The Home Strait

We made it into the home strait, my students and I, and now I only need to get them through seven more lecture hours before they are finally rid of me and get to sit the exam I nominally wrote. And then what will happen to them? Well, they'll go on to their next courses and classes and I'll go on to whatever my next port of call might be. It's just hard to know where and what that might be. Probably there will be a lot of work as post-PhD rebuilding goes on.

Life after being a student is rarely what it was before, or what it was planned to be, or so I perceive from the people around me those I used to know. It's a strange and hectic time. Where one would expect a degree of stability with a PhD after one's name instead we find insecurity and pressure. It's tough, and would be better with a publication or two, but that's the touchiest subject of all.

To get on in academia you have to justify yourself and your research with publications. In principle and in practice that would appear to be fine, but in actuality we end up in the worst kind of quagmire. For my part, it's reasonable that I don't have publications as I really haven't worked hard enough. This will have to be made up for in the worst ways imaginable - working, blast it! - but in the meantime I'm pretty much unemployable as an academic. It's time to buckle down and examine every possible combination of boundary condition possible until death or glory beckons, and then convert to Statistics and founder there as well! Or bizarrely succeed, of course.

So seven lecture hours to go and three or four topics left to stretch into the time... It's not as hard as it could have been, even if the content of the module is woefully insufficient. Tomorrow's lecture has been naturally extended just by adding a clear throughline, and talking about the individual steps. The only danger is that students can get put off the things they need to know for the exam by the things they need to know to succeed. Teaching to exams is a dangerous business, after all, and one best to be avoided. Hopefully I've added enough to make the lectures coherent and linearly stronger while not obfuscating the issue overly.

obfuscate: to confuse or make unclear

'Obfuscate' is a lovely work, the antonym for 'explain' or 'clarify'. If we only knew how much some of the people in charge obfuscated we would be much much harder on them. I've often been tempted to obfuscate in times of utmost stress just to escape a tedious social occasion. Usually I just left instead. Why obfuscate when you can just be rude?

O.

Story: Oneiromancy, IV

(Part O , III , V)


This time he was flying, high - far too high - above a desert that was shimmering under the heat of a relentless sun in the pale blue sky. The dunes were barely perceptible from this height, merely smudges on the otherwise featureless expanse from horizon to horizon. The speed was incredible as he knifed through the air, and if it weren't for the inevitable dreamland physics in action he felt he would have fainted due to lack of breathing mere moments into the experience.

It was calm up there, in the great expanse, and for a while he forgot about it all and enjoyed the experience. Where he was going, he knew not, nor where he had flown from. Between a few minutes and a few days later the man slowed and then stopped high above what seemed to be a featureless hill of sand projecting from the arid plains. The world convulsed.

The shaking went on for ages, and the sky itself seemed to shudder. The sun vanished and the moon rose, and the moon vanished in turn to be replaced by three new moons and a ring of cosmic debris emitting a ghostly light. The convulsions settled and in startlement the flier saw a face in the hill of sand beneath him. Defiantly feminine nose, eyes and mouth could be seen in the dunes and valleys beneath and the suggestions of ears and a noble brow and chin.

The eyes opened and for a moment looked about wildly before seeing the man. Disconcertingly, the blue of the pupils had no tinge of sandiness and a sense of serenity settled into them as she gazed upwards and he down. The mouth opened, but only a mighty wind emerged, and then a horrid void pulling the man down in a great wave of suction. All power of flight faded and he plummeted down, down, down into the abyss that was the sandy mouth until finally he vanished from all Earthly sight and was gone.

The great sandy face wept sandy tears and seemed to shiver and quake in its own feeble structure, looking for a way out back to reality. A way to tell what she was trying to tell. The blue eyes of sand blinked, faded to yellow, and then the whole facade crumpled back into the desert, as if no-one had ever been there. The sandy desert continued, an archetype buried in the great common unconscious of the people dead, born and waiting.

The dream time faded into nothingness and somewhere out in the wide world of space and time a man awoke - and a woman - both confused and disoriented, and both with a nagging sense of things badly awry. If only the man had had time and thought in their own private shared desert to look up, and gaze upon a now sculpted debris ring, he would have seen something extraordinary: "Help me".

And then they went about their business for yet another day.

To be extended...

Blockages

Hitting my head against a wall. Mathematics getting in the way of real writing. Giant concepts flying around and messing with the concept of reality. Logarithms jumping up and down and waving noxious plain yogurt around menacingly. Oh good grief, it's so hard to be analytical and so tired, and still trying to write prose. Tired because of locking myself out of my hotel room for six hours and not sleeping a couple of days ago, and analytical because I am a mathematician. Today I was thinking about how they determined the value of the exponential constant e and am still wondering. The exponential function is incredibly interesting. Presumably they estimated e from some graphical concepts first, or one of its limit definitions, and then realised that it was the same number that kept popping up elsewhere before connecting all the dots and shouting 'Barnaby Jones'!

My hotel has very interesting carpets, by the way. Oh, the tedium!

Anyway, back off topic we go. What is the topic? I don't know, and I'm determined to stop having such things in general as they ruin the intent of the whole thing. It doesn't have to be about anything, not least of which the way the little Shakespeare head patterns in the weave would skip pattern halfway up each flight of stairs as they changed rolls. No, it shouldn't even be about carpet! Oh bother, that might be too hard, but carpet is certainly off the table. No more carpet talk. That reminds me that one of the most annoying things about living in Hungary was the lack of carpet and the insistence people would have on you removing your shoes when you visited them. It was bizarre. There were lots of good things about Hungary but this wasn't one of them. I wish they had had carpet instead of trying to make me wear communal slippers. Oh, and the green men lie. Strange places and silly times. That was not carpet talk, but rather 'absence of carpet' talk and so no rules were broken, especially if you look away now and pretend to be examining that cloud that looks like Clement Atlee.

One night's sleep isn't enough to make up for working too much. My head is so full of cotton wool that is even this nonsense has twinges of sense to it. Hopefully the trend of people not reading this will continue so as to leave this all unknown. Hmmm, but hopefully the stories will continue to get enhanced viewership. We're due to have the next episode in 'Oneiromancy' soon, and it's proving tricky as convincing dream imagery can only really be concocted while in a less than lucid state. In short, you have to be in a truly weird state of mind to come up with things which can actually be realistic as dreams. <breaks> I just wrote some due to being utterly sleep deprived and thinking that camels might be covertly comedic on purpose. There could be an academy somewhere that teaches them. Oh, and you are all sand dunes.

What? Oh! Um, the second season DVDs of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' are waiting for me to get to them. TSMDM is an interesting television show. It's camp and cheesy but also good hearted and was also a massive shift forward for genre television at the time. The dramatic standards were high and they made the best of what they had. It's fascinating. It's even more fascinating to realise how few years lay between the end of TSMDM and 'The Fall Guy'. Suddenly the words are making sense, just when it's time to stop. It was actually more fun to be fighting through the block in a way, but the lunacy has gone. Humbug!

O.

Paranym

The Phrontistery states that a 'paranym' is an obsolete term for a 'euphemism', those beloved terms we use in place of things considered crude or inappropriate. The vast majority of euphemisms, as a consequence of their function are related to scatological and sexual issues, those twinned topics that make people uncomfortable the world over.

I like the word 'paranym', it being a word that can be used in place of 'euphemism' and unknown enough to be a euphemism itself. The Phrontistery is a treasure trove of little known terms that faded out of the language, and yet when you browse through the lists it becomes apparent why some of them went to begin with. We just don't talk that much about donkeys in detail anymore, or tiny details of churches, and people don't seem to want the extensive vocabularies of days past. It's sad, but I digress from my original intent, which is for now lost to time as much as 'paranym' or 'tetradarchy'.

Euphemisms don't seem to be as common now as they were in the past, a legacy of a bygone era when people were less open and all things scatological and sexual proscribed from the language at all cost. Now, it somehow feels quaint to use a paranym. Perhaps that societal change is one of the reasons why spoken English has become rather less colourful as time goes by and more and more things become acceptable to the population at large, if not for prudes such as myself.

There are lovely words that could be used again in my world at large. For example, the word 'xerostomia' is far more interesting than 'excessive dryness of the mouth'. Next time I'm trapped in a parching hotel room, gasping for air and wondering when the night will finally come to an end I will cherish my xerostomia even if it is worrying in the extreme. You should all cherish xerostomia when it occurs, but not preserve it for time immemorial. That would be the insane option, as favoured by game show hosts and people of dubious reality.

And now, for a mild diversion, last night was the last night for 'Thor: The Dark World' at the local cinema and so I duly toddled the twenty sideways steps to get there and was ultimately a bit bored. Previously mentioned somewhere was my apprehension at this year's movies as among them were three essentially corrective sequels or reboots to movies I liked but apparently very few other people did, name 'Iron Man 2', 'Superman Returns' and 'Thor'. 'Thor: The Dark World' is fine, but it has had its predecessor's soul sucked out of it and replaced with generic action. If you want to make a film interesting then the characters are what is needed, not fighting. Fighting just makes a movie like every other fighting movie. What was a neo-Nordic-Shakespearian romp was converted to spaceships and cataclysmic events with really far too many jokes. They were good jokes, of course, but there too many. Also, filmmakers, if you're going to use Christopher Ecclestone then you'd better give him something interesting to do underneath the rubbishy makeup! In the end 'Thor TDW' was the only one of the three relaunches I saw, and in a perverse way I'm glad to have skipped 'Man of Steel' and 'Iron Man 3'.

Perhaps we'll get back to paranyms one day, and start babbling incoherently again, as only the use of euphemisms permit, smoothing as they do the dark potholes of narrative stream and denying dalliances with subjects best left for another conversation. Here's for encouraging euphemisms!

O.

Television: 'M*A*S*H: Abyssinia, Henry' (Episode 3x24)

There is conceivably no other television show that I will write two episode articles about, barring possible original Star Trek. I could easily pick two or three more to write about, even, which is unprecedented. The series was so good and original and funny in its first four seasons that it transcends the limits of its own format to be spectacular.

The man behind it all was show creator and leader Larry Gelbart, who with the great assistance of the crack directors and cast managed to produce a series both heartfelt, socially aware, critical and utterly human. The only downside to the show's first three seasons was the unhappiness of Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson, who played Trapper and Henry, and the perceived (and real) priority given by the show to Alan Alda's Hawkeye Pierce. Clearly there was a degree of 'second banana' syndrome but the show really did bias heavily and unfairly at times toward Alda at their expense and so independently the two finally decided to leave. Wayne Rogers was written out more absently in the fourth season premiere but here the beloved Henry gets a full and unexpected sendoff, Stevenson leaving in a presumably more planned and less acrimonious manner than Rogers. Even Frank Burns got a nicer sendoff than Trapper!

On the other hand, they killed Henry Blake.

It wasn't unprecedented for a character to die in a television show, but here it was a surprise, and came hot on the heels of twenty minutes of reminding us why the character was well-loved. The closing sequence was shocking: Radar walks into the OR and reads out a report that Henry Blake's plane was shot down, and that he was lost on his return home to the US after his trials in Korea. The actors themselves had only had a few minutes to prepare and it shows. There's a rawness to it all that is quite, quite jarring. The producers were vowed to never do anything so shocking again, and they didn't, but they didn't have to. You only have to throw the elbow once, after all, to show that you can and will. There was an episode of 'The West Wing' about that.

The main point about this episode is that it put MASH aside, into a whole other category of television show. For the rest of its run it wasn't the 'sitcom called MASH' anymore, but simply MASH. It may never have done anything so extreme as 'Abyssinia, Henry' again, which is extremely funny as well as sad, but it set a bar. In many ways no-one else has ever even made it close enough to see that bar. It's a quality mark to be able to do drunken shenanigans, a hearty farewell to a character flying home, and then a grim moment of terribly bad news. You can tell 'Abyssinia, Henry' is a good episode because it's hard to watch. Even while the fun is going on, the spectre of what to come refuses to budge, and so any viewing other than the first is permeated with an almost vicious melancholy. I'll even avoid the couple of episodes preceding it just to try to forget it happens. Blast you, MASH writers.

Rest in peace, Henry Blake, you were loved.
O.

PS For commentaries on every single episode of MASH, check out Rob Kelly's AfterMASH podcast. So far he's almost halfway through season six.

Doodling On

Random reflections. My weeks tend to be rather schizophrenic, split between Aberystwyth and here in picturesque Pontyates. There's never any time to get settled, and the two hour bus journeys allows time only for reading huge tracts of lovely novels and getting rather travel sick. It's all quite the slog but there is reward in it, of the more abstract kind. An opportunity to lecture has been invaluable and as the remaining weeks dwindle away it's fun to think about what has gone right and what has gone wrong.

It's surprising how well the overall process of lecturing has gone. I surely could have been better prepared for every single lecture, the early ones being particularly catastrophic, but the lectures have been mildly successful. It's true that they laugh at me rather than listen and learn but that's the way of life as I have learnt it. There have always been people laughing at or dismissing rather than being interested. I think I must put out some kind of 'buffoon' aura or miss some cues. Ah well, 'tis life, and we do what we do to get by. Now if I could only get these lectures to be long enough I would be delighted!

As I continue to doodle here I remember how strange the latest 'Due South' commentary for Film Bin was, all kinds of hesitations and garbledness pushed together to make a big mess which sometimes seemed more concerned with director Lyndon Chubbuck than the episode itself, which was rather good but part two of a story whose part one was bizarre. As a result the whole thing was bizarre but Mr Chubbuck saved part two heroically.

So many novels on the go at the moment, thanks to the (lonely) awesomeness of living away from home four nights a week. Even if I wanted to work I couldn't, as there is no laptop and I refuse to buy one. In this frantic and frenzied world I am amazed, utterly astounded even, that people buy gadgets so that their work and entanglements follow them even on holiday! Isn't it bizarre? Humans are so confounding! It was probably less stressful when we all used sign language and the occasional grunt to communicate. I hypocritically use my primeval phone to check e-mail but really wish that habit hadn't grown.

The Patrick O'Brian novels are rather good. I'm enjoying them much more this time. Mark Twain is also proving to be much better than I expected as I plunge into 'The Prince and the Pauper', while remaining bafflingly stuck on Dorothy L Sayers' 'Five Red Herrings'. It's noticeable in the Sayers novels that she employs extremely accurate dialects and the Scottish verbiage in 'Five Red Herrings' is extremely annoying. Sometimes realism can be taken so far as to sabotage the intended effect of the story itself. It's entirely possible I'm the only one who has ever been bothered by such things though, so I'll refrain from further comment. I think the book must be missing a hook of some kind or that I'm just jaded with mysteries.

It's time to stop, and think about the stories to come. What will come down the Dream Line?
O.

Story: The Glove, VI [Obsoleted]

(Part I , V , VII)

Steffan stood outside the Piper Hall for a moment and wondered at the madness of what he had just done. Then, without looking back even once he walked down the road and submerged into the throng of people going about their business.

Inside the Pipers Hall, Master Octavius sat with steepled fingers and thought about the events of the day. He had not considered for a moment that the apprentice would refuse and now there was someone unprecedented out there in the world, someone aware of the purpose of the Guild but also apart from it.

The Apprentice sat in a cafe and wondered what to do with his life. After refusing the honour of joining the Masters Council he had also requested and been granted a suspension of his Guild Membership for the purposes of sabbatical. Sipping from a hot mug of coffee he realised that he had no purpose in his life for the first time since being little.

Octavious had two meetings after Steffan had gone and his duties had reasserted themselves: One with the other members of the Council, and then another with the second choice for the mission. The reserve Piper was experienced, steady, and incredibly well known. The very presence of Master Lambo would not fail to make itself known in any location for very long. It was not an ideal situation at all.

The coffee ebbed away to nothing in the mug, and Steffan wondered at what he had learnt. The Pipers functioned as a surveillance agency for the whole world, gathering and collating intelligence in a way he had never realised before. During training he had been told a little about listening to people and to always be on the watch for new material for ballads but this new information took that idea several steps beyond anything. The piles of papers and maps on Octavius's world indicated something major in the works, and a huge trust in the man who had rejected his offer.

Octavius sent Lambo on his way at the same time that Steffan left the cafe for home. As the suspended apprentice went into his kitchen to tell his mother and father the news, new piles of intelligence collapsed onto the Master's table as well as an in-depth study of Steffan himself. The study was the same as it had been the last time he had read it, but now the conclusions twisted about and a nagging anxiety about the boy would not abate, even as that boy lay in his bed and wondered at the supposed rise in anger amongst the population at large.

The night rolled in and Burgh settled to sleep, or as much to sleep as a bustling city could. For most, anxieties faded away as blissful repose put their minds to ease, but 'most' is almost never the same as 'all'.

To be continued...


NOTE: After re-reading 'Dragonflight' and 'Dragonquest' it is obvious that the Pipers are are inspired by the Harpers in those classic Anne McCaffrey novels. If you haven't read the pair, then you really should.