English/English

British English: voucher
Canadian English: coupon

British: disabled
Canadian: handicapped

British: queue
Canadian: line up

British: boiled rice
Canadian: steamed rice

British: jiffy bag
Canadian: padded envelope

British: Bag
Canadian: Purse (and bag)

British: Purse
Canadian: Wallet

Karine (holding up her little wallet): what do you call this?
Karine's roommate Hannah: "A wallet."
Me (holding up a slightly bigger wallet): What do you call this?
Hannah: "A purse."
Me: "AAARGH!"

Edinburgh Fringe fest

Okay, I'd been saying it about Edinburgh since I walked out of the train station, but it's still true: "Oooh! Pretty!"

Georgian and Victorian houses, a centuries-old castle, and—in August—lots and lots of Festival goers.


In Edmonton, I live mere blocks away from the second large Fringe theatre festival in the world. This year, I decided it was high time that I attended the much-bigger largest Fringe Theatre Festival in the World in Edinburgh. Edmonton wears its "second largest Fringe" designation proudly, but seriously, in every possible category, it's a distant second compared to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh program is larger (as thick as a Sears catalogue), there are over 100 venues spread out over the city (many concentrated in the Old Town area), the festival lasts for over three weeks, some bars stay open as late as 5 a.m., and you can buy booze and bring it into many of the performances.

My Edinburgh set-up was obviously very different than my Edmonton set-up—I was without a proper "home base", without my usual Fringe buddy, and without a plan since the schedule was so daunting. I was also with three other people and we proceeded to drink a lot, eat a lot, and see some shows. If I were to do Edinburgh Fringe again (and I would), I would certainly book accommodations earlier (no fault to Nicole on this, who did her best) and read trusted reviews sooner. I'd also scope out the Scotsman each day for their coupons for shows and take more advantage of the e-ticketing system and the half-price same-day tickets. I realize now that it would have been relatively easy to see some great shows. While a good early review at Edmonton Fringe will sell out a show's entire run, Edinburgh runs for so long and there are just so many competing shows and events that you can still get tickets for a five-star show the morning of. At least, in the beginning days of the festival, which is when I was there.

Some highlights:

• I saw two excellent shows on my last day (when I finally clued into how to do things), an incredibly well-written, well-acted one-man show, Scaramouche Jones, about a clown whose life was a metaphor for the 20th-century British colonial experience (sounds heavy-handed but it really wasn't). I gave it a standing ovation, though not everyone in the crowd did so.
  
• I also saw one half of a pair of related plays, The Bird and the Bee: The Bee, about a fifteen-year-old girl who commits suicide. My only regret was that I missed seeing The Bird, which is about the boy she loves, who commits suicide with her. Depressing? Yes. But also lyrical, intelligent, and really well acted and directed. I should have given this a standing ovation, but I was crying too much.
  
• of course, X-files improv
• my student card got me discounts on lots of tickets! Wo0-hoo!
  

Lowlights:

• One of the shows I had marked out in the program was a "could-be-good, could-be-horrible" puppet show whose program description ended with "Sophisticated wordless puppetry from Poland." Well, it was puppetry and I'll assume that the three puppeteers were Polish, but it was not sophisticated at all. Nicole was right when she called it self-indulgent. The show needed a plot to add cohesion, the movement work wasn't detailed or musical, the themes were superficial, and there was a lot of repetition. I don't mind pretentiousness in my art, but it still has to be good.
• I almost walked out of another show, The Gullibility Factor, a series of supposedly satirical sketches that were just annoying. The last sketch, a critique of the selling of the war in Iraq, was heavy handed without contributing to the debate. And another sketch hinged on the mocking of a character's Canadian accent, specifically the pronounciation of the word "Saskatchewan", but the actress playing the Canadian couldn't actually pronounce "Saskatchewan" correctly. It really really irked. I hated the show so much that when I left I walked up to the box office and bought a ticket for another show nearby just to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.
  
• With the number of people in Edinburgh for the various festivals (book, comedy, music, and the military tattoo), you'd think there'd be relatively good audience numbers. Not so. I saw a show where I was one of three (!) people in the audience. The venue was small (essentially, a large reception room in a house) but it could certainly seat more than three people. It was a one-man play that was only okay, but the poor actor deserved more than the £17 he made that night.
• I missed out on getting a ticket for what promised to be an amazing show, How It Ended, a physical theatre/dance performance. I was on the stand-by list, but there were no stand-by tickets to be had. I picked the show based on the description, not knowing that it had received amazing reviews, and had I gotten a ticket it would have been my Fringe "discovery", that show that you have no expectations of and that completely blows you away. Alas.
  

My five days (more like 4.5, really) were not spent solely on the Fringe. A conscientious researcher, I also went to the National Archives of Scotland (the building in the middle of the photo below) and looked up some of Robert Adam's letters. They were, for the most part, useless, but being in the lovely archives and getting to read and touch letters written in 1755 was pretty fucking cool. Last summer I'd e-mailed the archives asking for a quote on photocopying and mailing the letters I was interested in to Canada. The quote came to £115. Having now seen the letters, I'm very very relieved that I didn't get them.


Also, I ate haggis for the first time (the stuffing looking food underneath the chicken). It had the consistency of dried stuffing but tasted good.


And then, after five days of on-and-off rain, hit-and-miss theatre, disappointing research, and confusing navigation through the windy streets of Edinburgh, I was on a train to Sheffield.


I miss the Canadian summer.

Edinburgh: Story 1 (in two parts)

Part I:
The story behind this photo:

On the left we have Dean Haglund, whose main claim to fame is that he played one of the Lone Gunmen on the X-files. We went to Mr. Haglund's improv show at the Fringe (because Nicole found a flyer at a venue) and Nicole snagged a photo afterwards.

The story behind this photo is more interesting:


The show was essentially an improvised episode of the X-files in which an audience member went up on stage and helped with traditional improv games, like providing sound effects or random words when prompted or reading out lines previously written out by the audience. Because I'd had a pint and a half and because I'm kind of a jack-ass at improv shows (I once suggested "magic realism" as a genre) I gladly yelled out suggestions. Thanks to my suggested profession of "theoretical physicist", I got pulled up to the stage and got to play Dean Haglund's arms.

(photo courtesy Nicole's Facebook)

The set-up was that Dean Haglund was playing a government scientist at a press conference. For the final part of the section, he took questions from the audience. One of the questions was "Can you still touch your toes?"

As you can tell from the photo, Mr. Haglund is quite a bit taller than me. So it was clearly physically impossible and the audience member was clearly just being a jack-ass. So in response, I gave him the finger.

[no photo due to Nicole's laughing too hard]

Afterwards, though, it did lead to the multi-middle finger photo above, which I will treasure always.

London: in pictures

I am blogging from a National Express East Coast train travelling from London to Edinburgh. Is it a sign of crappy Canadian wireless that I'm shocked to discover free wireless anywhere (Edmonton airport, for example), much less on a mode of travel? I'm totally plugged in to my seat: power cable, charging cell phone (through USB port) and earphones to block out the two groups of chatty people in front of me. (In honor of this train's ultimate destination, I'm listening to the Glaswegian band Travis). My total isolation from the world would be an affront to Nicole if she wasn't in another train car altogether.

I am heading to the Edinburgh Fringe after a lovely few days in London which I spent wandering around. Nicole and I saw and giggled at this tavern:

I stumbled around Picadilly and found 10 Henrietta Street, the house where Jane Austen's brother lived and where she would stay when visiting London.

We went to a beer festival where Nicole's friends won a cute little stuffed ram. And where we sampled beer from many different places (alas, no Canadian beers were present).

I saw a Banksy:

And, in a nod to the second chapter of my dissertation, I wandered around Portman Square. It's only 2-3 blocks from Oxford Street (a major shopping drag) and the exteriors have been mostly redone or demolished. On one side it looks like a Metropolitan police office, on another it's a hotel (the Churchill), on the third it's businesses and the fourth converted flats and a private club. The private club is at No. 20 and is historically relevant to my work, being designed by Robert Adam. Alas, I couldn't get up the nerve to knock and see if I could walk around.

Yesterday I took the bus to Greenwich (technically still in London) where I saw the gorgeous buildings of the Royal Naval College

and the Maritime Museum


and the Queen's House, which features an absolutely beautiful spiral staircase designed by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s.




A short walk up the hill behind the Queen's house led to the Royal Observatory, a place of major astronomical import and, for better known purposes, the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian.

That silver line that I'm standing on? Zero degrees longitude, baby.

Next up, the Edinbrugh Fringe, for which I have done no planning except to have Nicole secure accommodations. The Fringe program is as dauntingly thick as a Sears catalogue and I've barely gone through 1/4 of it.

the article

Fuck it!

We'll do it live.

I mean, I'm putting it on hold and moving on to chapter three.

Haunted

Was only mildly behind on my summer list of "Things to do" until this week, when I subjected myself to an epic, multi-day case of procrastination. The current task to to revise my first chapter into academic article to submit to a major journal. I am not working on it (and don't want to work on it) for the following reasons:

1. Form/Structure: I am focusing on only one part of the chapter (the section I extracted and revised for a couple of conference papers) so I am currently working from a 10-page conference paper rather than a 40 page-chapter. The goal is a 20-25 page article. In terms of revision, cutting, not expanding, is my forte.

2. Haunting. Let me explain.

The life of a neurotic grad student (no, not necessarily a redundant term) is one pervaded by a sense of anticipated failure. Since we all made it to grad school, actual academic/professional failure is rare and occasional (ahem, SSHRC) but for the most part it is the spectre of imminent failure that haunts me/us, that leads to qualifying claims with parenthetical asides (like this one!), that either drives or paralyzes us (often one leads to the other, and vice versa). One of my profs once mentioned that he thought he would stop feeling like a fraud once he actually got a job as a professor, but he was wrong. We are all haunted; the haunting will never stop.

In terms of this particular project, I am haunted by the feedback (constructive but not glowing) that I have recieved on it, including that from my supervior, one of my committee members, and two anonymous conference paper vettors. Frankly, I can't take criticism (to be fair, I also don't take praise well. I never know how to react). It took me days to work up the courage to re-read the more critical of the two vettors' reports, and even then I had to start by merely skimming. The skimming is representative of my roundabout approach to this article. This week I've read a couple of marginally relevant articles, started trying to read McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity again, and even writing about my writing difficulties in this blog entry. I have also watched my hours of Hell's Kitchen UK on Youtube and learned to make Greek salad (two unrelated items).

I am also haunted by my experience of writing the chapter, a torturous, dragged-out process that I was undergoing this time last year. My mistake with chapter one was to start writing the draft before having fully developed my argument—I'm not a process writer in that I don't think as I write. I do "write to think", as the saying goes, but by hand and on looseleaf pages. Last summer I went against my usual process and the result was a chapter that had potential but lacked overall cohension. Some writers need to think of their chapters as "just a draft" in order to get over the hump and start writing. I don't think I'm that kind of writer.

So the mist of failure hovers over me as I look with dread at my cut-up chapter. My procrastination has also seeped into other aspects of my life—some research trip loose ends I need to tie up during my upcoming trip, gathering reading materials for my chapter three prep, figuring out when I'm heading back to Calgary. Everything is at a standstill.

This is ridiculous.

Happy belated Canada Day

Hope yours was a good one.