Musings

Long time no write. I guess it must have been the move, the new job, the new partner, the whole new life, and the new annoying glandular fever virus that have kept me from this blog for so long. Oh, and the new pain in my rear lack of internet access from home too. I hate BT. With a passion.

Now that I've got something worth describing, I thought I'd summarise the last few months' experience of London, for all my huge audience around the world. Firstly, there's been the new job. A myriad of oddness, working for the French government, teaching English - sometimes the British curriculum - as an Irishman, thought to be English, among French colleagues... The school is something of a conundrum. I won't go into the politics here, but suffice it to say that the little channel of water which separates Britain from France is no barrier compared to the cultural chasm which separates how they think of education.

The move; I now live in Acton. It's an odd place, full of internet cafes and dodgy grocery stores where people look at you funny if you come in and ask for things they'd normally have in a grocery shop. It's an odd mixture of Arab-muslims, antipodeans and Poles, and shops which seem to cater for one of those three groups. It's got a great Portugese restaurant, though, where I just had a fresh coffee and apple pie for £2. In these times when the pound is worth less than the rouble, it's worth saving where you can...

My new lady. What can I say. It makes all the difference to have someone in one's life who can both boost and kick your self-satisfied male ego. That's Ruth. The most colourful, musical person I've ever met.

Onto a less pleasant subject, glandular fever. It's the strangest illness, because it's viral and can't be medicated, and doesn't express itself till I make some kind of physical effort. So no running, and therefore a feeling of constant tiredness. It basically doesn't go away, but dies down within 6 months, if you're lucky. Until it does, you feel like you've been hit over the head with a shovel half the time, and feel absolutely normal the rest of it. People get tired of you feeling tired. Are you ill or are you well? You were fine yesterday, make up your mind... It's all the more frustrating for someone like me who wants to either be healthy or die trying. Grr.

Finally, my MA course. It's in Critical and Cultural Theory, and we started last Monday with Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I wasn't too impressed with this essay, but have taken to reading Benjamin, and think I might be a convert after all. Meanwhile, it's got me back into reading all sorts of pretentious European philosophy. That's the idea.

This exhibition is what I got up to yesterday before burning out and going home to sleep. This guy makes waxworks of various bodies, and they are frighteningly real. You arrive in the exhibition hall and it looks like somebody has just fainted or fallen down.




As you can see in the second picture, the body is just a reproduction of himself. It doesn't look like much here, but it's really convincing when you're actually there. He captures a lot of what Foucault had to say about the body and how we have a pornographic way of looking at bodies nowadays. Our aesthetics in the media seems to be obsessed with turning the body into something to be admired or loathed, but in any case changed and improved. Xin shows us the body the way it is, and we wish it wasn't.