Rant and a Recipe

It’s an uncertain business these days, English Language Teaching: famine or feast. Allowing for the fact that there’s many a slip, etc., for this year at least I’m in the chips until the end of November. I can’t look any further than that, though. Such regular readers as remain to me may remember that a couple of years ago our department fought off an attempt by the management slime-bags to sell us off to a kind of educational Macdonald’s. Well, it seems they’re at it again. At least they won’t issue a straight denial, which is as good as saying they’re still plotting. Maybe someone who knows more about economics and education and integrity than I do can explain this? We have the Little CHEF (Centre for Hammering English into Foreigners), a small department that is staffed by well-qualified people, is fairly busy most of the year and bursting at the seams from June to mid-September. It receives glowing feedback from the punters, and relative to its size, is the most profitable department in the university. Would you not expect such a department to be designated an area of outstanding natural beauty, and that any attempt to despoil it be decisively repulsed? Why do they want to flog it off? Well, they can replace us with younger, slimmer, prettier people who have just rolled off the CELTA production line, and staff with a fraction of our collective qualification and experience can be paid less than half what they pay us. Sod the long-term consequences, so long as certain fat cats get fatter. Once their desiccated hearts and fatty livers have packed up, what will they care about the state of education in this country?

Photo Well of Health

Anyway, I was going to share a recipe before you got me started. I decided famine rather than feast will be the leitmotif of my remaining days in this world, and I’d better start spending less on food. The other day I made a salade Niçoise: lettuce, tomatoes, green beans, tuna, anchovies, olives, capers, basil – no arguments about ‘authenticity’, please, I just used what I had in. I also added a couple of soft-boiled eggs. I have tended to limit severely my intake of eggs over the last few years for fear of their cholesterol content, but now they appear to have been reinstated, and man, what is more comforting than warm, runny egg-yolk mingling with the vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, lettuce and capers in your salad? Or bursting over crisp toast at breakfast? I looked up egg recipes in my large (and largely ignored) collection of cook books, found ‘fisherman’s eggs’ in The Silver Spoon, the Italian cookery Bible which I bought yonks ago and have never used. I cooked this a few evenings ago, adapting it to what I had in the cupboard and omitting the butter that blights the original. As I’ve said before, the allure of butter is lost on me, but by all means include the loathsome stuff if its vomit-and-sebum aroma appeals. Don't let me put you off.

Right, for the ‘fisherman’ bit, you need a couple of cans of sardines in oil, and withal a fistful of chopped parsley, a smashed clove of garlic, two or three eggs and, optionally, a few capers. Heat the oven to very hot, and warm up a small oven dish. When it is warmed through, throw in your sardines, drained of oil. Pepper them extravagantly, add the garlic, and bung them in the oven for five minutes or so. When they are warm, scatter over them the parsley and capers, then add the eggs, taking care not to burst the yolks. Return the dish to the oven for seven minutes or so, until the whites of the eggs are set but the yolks are still smooth. I added the teensiest slatherette of virulent chilli sauce and ate it with wholemeal toast rubbed with garlic, and a green salad. It was at once smooth and crisp, bland and salty, punchy and comforting, and probably cost about one pound fifty.

The original recipe tells you to remove the bones from the sardines, but I’ve never felt that necessary with the small, tinned variety at least - and anyway, how bloody fiddly would that be? Not as fiddly as that seventies Anton Mossiman recipe that called for the hollowing out of small, artfully corrugated courgettes, that they might be stuffed with pureed carrot and sliced into decorative 'cog wheels', but too pernickety for me these days. I’ve been using Tesco more lately, as Marks and Sparks and Waitrose are getting absurdly overpriced. People in Tesco are more likely to talk to you in the queue, I’ve found. ‘They reckon you shouldn’t eat ready meals,’ an old woman in front of me said recently. ‘I can’t see what’s wrong wi em. Forty year cooking for two, now I’m on me own, I can’t be bloody arsed.’ Maybe I’ll be like that soon.    

Now You're Cheating

I spent what must have amounted to several months of my fifteen-year stint in Greece trouncing badly-designed practice tasks in home-grown English language teaching material. Here’s one I’d regularly denounce in teacher training seminars:

Complete the sentence with the correct form of the verb:

Look! Mary ……… out the candles!

a)      is blowing

b)      has blown

c)      blew

d)      will blow

e)      is going to blow

We do not know – nor is it of any great consequence to us – who Mary is, where she is, or when the action is taking place. We don’t know who is drawing our attention to the fact that there’s a connection between Mary and the extinguishing, at some point in spacio-temporal continuum, of some sodding candles. Is it a doting Granny at a little girl’s birthday party? A dispute over who gets to close a Satanist ritual? Unless we know and give a stuff, all five options are a possibility. Context, I’d say evangelically, is all. No context, no meaning.   

This evening I got a text from a colleague telling me to start on page 9 of the course book tomorrow. This has practice of the distinction between simple and continuous forms in English, and our supposedly up-to-the-minute coursebook gives us this to do:     

Five of the following sentences are wrong. In pairs, identify which they are, and discuss why they are wrong.

1.      You’re absolutely right! I am agreeing with you.

2.      I was writing a letter to my mum on the train, but I didn’t have time to finish it.

3.      She’s working as an au pair until she goes to university.

4.      We stay with our parents until the work on our house is done

5.      My grandfather is knowing how to text.

6.      Look. He talks to the linguistics professor.

7.      Peter is studying telecommunications at the moment

8.      These days mobile phones get smaller.

Cotton D., et al (2008) Language Leader Upper Intermediate Harlow: Longman. 

You are supposed to go for numbers 1, 4, 5, 6 and 8. However, I reckon only number 5 stands out as obviously in violation of a rule: even the grammar checker on my laptop knows that ‘know’ is a stative verb, and stative verbs are not used in continuous forms, except when they are. (‘Yah, it’s rarely good on you – and I’m liking the mandarin collar.’) I can’t, off hand, think of an instance of ‘know’ used in a continuous form, can you? However, all the other ‘wrong’ forms seem perfectly OK to me, potentially:

1.      You’re absolutely right! I am agreeing with you, right, so chill, dude, yeah? (Use of the full form of the auxiliary here might itself suggest that interpretation.)

2.      We stay with our parents until the work on our house is done. It’s always such a pain. Where do you stay when you have the builders in, now your mum’s dead?

3.      My grandfather is knowing how to text. (‘Wrong’ - for the time being, at least. However, see Scott Thornbury's comment below.)

4.      Look. He talks to the linguistics professor. Honestly he does. He talks to him after every lecture, but he never gets any sense out of the bugger, OK?

5.      These days mobile phones get smaller, computers get more sophisticated, consumer choice increases, yet how many of us, brothers and sisters, are truly happy?

In a university in England in 2013, are students to be presented with perfectly formed English sentences and required to judge them wrong? Well, not in my class they aren’t. I just hope everybody else is skipping this bit that got past the editors – or maybe even got put in by them. I know from painful experience that not everything you write for your book actually gets into it. Editors have egos too. 

Back in Greece, I gave a group of new teachers a few sentences to judge correct or incorrect. This they did quickly and decisively. Then by placing the sentences into various contexts, we proved them all ‘correct’. One woman was not happy. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘now you’re cheating.’  

P.K. And Me

 

P.K. looking henrician.

It was a shock but not a surprise (if that is possible) to learn early last month of the death at 49 of Peter Kanellakopoulos, the owner of the school in Kalamata where I worked from 2002 to 2005.  Peter’s Greek name was Panayótis, which is shortened in most parts of Greece to ‘Panos’, but sometimes abbreviated in Kalamata to ‘Potis’. Make a minor adjustment to the spelling and this also means ‘drinker’- a most apt hypocoristic in Peter's case. We had in common a lively appreciation of ‘Johnnie’, the beverage that the late Christopher Hitchens called ‘Mr Walker’s Amber Restorative’ and ‘the Breakfast of Champions’. (If you offer a guest in Greece a drink and they ask ‘have you got a Johnnie?’ they are not jumping the gun, just stating a preference.) A young man called Ilias kept a kava or booze shop nearby, and Peter would call him to have bottles of Johnnie delivered whenever he ran dry, which was daily. Peter’s love for Johnnie was far more intense than mine, though, and very sadly the result of this infatuation is now obvious.

 

Kalamata

Peter was a very generous bloke who worked diligently in the background of a number of people’s lives to help them with their jobs, their education, their taxes, their accommodation, whatever. If he didn’t always get the appreciation due to him for this, it was probably because face-to-face he could be rather hard work. Most people who knew him would probably agree that he was not the easiest person to deal with in the early stages of acquaintanceship. A friend of mine who knew him much better than I did described him as monokómmatos, 'one piece', by which she meant unyielding, wooden, blunt - just what you might expect from looking at his photo. Few can tolerate silence in a social situation as long as he could. When I first had dealings with him around 1996, after a fifty second hiatus I would struggle to say something, anything, to keep the lines of communication open but when I managed to spit something out, he would frequently ignore it or change the subject. Thus in those early days he often made me feel like some prattling halfwit interrupting the cerebrations of a deeply serious scholar. It was a relief later to hear that he had the same effect on most people, and much later, comical to learn that he had thought I was the one who was hard work. Even after I understood him better, some of his thought processes remained baffling. One summer, we needed to advertise for new teachers. Peter wrote an ad for the local rag and asked me to cast an eye over it. I pointed out that although it provided a contact number, it didn’t give the name of the school.

‘We don’t want people to know we need more teachers,’ he said.

‘But we do need more teachers. Why else are we advertising?’

‘Trust me.’   

I never worked that one out.

Kalamata central square

Before I moved permanently to Kalamata I would visit the school perhaps three times a year to run seminars and study skills courses, and over time Peter and I established a modus vivendi maintained in large part by a common interest in ethanol. The study skills courses were for kids who were applying to British universities. While I taught them, Peter would be dealing with their parents, or on the phone to the universities, or sorting out their UCAS forms. The bizarre things that kids and parents said to us in the office became a staple of our conversations.

‘I want him to go to an easy university with a direct air-link to Kalamata, and no Pakistanis’ one father stipulated. His son Vangelis wanted to study chemical engineering but could barely compose a sentence in English, so the father was given to understand that the options would have to be narrowed down to one: a desperate university. Peter duly found one, and the other two requirements were waived. (The racism, incidentally, was just something you learned to live with. Few people of the father’s age in Kalamata had had dealings with other ethnicities at the time.) In due course, we received a wad of bumph to be completed and returned to Bumson-Seates University, and Vangelis was required to provide assorted documentation. He brought in a stack of forms and certificates for this and that, accidentally including a doctor’s note pronouncing him free of gonorrhoea. One form from the university asked if he wanted mixed or single-sex student accommodation. Vangelis didn’t understand this; the word ‘sex’ has been borrowed into Greek, but designates rumpy-pump, not gender.

‘What’s mean?’ Vangelis asked.

‘With women, or just with men?’ I said, erroneously assuming he knew we were talking about digs.

‘No, no! I like girls!’ he gasped, horrified. What sort of question was that, for God’s sake? I wonder if he went home and reported this impertinence to his father, who no doubt execrated poufters even more than he did Pakis: we were in a deeply conservative part of a very conservative country. Later in the course, I invited back a couple of graduates from the previous year to regale the rookies with their experiences of British universities. One of these was Peter’s nephew, Argyris, who had returned from Edinburgh with a faceful of studs and metal rings and a t-shirt held together with safety pins. Had he been present, I suspect Vangelis’s father would have put a stop to his son’s university career before it started, and got him a job as a waiter on the sea front. Argyris informed the kids about Freshers’ Week:

‘Yeah, in the first week, like, everybody’s absolutely off their face!’

I was confident that the idiom was unknown to the Kalamata kids, and did not ask Argyris to explain it in case they went home and relayed this snippet to their parents, who were already worried they were sending their tender young shoots to Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘I feel like a fucking social worker,’ Peter would say, sloshing ice and Johnnie into our glasses late in the evening, after he’d spent all day answering parents’ qualms and queries. Some of the qualms he was so impatient with were in fact the perfectly reasonable fears of parents for kids about to leave home for the first time – not everybody was exercised about the availability of feta in Salford. Now that Peter’s own son is of the same age as those kids were back in 1998, no doubt he would have understood better.

One September I had to get the teachers together to design syllabuses for each level of kids at the school. The teachers were not paid for the workshops, and I got a bit worried as to how they’d react. Peter sensibly suggested I quit trying to be The Knower and The Leader, and just chuck the problems at the teachers to thrash out in groups. The week I had been dreading was a success. I e-mailed a friend in England:

Well, the workshops are going very well - never seen this lot so together, so conscientious and so thoughtful about what they are teaching and why. It's 100 times better than my wildest dreams, as I thought I would never be able to sell it to them.

I was dead chuffed. I went into Peter’s office to get a book. He was clearly crapulous, as betrayed by the smell of the menthol lozenges he kept in a drawer to disguise morning Johnnie-breath, and the fact that he was wearing dark glasses in the office with the shutters half closed.

‘Somebody’s gonna have to tidy up that classroom, it’s fucking chaos in there’ he growled.

(Congratulations, Steve, it’s going really well. Jolly good show, μπράβο σου, etc.)

Peter later had to ask a colleague why I seemed so angry. In the end we had it out and he said all the right things about the syllabus design workshop, but adding that he didn't see why he needed to be diplomatic with me, didn't we know each other better than that, etc. I let it go before we began to sound like an elderly married couple.  

Ten days or so before I left Kalamata for good, Peter's brother-in-law died suddenly and horrifyingly of anaphylactic shock, and I didn't see PK after that. I did not contact him again after leaving Greece in 2005, which is a pity, as he seems to have become somewhat isolated over the years. His funeral was well-attended, and grief was genuine, as he had helped a great many people in his unobtrusive, behind-the-scenes manner. I owe him an apology for not recognising this ages ago, and am sorry it’s such a belated one.  

Photo: Ifigeneia Poulopoulou

Bryan Fischer

David Pakman (the thinking daddy's crumpet) reports here on an interesting interview with dick-headed, bat-shit insane homophobe whack-job wing-nut scum-bag Bryan Fischer, who is loonier than a shit-house rat, and then some. And some more. I admit it, I harbour a certain antipathy for Bryan. He is Director of Issues Analysis (or something) of the American Family Association, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center a a Hate Group, an organisation whose 'primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization'. Therefore I have no compunction in laying on him the colourful terms deployed in that first sentence. This interview provides a nice insight into a Christian fundy's perception of his own sexuality, and his projection of his fear of this onto the rest of us. As Louis says, the interview could go viral. I'm doing my bit.

Words On the Brain

The lock of my door broke this morning as I was trying to leave the house, so today it’s been necessary several times on the phone to use the word ‘locksmith’. An odd and rather frustrating thing: the word comes to me much more readily in Greek than in English, probably because I have had no truck with locksmiths in this country but had to avail myself of their expensive services several times in Greece. I suppose it’s all to do with context: keys + locks + frustration = looking for a phone number (usually on stickers in the lift) and mentally preparing what I’m going to say in Greek. The Greek word is ‘κλειδαράς’, pronounced, more or less, klidharás, and all morning for a few stuttering seconds it has blocked off the path to wherever the English word resides in my brain.  

There are other Greek words that do this. I have only ever had to ask for an advance on my wages in Greek, and the Greek word for ‘advance/deposit/down payment’ is prokatavolí. It always springs into my mind a second or two before ‘advance’ or ‘deposit’ do. Another curious ‘blocking’ word is periorisménos, meaning ‘restricted’ or ‘limited’. One Sunday afternoon back in the nineties a Greek queen of my acquaintance was indulging in nostalgia for the days when girls were severely limited in their movements by their fathers and brothers, and so boys turned to boys for sex. (I was some fifteen years too late for that.) Picking up a lad back then, he said, was easy as buying twenty Marlboro. The adjective he used to describe the condition of women was ‘periorisménes’, a word I had not heard up to that point, but whose meaning could be worked out from context and morphology. Correctly deducing meaning from contextual clues is a sure-fire way of fixing a word in my mind, but so often it causes this odd blocking of the English words. Whenever I need to use a word belonging in the lexical area of ‘restriction’, periorisménos bounds up wagging its tail and the right word in English is lagging a few paces behind. Same with prodiáthesi, meaning 'predisposition', which I read in a body-building mag in the far-off days when I used weights at a gym. I wish this meant that I was effortlessly fluent in Greek, but it doesn’t, especially after eight years away.

One evening in Athens I was walking home from work, racking my brains to recall the Albanian word for ‘prostitutes’. (I’m sure you do this all the time.) I had worked this one out from context whilst translating an article from Koha Jonë* a few weeks earlier. I kept getting Greek alepoú meaning ‘fox’, then lýkos meaning ‘wolf’, but couldn’t home in on the right word, and this bugged me no end until finally lupësa popped up out of the murk. Obviously! From Latin lupa, ‘she-wolf’, and slang for a lady of the night… hence the foxes... yeah, well, it was getting close. I felt dead sophisticated.

Until I started to write this post. I decided I had better check the meaning, just in case. Lupësa appears in a Google search only three times, each one the same article that I had read in 1995. It is not in my dictionary or in any online translator. I messaged an Albanian Facebook friend and meanwhile looked in my dictionary at alternative spellings. Yep, it’s lypësa, and it means ‘beggars’. Edlira later confirmed this. I’m so glad I was not trying to translate that article for anyone else's eyes, as I’ve been deluding myself for 23 years because of a typo. It occurred to me to hope that the word might still derive from Latin lupus, but no – the root is lyp-, meaning to ask or request, and nothing to do with wolves.

While we are sort of on the subject of wolves, bet you didn’t know that the English verb ‘look’ derives from the Greek for wolf. A colleague in Greece solemnly declared this to me. In Homer, she said, lýkofos means ‘wolf-light’, i.e., twilight, and you can’t deny that lyk- looks a bit like ‘look’, and you need light to look at stuff, and anyway, it’s in Homer, so QED. Thus a really chauvinistic Greek filológos – and there’s no shortage - can derive every word in every one of the world’s languages by trawling Homer for a syllable or two, and a little semantic lassoing. If I had had five thousand drachmas for every time I heard ‘Greek is the basis of all languages’, I’d have been dead of cirrhosis years ago.  

Actually, English is the basis of all the world’s languages, and I shall use the popular Greek method of etymology to demonstrate this. One illustration will serve to prove me absolutely, incontrovertibly right. The Chinese word for person is ren. It is written thus: 人 - a rather silly picture of a thing with two legs invented by people who’ve never learned to read like Christians. The word is quite plainly derived from the English ‘wren’, which, like a person, is bipedal. The Chinese failed to understand that the word refers to a bird and not a man because they are foreigners and we aren’t, and this is why the word means so much less in Chinese than it does in English.

Gus Portokalos is not much of an exaggeration.     

*****

*Koha Jonë ('Our Time') Albanian newspaper.

Most Reassuring

Close, but I'm afraid I can't give it to you.

Here is an online tool that analyses your blog and tells you who it thinks you are. Of me it says: 'giaklamata.blogspot.com writes like an old lady. Her style is personal and happy.' It reckons I'm between 66 and 100 years old.

I reckon it has the reading skills of a teenage air-head.

*****

Typalyser is more successful. Spot on, in fact. Give it a go. 

Not So Good Friday

Here we see the procession of the Epitaphios, which takes place around nine o' clock in the evening of Good Friday in every district of every town in Greece. It's a solemn funeral procession with candles and chanting, creating a heavy, sombre atmosphere as it passes below your balcony in a cloud of frankincense. Even if Christianity ordinarily leaves you as cold as it leaves me, it is impossible not to get caught up in the ever-darkening mood of Holy Week, a mood that will be shattered at midnight on Easter Saturday by rockets and fire-crackers and the proclamation that Christ is risen. It's a great piece of stage management.

I went up to Marks and Sparks a couple of hours ago. The pedestrianised High Street was busy, even for market day, so summat was obviously up. There began a solemn drumbeat of the kind that in old movies accompanies the condemned to the gallows or the guillotine, and the crowd parted to allow the passage of a procession. I looked around for a flower-bedecked glass coffin borne aloft on a bier, and a parade of musicians and bearers of tall candles. Silly of me. There were just four blokes: the drummer, two more without drums, and Jesus. Jesus was identifiable because He had His cross to bear, but it wasn't very big and unlike the ones the Romans were supposed to have used, this was a handy Wheely-Cross. ('Why schlepp!?!?') Also, He was bare-chested and had wobbly red and blue lines painted on his back. The four of them trudged along the street through the channel created by the parting of the crowd. I got up a bit closer. Jesus was about fifty-five and had round shoulders and love handles. He'd removed his shirt but hadn't gone for a loin cloth - it was snowing lightly, after all, and he probably had a wobbly bum. In defiance of all conventional representations of the Saviour, this Jesus wore grey slacks and Hush Puppies. I have no idea what the two non-drum carriers were there for, except not to carry drums.

It might have been a clever attempt at Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, as the spectacle was entirely successful in not creating awe, compassion, gratitude or any sense whatever of emotional involvement. Then again it might fuck as like. It was just a bit more style-less Brit-frump, of a piece with the awful, clod-hopping Morris dancing we'll have inflicted on us on the same street later in the year. The Greeks do it so much better.

***** 
 
Before any Greek readers feel too superior, on the occasions when we get kiddie brass bands here, those kids can play. I cannot abide brass bands, but I can appreciate technical skill. A friend and I were sitting on the sea front in Kalamata one evening where a local youth band, smartly uniformed, were giving us their repertoire. They were being applauded and cheered to the echo by everyone around us, but they sounded like sick cattle. We sank our beers and moved out of earshot.           

Listening to IELTS, etc.

Excellent advice there from the Briddish Kyncel. Far better than 'I think they should just dive in without having a clue.'

I spent the morning invigilating tests. There is a species of test known as IELTS, and overseas learners are required to do it if they want to study over here. My Art and Design kids were doing some IELTS practice tests as part of the assessment for the course they have been pretty much ignoring for the last three months.

IELTS listening practice tests are read from stilted scripts by lousy actors who employ a variety of bizarre accents. These include quasi-Oz, almost Irish, and all-purpose foreigner. Thees latter eez achieved by lengtheneeng the /I/ vowel een every word where eet occurs. In today’s test we had to listen to Bruce and Drusilla (Quasi Aussies) maunder on about organising a charity run. While the kids attempted to fill in gapped sentences and charts with information from Brucie and Dru’s brain-curdling colloquy, I sat wincing at the inability of the writer and performers to produce anything that sounded like real human communication. They used full forms of all auxiliary verbs: ‘is not’ ‘do not’ and so on. They never interrupted one another, spoke simultaneously, completed one another’s utterances, made false starts or left thoughts unfinished, but instead used well-edited, flat footed prose all the way through. At one point Dru tells Brucie what all the prizes and consolation prizes are, just so the students can tick these off on a list. There can have been no other reason. Bruce is, when all’s said and done, the bloody organiser, so presumably he knows already.

Now I happen to know a thing or two from direct personal experience about the publisher of this material, and I know that the writers and editors are just a tad on the naïf side when it comes to language analysis. They haven’t really noticed the features of spoken discourse I mentioned above, but they are obviously nagged by the feeling that their scripts need to be a teeny bit less tidy now and then. So, I imagine they sat down with their thinking caps on and said ‘guys, what happens when people talk? They often misunderstand one another, that’s what!’  This insight led them to produce scripts not dissimilar to the following:

You will hear a group of students with funny accents discussing an assignment. Listen, and answer questions seven to twelve, if you possibly can.

BRUCE: Sow, hwin we finish the assarnmunt, we complete the rid form and hand it in at the disc? Thit’s what Dr Klutz sid, raht?

ARAMINTA: No, no, he said we ave to complete the peenk form. The red form eez only eef you ave an extension. Then you must geev eet directly to Dr Pecker. Or was eet Dr Meenge?

SASKIA: Ay, golly, I thought Professor Bonestroker said the yellow form was sort of for if you had an extension! Gosh, I'm rarely, rarely confused!

BRUCE: Nigh, thit was laaahst year. Thy chynged it in Oktauber. This year’s the rid form, and if you use the pink one you get capped at 50%

ARAMINTA: 50%? I thought eet was 55!

SASKIA: Ay, cripes! And here’s me thinking it was the yellow form all along! Or is it? Goodness, I'm like say confused!

1. The essays of students who submit a yellow form:

A. Might be capped at 55%
B. Could be capped at 50%
C: Will probably not be capped.
D: Might or might not be capped.

And so on. By now students and tutors forced to prepare them to listen to this sort of verbal train-wreck have temporarily lost the will to live. I mean, if you were part of this group of students, you would hold up a hand and shout ‘CUT! Let’s go to the office and get this from the horse’s mouth’. And if you weren’t part of the group (and as a listener to a CD, you obviously are not) the exchange would be of no conceivable interest to you. Yet here you are, being forced to try to engage with this needlessly complicated twaddle just so you can study computing at Sheffield Hallam.     

More on IELTS here and here . Also here. Here as well. You might get the impression of a certain cynicism on my part.

   

*****

A colleague told me at lunchtime that a student had come to her to say he would not be attending the afternoon lesson. Non-attendance is much frowned upon and students are required to provide proof that they were legitimately absent: doctor’s note, undertaker’s bill, that sort of thing.

‘I go boast offers, giffing fenger brent.’ Aladdin said. (It’s a real name)

‘You’re going to the post-office to give finger prints?’ Alison asked. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Because many women.’ he explained.

Setting aside the bizarreness of his mission – it really does sound like something you’d do in a dream - Alison wanted to know why he couldn’t go to the post office at three o’ clock after the lesson. He had to ‘go his house’ first and get something, he said. We speculated that he might have left his fingers at home.

Any explanation as to why one might need to go to the post office with finger prints, because of many women? Answers on a post card, please.        

*****

‘Iconic’. What a bloody irritating word it’s become. The brightly yapping announcer on BBC 4 TV news managed to shove it in five times in the space of half an hour yesterday evening, almost causing me to choke on my sherry. ‘Well known’ would have done for all five occasions.

*****

The stress-trashing human announcers are all but gone from British railway stations nowadays, but the new robot announcers are still programmed by people with two linguistic left feet. At Leicester station every five minutes a female voice warns us:

‘Smoking is not permitted anywhere on our station. However, please keep your luggage with you at all times.’

What a weird non-sequitur. I think I’d prefer:

‘Smoking is not permitted anywhere on our station. So there.’

At least it’d be of a piece with that proprietorial use of the possessive adjective before ‘station’.           

Breaking News

Did you know there's a new Pope? It's just been on the telly. According to the BBC reporters, who've really got their fingers on the pulse, he's a man of 'great humility, deep spirituality', and stuff like that. He once washed the feet of AIDS patients, so it all goes to show, doesn't it? That was probably a good deal more pleasant than changing as many babies' nappies, but he's a priest and very pure, so foot washing's really impressive when you think about it, given his standing, and he's a bloke and all. He paid his own hotel bill after the conclave was disconclaved, then he carried his own luggage! In his own hands! So to borrow a phrase from the great Tony Blair, he's definitely the People's Pope. You lot are just cynical buggers.

Ratso departs in a flurry of petticoats. 'What, this old thing? Had it years, luvvie,
just threw it on cos the best frock's in the wash.'

 

 

More Cheap Chow

Chicken with cannellini beans

The blogger spell checker doesn't like 'cannellini' and proposes, inter alia, 'cunnilingus' instead. A chacun son goût. Some crude joke about cunnilingus beans might be possible, but I'm not going there.

Anyway, this dish is lovely stuff, nearly as easy as beans on toast and muck cheap. You'll need chicken thighs or breasts with the skin on, some cannellini beans and some sliced red pepper for the body of the dish, and rosemary, thyme, garlic, chili flakes, grated lemon zest, white wine, olive oil and salt to goose it up. Despite its simplicity and economy, you could serve it to guests and they'd still feel cared for, mainly because it's so tasty but partly because it promotes vigorous peristalsis. All those beans will eliminate the need for the chronically costive to stay home periodically and purge. Pepys would have raved over it.

Yesterday, all day bound and with little wind, yet I made shift to endure it and did go abroad. At noon to my Lord Suola’s, and there a poor man's dish of beans sod in wine and a brace of capons. We had nothing but only this, which being stewed with sweet aromas was a pretty enough dish, but Lord, methought, so sorry a dinner, for my Lord Suola keeps a lean table and inveighs against venison pasties, neat’s tongues, muttons and salmagundis for the stopping of the bowels, and this I thought a strange thing; and not a handsome woman in sight, which was another. Then today, from the eating of beans, a marvellous great freedom of wind, and an easy and plentiful passing of goodly stool, neither watery nor barbed: and this without physic or clyster, for which I thank God and My Lord Suola’s dish of beans.    

If you want to feel virtuously frugal, you could buy your cannellini beans dry from a health food cooperative, soak them overnight, then boil the bloody things forever, but I find canned cannellinis save on time, fuel and flatulence. Just rinse the gunk off your beans and tip them into an oven dish. Sprinkle over them your chopped fresh rosemary and thyme, chopped garlic, lemon zest and a scattering of chilli flakes. Throw in your red pepper. I used peppers from a jar last time I cooked this, but next time I'm going to use one I charred and scraped myself, to see how well the smoky flavour complements the whole thing. If it turns out tasting as if it had been cooked in an ash tray, I'll let you know. A bit of free advertising here: the only jarred red peppers I can eat are the ones from the Spanish company Fragata. I find everybody else's too soft and slimy, and I hate slithery-textured food. Fragata peppers retain a just a little bit of resistance. Where were we? Oh yeah, add a slug each of olive oil and white wine, some salt to taste and give the mixture a damn good toss. Last time I added a little concentrated chicken stock, but I reckon it'd be perfectly good without it.

Heat the oven to 200-ish, and place your chicken, anointed with oil and sprinkled with salt, on top of the beans. Cook for about 40 minutes, stirring up the beans at about the half-way mark.  It occurred to me that these garlicky, chilied and rosemaried cunnilingus beans would go well with sausages, or be perfectly acceptable as a vegetarian meal. Eat with a green salad and some good bread. We can actually get bloody good bread where I live nowadays. Anywhere else in England - good luck.

Grace to You

I frequently get into discussions online with earnest US Jesus people who want to save my soul. They just know (without my telling them) that I live entirely selfishly and consider myself accountable to nobody, and that this must cease. They have an invisible friend who tells them exactly what to do, and that is true freedom. American readers will have to forgive me, but it does seem that over there, they tend to go for the wholehearted espousal and vigorous defense of crackpot religious ideas far more than we do here. I mean, we do have Stephen Green, founder and, as far as I know, only member of Christian Voice, but he is pretty much the only completely home-grown nutter I can think of off the top of my head, apart from that bishop a bit back who told us that evil spirits entered the body via the ring-piece during man-on-man bum sex.

Why do I bother, you may ask. Well, these are often kind people whose concern is genuine. Also, their contributions are most instructive, furnishing as they do copious examples of every logical fallacy known to philosophy, along with demonstrations of selective inattention and often hilarious ignorance. Attempting to find a way into their minds, formulating an approach they cannot misinterpret, is a good exercise for a teacher, or anyone else who doesn't have a life.

What most drives me nuts is the stultifying literalism of the people I'm talking to. Ironic, isn't it, what this literal-mindedness forces you to do? You have to insist that myth (the creation, the fall, the redemption) is physical, historical fact, and that physical, historical fact (evolution through natural selection) is not even myth, but lies. You have to believe that a bunch of fervent, half-educated bible-bewitched amateurs from God-Box Ministries Inc. of Ballsack Falls, Shitsplat County, Texas have the truth ('We decided God done it all, and when we looked at the evidence, we found we were right!') while all those very smart people working so hard in the evolutionary biology departments of the world's top universities are labouring under a massive delusion. Then you call them arrogant. And you want your version of how we got here taught in schools, God help us, that you might raise a generation of scientific illiterates for Jesus.

An earnest but somewhat uncomplicated young man called Brandon asks me questions he thinks are going to stump me, such as: 'So tell me, if we came from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?' and 'what good has evolution ever done for the world?' In his overture to me, he told me that he too had once been a skeptic, but was now showered in the blood of the lamb and saved. Praise Jesus! This is a common ploy: 'I used to think like you, but then the evidence convinced me Jesus is real.' I told him he did not sound like a former skeptic, since he did not appear to understand, let alone to have entertained, any arguments against his position. I told him he sounded more like someone who'd been home-schooled, which he then admitted was the case. Congratulations, Mom and Dad. You've produced a goodthinkful little godbot who is completely unable to think outside of his immediate context.

'Everyone sinned and died. I deserve to go to hell for the wrong things I've done....I've done a lot.' He's twenty-one. His parents must have persuaded him he deserves hell simply for childhood misdemeanours. That, or it's just late adolescent self-dramatising.

'But, since I realized that Jesus died for me, to save me....I don't go to Hell. He came to save you, He came to save me. He died, so we could have the CHOICE of what we believe. He wants you to believe in Him and have a relationship with Him so you don't end up in Hell. But, He gave you the choice to believe what you want, just like a parent loves their kid and gives them a choice. It's your move. He hopes you'll make the right choice.'

I asked him how an omniscient Super-being has any need for hope, since he knows my choices before I make them, but he hadn't a clue what I meant. I might as well have asked if he thought that the inconsistencies encountered in religious imageries might be brought into harmony via a sapiential esotericism that would bring those dissonances back to the harmony of the substance.

Does not the story of Adam and Eve resonate with us because we all know that living inevitably involves a loss of innocence, that merely existing causes us to hurt others, and for many of us there's a sense of exile, and a sense of having fallen away from a better self in a better place? It has the emotional impact of a dream. Dreams often have a powerful effect on us, even if the details are absurd from the point of view of the waking self. Insist Adam and Eve were historical figures and that it all happened in physical reality, and you strip the tale of all its reverberations, making it merely silly. Did Adam have balls when God first made him? If so, what were they for, since Eve appears to have been an afterthought? Why did God plonk that sodding tree in the middle of the garden with two such innocents about? It was like leaving exposed wiring in a nursery. How, if they were innocent of good and evil on eating the fruit, can they reasonably be blamed for having done so? And so on.

After a few exchanges with people of Brandon's stripe, I need to hear music that will restore a sense of the mysterious, of the barely perceived, of a far-away mind that knows me but whose voice is obscured by the noise of this world, especially that kicked up by imaginationless Evangelical God-botherers. This is one such piece, 'Grace to You' by Jan Gilbert, from the album Sound in Spirit by Chanticleer. The words are verses four to six of the first chapter of Revelations.

4 ἰωάννης ταῖς ἑπτὰ ἐκκλησίαις ταῖς ἐν τῇ ἀσίᾳ· χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος, καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἑπτὰ πνευμάτων ἃ ἐνώπιον τοῦ θρόνου αὐτοῦ,

5 καὶ ἀπὸ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ, ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός, ὁ πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς. τῶ ἀγαπῶντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λύσαντι ἡμᾶς ἐκ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῶ αἵματι αὐτοῦ _

6 καὶ ἐποίησεν ἡμᾶς βασιλείαν, ἱερεῖς τῶ θεῶ καὶ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ _ αὐτῶ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας [τῶν αἰώνων]· ἀμήν.

4 John to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne;

5 And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,

6 And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

*****

This morning I received from Amazon my copy of Writing the Icon of the Heart by Maggie Ross. I am going to start reading it on the train tomorrow. She quotes this poem by R.S. Thomas.

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God. This is the deep 

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

we launch the armada of 

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our

own fathoms. What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

So shut the fuck up. 

*****

Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church explains why there's oil under the ground.  

Arts and Farces

When I learned last September that we'd be offering a foundation course in English for Art and Design, I thought, cool; we'll have a class of lively, enthusiastic and creative young people, athirst to express their passion for art in English. They'll be dying to do presentations. They'll learn a lot from us, and we from them. I was not scheduled to teach them until January, and had October to December with a Foundation in Business English group. They were only eighteen years old and could be very hard to motivate, but they were paragons of dedication and diligence in comparison with the Art and Design students.

'Students' was not the noun most often used by their teachers to designate these kids; a selection of shorter Anglo-Saxon terms was usually deemed more appropriate. With one exception, they were a bunch of sullen little princes and princesses who would roll up fifty minutes late, sit in lessons sulking and playing with their smart phones, respond to teachers' prompts with silence or monosyllables, and frequently disappear after lunch. The teacher who had to teach them most often was crossing off the days until he could finally get the hell out. Of course they were rebuked and threatened, and their Xmas test marked most severely, and I hoped that by the time it fell to me to teach them, socks might have been pulled up and places in the scheme of things understood and accepted.

The students are from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I have them for four hours on Wednesdays. Last week it only took twenty minutes to get four out of six kids present. Joanne asks if she can leave early, as she has a portfolio to prepare for an interview. I say no, and so she goes into a sulk which she will nurse and nurture for the rest of the day. I announce that we shall be considering the illusion of depth, and launch into my powerpoint presentation, which I refuse to deliver as a lecture: it's going to be interactive if I have to resort to the rack and the screw.

I have loads of vocabulary and loads of paintings and drawings. The vocabulary is chosen to help the little fuc... sorry, students to respond emotionally to the paintings and to describe the artists' use of perspective. You would think, wouldn't you, that anyone who has made the decision to study art and design over here would a) be passionate about art and b) see the necessity for expressing that passion in English, at least some of the time? But no. They have no passion, no fears, no horror, no compassion, no wonder. They dutifully take down the vocabulary, even ask me to re-explain some of it, but they have no reaction to any of the painting beyond monosyllables to describe some obvious, overall feature: 'dark' 'space' 'clouds'. These kids are pretty fluent most of the time, except on the matters that most should occupy them.    

My last slide, ladies and gentlemen, is a mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps you know of it?

'Jesus's Last Meal,' Kevin says.

Yup. Steak, french frarze, onion rings and a pint o' mint chocolate chip arse-cream, 'fore they done fried His ass. 'Last Meal' don't mean shit up heey in dis bitch, muddafucka. 'The Last Supper' is what we call it - it sets up quite different vibrations.

They didn't know anything about the story of the last supper and the impending betrayal and crucifixion, but then again, why should they? They're from the other side of the earth, where they have myths of their own. I filled them in on a few details. Then after two hours filling their heads with vocabulary about one-point perspective, horizon lines, vanishing points, isometric and atmospheric perspective, I said 'tell me about this picture.' 

'Jesus's face is the vanishing point.' Kevin drones.

Hallelujah! A reaction.

'Yes!' Well spotted, that boy, 'Why is his face the vanishing point?'

'Cuz it's in the middle.'

A new group of Algerian pilots and technicians arrived last week. Pretty low language level. In one lesson we were discussing leisure pursuits. 'I like riding whores', one told me. He didn't mean ladies of the evening, but gee-gees.
 

Loony Module II

I spent three days at home a couple of weeks ago marking essays produced by Chinese MA students on my inter-cultural communication module. Marking these things one after the other is a mind-numbing business but there was a deadline to meet, and I wanted to get them all out of the way as soon as possible and sent off to the other tutor whose privilege it is to double mark them.

'When people who have the first time face to face the person who is not the same as me we might naturally classify he is different.'

Er, yeah, OK, go on...

'Cultural generational might avoid the stereotype by preponderance of belief culture'

Got to read that bit again...

' ...might avoid the stereotype by preponderance of belief culture are generated by human then we believe the culture perform and present our mind then it is from like that way and the more people have similar perceive.'

After marking five or so, your mind starts to wander, the gaze starts to slip down the page; there is seeing but no registering of meaning. Then you realise you have just spent five minutes staring at the margin, without a thought in your head.  

In fact, Culture is a kind of common phenomenon on the surface of the earth. For example, to western culture, the doctrine of Christianity, Copernicus's astronomy and Newtonian mechanics is a culture; 

I suppose so.

Women beam waist, fire burning Joan of Arc and abuse Galileo, is also a culture. Birds of the air, the fish in the water do not have these results. 

Jolly good thing too, I reckon. 

I'm comfortable with the way I handled that first module - pleased with myself, actually. Module no. two was intended to centre around improving the students' linguistic performance in business contexts; meetings, negotiations, memos, presentations and what-not. Language development was what I understood to be the main focus – I mean, look at that bloody essay - and this was why I had been asked to teach it. So judge, dear reader, of my horror when I found in session one that we had been joined by what I took to be two highly articulate native speakers of English. Hell, damn and shite, I thought, these two don't need anything I can offer them, nor can I offer them what they need. They don't need language for negotiations, but actual input on negotiating tactics, and if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a tactician. I’m way too innocent.  

EFL teachers have to teach English for all sorts of special purposes: I've done academic English, law, art and design, tourism and marketing, and others I know have done aviation, banking and medicine. Back in more innocent days, older teachers used to tell gibbering rookies 'oh gracious me no, bless you, you don't need to know the subject, the students are the experts on that. You just teach the language for the subject.' I didn't really believe that then, and I believe it even less now. You do have to know the subject pretty well, and if you are teaching an MA module, you'd better be an expert.

There was no point imagining that I could become an expert in inter-cultural negotiation tactics merely by boning up with a few library books in the evenings. I’d have to actually take part in a number of such negotiations, probably over a number of years. I wouldn’t be ready to teach this module for a decade. I started to get paranoid: who allowed native speakers onto a module intended to help non-natives with their language, and why? What does it do for the reputation of the university and of the MA to have someone teaching by the seat of his pants? And what does it do to me, fearing exposure as a fraud in every session? 

It did my fucking head in, is the answer. Just as an infuriating process called svchost.exe frequently sends the CPU usage screaming up to 100% and paralyses my laptop, the fear of failure dominated my thoughts to the exclusion of every other consideration and I felt nothing but anxiety, simmering and occasionally boiling over, for a week.

I went to see the lovely Professor Jiaying Wang, who’s in charge of the MA. She pointed out that the two people who were worrying me were nowhere near as clued up as I feared, that I was not required to teach business content but inter-cultural communication, and having a native speaker on the course along with the non-natives was therefore a good opportunity for all concerned. 

‘The students really like you!’ she said. ‘They appreciate your sense of humour and all the work you put in and how clear you make everything for them. The only reason I’m not trying to persuade you to go on is that I can see it’s stressing you out and I know how bad that feels.’ 

Bless you for that, Jiaying, I'll never forget it. Pity I can't use your real name here.

We agreed I would do one more session while she found a replacement for me. So feeling like a prisoner on a tumbrel being transported to Tyburn rather than a commuter on the Birmingham New Street train, I went in and did it. And it was fine. Nimit the Native Speaker was indeed as clueless about intercultural communication as Jiaying had said, and the other ‘native speaker’ Carla, was in fact Colombian and married to an Englishman, and she very much appreciated some of the vocabulary work we did.

I told the group at the end of the session that I was withdrawing from the module.

‘Oh, that’s a pity!’ Carla said.

‘You don’t teach us again?’ Rui asked.

‘No’

‘But we love you!’ she said.

I was pressed for an explanation, and mumbled some crap about needing to reduce my hours a bit for health reasons, and felt rather pathetic saying it.

‘But why is it our hours you have to reduce?’ Meixiu asked. ‘Who’s gonna teach us?’

‘Probably Professor Wang.’       

Consternation! No doubt Jiaying cracks the whip more than I do, and they won't be able to crack in-jokes in Chinese. They probably like me because they think I’m a soft touch, I thought. (Because of course, no other reason is possible.)

By the time I got home I felt completely different about the whole thing, and pretty bloody stupid. Why had I got it into my head that I needed to deliver anything other than discourse analysis and language input, as agreed? Why hadn’t I seen immediately that Nimit was clueless about both, and was going to need to learn language grading and more subtle ways of reading reactions and interpreting utterances when dealing with Chinese people? I e-mailed Jiaying to say I now felt I could hack it, but she replied that she had found someone to replace me, various inter-departmental favours had been granted, and it would all be too complicated to ungrant them.

I now think that the anxiety attack simply coincided with the first day of the module, and my mind latched onto the presence of Nimit and Carla as justification for the purely endogenous fear. The worry did not subside when I knew I was off the module, but fizzed and bubbled on for several days. There’s still the occasional pang – even writing this piece made my stomach roll as I relived how I felt a couple of weeks ago. 'Don't get so stressed,' Jiaying said in her e-mail. 'Life's not about work.' Trouble is, there's not much else in mine these days. 

It’s only been in the last two years that I’ve had these paranoid periods. I used to get just peaceably depressed, not screamingly neurotic, and if I had to choose, I’d stick with the former state. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do about it?        

Omelette with Croutons

Because I live for the evening when I can open a bottle of wine and start to cook dinner, I get through rather a lot of money. Money is in short supply these days and so I’ve economised, sort of, by buying cheaper wine. Some of the basic reds from Mark and Sparks or Tesco are not that bad when swigged pretty cold and accompanied by hearty winter food, but tonight, sod it, I’m having something with a bit more character and eating cheap instead. Before we get onto the topic of food, though, let me counsel against buying Waitrose own ‘Italian Red: Rich and Intense’, unless you’re really desperate. ‘Red’ is the only honestly applied adjective on the label. It tastes like flat Cream Soda.

These days I need food to be economical, but also colourful, nutritious and above all, not boring. Omelettes are an excellent solution if you want to eat cheaply but not feel short-changed, and the one I’m going to make this evening could hardly be more frugal; you need three eggs, a slice of bread, and a handful of chopped spring onions.      

I’m not sure where I found the original recipe: might have been Elizabeth Jane Howard and Fay Maschler. I remember they called for parmesan to be grated over the omelette just before serving. I’ll be skipping that bit. The only parmesan I have easy access to at the moment is that repellent stuff that comes ready-grated, looking like soap powder and making food taste like it’s coming back the other way. I have a horror of it. We often ordered ‘Italian’ take-away for lunch when I worked in Athens, and a little drum of this evil stuff would come with each portion of pasta. I always gave mine to a colleague who actually liked it. Tipping two measures of the vile dandruff over his spaghetti he’d inhale and pronounce connoisseurially: ‘Ααα, σαν παπούτσι μαραθωνοδρόμου!’ Like a marathon runner's shoe! The office would reek of pre-bathtime infant and I’d have to go and eat my lunch in the library.    

Well, now that we are thoroughly in the mood, here’s what you do. Cut the bread, wholemeal for preference, into cubes, chop the spring onions, green part included, beat the eggs and add a pinch of salt. Fry the bread in garlicky olive oil until crisp, then drain it on kitchen paper. Add more oil to the pan and chuck in your spring onions, whizzing them briefly around until there’s a nice savoury aroma. Finally, add the beaten egg. Just before the omelette sets, scatter your croutons on top, fold it over and slide it onto your plate. That’s it. 

Preceded by a bit of pâté, a few olives, some roasted red peppers dressed with olive oil and basil, and accompanied by a green salad, I think this omelette would be good enough to serve to guests. I wish it had occurred to me to cook it at my mother’s the week after Christmas when everyone was getting fed up of the sight of food.