was far more interesting. There is possibly an irony in there somewhere.
Another girl wanted to be a teacher of english - presumably because no one wants to learn her native spanish.
One boy wanted to be a lap dancer, which I thought was sweet. Then changed his mind and decided he wanted to be a dandy, which I thought was exactly right.
Today's Pavement Wit. For use in competitive singing to backing tapes.
Kara Oke? Kara not okay!
I'll get me coat.
View
Sometimes a fictional book review saves you the trouble of writing the book, and sometimes a fictional art review serves in place of the art you can't make yourself.
Re:View
by Nabil Tarkovski
Published 2113, Journal of Temporal Art
Reflexive timelapse films have become an established minor genre in the digital arts. It perhaps started with JKs Living My Life Faster, in which the artist simply took one picture of their face a day for 8 years and played them in rapid sequence. Then Noah Kalina's similar but unnamed project became a lifelong artwork, inspiring dozens of related ideas including one where we see a baby girl's face change literally from day one.
Suzan Webb's work is slightly different. At age 18, in the first week of her first art degree, having just moved into student digs, she found an old laptop and webcam in a skip, plus a battered camera tripod. Later in interview she said the idea came to her instantly, but she didn't expect to continue it for more than a week, let alone twelve years later.
Her room had just one window, and she set up the camera and computer to take one snapshot of her view every hour - but only when she was in the room. When she later moved into a place with two windows, she begged another cam and laptop from a fellow student, and continued her project in stereo.
This timelapse would most likely have little merit if Webb didn't change living space quite so often - and indeed didn't now stay in quite so many cheap hotels in so many countries.
As it is the vista changes from the initial scene of derelict factories, to a split screen of park and kebab shop. to a back garden going through the seasons with occasional bouts of highspeed rain, split with clouds seen through a skylight, to views from homes of friends in New York, her mother's holiday home in Scotland, and a building site somewhere in London.
Occasionally there are black frames, sometimes one or two, sometimes as much as three month's worth, and these I think give a clue to the real meaning of the work. Webb only shows us her life through her views from windows. The black frames are from hours and days when she isn't behind any windows, or in any building. Occasionally she sleeps under the stars, and sometimes she hikes through hills and valleys - in Australia, Canada and the Hindu Kush.
Some use cameras to record their holidays and time outdoors. Webb records what she can see of the outdoors, when she's indoors. This is a record of a person's homelife - one that never shows the home or the person.
Play Nice!
"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."
- Cicero
My mother's elder brother spent several years in the 80s living in Saudi Arabia. He was there for work, with his family, living in a "westerners compound". Back in England, he said the arabs he'd met were mostly decent people, often highly accomplished in their chosen areas...but all basically like children.
I was seventeen when I heard him talk about it, and thought there was more than a hint of a patronising colonial attitude (unconscious, of course) behind the words, but I couldn't prove it.
Some years earlier, his father had taken a holiday in Iraq. He said all the people he'd met were refreshingly friendlier than Britishers, but...psychologically like little children. Pleasant, open, helpful, honest, and simple. I had similar doubts.
Now I teach eighteen and nineteen year-olds from Saudi Arabia each weekday afternoon. I've got a boss who lived there, and fellow teachers with experience teaching them. My teens have the mischievous but easily cowed behavior that I'd expect of five year olds...and all my colleagues tell me I need to be a firm schoolmarm to teach them.
All of which tells us more about western attitudes to children than eastern attitudes to education. We don't like our children much, and if someone behaves in a way we don't like, we're quick to call it "childish". As an insult, it's quite revealing.
I read somewhere there's eight basic theories of "how to teach EFL" - or "classroom practice" as we're supposed to call it. The thing is though, almost all of them share an unspoken premise - that people learn language in a classroom by being given a little grammatical instruction, and a lot of varied activities to "consolidate" or "realise" or "internalise" the grammar theory.
Maybe that's true, I don't know. But it does mean most of the job involves having a raft of activities and games to fill up the ninety minute lessons and keep the students occupied, alert and interested - or at least busy.
Result: I sometimes feel a bit like a playgroup leader. which is fine, but I can't help thinking the real role of a playgroup leader is to keep control of children while their parents are away doing parent things. In effect, to be a warder - one half pacifier, one half gatekeeper.
Nevermind, I'll try to teach anyway.
So much for deep, let's do shallow. How many surfaces can one blob of chewing gum attach to?
I only ask because, either I've managed to sit in three separate blobs of gum in one day, or one especially runny stick currently occupies a park bench, two seats in my home, one pair of jeans, a towel and a jumper.
And as an extra bonus question: My bedroom contains an open window, opened packets of peanuts and chocolates, slightly stale cups of tea, lots of old paper, a sink connected to temperamental plumbing system, obnoxious liquid for cleaning it, three kinds of moisturiser (what?) and a first aid kit. And me. So why is the only smell a strong one of chewing gum?
Not shallow enough? I'm all alone in the house tomorrow, so I'm having a friend round. When I say "having"....
Now, in my modest little life I manage to offend a few people. Last week I offended everyone I work with at a meeting by saying the workbook we all pretend to teach from is "cack". There was an embarrassed tumbleweedy silence, then after the meeting I got private agreement mixed with admonition that I'd been "unhelpful".
Before that I put the odd nose out of joint on a discussion forum where some were advocating the death penalty for baby rape - I wondered why child torture was only newsworthy when the torture implement was a genital organ.
Though that was nothing to the abuse I got for say the Doctor Who final episode didn't make sense.
But now I know what I have to do the get death threats and nationwide vilification. I have to steal a biscuit.
My infamy shall be unbounded. Bwa ha ha.
The Stupid
"So I'm at the wailing wall, standing there like a moron, with my harpoon."
- Emo Philips
Mother: Have you met our new exchange student yet?
Daughter: Yes mum. Her name's Li Yun and she's from Thailand!
Mother: That's very interesting. What does she look like?
Daughter: Well, She's got long black hair and she wears a green dress.
Mother: She sounds really nice.
Daughter: Yes, she is really nice. I hope she and I will be friends.
Mother: I'm sure you will. Now you need to go you your Karate class. You don't want to be late.
Daughter: No I don't. Thanks mum. I'll see you soon.
Mother: Goodbye. Have a nice day.
Yes, it's EFL English. The linguistic water torture spoken only in the town of Stepford - and textbooks for young people learning English. It's like being nibbled to death by anodyne ducks.
I used to wonder why most of Europe had an image of England as both painfully inoffensive but also quite spooky. Now I think I know.
What kind of teacher keeps the only copy of important and detailed information, on a whiteboard? And gives no indication he's doing it? Presumably one who doesn't realise other teachers use the room too.
The school has a social program. Teachers get paid to take groups of students out in the evenings to experience local culture
Tonight it was a pub curry. It was all arranged a week ago - all except for two things. First, no teacher had been asked to be guide/guardian/general-decision-maker for the event - so one volunteered himself. Guess who.
And second...no one had mentioned it to the students.
So I turned up, waited half an hour, and went home. And still got paid for it.
Sometimes blithering incompetence is nice.
Today's pavement wit, to be written on an assessment form following any introductory educational presentation:
Before the presentation, I was keen to know something about the subject. After the presentation, I was still keen to know something about it.
Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom
"Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin' ready to hang himself."
- George Carlin
I could have done a lot of interesting things on Saturday. I could have gone on the Gay Pride march and flirted outrageously with the crowd of onlookers. I could have gone to the Marxism 2008 conference and debated the collapse of the political left over the last few years. I could even have accompanied thirty EFL students to Brighton and pretended to be a tour guide.
But I was too busy doing deeply uninteresting things instead.
Sometimes you write something on impulse, then look at it and think "That's quite clever, and it's funny with a hint of pathos. But mostly it's just a bit horrid."
So, with apologies to Tiny Tim, Cher, and anyone else who's ever sung the original song in public, I present...Cammy Boy.
Come onto my screen cammy boy
You are seventeen with your toys
You've no way of knowing, just to whom you're showing
And what you've shown to me, bummy boy
When there are gay guys, I don't mind the fey lies
you make it blue, webcam boy
Friends they fail to date me, won't even masturbate me
I've still had you, my nancy boy
You cam from elsewhere, into my place
You squirt a puddle for me, onto your face
I'm an old and fat queer, but you don't care 'bout that dear
My sonny boy
And apologies to Camy too.
Moving swiftly on...Monday.
Yes Monday. Named for the Aztec deity Mund, god of fuckups. We still celebrate his weekly rebirth by fucking up everything we try to do on Monday morning.
I got to work in good time with an adequate plan of what and how to teach my six Spanish students for four hours. The plan was: Seeing as they have absolutely no need to go over the grammar points in the book yet again, but they could use some conversation and writing practice, make up some games that get them talking and writing. It was a good plan.
Then I found neither of my whiteboard markers worked, so I put them in the mysterious magical whiteboard marker refiller device. Which promptly exploded, showering me, the floor and bits of the office in blue ink.
Now, I don't know about you, but I would have thought that "easily erasable" board ink would wash out of clothes without trouble. But no, my nice new shirt is now permanently redesigned in big splashes in two tones of blue. The students rather liked it, thinking I'd gone all fashionable.
The secretary got a few spots on her skirt, and went into that insipid upper-middle class routine of shrugging and smiling and "Oh never mind"-ing, before demanding my immediate sacking as soon as she thought I was out of earshot.
So, I directed a few educational games for a few hours, inventing some as needed. Meanwhile outside the classroom there was a sudden noisy influx of new students arriving from all over the world - the usual mix of those who weren't supposed to arrive for another week, those with incomplete or inaccurate paperwork, and those labeled "advanced" who can't make a one word sentence in English.
There was therefore much frantic rearranging of timetables. I started the first lesson with six students, and finished it with eight, five of them the same.
Then during lunch some of them amused themselves drawing on my whiteboard - with what turned out to be a permanent markerpen.
Oh, and my final class bunked off. Seven new students I hadn't met yet collectively decided they'd prefer to lie on the beach instead.
Chupacabras
"I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate."
- George Burns
Kap: How many words can you think of about Spain that begin with "T"?
Class: Tacos!
Kap: Yes, that's good.
Class: Tortilas!
Kap: Very Spanish.
Class: Bullfighting!
Kap: Um...
Class: In Spanish it's "Toros".
Kap: Ye...s. I meant English words beginning with T that are about Spain.
Class: People who make sex with goats!
Kap: ...
For three or four years I've rented some cheap webspace for occasions when I needed to send or receive large files from people. But with email attachments getting larger and filesharing on social networking sites getting more common, I don't really need it anymore.
So I go to close it down. And find it's been down for three months because the host went bankrupt. Without telling me. Humph.
Kap: How many words can you think of about England that begin with "G"?
Class: Golf!
Kap: Golf? Good one.
Class: Great Britain!
Kap: Ha! Yes indeed.
Class: Gay People!
Kap: Er....
Class: Yes! Gay People!
Kap: Oh alright then. England has lots of gay people.
Apparently today wasn't just July the forth. It was also The Forth of July, which is much more impressive. Not only that, but Jesse Helms died too, which is even better.
Andrew Schlafly just pales by comparison. Whackjobs aren't what they used to be.
Kap: Can you make a sentence using one of these words on the board?
Student: [Looks hard at words, then smiles]. I love my teacher.
Art/School
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government."
- Lenny Bruce
Last week I went to the jobcentre, stood in line for half an hour, and told a hardfaced lady bureaucrat where she could shove her training schemes, because I'd finally got a job.
Then I went to the jobcentre, stood in line for half an hour, gave up and drank three glasses of cheap red wine, and told a hardfaced lady bureaucrat where she could shove her forms, because I just didn't care anymore.
The first time was in a cramped and dimly lit office. The second was in a spacious and bright art gallery, containing a recreation of the mindless tedium and officious oppression found in the former.
Relational Art is the creation/recreation of a social environment - as an aesthetic object. The viewers participate, act and react, conform or rebel, within the artificial situation - both controlled by the artwork, and contributing to it.
There were interview rooms, a queueing system, a tannoy summoning punters by ticket numbers, threatening notices...and hardfaced lady bureaucrats behind desks.
I took a few snaps.
I also took along my real "jobseeker" documents, and ripped them up in the ladies' faces with much shouting and rude gesticulating.
Just to add to the verisimilitude, you understand. It was quite appreciated.
Recently I jokingly suggested to a friend that a good day trip for Arabic student might be...a gay pride festival. I was roundly told this was not a good idea.
Guess what day trip had already been organised. Oh not to see the festival itself, but there was no suggestion of changing plans when the coincidence was discovered.
One or two students were nervous when they were told - before being reassured that "It'll be great fun, with lots of dancing and music. Gays always have the best music". This from a teacher with two marriages and three children. Heh heh.
Oh, and one devoutly Muslim student proudly came out, declaring "It's my freedom".
So, either the laid back British culture is infectious...or the offspring of the Saudi Arabian middle class vary as much as everyone else.
My insect bites are coming along nicely. I may be teaching with a bandage on my arm tomorrow.
What is the difference between a great uncle and and grand uncle? And just what is the system of numbering for cousins?
I read that George Bush is ninth cousin twice removed to John Kerry. He's fourth and seventh cousin thrice removed to James Garfield...and ninth cousin thrice removed from Osama Bin Laden. But what that means, I've no idea.
Kapitano's current favourite band: Cause & Effect. New wave, synthpop 'n' guitars, mellow dance a la Camouflage and Cetu Javu.
Summer Lovin'
"Teacher, you eat your beans."
- My class yesterday, on seeing me eat some peanuts.
Yes, yesterday was my first proper day as a proper teacher. There was a textbook provided for me to teach from - one so dry and badly thought out that I threw it away after ten minutes trying to use it. That was when the students started to pay attention and I stopped hating the job.
A week ago, there were five arab boys who didn't know that hair can be "wavy", eyebrows can be "bushy" and the start of a beard is called a "stubble". Now, they know. Plus they're no longer puzzled by "Odd, init", "Mind the Gap" and "Eh?".
In today's lesson we supposedly covered the vocabulary chunks involved in negotiating an evening out - "How about...", "Do you fancy...", "Shall we...", "I'd love to but...", "Good idea" etc.
In fact we established (a) that raising middle and index digits with palm inward is an offensive gesture, while the same configuration with palm outward is not, and (b) the differences between "accept", "except", "expect" and "aspect" get quite confusing after ten minutes.
We also established that any textbook for low level students which includes the sentence "Let's meet up in the White Horse around one-ish"...is written by frauds and recommended by idiots.
I've mentioned what I call Pavement Wit before. It's similar to Staircase Wit, but you think of witty ripostes sometime before an occasion for their use arises. By which time you've forgotten it.
Today's example is:
Is the pope jewish in the woods?
More when I think of them. But before there's a chance to say them.
I had sex again tonight! :-).
I count five insect bites. Summer is truly here.
A Blog is a Place to Keep Your Stuff
One school don't want me, one is conspicuously silent...and the one that didn't have any work for me want me to work full time. It just goes to show. Though exactly what it goes to show I'm not sure.
George Carlin died on Monday, at 71 of heart failure.
Last of the Philosopher-Comedians, a one-man baloney detection machine, and the man who said:
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd and twat.
Great Stuff.
Did you know Clive Barker is gay? Oh the horror.
Do you realise it's almost exactly two years since the end of the world? As predicted in The Bible Code, I mean.
Whatever happened to that?
If you could talk to god, what would you say? Well now you can find out by going here!. iGod, probably the internet's only direct channel to heaven.
Here's what God and me said earlier:
Kap: Hi there God.
God: GOD rules. Hello friend. What is your name?
Kap: I am the rain.
God: Who made you the rain?
Kap: Evaporation, followed by precipitation.
God: We have never talked about it before.
Kap: That is true. we have never met before, dude.
God: Yes, it is self-evident. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else.
Kap: But you are omniscient!
God: Do you mind if I tell other people you say I am omniscient?
Kap: I am only a humble sinner. I am not worthy to give advice to the creator of the universe.
God: Don't be so modest. You are a humble sinner? Do you get to meet a lot of people? I am sorry to hear that you are not worthy to give advice to the creator of the universe.
Kap: I meet a lot of people. Sometimes I have sex with them.
God: That's nice. I have a birthday on the big bang.
Kap: I like big bangs. But I think I already said that.
God: What is wrong with small ones? You believe that? What did you mean by it? That is "What is wrong with small ones?".
Me: Nothing is wrong with small ones. They say small ones are more juicy.
God: I think there might be a few exceptions.
As you can see, he understood everything I said.
I have platonic relationships with gay men, and sexual relationships with straight men. How did that happen? What's all that about?
Montaigne said "A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid".
A murder mystery where there are two murderers, both poisoning the same victim at the same time, but unaware of each other.
Possibly a more coherent post soon.
Through the Streets of London
The anti-nazi demo on Saturday was quite small - estimates have settled at around 5000 people, though 10,000 isn't impossible. But from accounts all over the blogosphere, it's almost like the demo I went on took place in a parallel universe.
As I experienced it, me and 25 others got off the coach and walked with our banners to the start point. Where the organisers kept us waiting near the front for an hour without explanation. I took some photos.
(We agreed the above slogan was slightly unfortunate.
Finally the march began at the exact moment my camera packed up, and we moved with occasional chanting through empty backstreets to Nelson's Square, where a succession of B-list speakers spoke about the British "National" Party, but in the context of the Holocaust, rather than what's happening here and now.
And that was more-or-less it. Not a failure and not a ringing success either.
But from other accounts (which are from reliable people) the police threatened and beat up dozens of protesters at random, and placed provocaterus in the crowd trying (and failing) to start trouble.
Even the rightwing gutter press are acknowledging that, which is...unusual.
So on the one hand, it was a small turnout trudging along a bad route to dull speeches. And on the other, it was the police showing their true colours...for no reason.
Linky Winky
There are three reasons to study psychology.
(1) You need some pseudoscience to justify your beliefs,
(2) You like to make fun of the pseudoscience other people use to justify their beliefs.
(3) You want to know why people feel the need to justify their beliefs, why they accept such weak justifications, and why they have such daft beliefs in the first place.
If anyone can suggest a link for (3), I'd be most grateful.
I've stumbled on some works by and about James Burnham. In my opinion quite a fascinating figure.
He was an American political theorist of the 1930s, an anti-stalinist socialist who became an anti-socialist paleoconservative, and he's best remembered for a string of failed predictions.
He predicted managers (bureaucrats and technicians) would gradually replace capitalists as the ruling class - whereas in face entrepreneurial capitalists were replaced by corporate capitalists. He predicted Japan would become a superpower after allying itself with Russia - whereas Russia became the superpower. He thought Germany would win the second world war and become a third superpower - all quite plausible, but wrong.
But if you dismiss everyone whose predictions mostly turned out wrong...you'll dismiss everyone. That's the nature of prediction in politics.
Here's an aphorism: When shallow people are wrong, it's for shallow reasons. When deep people are wrong, it's for deep reasons.
I feel that Burnham may (or may not) have been wrong when he analysed Dante, debated Trotsky on the dialectic, or declared Liberalism irretrievably contradictory. But either way it's worth finding out why.
eXile magazine probably soon won't exist anymore. It seems you can't tell the truth by disguising it as humorous cynicism anymore in Moscow. Or by doing it in English.
But in their dying breath they've given me an idea - of how I can become a millionaire. And it's perfectly moral, because it only involves defrauding people richer than me.
The British Potato Council.
The British Peanut Council.
The other website of the British Potato Council
The Potato Fan Club.
The British Potato Council's website for schools.
20th century history. Not about potatoes. But told by a potato.
Democracy is not a potato.
I was here today. A few details when I have the strength.
Ring, Ring
I never realised the office telephone had so many functions.
In some offices, it's a way of telling the public they should visit the company website, where all conceivable questions shall be answered.
In others, it's a radio station provided as a public service. At any time of the day or night, you can listen to Handel's Water Music for as many hours as you wish.
In many, the telephone serves a purely decorative function, positioned on an empty desk to look efficient and helpful. Occasionally it emits a strange ringing noise, but no one there knows why and it stops soon enough.
Increasingly, they're used to send high pitched bleeps and bursts of white noise to whoever calls them. This could be a special service to nostalgic computer nerds, but I think it's a secret communications network used by giant alien insects prior to an invasion. Either that or the collected works of Aphex Twin.
All these wonders and more I have discovered in the last few days. But I've found it's more effective to walk into the office and hand over your CV in person.
Two interviews arranged.
Oh, and I'm booked to teach a class on Tuesday.
They want me to teach that English doesn't have double negatives. 'Cos native speakers don't hardly ever use double negatives. Not never.
They also want me to teach that "state" verbs like Have, Do, Be, Like and Want never occur in continuous form. Apart from state verbs like Run, Sit, Look, Hope and Sleep, which occur in continuous forms all the time. And apart from common collocations like "having breakfast", "doing a runner" and "being a pain". But apart from that.
I wonder what they make of "if I was you" and "to boldly go".
Did both interviews. Contrasting schools - one was large and mistook paperwork for efficiency, the other small and mistook paperwork for seriousness.
Neither school liked me much, but they're both desperate, so we'll see.
PS. I'm going to have sex tonight. If it isn't raining. So if it's dry it'll be wet. Just thought I'd mention it. No particular reason.
Update: Some men cancel at the last minute, some stand you up and you never hear from them again, and some turn up promptly on time before even more promptly changing their mind. This one just oversleeps.
Nevermind. Better fuck next time.
Cemetary and Seminary
A lot happened today, most of it bad. Rather than rant boringly on the details, here's the important points:
* I don't want to work for people who tell me different lies every day, and they don't want to employ someone as highly stung as me unless there's absolutely no one else available.
* I have an interview for another school on Friday - and wlll be contacting more.
* My "jobsearch advisor" (dole officer) thinks I only get jobs to avoid going on government training schemes. Yes, that's what she says.
And on a lighter note:
* I have now twice in my life got lost in graveyards.
I have discovered a new source of spiritual uplift - the Christian Newswire. I learn things here that I wouldn't learn anywhere else.
Did you know for instance, that Arnold Schwartzenegger, Wells Fargo and the president of Brazil are part of the international homosexual movement? Or that being gay kills more people than smoking? No wonder western civilisation is threatened. By gays.
Apparently homosexuals like to mock Christians too. Surely not.
Still, it's easy to be cynical about the Internets. And I always am. Easy, I mean.
But the trouble with being cynical is, although you're usually right, when you're wrong you're really wrong.
Which is just a roundabout way of saying: I'll be looking at this site closely. Even though it isn't. Easy I mean.
School's in for Summer
How to teach your first class:
* Get allocated a class of students at Elementary level. Elementary students require special skills to teach, so make sure you've had none of the necessary training or experience.
* Your students will be in their early teens, so take care to be provided with workbooks written for young children.
* Do not have time to read the lesson plan before you start to teach.
* An integral part of the lesson is the pre-recorded conversations on cassette, so it's vital you get the wrong cassette.
* For bonus points, use board markers that ran dry six years ago.
* Conduct your ninety minute lesson in a tiny, stuffy room.
* Most importantly, have no idea what you're doing.
I'm told by several people that this is the norm. Same again tomorrow.
How I spent my evening:
You've got a cassette to play to tomorrow's students - or rather, you've got five minutes worth of useful stuff, fragmented over half an hour. So you play the tape into your computer's sound card, cut out the useless bits, clean up the signal, and play the result back onto another cassette. Having first spent an hour digging out your old cassette machine and finding some old tapes for it.
It's either that or spend ten minutes of the lesson winding the tape backwards and forwards. Or just getting the class to read out the dialogues, which would be ridiculous. Um, oh.
TEFL may the last industry in the world to abandon the compact cassette. I've got some reel-to-reel machines somewhere they could use.
Ambrose Bierce defined a "career" as "the first day of a new job".
Gizza Job
An interview for a smallish language school.
I arrive at 0900 for the interview. A man greets me, reads my CV and asks a few informal questions, before handing me over to a second man four feet away, who reads the CV and asks the same questions. He then asks me to come back in five hours for the "real" interview, and spends half an hour trying to print out the application form so I can apply for the interview we've just arranged.
He wanders off to find the first man to ask him why his printer isn't working. The first man wanders in, fixes the printer and I take away the form to copy the CV they've already got onto, and bring back later.
I arrive at 1430, to find the second man still out to lunch. He arrives, doesn't even ask for the form I've filled out, but produces his own form of prepared questions. But first, there's a preliminary question:
Interviewer: I understand you know about computers.
Kapitano's Mind: Oh fuck.
Kapitano: Yes....
Int: I was wondering if you could tell me why my printer isn't working.
Kapitano's Mind: Here we go again. Here we fucking go again.
Kapitano: Probably a network or a driver problem. Let me see....
It was indeed a driver problem.
Then there was the list of prepared questions:
Interviewer: Many of your students would be Arabs. Do you have a problem with that?
Kapitano's Mind: Arabs? You mean Muslims don't you. You're asking me whether I hate Muslims. Not foreigners in general, not immigrants, not people with darker skin than me. Muslims.
Kapitano: No of course not.
Interviewer: Should a lesson be teacher oriented or student oriented?
Kapitano's Mind: Oh what a difficult question. Oh I can't possibly guess what the right answer is. Anyone who understands the question knows what to say, as you and I know perfectly well, so what's the point in asking?
Kapitano: It should be student oriented.
Interviewer: How much time should be student talking time, and how much teacher talking time?
Kapitano's Mind: What a fuckwitted thing to ask. It's not like I'm going to stand in the lesson timing my sentences with a stopwatch and failing to explain something because I've gone over my quota of seconds.
Kapitano: Well...pulling a figure out of the air, I'd say 70% should be student talking time.
Interviewer: What sort of relationship should you have with your colleagues?
Kapitano's Mind: Five of them will be mindbogglingly mediocre at their jobs, two borderline incompetent, one staggeringly incompetent, two pretty good and one absolutely brilliant. I've got absolutely no interest in these people outside of the basic courtesies of working together. Apart from the really cute but completely straight one, and the insecure one I have the brief fling with.
Kapitano: Friendly but not friends.
Interviewer: Should you allow students to speak in their native language during lessons?
Kapitano's Mind: Oh Jesus H fucking Christ on a shitty trike. Is this man one of those managerial imbeciles who read once in a book that all lessons should be entirely in the target language, or is he an actual teacher who knows the books are wrong? Hmmm.
Kapitano: If students are quickly helping each other out, that's fine. If they're having conversations, it's not.
Interviewer: What areas of your teaching do you feel you could improve on?
Kapitano's Mind: I'm virtually a beginner, you great twonk. It all needs improving. As you already know 'cos I told you this morning.
Kapitano: I need to improve my teaching of basics to beginners.
I start on Monday.
Exactly what I start on Monday is a little unclear, because they won't know till then how many students they've actually got, and so won't know whether they need a full time teacher, a part timer, or someone to fill in when someone else is ill.
But...I do have a job. Of some kind, And it's five minutes walk from home. So I didn't actually need to go to Bulgaria at all.
Move on, Nothing to See
There's two reasons to neglect your blog:
(1) Have nothing interesting to blog about
(2) Have a lot of interesting things blog about but be too busy doing it to blog about doing them
However, as a marxist, I've found a dialectical unity of the opposites: Be too busy doing things too boring to blog about to blog about them even if they weren't too boring to blog.
But I did get to write a little song, provisionally titled "TV" until I can come up with something better.
Verse 1:
Break, wake
Dark familiar
Lie, stare
Quiet warm
Dreams fade
Numbers glowing red
Time four five six
Creep out of bed
Chorus:
This is the future
Tomorrow's been and gone
Sit and watch the old films
Stand and sing the old songs
This was the future
Can't quite remember when
Life on endless replay
What's old is old again
Verse 2:
Click, flip
Thousand channels
Smile, stare
Lost again
Dreams begin
Numbers glowing green
Channel six oh one
Eyes on the screen
Watch this space to see what I do with it. If the laptop stops crashing.
95% of the internet had just been rendered redundant. This is how.
Nothing is What It Seems
A man stopped me in the street and asked for directions to the community center. Sweat was almost literally pouring off him, and he was trembling uncontrollably - the classic signs of an alcoholic in major withdrawal. I pointed him in the right direction (it was only street away), he thanked me as though I'd given him a hundred pounds, and we went on our ways.
It was Tony. Again he didn't recognise me. The community center hosts an Alcoholics Anonymous branch - maybe he's trying to get his life back.
The thing is, I'll happily play this tiny role in helping him kick his habit, but if he asks for coins to buy that revolting ultracheap cider he depends on, I'll give him spare change if I have it.
I'm reading Lenin's Embalmers - essentially the autobiography of the son of Boris Zbarsky, the social climbing biologist charged with preserving Lenin's corpse under communism. But it's also a history of paranoia, inflated egos and bureaucratic absurdity in 20th century Russia.
The sentiment is snipingly anti-soviet - the rumour that Lenin had syphilis is uncritically repeated as though it has some bearing on his ideas, as is the silly story that Lenin only tried to get Stalin booted out because Stalin was rude to Lenin's wife. Having said that, I was astonished to read just how easily the Bolshevik leaders sank from high-level theory and brave military action in the revolution, into squabbling and scheming afterwards. It's...worrying.
I caught another episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat. On the one hand, he's really scraping the barrel now. On the other, shows like this tell us something about what beliefs are now considered silly, and which sophisticated.
He appeared to teach a woman how to hold her breath underwater using "ancient yogic techniques known only to a few", and how to untie a knot using only visualisation. The latter, involving tying what looks like a strong knot, then hiding the knot itself with one hand and "dissolving" it by pulling on one free end, is a painfully familiar trick of stage magicians. The esoteric trick to holding your breath for ninety seconds is...to keep calm. You see what I mean about scraping the barrel, but both these commonplaces are presented as an advanced level of "mind over matter".
Brown is repackaging old stage magic as remarkable but hidden and undeveloped abilities that all humans have. The message is that everyone can work wonders, that the paranormal is normal.
One sequence I think was quite remarkable, ideologically speaking. He claimed to teach the woman how to enter a special "mediumistic" trance used by Victorian spiritualists, which enabled them to break out of otherwise unbreakable ropes and chains, in the dark, in order for them to put on fake spirit manifestations.
In other words, he's openly assuming that the audience knows that all spiritualists are frauds, but claiming they perpetrated their frauds by effectively supernatural means.
Obviously there is no such special trance. Spiritualists broke out of bindings the same way they and magicians do it today - with fake bindings. But Brown confidently expects his audience to be sophisticated and skeptical of spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, while casually swallowing his similar mumbo-jumbo, packaged as "hidden human potential".
I recently saw a YouTube video (now taken down for copyright infringement) of the illusionist Chris Angel walking on water. He was surrounded by the same group of "bystanders" he always uses, looking amazed and whooping their bafflement. And the perspex ramp just below the waterline was just visible in some shots.
Angel is one of those illusionists who's just as well known for debunking new-age scams as for seeming to do the impossible, so his fans ought to know that he wasn't really walking on water - right? Judging from the comments on the video, fully half thought he really was walking on water. For real.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Penn and Teller once performed a seance, before explaining exactly how they achieved each of the effects. The volunteer student participants then tried to argue that some of the effects weren't faked after all - they just felt too real not to be ghosts.
People really are fuckwits sometimes.
Two comrades are preparing to move homes, which means they're throwing out a lot old books, which means...I've got a big rucksack full of lovely books to read.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roddy Doyle, Anthony Burgess, Margarat Atwood, Robert Fisk...and one book explaining in great detail why Lawrence of Arabia was (a) a liar of epic proportions to the world, (b) a liar of similar proportions to himself and (c) a big screaming queen who liked being whipped by Arab boys.
Which one should I read first?
Mad, Innit?
Have you ever had a few minutes when you just had to sniff or wipe your nose repeatedly because it kept feeling like it was going to start dripping any moment? Were you one of those children who, having touched something once with one hand, felt compelled to touch it with the other hand? Did you spend your pubescent years trying to fit your actions into patterns based on a particular number?
Did you go through a long phase when you compulsively whispered what you or someone else had just said? Or when you only felt comfortable when you'd brushed all your upper teeth before your lower ones?
If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes" or "Not exactly, but something like it" then I have two items of news for you. First, you have or had Tourette's Syndrome. Second, I'm pretty sure most people have it to some extent when they're growing up.
Tourette's? Isn't that the one where you make animal noises and uncontrollably shout rude words in supermarkets? Well, not exactly. That's the popular image of Tourette's, but it's an extremely rare form. Mostly it's a repetitive action of swallowing, shrugging, saying particular words, humming, moving in a particular way etc.
The Tourette's sufferer don't do these things unwittingly or uncontrollably. Rather, they experience a very strong compulsion, which they can with discomfort resist for a while, before the "pressure" builds up too much and they submit.
In other words, someone with Tourette's doesn't have a neurological condition, or any kind of "genetic" "disease", or any condition that could be meaningfully called "insanity". No, what they've got is superstition. A strong, self-created internal imperative to perform some action - the action's value being ceremonial rather than practical. It's a ritual to ward of "the bad" - where the bad could be illness, pain, the disapproval of others, or anything regarded with fear.
You think that does sound a bit like madness? Then consider that Tourette's symptoms almost always occur between the ages of around seven and fifteen. And consider how children in that age range easily accept such superstitions as "Don't walk on the cracks or the bears will get you" and "You must drink from the special cup".
Tourette's Syndrome is simply the invention of one's own childhood superstitions - and then getting trapped by them, at least until they naturally fade away. Occasionally (or is it frequently?) they don't fade away. The actor Derek Jacobi has discussed in interview how, before doing some things, he has to nod three times and say the word "Amen" to himself - and to do it three times. He plausibly connects it to his catholic upbringing, with the special word "Amen" and the special number three.
Conventional psychology posits (on no evidence) a neurological cause for all this, and prescribes drugs. This is the same conventional psychology that diagnoses "lack of writing practice" as "Dyslexia", "being socially awkward" as "Asperger's Syndrome" and "School being boring" as "ADHD" - and prescribes drugs for the disease called "being human".
It's an open question, and I've no idea how to answer it, but: How many of the socially disapproved acts which get adults put in asylums or zombfied on medication are merely private superstitions which they never grew out of?
In cases where the ritual involves shouting numerals or spinning in circles, the "tic" is disruptive and obvious to all. But what about the presumable majority who have non-disruptive tics? Just odd little habbits that bystanders don't notice or classify as eccentricities? There doesn't seem a qualitative difference.
I only write this because, after revisiting a classic video cutup and following it up with the Wikipedia article, I realised that, yes folks...(cue drum roll)...I was a textbook Tourette's child.
My superstitions changed over time, but there were two basic ones:
1) Presage any important action with a voiceless glottal plosive - think of the "kick drum" sound made by human beatboxes - and close the action with another one.
2) Segment repeated actions, like those involved in eating or walking, into sets of four, and if possible square multiples of four. This was to "enclose" them in a protective box.
Those were my rituals, and I had then between around seven and twelve, but what were the fears they guarded against? I think a nebulous fear of unnumbered, uncompartmentalised chaos.
Of course, I've also been informally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, Dyslexia, and (my favourite) Social Anxiety Disorder. Seeing as these are all synonyms for "normal but has trouble with some tasks", and seeing as I can now speedread and sing in public, I reckon that makes me extremely normal.
Hack Cut-a-Cut
I'm still here, just rather busy most of the time and too tired to write about it the rest of the time.
Friday
I'm typing this on a rubber mat. No, I'm not sitting on a rubber mat typing on a keyboard - the keyboard is a rubber mat.
I've knackered at least three keyboards by packing them into bags or rucksacks and carting them around - they just get subjected to twisting and bending forces in transit, and eventually something breaks. But now I've got one of these - a flexible, rollable, portable keyboard for GBP10 - about the same price as a rigid, awkward, non-easily-portable keyboard.
And as a bonus, it's made of silicone rubber, so it takes me back to my pubescent years of using the ZX Spectrum keyboard, with it's famous "dead flesh" feel.
Actually, I've got some spectrum emulators somewhere, with a couple of hundred old speccy games. Oh the nostalgia.
There was exactly one good thing about being a ten year old gay computer nerd in 1982 - the computers. And yes, I did know.
Wednesday
Today I got slashed and burned. It was meant to be me cutting down thorny bushes and shrubs, but they staged a plantarian revolution and cut me instead. It was meant to be the browned greenery burning in the garden incinerator, but it just emitted plumes of lung coating smoke before going out, while I nursed areas of skin splashed by hot petroleum.
The war between man and nature continues tomorrow.
Sunday
Someone asked me if I was depressed. It took me a second to work out why. Both my wrists have livid red cut marks on the underside - the result of trying to uproot a garden of thorns without scythe, secateurs, trimmer, shears...or gloves.
Thomas Edison said something to the effect that he'd discovered nine hundred and ninety nine ways to not invent the lightbulb. My claim is more modest - I now know four ways not to burn garden refuse. One of them involves a tub of vaseline and some cardboard.
Sill, I did get to watch the entire Eurovision Song Contest for 2008.
In 2006 eurovision lost whatever pretence of seriousness it had when a goth metal band from Finland - entered, I'm told, as a joke - won. Since then, Finland have been repeating the joke, with other heavy metal bands - and good ones at that.
In 2007 the hot favourite to win was a Ukrainian transvestite. In the event they didn't come close, but they're the only act anyone remembers - unless you're a Brit and remember the UK's execrable entry, which managed to look like it was painfully trying to be camp.
This year there was a thoroughly misguided attempt to give eurovision back its image of worthy respectability and international-understanding-through-friendly-competition. This is the image it's never had in the UK. About half the twenty six(?) entrants towed the line with completely forgettable "safe" entries - power ballads and eurodisco. The other half hoping to stand out by being...quirky. Apart from Finland's heavy metal, France gave us song which managed to be both instantly forgettable and intensely annoying, thanks to the pseudo-doowop backing singers. Romania did cafe jazz with ranting spoken interludes, the Ukraine gave us techno pirates and Bosnia-Herzegovina were...just willfully weird.
The UK broke with tradition and produced some pretty good soul-funk - but still came traditionally last.
The Writing on the Wall
In my last week in Bulgaria, I had a camera. In the days between booking the flight out and catching it, I took snaps of whatever caught my eye. Here's some of the graffiti.
You've got a spraycan and an opportunity. What's the first thing you think to draw? What does that reveal about you? Hmmm.
Is this patriotic? Is it about war or peace? Or is it just a nice shape that at one moment appealed to one person with a spare moment?
At least I know what these are about.
They export vodka to us. What do we export to them?
Nazis are wrong in every way. Even their geometry.
Still, some graffitio themes are universal.
There's also a second kind of wallwriting, whose purpose I could could only guess at.
And finally...a scribbled out mistake? A drunken whimsy? Something occult?
Graffiti. A message to everyone and no one. The vandalism of the creative. A way to personalise public space, cultural barometer, and Rorschach blot for the perplexed visitor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)