andy_godfrey

People ask me a lot about just what it was that Nietzsche thought, and what's so good about him anyway. Maybe they're just being polite, but here's my attempt at a quick, introductory answer about what I find interesting in him.

( Nietzsche in a (long, rambling) nutshell )

So, I am back in England and am a student once again. It some ways, both of these feel cosily, reassuringly familiar - even if England is in many ways basically a bit shit and underwhelming, it's shit and underwhelming in a comforting, understandable way. And being a student feels like my natural state of being - I feel less like I'm going through the motions of living real life when I'm in the library or in a seminar.

On the other hand, various things have been rather disconcerting. I love being able to cross roads on a red man - but miss having pedestrian crossings at every single junction without exception (cue lots of standing round gormlessly). I also find it odd shopping in English supermarkets - the quantity of processed food and ready meals is really striking, and it's quite difficult to just buy straightforward food. That said, I am appreciating having proper jacket potatoes, oat cakes, potato cakes, malt loaf, toast. Though not necessarily all in one meal.

I've also noticed how the guys are, on the whole, far preppier and more groomed ... with the main exceptions apparently being the huge contingent of gay guys who call each other mate and watch football. I  understand why foreigners get so confused.

I'm still very much stuck in a "work" frame of mind, which means I find the amount of free time I have slightly overwhelming, and am not used to the idea of actually having a social life where I have multiple opportunities for stuff to do most evenings. Tonight my flatmates spontaneously gathered in the kitchen - the first time we've all met as a group. We vaguely decided to have a party, and have all added each other on Facebook (compared with last Freshers. The work frame of mind is good in other ways though - it means I keep weekends and evenings free, and get work done during the day.

It's weird how I have less to write here than I did when my life was far less eventful - I guess maybe because more energy actually gets dispersed into doing stuff and I actually vent my need to share stuff on real people. Even my months of hedonism were mostly pretty dull bar the odd highlight. I am attempting to keep up the hedonism here but my two club nights so far ended up with me living pathetically early.

Lots of gay guys (including myself when I first came out) talk about preferring guys who are "straight-acting" , though I now don't necessarily see this as a plus, as it potentially suggests uptightness, blandness, frumpiness and prudishness, as well as a certain alienation from the gay scene. I would see "camp" as meaning roughly the opposite: "gay-acting" and part of the scene. Despite all my efforts, I think it's fair to say I fall into the first category - my current boyfriend didn't think I could possibly be gay until I actually told him so, despite having met me at a gay bar the previous week. He, on the other hand, definitely falls into the second category, and it's been quite interesting to notice some of the reactions and comments that this has provoked in the past few weeks.

For instance, at my work leaving party, my boss and some of my colleagues started talking about him (he briefly worked at the same company but was fired after a few weeks). Lots of the discussion centred around his "flamboyant" behaviour, including my boss mimicking his way of speaking and gesturing while another colleague said she found him "extreme" despite having no problem with "that sort of thing". I later mentioned this to a friend, who seemed surprised that I considered this homophobic. "After all, if she employed four gay guys, she clearly can't be homophobic. It's OK to criticise people for being camp - it means they're reinforcing derogatory stereotypes."

On a separate occasion when I was with him and some straight friends, one of them quizzed him about his habit of referring to his gay friends by women's names, as she knew her gay best friend would definitely find that demeaning, and at another point expressed surprise when she heard that one of his 22-year-old gay friends was seeing a 40-year old - at which point he casually mentioned that his previous boyfriend had been 38. 

The conversations have given me a lot of food for thought about wider issues than just this specific, personal case, and I've tried to outline some of my ideas below:
 

( An overearnest, pompous and thoroughly non-camp defence of campness, cut for great clunking length, Oh for a light touch. )

( Ramblings about leaving Hamburg and my trip to Poland )

I replied to shelf woman with the line "I'm sorry I made a mistake and told you the wrong thing, but it's not my responsibility if your son cries: it's only a shelf after all and it's rather unfair to blow it out of proportion." I decided to avoid the terms "emotional blackmail" or "passive aggressive" as I will actually have to meet her when she picks the rest of the stuff up, and I want it to be halfway bearable. I frankly doubt she even has a son.  I rather exaggerated exactly how guilty I felt about it all in the last post I think - I was more amused/bemused by the whole thing. I shall stop angling for sympathy so much! And shall attempt to stop leaving cryptic asides too - the creepy/crazy date was just a normal date that I had been slightly concerned from the email conversations could go either way, and Herr Kruse turned out to be some guy at the Luebeck Customs Office branch. On one of my last two days, I need to pop over there and get my DVD which actually arrived incredibly quickly from Taiwan, only to end up getting passed around various German offices without anybody actually telling me.

Oh and I did see a rather astonishing example of German political incorrectness today:

http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090814-21241.html

The slogan translates as "The only reason to vote black" "The only reason to choose black" (it's a vague but rather unsuccessful wordplay). And this is from the liberal-left Green Party.

Yikes. I have recently discovered the perils of giving away furniture. I thought it would be tough to find people to offload my stuff onto, but actually I've kind of been overwhelmed by responses and, due to being unable to say no, misphrasing things and having misread what people had said, I appear to have semi-offered everything to 2 or 3 separate people (it's complicated). I tried to resolve this as diplomatically as possible, but I nonetheless got the following email. It's a masterclass in manipulativeness, and it has definitely succeeded in plunging me to new depths of guilt (and, as a very lapsed Catholic, that's saying something):

"That's a pity, I need the shelf very urgently. I thought you'd said everything. My son had really looked forward to it. He wasn't asleep earlier, and I showed him my email. He unpacked his stuff from the packing boxes right away. I've only just seen your new email now .... I didn't have time to read it earlier, because we were in the hospital for a long time, as my son had heart pains. Well, if you'd rather give it to your colleague, then I can't say anything about it, I guess my son has just had bad luck. I hope he won't cry tomorrow"

Other delights this week include a date with a guy I'm concerned is going to turn out to be crazy and/or creepy, incomprehensible emails from Taiwan about my DVD (which has been delivered to some randomer called Herr Kruse, as far as I can gather) and giving myself a paper cut inside my mouth with a yoghurt pot, which makes eating and brushing my teeth rather painful. My last day at work is on Tuesday, so I hope these aren't bad omens for my planned month of hedonism ...

Ooh am I in a good mood ... I just found out that an English-subtitled director's cut of Love of Siam (the film I saw and loved last year, even if it did trigger the Existential Crisis) was released at the start of this year. And I think it only cost me €11 (or 540 Taiwanese dollars). At least I hope so, else I have inadverentently bankrupted myself. I hope the film isn't crushingly disappointing on second viewing.

I also bought tickets to return home (interrailing via Berlin and Poland, getting back September 23rd) and placed ebay bids on my university reading list. I may have funding, but I am still a cheapskate. I may need to be if I got the exchange rate wrong on the Taiwanese dollar.

I also just shredded my entire drawer of lists (though not before ordering loads of the stuff from them off Amazon). From now on I will be spontaneous and free, albeit bankrupt. We shall see how long that lasts.

And now tonight I have a date with a foot masseur. Hurrah.

At uni, my focus was split between the sharply delineated area of “proper” analytical philosophy and the slightly fuzzier general mish-mash of literature, cultural theory and existentialist philosophy, as exemplified by Nietzsche and various Modernist authors. The latter suggested an exciting, radically cutting-edge way of thinking – until, when I left, I realised I was still firmly stuck in around 1920 (1950 at best) and had no idea what had happened after that, so I’ve been trying to catch up via introductions to sociology, literary theory, postcolonialism, cultural/identity theory and other areas my philosophy tutors would probably be aghast at but which do expand rather fascinatingly on the stuff I found interesting in Nietzsche.

All of which has meant I am now firmly in the 1980s when such stuff was popular, and am thus only a quarter of a century behind the times. I did recently, however, read a rather interesting book published only last year which, in addition to finally allowing me to connect to the Zeitgeist, has been rather thought-provoking as it neatly touches on all sorts of topics that I’ve thought about a lot over the past two years.

The book is called Die Vertreibung aus dem Serail: Europa und die Heteronormalisierung der islamischen Welt (The Expulsion from the Seraglio: Europe and the Heteronormalisation of the Islamic World), which I’ve just realised is a wordplay on a Mozart opera. It’s written by the sociologist Georg Klauda. The book criticises the assumptions behind European claims about Islamic homophobia, suggesting that homophobia is a fundamentally European/Christian concept, and analyses the reasons why such claims are made.

Below, I’m going to try and summarise the book’s argument, before explaining some of the other thoughts I had connected to it (in which I brilliantly leap years ahead of my time to groundbreaking thoughts that everyone else had a few decades back ...).

 

( 2,000 words of essay-style rambling - enter at your own risk )

 

There's no proper post below the link ... I just decided, as my time in Germany is drawing to a close, that I would wallow in memories and write up some personal insider tips about Berlin and Hamburg for anyone planning a trip to Germany. It's not huge on detail - you can find that elsewhere - but I've tried to give a concise idea of some of the stuff worth knowing. ("Concise" relative to my tendency to ramble, anyway).

I might gradually try adding other German cities, though obviously I don't know anywhere near as much about them as I do about Hamburg or Berlin.

( General Germany tips )

( Useful German )

( Berlin )

( Hamburg )

Did anyone else see this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/10/white-male-heterosexual-oxford-officer

Those hilariously ironic Oxford students have gone and done it again.

Jesus, I had a scare today. My mum had a letter saying my AHRC nomination was unsuccessful and that my name wasn't being put forward as a candidate. Hours of desperate phone calls and emailing and despairing at the fact that I had vainly built up my hopes later, it turned out it was just a clerical error. And that they confirmed today for definite that I really have just been given lots of money for an essay I wrote on a train.

And now I'm going to go and have a heart attack.

Bah I am waiting impatiently for Gordon Brown to resign by refreshing the Guardian website every minute. I have had to make do with gay penguin news instead. And I've actually been bored enough to work.

Continuing my rather good week, I finally have my hands on the final Battlestar Galactica DVD, having somehow survived months and months without being exposed to any spoilers. Let's just hope that it's in the spirit of the amazing season finales rather than the disappointing filler episodes.

So ... it appears I've been offered AHRC funding for an MA in Southampton next year. It still has to be approved by the Southampton central committee and the AHRC itself, but I think that's a formality. Though after all the false hopes with interviews last year, I've not quite allowed myself to get too excited or make too many plans just yet, because I don't want to set myself up for a fall or entirely lose my state of xen-like calm. Or at least my feeble imitation of it.

It should definitely pose me with a dilemma, because I love Hamburg and I love my flat, but I don't know if love my life in Hamburg or if I can be properly happy here, and given the financial crisis, it might actually be more pragamtic to study the MA. I'd feel pretty stupid if I declined funding so I could cling on to my nice flat and my occasionally interesting job, and then my company here went bust along with the rest of Germany.

So, though I haven't really accepted it or made a decision yet, I guess I will probably be back to England in September. Elation should hopefully set in when I've got 100% official confirmation and have had a proper night's sleep.

I visited Luxembourg last weekend for literally three reasons: (a) my friend Nik is doing an internship there (b) it was the name of my tutor group at school and (c) it represented an annoying hole in my map of European countries that I've visited (now the only gap is Liechtenstein). I was ready to be underwhelmed, but once again it turned out that my enjoyment was directly proportional to how low my expectations were. All in all, I thought it was rather stunning  - the beautiful countryside (sweeping hills and forests) and the weather (apparently the best in 2 years) helped, but the city itself was really rather pleasant in a kind of quintessentially European way, and the super-modern glass and steel architecture was both really good and tastefully integrated. It was just a great city to wander around and have leisurely coffees in. 

The language situation was really odd - it seemed to be almost completely random whether signs were in English, French, German or Luxembourgish (the museum was exclusively French, for instance) and I had several weird trilingual conversations, because I could never quite tell what the etiquette was about replying to French questions in German (or English). I had also expected it would feel smaller than it did - but instead of everything being scaled down, it was more like the city centre of a much bigger city that just happened not to stretch out for miles and miles with more of the same.

Back in Hamburg, I've just had a slightly lazier 4-day weekend of parties, wandering round heaths and struggling to finish a mammoth German "postpostmodern" novel called "The Instinct to Play" in which two bored teenage geniuses decide to set up elaborate games (such as framing and blackmailing a teacher with no particular aim in mind beyond "playing") in the absence of any other meaning. It's filled with smart ideas and good writing, which was perhaps what distracted me at first from the fact that at a fundamental level I thought it was just wrong. I remember in philosophy we learned that goodness "supervenes" over other properties, which means that two things can't only differ in how good they are - if one chair is good and one chair is bad, there has to some other difference between them that explains the goodness/badness. But someone only needed to actually point out this property of supervenience because, especially in art, two remarkably similar things can vary dramatically in quality. This novel resembled exactly the kind of novel I should like in terms of the style of the prose, the philosophical questions it posed and the skill and intelligence displayed by the author - but somehow, something just didn't work.

Maybe I'm just not ready for the postpostmodern novel and am stuck in the 20th century in terms of the way I read books, and in 50 years' time people will look back and sneer at me. But you can't second-guess history and, in any case, I am more inclined to think that the flaw was actually that the book was behind the times, rather than ahead of them. It took a lot of pains to emphasise how slap bang-up-to-date and cutting-edge it was - what with the whole postpostmodern thing, and constant references to contemporary events/technology, and the assertion that this wasn't old fashioned nihilism: "They believed in nothing. We don't even have that." But I almost had the sense that the novel only needed to assert this so stridently to conceal the fact that it was basically a combination of fairly familiar German novel elements (the critique of Bildung/education, the magisterial philosophical pronouncements, certain fairy-tale-esque touches) with a splash of Heathers and game theory thrown in. And even though the novel is only 5 years old, the characters' decadent ennui already seems rather behind the times, what with the financial crisis and all the uncertainty and political engagement that has brought with it.

Or possibly I'm just far too tired and should have tried lighter fare. But once I've started something, I have to finish it before I can start anything else - and so I just wanted to get through the damned thing. Which I finally did today despite not really getting anything new out of the final 150 pages, perhaps because I was forcing myself to read it. But now I am free to move on and just put the whole thing behind me forever ...

In another reminder of why I love Hamburg (and Germany), this weekend there was one of the "long nights of the museums". This basically means that, for one evening, every museum in the city is open till 2 a.m. and, for €12, you can visit as many of them as you want - including on the following day - and travel on the special shuttle services too. Plus there's live music, special tours, and all sorts of other events.

Thus, this weekend I have duly been bingeing on art. Purely economically, I saved over €30 on ticket prices to things I wanted to see anyway, though this was slightly offset by the fact that I spent €20 on an arty gay photography coffee table book, which I justified as a late birthday present to myself. And also because, I kid you not, I had "arty gay coffee table book" on my list of things to buy for my flat (right below ice cube tray, which I also bought this weekend).

Besides the gay photography exhibition (which I very much enjoyed - it's very refreshing to see male nudes as aesthetic objects for a change. Especially fit ones.), I got to see two abstract painting exhibitions, a exhibition about Edward Hopper and American Classical Modernism, a Japanese installation with a fish made of beer bottle caps, and an exhibition with a mixed bag of modern art. It was interesting to see how certain themes came up again and again - particularly, images that hung teasingly between being abstract and depicting  recognisable objects, and the theme of different attempts to order or explain the world (lists, equations, artworks, plans) accumulating into a chaotic, incomprehensible jumble - yet were explored in very distinctive ways.

Perhaps the highlight was the Arts and Crafts Museum. I'd avoided it till now after being disappointed by the Berlin equivalent (which was all boring china and furniture), but figured I might as well go given that it wouldn't cost me an extra penny. It was very impressive - huge enough that I got very lost and didn't get to see anywere nearly everything, and voluptuously filled with a range of  beautiful, opulent and marvellously weird  things from all sorts of different times and places -  entire rooms kitted out in different art nouveau colour schemes, galleries of sumptuous chestnut pianos and baroque church sculptures, expressionist robot sculptures, ingenious pieces of modern furniture design, elegant Chinese watercolours, huge quantities of Greek pots and sculptures (more than the Pergamon in Berlin! More than I remember in the British Museum!) ... I just went around in a slight haze, admiring just how gorgeous everything was. And I will stop there, because I think I've run out of synonyms for "pretty".

It's mind-boggling really - there are 42 public museums/galleries in Hamburg, including at least 5 which either have huge, varied and amazing permanent exhibitions or regularly host pretty impressive and thoughtfully presented temporary exhibitions.

In other news of cultural consumption, I have watched enough West Wing to manage to finally settle into the rhythm of it and rather enjoy it. I do find it a teensy bit manipulative, but I enjoy the witty dialogue and the drama enough not to care. It's the right mix of entertainment and cleverness to watch after a busy day of work.

I also watched "Heavenly Creatures". This is Kate Winslet's first film, directed by Peter Jackson in between his "spoof horror" phase and his "fantasy action adventure" phase, and I've been meaning to watch it for ages. Unlike the other films I've finally seen recently after a long wait thanks to LoveFilm (Se7en, Brick, Assassination of Jesse James ...), I toved it. It's the (true) story of two slightly misfit girls who become extremely intimate friends and invent a fantasy world together, eventually ending up as murderers. It's just brilliant - the acting and directing style is larger-than-life, leading to this overly bright, slightly manic world populated with these almost grotesque individuals, and the script is ingenious. Really, really recommend it.

I've just started my second week at Lübeck, and am feeling far more upbeat about it all than I had expected. That said, it's far from perfect: the commute is a pain in the arse (I get back between 7:30 and 8:30 in the evening), my boss has gone a bit crazy (she switches between screaming so loud that you can hear her through two closed doors, utterly ignoring everyone and not telling them basic facts, falling prey to fits of whimsy, and actually being quite nice – though even that is always rather disconcerting!), and, worst of all, there are creepy/kitsch angel friezes on some of the ceilings.

Lübeck itself is a mix of gorgeous medieval buildings and horrible 1970s buildings – a bit like Oxford, except in Oxford at least a handful of things have actually changed since the 70s. It's mostly famous for Thomas Mann and marzipan. Not that I'm sure when I'll have time and inclination to do touristy stuff here – it would involve making an extra trip up at the weekend.

But weirdly, I felt really rather good at the end of the first week. I think it was to do with the fact that the worst was over and that it wasn't that bad, and that I've been more sociable, both with work colleagues (chatting on the train and at lunch) and with some new friends I've made through GayRomeo. A big difference is that for the first time I've actually invited people out to do stuff, rather than just passively accepting invitiations. I'm starting to feel secure in my life out here, and for the first time since the whole Lübeck thing came up I've felt an active desire to actually stay longer-term (which was the conclusion I had come to right before my boss dropped the bombshell about the move). So if I did get MA funding after all, it might be more a dilemma than I had thought whether to accept it.

Fortunately, my newfound sociabilty arrived right in time for my birthday. I plucked up the courage to invite some friends from work out for a meal, and, lo and behold, was not rejected out of hand. I co-opted the celebrations for the harbour birthday anniversary, which in typical German fashion is far more fun than a comparable ceremonial event would be in England. There were tacky illuminated funfair rides and fireworks on the banks of the river itself, and then we wandered through a massive unofficial street party with live music (German ska was particularly cool), real-life punks (you still get them in Germany ... I felt like such a tourist/anthropologist/ wandering through and condescendingly cooing at the fact of their existence)  and passersby selling beer from backpacks.

The evening before, I finally felt a bit more settled in at the gay bar I've been going to and chatted with more people – until then, I'd been clinging exclusively to the guy who'd invited me along, and last time I left rather abruptly because I felt I just didn't fit in. But as the evening drew on, the conversation turned to ... philosophy! Thomas Mann! the role played by right-wing extremism in contemporary German politics! the comparative virtues of different video rental systems and Disney animations! the fitness of various German and British actors! I was in my element, though I did leave kicking myself for all the things I should have said but somehow couldn't quite the words for - for some reason, it seemed vitally important that I should have been able to deliver a knock-down argument about why Death in Venice is not straightforwardly homophobic, or why left-wing extremism is not an equal and opposite danger, or why Kant's concept of free will coexisting with determinism was so ingenious, or why Daniel Brühl is definitely fitter than Zac Effron.

I also managed to still fit in plenty of time for DVDs, books and films despite actually attempting a social life ... some thoughts below because I'm in a reviewing frame of mind ...
( Star Trek, West Wing, Michael Cunningham, Max Payne 2 )

I wish I'd had this during my finals:

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/449889

I would love a therapy dog. We do actually have an office dog but he's really boney and slightly snappy, and hence not very huggable.

I'll get round to a proper post later, but in case anyone's interested, below are my thoughts on Spring Awakening ...

( Spring Awakening: The Musical )</div>

I swear there is no spring in Germany - winter just suddenly stops. This time last month I was still wearing a woolly jumper, and today I was out in a T-shirt and sandals. I'm having a weirdly quiet week after a wonderful, hectic fortnight at home (to summarise in numbers: 2 weddings, 2 ceilidhs, 1 cinema trip, 1 musical*, 1 dungeons-and-dragons-based stag party, 1 AHRC essay, countless coffees and meals with friends, and I think a total of 35 train journeys). It all felt reassuringly happy and normal.

* I fulfilled my ambition to see Spring Awakening! Overall, I really enjoyed it, despite the fundamental weirdness of the whole thing. I shall have to try and post a slightly more lucid version of my thoughts at some point.

In contrast, back here I've mostly been hanging round the flat doing mildlessly pointless things on the Internet. I have entered all the books I have out here onto the Visual Bookshelf on Facebook, and created a GayRomeo profile (instantly ushering in a hundred messages from middle-aged guys, and a handful of boring conversation-killing messages from guys around my age). I had lots of grand plans for my week off work, but it appears that my usual excuse of "I just don't have the time" has just concealed the fact that I can never really be bothered to do all that stuff even when I do have the time. Still, it's still definitely better than working - I could not imagine trying to work while I feel this tired.