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Fun With US Constitutional Case Names!

Fun fact for the day: in the American constitutional rights saga that began with the miraculous "creation" of a general right to privacy and eventually led to the legalizing of abortion, a case along the way that extended this right of privacy to activities relating to marriage was called Loving v. Virginia.

Okay, so maybe it's a thoroughly boring factoid and would amuse only the puerile, but when trying to research a comparative human rights essay on judicial discovery of unenumerated rights, one must look for these little joys.

How To Pleasure Your Girlfriend With Sheep

I probably big-up Alec here a bit more than is healthy for his ego, but really, what kind of guy dresses a ghetto blaster up as a sheep, complete with cotton balls for fluff and black socks on toilet rolls for hooves, and carries it across London to give his girlfriend at Christmas?

Judging from the malevolent looks he was apparently getting from other guys in the tube, some might say a specially sad kind of guy, but let me redeem him from male condemnation here.

I'm rather fond of sheep. I think they're cute (and for the record, I think most baby animals, some human babies, and fuzzy things in general are cute too, so sue me). For my past two birthdays, Russ gave me these adorable sheep, which I'm inordinately fond of.

Alec, being a cynical old git, is less than enamoured with their ickle fuzzy nature. Add to this the fact that Russ has a proud tradition of giving me kickass presents, and has also thrown down some cybergauntlets of his own, and you get my boyfriend's decision to dress his gift to me up as a big motherfucker of a sheep, and make it trample the two ickle ones.

[I should clarify: no bad blood actually exists between them. They accept each other as important people to me, who they care about, but also legitimate sources of mutual shameless wisecracking. I love both of them dearly, and all three of the sheep. I love my ghetto blasta' from Alec (it plays MP3 CDs!) and my Daydream Nation on vinyl (with poster and promo photo of the band, press release, and cover print!) from Russ. I am a veritable love-fest these days, which is a nice if embarrassingly soppy thing to be.]

Things I Want To Remember

I'm less than satisfied with the event-record ratio I've managed on this blog lately. For simple practical purposes, I can't seem to remember what I do without writing it down any more. More significantly, there's a backlog of things I do actually want to write about, and the neurotic symbolist in me wants to get them written down before the year ends.

I want to remember the frustrations that built up to an unhappy last Thursday, and also how prolonged ranting to a very patient Russ (over Berwick Street trawling [conversational excerpt, paraphrased - Me: Look, I know this sounds pathetic but I really know what will cheer me up right now will be buying an album. I really want to bring a new album home with me to listen to tonight or I'll be really depressed. Russ: Here, I'll hold those you're carrying already so it'll be easier for you to flick through the racks], jerk chicken at, er, Mr Jerk, and coffee in the smoke factory that is the basement of Costa on Old Compton Street) reminded me of that long-running question: what did I do to deserve him, and how do I bottle it?

I want to remember amazing crispy pancakes at Song Que with Alec, suddenly looking around stunned to see all the chairs upside down on all the other tables, the proprietors (and their kids) patiently waiting for us to finish, and cheerfully wishing us a Merry Christmas as we stumbled out a little embarrassed.

I want to remember a cozy Saturday afternoon finishing The Hours (wonderful), swaddled in a duvet while rain pattered on the skylight, alone but not lonely.

Christmas 2002

The bacon's bubbling away in the Coke, Avril's alternately wringing her hands and shouting "Big Willy!" at the TV, Alec and his brother are blowing raspberries and doing armpit farts, and I am calmly and detachedly taking it all in. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Lessons In Low Self-Esteem

I finally finished Life A User's Manual (Georges Perec), which has taught me that I am an ignorant, stupid, boring, uncreative person. Now I am reading The Hours (Michael Cunningham), which, 48 pages in, is already teaching me that I really can't write for shit.

You learn a lot from reading.

In Bruges I photographed the

In Bruges I photographed the reflection of a medieval building in a gleaming red car hood. It's one of my favourite pictures that I've taken, but I think this puts mine to shame.

Scratch: Not Really Worth Scratch

Call me a music snob, but I suspect the reviewers who were falling all over themselves to pour platitudes on Scratch are somewhat unfamiliar with hip-hop beyond the flatulence of Puff Daddy and Will Smith.

I wasn't impressed by its "look ma, I can speed the film up and cut quickly from scene to scene" cinematography (if you could call it that) - MTV does it a lot better, and it's so tired and overdone by now anyway.

I wasn't impressed by its organization or editing, in that I think it could have conveyed much the same experience in half the time it took if it had left the more inane interviews on the cutting room floor. For instance, I really wasn't interested in Mix Master Mike and Qbert talking about how the universe and various imagined alien cultures inspire them. Instead I'd have really liked to hear from Krush, who features in a clip but isn't interviewed, or anyone else in Japanese hip-hop, which is mentioned more fleetingly than it deserves. In the section on "battling", we're informed that when you compete in the DMCs, you're no longer competing against one other person, you're competing against everyone else in the competition. This is hardly profound. You could say the same thing about a yodelling competition.

I thought the clips it did show of scratching were often boring and samey, and hardly explored the sheer ingenuity with which some artists use it. Kid Koala doing Drunken Trumpet, anybody? It showed Beck's DJ demonstrating the record he made composed entirely of guitar sounds, but didn't go on to show how that becomes Smoke On The Water in concert. It showed a clip of beatboxers completely out of the blue, but provided no commentary or follow-up. I don't even see why beatboxing would be that relevant to the subject matter of the documentary in the first place, but if they were going to put a clip in, they might as well have put some more in, because it was bloody amazing. I could go on, but won't.

Surely I liked something? Well, yes. I always like good beats. Qbert had a gorgeous face (pity about the height). I liked the uniting theme of how everyone seemed to have been influenced by DXT scratching on the Grammy performance of Herbie Hancock's Rockit. I liked the jam session at Qbert's house with Shadow and others. The clip of Jurassic 5 was well-placed and did a good job of explaining the ideal, arguably, of a DJ working symbiotically with the MCs. And I liked laughing at Cut Chemist, who is either naturally inarticulate or was just really out of it. On balance it was probably just about worth the trek to Hammersmith (Riverside Studios), but only just.

[Bizarrely, at the IMDB entry for this movie (linked above), "if you like this title we also recommend...Mother Teresa."]

Useful Males

Okay, I admit it. I throw my hands up when dancing to the chorus of Independent Women, and have been known on occasion to shout "ALL MEN ARE BASTARDS!" But today I needed men.

John had to metamorphose from his usual lovable non-fleahurting self to protector of my virtue first in a Secret!Christmas!Mission! in dodgy bits of central London, and then from an equally dodgy plumber who seemed to travel by minicab, and his mate who was either very laid back or fairly stoned. This was admittedly not a difficult thing to do for a tall Geordie who survived two years in Finsbury Park and Hackney with hardly a scratch, but I'm still grateful.

We did manage some non-dodginess with a trip to Antony Gormley's incredibly endearing Field For The British Isles, which has become a fixture of my regular pops through the British Museum on the way home (you don't get many short-cuts more beautiful or soul-lifting), but that was cruelly cut short by my landlady calling and saying ceilings were about to collapse and I had to hot-foot it home or else.

When John had to leave from plumber-watching duty, Alec assumed the position, albeit in markedly different garb of yuppie suit, leather gloves, skinny umbrella and latest copy of The Chap. All the same, my virtue remains intact (well, kind of, but that has nothing to do with the plumber) after a day of decidedly sleazy encounters, and for that I thank these two particular members of the male race. Without them I'd have felt decidedly vulnerable, whatever feminism may argue to the contrary.

Not Quite Nigella

It is probably advisable, when throwing a dinner party on Friday, to decide you're doing it a little earlier than Thursday.

I don't really know what I was expecting when I decided, in a fit of festive benevolence, that I'd throw some sort of dinner party at my flat in an attempt to celebrate the end of term and general Christmassiness in a more sophisticated way than getting pissed at the union. It was a tentative idea at first, more tadpole than frog, and could quite possibly have been abandoned soon after as more trouble than it was worth. And then we arrived at Michael's basement palace in Kensington for his Christmas party, and there were candles, and an improvised cloakroom, and people in nice clothes, and chocolate fondue, and all of a sudden I thought I too could be Nigella Lawson.

So I got home (having earlier called a few friends who gamely agreed to take the plunge), settled myself down with our cookbook collection and a Crispy Strip (chocolate fondue isn't really filling), inserted a finger up my arse, and started tugging.

[Clarity note: this doesn't refer to what I eventually served at the dinner party. That would be disgusting. It's just that I commonly refer to embarking on an enterprise for which I am ill-suited and have no real knowledge or skill for as "pulling something out of my arse". Brits will understand.]

Morning came. I tidied my room. Went out and bought groceries. Lugged everything home. Cooked. I was planning on crudites (unfortunately named, I've always thought) and dip for everyone to munch on while I was finishing cooking, and a bizarre mixture of Thai beef salad, chicken, aubergine and chick pea curry, spinachy garlicky rice, and paratha, for the main meal. Nav brought chocolate cake. Gwen brought wine. Alec brought wine, ice-cream, interior decorating resourcefulness (a folded bedsheet with coloured napkins on top for the tablecloth) and general sweetness and reliability in helping to fight fires (I mean this literally as well as figuratively).

I'd even invested in crackers and festively hued serviettes.

We started at nine, an hour after the time I'd told people to come for, which was annoying to my perfectionist's soul, but still fairly on par with most other dinner parties I've been to, so I won't scourge myself for it. All I can say for the quality of the food was that I thoroughly enjoyed it - the Thai beef salad actually lived up to the immense trouble it was to make, the chicken absorbed the flavours of the curry and wasn't dry, and while some mistakes I made with the rice meant it could have been a lot better, it still tasted good to me. As for what my guests thought, or the state of their digestive systems the next morning, I can only vouch for Alec (whose cooking credentials far surpass mine, which made his thumbs-up all the more gratifying), but the absence of lawsuits thus far indicates they were at least not too negatively affected.

The party ended around three in the morning. I spent Saturday nursing my headache and cleaning the place up.

Would I do it again? I'm not sure. I don't regret having done it, but it was a lot of effort for the benefit of a very small number of people. I think my energies might be better directed towards world domination.

Installation

I had wall space to fill and a collection of prints and postcards to fill it with - various Eschers (Reptiles, Concave And Convex, Relativity, The Tower Of Babel), Guernica, one of Picasso's mutations of Las Meninas, Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Jack Yeats' For The Road, a photo of Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter and that Flandrin I really love.

The Eschers and Picassos are black and white, the others are in vibrant colour. I had this vision of connecting the black and whites to radiate outward like spokes from a hub, and then surround their tips with the coloured prints. I worked assiduously on the arrangement, Blu-Tacking, sticking, checking for crookedness and congruence with surrounding prints, re-arranging where necessary. Finally, I stepped back and surveyed my work proudly, convinced that despite a congenital lack of graphic or spatial talent, I had indeed come up with something artistic here.

It was a huge swastika. I took it down.

Distracted By Jesus

While ploughing through back issues of The Irish Jurist I was completely diverted from my quest for articles on unenumerated rights in Irish constitutional law (no prizes for guessing that Comparative Human Rights is my "fun but impractical" Masters course choice) by "The Trial Of Jesus As A Conflict Of Laws?" (1997 32 Ir. Jur. 398 for any similarly sad lawyer type who's interested).

It tackles the three main areas of concern in the subject: jurisdiction, choice of law and enforcement of judgments, basically: who had the jurisdiction to put Jesus on trial, Pilate (as Roman governor of Judea), Herod (as tetrach of Galilee and a client-king of Rome), or the Sanhedrin (as highest Jewish court of law)? What law would be applied in the trial, Roman or Jewish? Lastly, if in answer to the first two questions we discover that the Sanhedrin decided, applying Jewish law, would Pilate be prepared or required to enforce the judgment?

It ultimately concludes that there was only one trial, before Pilate, who applied Roman law, which seemed a sensible if not revelatory stance, but it was a refreshing diversion none the less.

The Well-Tempered SF/Fantasy Plot Device

It occurred to me, on reading The Well-Tempered Plot Device, that with SF/Fantasy writing, the simple love-it-or-hate-it divides don't exist. You either love it, hate it, or if you're like me, both.

He starts off by promising that "You have to remember that Mr Donaldson's spent years learning to produce a book so flatulent you have to be careful not to squeeze it in a public place. All I can do in the time available is to offer instruction on the first and most important element of crummy writing, which is (as my title suggests) bad plotting. I can't promise that by the time you've read these pages you'll have learned to write significantly more stereotyped characters, or that your style will have become significantly more leaden and clichéd. But I do promise that you'll be fully conversant with the many varieties of plot device, their use and function, and you'll be able to recognize and admire their handling in the works of the masters: Lionel Fanthorpe, A.E. van Vogt, and the early sword-and-sorcery novels of Michael Moorcock, to name only some of the virtuosi of the plot device I haven't space to mention in what follows..." and it just gets better and better from there.

He doesn't really mention the naming conventions (like, why isn't anyone in fantasy ever called Reg or Cuthbert? Why are they all Gwynion or Tantreth or Xanthia?) or David Edding's amazing recycling feats which remain unmatched by any Green tree-huggy types in our world, but it's still going to hit lots of nerves/G-spots if you've ever read the genre. Enjoy.

Dear Wankers

To certain unnamed but now viciously described users of the law library where I unfortunately spend my postgraduate days:

German guy with overly floppy hair and a weak face that somehow looks capable of cruelty (think Rolf from The Sound Of Music), you are not the life of the library party, and your need to let the whole room know you're having a wonderfully entertaining conversation is really pathetic. Your lavender jumpers really don't go with blindingly blond hair. Also, not only is eating in a library a bit out of order, eating loud food (apples, crisps) and punctuating your already loud conversations with crunches and lipsmacks truly takes the cake, pun not intended.

Girl who hangs adoringly around German guy, and has an accent distinctly from my part of the world (Singapore or Malaysia), you are obviously so blinded by his hair that you have forgotten the manners and library etiquette they most certainly teach us back home. Thankfully, you're trying too hard to act demure and cute to add to his noise.

Thirtysomething-if-you're-a-day woman who leisurely answers unsilenced mobile phone and jabbers away at top volume for prolonged conversations, I have no idea what planet you're from, so I'm not even going to bother.

With utmost sincerity,
A fellow library user, who is hardly encouraged in researching her human rights essay by the fact that she keeps longing to bludgeon all of you to death, or at least chuck you in gulags.

[Just to clarify: the library I refer to in this post is not the UCL library where I was amused by graffitti. That one is largely populated by undergraduates, who may burble on a bit at times about how rat-arsed they got last Friday night, but generally focus their efforts on vandalism and falling asleep, which are silent preoccupations and therefore don't annoy me. The one I use most of the time, and which I refer to in this post, is only for postgrads, academics and professionals, all of whom really should know better.]

Law Library Graffitti

Selected graffitti from the carrel I was using in the UCL library yesterday:

• (On a white square sticker with rounded edges)
  I won't deny the pain
  I won't deny the change
  And should I fall from grace
  Here with you
  Would you leave me too?
  (Signed off mei3 nu3 du2 LAW, which roughly translates to beautiful girl law student)
  (this promptly put the song into my head for the rest of the day, where it is still.)
• SOCIALIST WORKERS FUCK OFF
• My pen is Better!! (with the dots in the exclamation mark replaced by circles)
• Today is the first day of the rest of my life!
• moo moo moo (in neat cursive, the person probably does very legible lecture notes)
• shezad is an annoying fuck
• (below, in red) SO YOU BOTH HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON...
• (I think the following few constitute a continuous exchange, although various snippets were sprawled all over the surface wherever writing space was available)
  IF YOU'RE TIRED/BORED, GET THE FUCK OUT OF 'ERE!
• YOU WERE OBVIOUSLY NOT SUITED TO A LIBRARY
• YOU WERE OBVIOUSLY A KNOB
• Using a vibrator (this word underlined in red, with concentric "vibration" marks emanating from it) sometimes helps. Put it on your brain perhaps!
• What has a VIBRATOR got to do with REVISION?
• What little imagination you have!
• I wouldn't mind a vibrator. Will it hurt?

Excerpts + Thoughts: Life A User's Manual (Georges Perec)

"Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a "word-killer": he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity."

[This seems to be the antithesis of what Perec's trying to accomplish in this book. He's trying to document the minutiae, to impress upon the reader that behind everything and everyone in this random Paris apartment block among countless others there is a story to be told and a context to be appreciated, richness beneath apparent mundanities.]

But pretentious literary analysis aside, I was thinking about how much I would hate to be a word-killer. The notion of making a living out of the fall of entities depresses me immensely - to do a proper job you would first have to become familiar with their genesis, their emerging into common parlance, then stagnation, then obsolescence. And after all this your job wouldn't be to document lives but to cement over them.

Warning: Awwwwwful

On days when you're royally pissed off at everything and everyone because the computer eats the notes you've just finished typing, and you're tired of never having a warm flat, or a TV that can receive more than BBC1, and you're sick of having to sacrifice your study time while you're stuck in the flat with a bumbling plumber trying to fix your sink, and always seem to be washing pans in aforementioned sink which you didn't leave there, on days when this multitude of little flea-like annoyances accumulate and nibble continuously at the edges of your composure, you really appreciate a boyfriend who cooks and serves you chicken rice by candlelight, especially when he's never eaten it in his life, comes from a culinary tradition of cabbage, potatoes and offal, and is at his wit's end with the chilli because every recipe he consults tells him different things.

Awwwww.