A Preliminary Report

A preliminary report from Aberdeen can conclude that self and RHB satill have it, if "if" is the ability to get hopelesslessy lost among Scotland's vast landscapes, decide to take a short cut and thus turn a quick 10K hike into a 20 Km epic. All of which is by introduction to our very recent visit to Joe and Anna in Aberdeen, a visit which included cats, some food, an unexpected beach, a surprise pregnancy and no dolphins. It was a great "mini-break@ until almost ruined on our return leg by the UK's privatised rail system (so much more efficient than if it had remained nationalised! _ NOT) but overall a great time.

The attached photo is the only one I have had a chance to down load ths far. It shows the site of our epic hike yesterday.i SHOULD ADD THAT YOU SHOULD CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO SEE ITS DETAILS. More will follow tomoz..........

The Ride of Hope III

This year, the Ride of Hope was endangered, mostly through bad planning, inattention, sloth and laziness. But both principle riders, as we sat in the pub early one Monday morning, decided that it was time to act. We have therefore mapped out a possible venue where we can bring our message of Hope - namely Scotland. And this year, we have determined that we will not go off message (as we did last year) by forgetting to articulate, in advance, exactly what our message is. Admittedly, we have not yet agreed between ourselves what Hope is, or does, or how we carry it (Skarra suggested small pieces of cake) but I have appointed Skarra as Ride of Hope Organiser and Brand Identity Manager, whose job is to flesh out the detail of these things. My job is Thought Leader, which I have found taxing becuase I am currently (for health reasons) on a 'thought restricted' diet and am limiting myself to five thoughts per day. If during the course of a day I think "get up" then later  "eat" (x3),  I find that by evening I only have one thought left to think out of my daily allowance. This causes a problem because often I want to think "drink" but obviously I need to think "sleep" as science has proved long periods without sleep is delerious to health.

A cautious whiff of optimism IV (or V?)

I believe this is the fourth or fifth time I have posted this particular post. As the blindness that accompanies it is perennial, I see no reason to amend it form the original posting: 


"I have never posted on the beautiful game before on this blog, perhaps because the most succesful club in the history of English football have been rather disappointing over the last few years (apart from a fifth European Championship in 05 and runners-up in 06).

But watching the magnificent progess through pre-season , I think every English, and European club should be very afraid of Liverpool Football Club this season.

There, I've done it, I've made a prediction. Now all I need to do is persuade Nel to let me gamble the proceeds from our house sale on Liverpool success this year. It's a sure bet, a dead cert..."

Place : Probably still in Finland. Time: Havent got a clue because the stupid sun wont go down and the curtains don’t block the light properly so it could be Saturnalia for all it know.

Sub-title: Bio-ethnographic semiotic mediations in paralinguistic ecologies: Toward a quantum theory of metaphor .

Well the conference is ended and the talk, eventually, went very well.  Which is a relief because sometime around “Its-still- friggin -Light” O’Clock on the ‘evening’ prior to the talk,  things were looking bleak. Not as bleak  as the previous day because some progress was being made, and after observing some talks I had developed some “What to do if your talk is crap” strategies, but there was still a massive hill up which to follow three particularly uninterested cats. 

In the end I didnt use the "What to do if you talk is crap" strategies, but one day, I am sure, I will. I offer them here as help and advice for others with a brief description of said strategies as follows. The first of these strategies was to spend the entire talk talking about everyone else’s work. This was a technique I have witnessed on more than one occasion. You stand up to give your talk but as soon as you’ve introduced yourself, you say something like “And I have to say that when I was preparing this talk I thought I’d talk about semiotics, but before I do, I’d just like to say a few words about what Steve was saying in his inspiring talk because it really got me thinking……” A few essential features of this approach are:

• 1.       Always say you were going to talk about semiotics. No-one will understand what you say you were going to talk about  (there are no Department of Semiotics anywhere as far as I know yet everyone talks about them. Or it.) but will be impressed that you were going to talk about it.
• 2.       The person who’s work you then go on to talk about must be much more famous than you.  This is called an ‘affordance’.

The second strategy to use is to invent a new word that sounds a bit like an old word then pretend that the small difference you have identified is significant. This technique mostly  applies in the social sciences for reasons that will be discussed in ‘3’. In fact, I have already successfully employed this technique domestically, albeit not in an attempt to break new research ground, but instead in an attempt to get RHB to look like an idiot in front of a class she is lecturing. I did this  by inventing the word ‘interpretatitive’ and deliberately using the word in conversation with her over several days hoping that she would pick it up and use it in her own conversation. You can employ  this techniquewith any existing word, provided that everyone already understands the initial word and knows how to use it. So, for example, this week I have seen a lecture where great importance was placed by the speaker on why they no longer used the word ‘interaction’ but instead now used the word ‘interactivist’. This change of word also involved a change from verb to adjective and hence meant that the guy who was impassionaetley calling for an end to the tyranny of using the word 'interaction' had to use  sentences that were impossibly long and convoluted. For this guy, there was a big advantage in employing this technique because  what he was saying was ok (something about natural language use), but he just didn’t have enough of it to fill the time he was allocated.So by making your own life much more complicated, and the listener's hearing experience almost unfathomably opaque you can spin out your own  threadbaricity (see I've done it there and should now gone on to talk about threadbaricty at some length).

The third strategy is to borrow a word from science – like ecology – then follow it with a word from the social sciences – like ‘mediation’ then add a word from another social science (but not your own discipline) but modify it with a prefix . Exemplars of this technique actually string together whole sequences of words in this manner and the subtitle of this entry is an example of this. Why this only applies to the social sciences is that science is much better at inventing words than the social sciences, albeit that they themselves steal them all from Greek.

The subtitle is also an example of the final technique which is to add a “Towards….” in your title. I realize this is controversial. I realize that Bakhtin was forever going towards stuff and is generally considered brilliant. But maybe its just a translation mistake ? Maybe Bakhtin wasnt going towards something, maybe he never claimed to be "towards" . Butt for others than Bakhtin, the justification for writing "Towards.." at the start of your paper is  (and I just know this is going to kill some philosophers I know) derived from philosophy and discussions about ‘Becoming…” . I have to confess I know absolutely nothing about these philosophical discussions, nor anything about philosophy, not anything about the discussions of Being, and hardly need to,  but I do know (from a conversation this week) that there’s a kind of philosophy-lite that goes on in the social sciences that is prepared to steal from anywhere in order to get a new idea.  To that end, these philospoher-lite guys justify the use of  “Toward..”  on the grounds that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed and nothing can be described in terms of either time or space. All is simply Becoming... And because of reflectivity, reflexivity and something else (I am usually asleep by this part of the explanation) the Becomingness of everything also applies to your explanations for stuff as well.   So your own position can only be described as a “towards” and you never get anywhere.

My attitude to all this is that it’s plagiarism. Therefore it’s wrong. Its also unnecessary, there’s plenty of good stuff in the social sciences and no reason to steal  (inaccurately) from other disciplines. Of course, there’s synthesis,  and healthy eclecticism,  and beyond this global relevance of some ideas that are valuable tools, attitudes of everyone aspiring to have thoughts. . But there are limits and when linguistists stop talking about the ways humans communicate and start talking about fishponds, or seriously discussing that we (applied linguists) should expand themselves beyond describing words, gestures, emotions, pauses, gestures, signs etc etc etc and should start describing the 'vibrations between entities such as when you talk to plants'   I worry. There’s  too much already imperfectly understood, described or interpretated and this search for ‘newness’, this  whole paradigm busting approach, sometimes smacks,  a little,  of ‘trying to hard’.

Having said that, I did have a little moment this week myself. I was busy writing my talk, trying to avoid using any of the techniques described above, when I had a thought. Now I should explain that as a rule, I hate thoughts. Like cats they usually arrive at inappropriate moments, go nowhere and you can definitely have too many. For someone who’s serious about academia, they also get in the way of the real business at hand,  which is writing papers, attending conferences and doing research. Nevertheless, a thought I had. Now usually, I don’t share my thoughts on this blog as they are too banal. Usually, I try to imagine what someone else would think and write it down.  But on this occasion to tell the rest of the tale with any satisfaction, the thought I had must be shared.Please note that I am not claiming it is not banal. 

“Hello” the thought said to me, “I've had an idea so stop writing  and listen carefully now.  What if,  instead of asking people ‘What are you doing?’, you ask them ‘What do you think you are doing?’”

“What?” I said to the thought “.. you are making no sense. I’m going back to writing”

“Hang on a mo” said the thought “ just hear me out”.

So I did, and eventually what the thought was saying began to make  sense. Firstly, the thought established that I was in an interpretive discipline. Correct, I agreed.

 “Which” it said, “involves you asking other people all kinds of questions, the aim of which is to find out why they think they are doing what they are doing”. I assented.

 “Well” said the thought, “why don’t you just ask them ?”. 

The thought went on to explain that because everything I did was an interpretation anyway, one person’s perspective is as valuable as any other’s. And  usually, I refer to some framework or something (after I have interviewed people) to try and tease out the person's meaning and usually what I am trying to find out is why they are doing what they are doing. All of this of course requires hours of transcribing long conversations in which the interviewer (me) tries to  use various strategies to uncover, illuminate, elucidate and interpretate what other people are thinking. And this is a completely futile exercise because you know, having read most of the stuff that Bahktin managed to write before smoking all his own work,  that knowing the Other is impossible anyway. Or its totally possible, I cant remember. So why don’t you just cut out a load of work which may or may not be futile, cut out all the interpretatatititve nonsense,   and ask the people you interview what they think they are doing, preferably limiting their answers to twenty five words or less. After all, the thought concluded, why should you do all the work? 

I don’t have many thoughts - as I have mentioned I don’t really like them – but this one I grew quite fond of as the day progressed. I went for a massive hike (about 20Kms round the lake), went for a few beers downtown, went to the hotel, slept about an hour, got up, got a train, a coach,  a plane, a train and a taxi and I was home. When I got home the thought had left, so I claimed the idea that the thought had had as my own. I really hope thoughts cant sue for plagiarism.

I have added photos of the trip at :

https://plus.google.com/photos/103609811127849277427/albums/5752029911502474961

Unfortunaltely, since I last used Picassa and Google, they have improved the utility of thier photo sharing stuff. Which means I now cannot uses said photosharing programmes, software, sites etc (like Google+) because I have no idea how to. Hopefully you can see the photos by clicking the link below. Let me know if you cannothttps://plus.google.com/photos/103609811127849277427/albums/5752029911502474961

Jyvaskyla: Day One of Now I dont know how long I have been in Finland: Day Two and Three of conference

I wake up slightly disoriented. I have been following cats all night and they are still out playing somewhere. I gave up four hours ago, fell asleep to some American reality how called "The Biggest Loser" and the talk is no-where near finished because after starting badly, it deteriorates rapidly between minute four and six before finally falling apart somewhere round minute 9. A new strategy is needed if I am to finish the talk, that is obvious, but quite what that strategy might be, I am in two minds. The first mind says "Go Back to the lake and jump in" and the second mind says "No, the lake is really cold". One of the cats comes back with an idea which the third mind (currently trying to decide what to wear) seizes on eagerly. Instead of staying in your room all day writing your talk, go to conference and watch a few talks. Once you have got an idea of the standard of talks, all you have to do is to aim to be no worse than the worst talk you see. It's a great idea, albeit somewhat un-collegiate, so I prepare for the short walk along the lake.

After a shower, I glance in the mirror and all three minds realise I need a shave. The beard is the salt and pepper of old, but not-quite-old-enough-to-be-distinguished, age. Unfortunately I havent yet bought any razors and I didnt bring any with me, so I decide it might look as if I am intense. Then there's the choice of shirt. Due to restrictions on baggage allowance on the airline I flew with I havent brought enough clothes, figuring I could wash them in the hotel, but I have worn all the decent clothes I brought and am now down to a choice of two shirts. Choice #1 is a skintight, long sleeved base layer designed to be worn under other outdoor wear that I brought in case of snow. You can stop laughing now, but when I packed this item, my reasoning was that this is Finland. In Scandanavia. Unfortunately, it is pure white as well. Or rather, it was pure white, but having seen a few seasons, its now a bit mangy with a yellowing around the collar and cuffs from sunblock, a few pulled seams and a large black mark on the left forearm from a fibre tip pen. Choice #2 is a vintage 1987 Liverpool football shirt with a number on the back and a Liverbird badge proudly sitting on the chest. Deciding which one is more appropriate for an academic conference is somewhat of a challenge. Next its the jeans, which have a bit of mud down the inside of the calves but are other wise ok. The hiking boots could do with a quick clean and are a lot muddier than the jeans, but the real problem with the boots is the laces which have finally dissolved after Sunday's hike and are now just frayed and tattered bits of string located sporadically among the eyelets of the upper part of the boot. I put my glasses on to examine myself in the mirror and remember that I cant find my posh glasses so am wearing the ones with the chipped lenses from a cycling accident  and bent frame from where I sat on them. I dont look perfect, but this is strictly a reconnaisance so I guess it doesnt matter. I put on the heavy winter jacket I have broughtin an attempt to reduce the effect of the football shirt and set off.

I shuffle (because of the laces) along the lake side mumbling my 'talk' to myself  amid a gaggle of athletic looking Finnish people who are roller skating, or rollerskiing in the bright sunshine but am grateful that they appear to be keeping a safety cordon around me, presumably so they dont crash into me. Pretty soon I get quite hot, so I hook the coat over one of the straps of my pack. I am nervous because of the talk, but I start to get really freaked out when I begin to feel a burning sensation down the back of first my left leg, then my right leg. The sensation starts just above the knee and gets more intense lower down the leg. At first I try to walk it off, but it just gets worse, so I try altering my gait and changing the shuffle to a little hopping/jogging motion but it keeps getting worse. Presumably for added safety, the Finns extend their safety cordon. I am also slightly late for the talks so I dont want to but reluctantly I stop and give the back of the leg an exploratory, tentative touch. My hand comes away wet and when I realise its not blood, I also realise that the back of my pack is very very wet as well. It appears, after further exploration that my massive 2.5litre  water bottle did not have its top secured correctly and has been leaking, slowly at first then more rapidly, down the back of the leg.

I arrive at conference looking like........well, its hard to say actually. Its also hard making my way to the room where the talks are because I am forced to shuffle sideways along the wall, like crab with a broken leg, in order to hide the massive water stain down the back of each leg. Earlier I said that I didnt believe in metaphor, but circumstances have proven me wrong,because I am not actually a crab, I am just like a crab which is problematic because a human-being being like a crab is a very unnatural looking thing. Incidentally, this volte face on metaphor is the only independent insight I gain from the whole conference.

It is a wet and miserable couple of hours. The speakers are all disappointingly good. I miss coffee because I have to stay in my seat as my jeans are still wet but I give in towards the end of the coffee break because I need to answer nature's call. So I sprint to the bathroom, kind of sideways, hopeful that this doesnt attract attention and sprint back, barging students out of the way, anxious to be back before anyone else returns from coffee and sits in my puddle. It is mine, after all.

Jyvaskyla: Day Five in Finland, Day Two of Conference

I have never shirked impending doom. Run away from it yes (thereby avoiding the creation of conditions which would make 'shirking' a possibility),  or  pretended it is not impending doom also yes (which usually is known as 'putting a brave face on the situation' and usually ends up in utter humiliation expect that you pretend to yourself that its not) but I have never shirked it. The reason for this is not an innate nobility of spirit, it is simply that doom, if it is to impend, likes to have a lot of material to work with and the more material it has, the more it tends to do whatever it is doom does after it has impended. So shirking -  which is trying to minimize the personal effects of doom's post impendingment by involving others - doesnt dilute the effects on you, it tend to make them worse.

Thus, faced with a conference talk in two days time, I have two options as I see it. Either I sit down and write the thing and try to make it as good as possible, because shirking - turning up and delivering something half-assed  - would just result in the type of awkward silence in the ten minutes allowed for questions at the end that is usually broken by someone saying "Thanks for your talk..." then going on to talk about their own work while you stand like a proper 'nana at the front and then everyone applauds the other person. Or (and as contemplate my options this is emerging as the favourite), I throw myself in the beautiful nearby lake and get into sufficient difficulty to require hospital treatment for two days but dont drown enough to actually be dead.

I happen to be by the lake as I am thinking about this, and experimentally, I dip my toe in the water. It is a beautiful lake, surrounded by tall pine trees and athletic Finns rollerskating, running, jogging, hiking, walking their dogs. There's also canoes, kayaks, sailing boats distributed around the lake and even a water polo match going on in a roped off area near the shore, and given how competent, healthy, calm and athletic everyone looks,  I feel assured that rescue would be available quite quickly if I did get into difficulties. In fact, they all look so competent and assured (as befitting a place every survey says is among the best places to live in Europe) I feel that I would actually have to plan my quasi-drowning quite carefully in order not to get rescued too soon. They look as if they would have a plan for such situations and be able to act on it. It's quite different form the random chaos of a British beach. I dip my toe experimentally in the water, just a rehearsal, but as the toe enters the water however, a flaw in my plan emerges. While I have no objection to getting into aquatic difficulties and nearly drowning in order to avoid giving this twenty five minute talk,  I have no intention of making the experience painful. But the water is freezing, cold enough to solidify blood, it seems. Glancing at the polo players, my assessment of Finnish happiness changes from one that involves the view that they have a kind of  existential internal calmness to the view that they must all suffer from a kind of quiet ontological madness which looks like contentment. I dont want to be rescued by people mad enough to ignore this kind of cold, they'd probably make me do the talk anyway.

So its off to the hotel room to write. I'd previously likened my poster to a puppy and I dont mean metaphorically ( I dont believe  metaphors exist anyway). My poster was a little six week old Labrador, with a snuffly nose, squished face and massive floppy paws. It was  playful, immensely loyal, eager and above all, so cute that no one really questions it even if it has a little pee on the floor. . Dogs and posters are safe and lovable, both in the private owning and the display of. Talks are different, they are cats. Even when you are trying to write them, they go wherever they want and wake you up at awkward times of the day wanting attention but giving nothing back.  They change their behaviour completely, unpredictably and capriciously and equally unexpectedly, return to their original behaviour just after you have given up on them. Or they dont. And when you display them, they have a habit of showing their private parts in public and scratching their owner just when you are proudly showing them to your neighbours, so instead of a beautiful, sleek, purring ebony ballerina what actually goes on display is  a flea-ridden, angry traitor  that suddenly turns round and shows everyone its arse just as you are saying how proud of it your are. I start to write, following the cat wherever it wants to go.

Jvyaskyla: Day Four in Finland; Day one of Conference

I promised that I would update this blog throughout the week. Obviously, this hasnt happened. Here's why....


Day One:
I arrive at the conference venue in very good time, cradling my precious poster to my chest like someone returning home with a newly acquired puppy. The poster itself just stops short of licking my face - it knows it is loved and, despite that it is now carried only in a humble cardboard tube, has been protected all the way across Europe by being additionally carried in one of my guitar cases during the journey from Hull to Finland, has been examined every day since I arrived,  and  placed in a cool corner of the hotel room awaiting its moment when I have gone out. The reason for this devotion is that this time, I'm determined to win. The last conference I attended, my beautifully crafted poster - which I regarded as a work of art and was therefore reluctant to let anyone near during the poster session - failed to win the prize for "Best Poster". I was devastated, as Grasshopper's advice that academia is a competitive sport, is advice I have wholeheartedly engaged with, endorsed and adopted as my own personal Warrior Code.

There's about an hour's wait before registration starts, as in my eagerness, I 've arrived a little early, but when the doors open, I sprint towards the registration desk, cut the greeters friendly welcome short, grab a welcome pack and conference pack  and slink off to a corner to examine the details of where and when and how to display, al driven by the rationale that - if I have a choice of location - getting there first will allow me to pick the best spot on the poster boards. In the poster section of the conference pack, my brilliant abstract isnt listed. Surely, I think, there's been a mistake, but after scouring the leaflet, booklet, maps, inserts, tourist information, abstracts several times, its appears that I've come all the way to Finland for nothing. I'm not listed as a poster and neither is my poster.

One final, slower, more forensic trawl through the pages is launched when suddenly I see within the "talks' section, on Conference Day Three, in Room Alpha, under Parallel Sessions, at 13:15 "Mazzer will talk about ....." . WHAT ?........ What?.....What?........what?.........what???  I check every notice board in the conference venue. I use the internet facilities provided to check the conference website. The same message keeps coming up, I have to deliver a talk in two days time. Not wanting to make an idiot of myself, I sidle up to one of the conference organisers, and introduce myself.

 "Hi" I say "I'm Mazzer, erm, Just, you know, er, like, er checking , er, a few , er" ...cough... " details of this here like presentation I'm giving, er, like....er, are these, er, times and stuff, like, er , confirmed and all, y'know?"

The organiser glances at my name, glances at the programme and says she's pleased to meet me and looking forward to my talk (I only later find out that everyone at conference claims to be looking forward to everyone else's talk, its like saying 'thankyou' in England). I wander around for bit, disconsolate. It looks true. I have to deliver a talk in two days. Nothing else for it, so I head back to the hotel and begin to write....