All A-Goo About AGU: Part 1

Day 1-3

That’s right, AGU. Not EGU. It’s not my fault the two biggest physical-geography/earth-science conferences have virtually the same name. The ‘A’ in this case stands for ‘American’, so I went to San Francisco for a week. Before going, I felt I should be somewhat excited about visiting the West Coast of the US for the first time, but I really wasn’t that bothered. It was never somewhere that high up my list of places to go. So, I arrived on the preceding Friday afternoon mainly feeling annoyed that I’d had to get an intercontinental flight to go somewhere I wasn’t really all that interested in. And, of course, tired, because jet lag and I can’t sleep on planes[1].

Even the conference was looking to be a bit of a damp squib – all the things I was interested in clustered on Monday and Friday, though I was actually talking on Wednesday in a solitary session in the middle of the week that I would have wanted to attend anyway. So, I had quite a lot of free time and not much that I wanted to do in it. And, of course, it’s not as if you can just sort of wander around an American city, because you will end up in a dodgy bit even more full of guns than usual. There are also many things near San Francisco that I would find interesting in terms of natural landscapes, but I would have needed to hire a car to get to them and at that point the whole thing would have started turning into a major holiday, which I didn’t really want immediately after the end of a long term and just before Christmas. So….

Basically, I was not approaching the week with a great deal of optimism.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that my first sight of California, the land of eternal sunshine, was one of drizzly cloud. At least the border guard had been helpful, but the experience of getting to the hotel did not predispose me to revise my opinion. The BART[2] was fine – a little antiquated, but with very large seats – but the short walk from the Civic Center stop to our hotel in SoMA, on 6^th Street, felt as if I’d stepped into Bladerunner territory, minus the high-rise buildings. The place looked generally rundown, there was a lot of neon, and an awful lot of homeless drug addicts casually shooting up on the street[3]. I was in one of the richest cities in the richest state in the richest country in the world, and it was apparently some sort of, if not quite post-apocalyptic, at least peri-apocalyptic metropolis and distinctly dystopian[4]. The hotel itself gave off some very Bates-Motel-esque vibes – the carpet looked as if it had been rejected by a Wetherspoon’s for being beyond salvaging – and, having been in San Francisco for all of half an hour, I wanted to head straight back to the airport and leave.

My feeling of being in some sort of Land That Time Forgot was further reinforced by dinner – we headed to a nearby American diner on Market Street, where the food was fine, but then we had to pay. It’s worth remembering at this point that Silicon Valley, one of the global hubs of digital technology, is literally round the corner of the bay. Because, in America, you can’t use contactless payment – it just doesn’t exist. Half the time, you can’t even use chip and PIN. No, you still have to sign receipts, because, apparently, it’s still the 90s. This isn’t just some odd technological aversion; it’s to do with the nonsensical way food prices are actually calculated in America. In Europe, entirely sensibly, you have a price for food on the menu. You pay that price, and then, if you’re feeling generous, you can add a bit as a tip, either on card or just by leaving some cash lying around. In America, you have the price on the menu. Then, when you get the bill, they add tax on, so it’s always a bit higher than you think. Then you have to write on how much of a semi-mandatory gratuity you pay, which they take off your card after you leave, so they need a signature to authorise it or something[5]. The gratuity is semi-mandatory because Americans haven’t worked out that they should pay serving staff properly, so if you don’t tip, you’re basically starving the waiters. In Europe, if you don’t tip, you’re perhaps being a bit cold-hearted on occasion, but the staff will still get paid enough to live on[6]. Basically, America is completely nuts.

Whilst exploring the city the following day[7], I managed to pin down exactly what was making me feel so uneasy about San Francisco. It was the fact that, at the same time, it was both utterly familiar and utterly alien. In that, I’d seen it and the American way of life depicted in so many movies, that I, in some sense, recognised virtually everything I saw and knew exactly what it was and how I was supposed to interact with or appreciate it. But, at the same time, actually being there made me realise quite how alien the underlying culture is and how far I don’t share a lot of its bases or assumptions. The US and UK might share a common language, but, culturally, the US is far more different than most of continental Europe. The French and the Germans might speak different kinds of Foreign, but they do agree that guns are Bad and affordable healthcare is Good, to take the two most obvious examples. The whole thing was profoundly disorienting.

Our explorations at least took us into some nicer areas of the city, including Chinatown, as we headed towards the Black Hole of Tat that is Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. We went up Coit Tower[8] to get a look over the city and realised quite how low-rise most of San Francisco is. And how griddy. In true American fashion, it mostly sprawls over the surrounding terrain with endless straight roads. When we got to the pier, I almost admired quite how tacky it was – it had managed to elevate Tourist Tat to such a height that it achieved a sort of distorted, unashamed, ostentatious glory. It was probably the closest thing I saw during my entire stay to a temple to Americana. I wandered around it morbidly fascinated at the new depths of consumerism masked by quaint folkiness that opened before me. It was as if someone had taken Minehead and put it on steroids. It was, quite simply, awful, in both the original and modern sense of the term.

We then went to the aquarium and, because it was included on the aquarium ticket, Madame Tussaud’s. Suffice to say that they both completely conformed to expectations. One was full of fish, and the other full of wax. We headed back early to the hotel, due to jet lag, which was fortunate, because while we were riding on one of the historic[9] trolley buses, what appeared to be the Bay Area Winter Monsoon started. It absolutely poured it down. The entire sky turned incontinent in a flash. In the five minutes from the bus stop back to the hotel, we got thoroughly soaked. Had we still been at large in the city, we might have just dissolved. As it was, a large part of the afternoon was spent applying the hair dryer to our clothing and watching the deluge continue. It cleared up after a few hours, when we went to get some pizza from a dodgy local place, where I spent an uncomfortable half an hour expecting to get murdered. I have never eaten a pizza so fast. It wasn’t even that good.

A cable car.

Some Art Deco mural. No indication of whether they’re from a Land Down Under.

GRIDS.

Shrimp Heaven at Pier 39.

Water: check. Fish: check. Must be an aquarium.

Groot.

The following day, the Sunday and the last before the conference started, we did the one obvious thing to do in San Francisco: we walked out to the Bridge. And it is a big old bridge. Curiously, for one of the biggest tourist attractions on the West Coast, it is also very difficult to get to. The BART goes nowhere near it, so your public transport options are buses, and there aren’t even that many of them. Fortunately, the weather had brightened up marvellously, so we just walked, via Lombard Street[10], out to the coast and along to the bridge. In t-shirts. This was more like the imagined California of the movies! The walk out along the coast is quite nice and the Golden Gate Bridge is very impressive – it looms on the horizon and keeps looming, even when you’re next to it. We, in fact, walked across the bridge and to the small town of Sausalito[11] for lunch, and then got the ferry back, getting a good view of Alcatraz in the process for a fraction of the cost of the tourist cruises. I can definitely say that it’s a small island with some buildings on.

The Bridge is far.

Looking back along the coast towards San Francisco.

The Bridge is still quite far.

The Bridge is near.

Proof that we were there.

On the Bridge.

A View From The Bridge.

Alcatraz, as we motored past.

Our final act of the day was to head over to the conference centre and pick up our badges at the Regi-ception[12], where we managed to find most of the rest of British glaciology attending the conference that year, i.e. one person. In the true spirit of corporate America, the drink options were beer or various horrendous soft drinks; no water at all. So I had to drink some sort of Mountain Dew knock-off that was pretty much liquid sugar. And you wonder why the obesity rate’s so high….

[1] On the plus side, I had managed to watch Toy Story 4 (fun), Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (very self-indulgently Tarantino-esque, but good), Midsommar (Sweden tries to one-up the Wicker Man for weird sacrificial folk rituals and succeeds), and Angel Has Fallen (very very stupid, but enjoyable if you’re in the mood for Gerard Butler blowing things up for two hours).

[2] Bay Area Rapid Transit – the tube of San Francisco.

[3] Cambridge has got quite a lot of homeless people – it’s a real issue in the city – but San Francisco makes it look like some sort of Soviet socialist utopia full of happy, smiling folk, each with their own affordable property to live in and raise a family.

[4] These two facts are related – the large numbers of homeless people exist because the city is so rich. Property prices in the Bay Area are ridiculous, so rents are colossal. Unless you’re earning megabucks, you can’t afford to live there, so a lot of people have lost their housing over the last few years. Combine that with the opioid epidemic in the US, and everything’s set for a perfect storm of addiction, homelessness and early death.

[5] You can tell I lost the will to properly look this up. It’s just all so stupid.

[6] Usually. The EU is pretty hot on workers’ rights, so anywhere within the bloc is pretty safe on that front. Of course, we can look forward to such silly things getting dropped in our glorious Brexity future.

[7] I should point out that I wasn’t on my own – Tom, a fellow PhD, and Charlie, one of our group’s postdocs, were accompanying me on this intercontinental escapade.

[8] Which has some nice Art Deco murals on the ground floor.

[9] Remember, this is America. ‘Historic’ means ‘pre-WWII’. There’s probably one or two buildings in San Francisco that even date from the 19^th century, jeez, mister, ain’t that so old? I think you can tell by this point that I’m not exactly the biggest advocate of American culture and life.

[10] A street so steep that even the people of San Francisco thought ‘Let’s make this one windy, rather than straight up the hill, OK?’.

[11] You’d think this would be easy. But, from the far side of the bridge to Sausalito involves walking down the side of the road. There isn’t a convenient footpath or anything. This is America – only poor people and Communists don’t own cars and neither of those groups should be allowed to move around freely.

[12] This is why Americans should not be allowed to attempt puns.

Cult Of Personality

So, we come to it at last: the nominal end of the Star Wars saga[1]. If you haven’t seen Episode IX yet and care about spoilers, you should maybe stop reading now. Or carry on and live dangerously. YOLO.

Now, I know a lot of people like Episode IX and a lot of people didn’t. If there’s a truism in nerd culture it’s that you will never be able to please a group of size n of Star Wars fans, where n is greater than or equal to 2. I did enjoy it. I know it was very safe and basically just Star Wars: The Greatest Hits, but Star Wars has got some pretty good hits and can get away with it. I didn’t get bored at any point, even if it was entirely predictable how every set-piece was going to play out. To be honest, that was part of the fun. It might have been interesting if they’d carried on with the different direction Episode VIII took[2], rather than rowing back manically, but I wasn’t personally too bothered, even though I know a lot of people were a bit disappointed by how safe it was. Quite why the First Order suddenly stopped bothering with their successful counter-insurgency tactics, we’ll never know, but there we go.

I particularly enjoyed how Conflicted Angst Bomb, Kylo Ren, got go-faster stripes on his helmet and how his posse looked as if they’d been outfitted at some sort of scrapheap-cum-garden-centre. For the galaxy’s elite evil fighting force, they did look a bit of a mess – one of the main attractions of Fascistic regimes is that normally they’re really keen on natty uniforms. The Stormtroopers have a look, they all share it, and they’re instantly recognisable. The Knights of Ren sort of look like if your dad had tooled up as an evil gladiator using whatever he had in his shed. So they’re all a bit different and just look a bit amateur. More work needed. Richard E Grant as Chief Frothing Zealot after General Hax’s unfortunate turn towards sense was also very enjoyable. And a cavalry charge against a Star Destroyer was something new.

But, the thing that really made the film for me was the Emperor’s personality cult and Bond-villain megalomania. That man has got it totally bang on. Bubbling weird science experiments? Check. Massive evil throne in massive evil throne room? Check. Hordes of chanting cultists[3]? Check. Ridiculously over-the-top galactic domination plan with one worryingly-easily-discoverable fatal flaw? Check. Manic evil cackling? Check. What a guy. In the same way that Javier Bardem’s Silva makes Skyfall as a movie, the Emperor in full-on Evil Mastermind mode makes the Rise of Skywalker as an ending to the saga. He might have been a few Stormtroopers short of a company, but, boy, did he not let that get in his way. Emperor Palpatine: the real hero of Star Wars; by whose incredible hamming and noble sacrifice the whole thing ended well. Mad, bad and dangerous to know in despotic style, showing us all how real cinema villains should behave. I salute you.

[1] I can’t help feeling that, given the huge monetary potential involved, Disney is, sooner or later, going to decide we need Episodes X, XI and XII….

[2] Which I also enjoyed, even if, apparently, lots of people really hated it. See above about Star Wars fans, impossibility of pleasing of.

[3] I really want to know who all those cultists were. Where did they come from? What did they do all day? Where did they get their matching cloaks from? Is there some sort of evil lord package deal along the lines of ‘Buy one Throne Room of Terror, get 10,000 Cultist Minions absolutely free!’?

Left In Agony

So, an election happened. The result was somewhat unexpected, in that the Conservatives won a substantial majority and Labour collapsed to their worst performance for almost a century[1]. You may or may not be terribly happy about this. On the plus side, it would seem we may finally be able to get out of the Brexit Labyrinth, where we’ve been studiously avoiding Asterisk, the Minotaur of Deception, Indecision and Second-guessing[2] for three years. On the downside, it seems we’ve decided to do it, not by following the strand of twine and leaving sensibly by the way we came in, but by nutting our way through the walls and taking the Aegean option of jumping off a cliff BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT, DAMMIT[3]. So that’s unfortunate.

But why did Labour do so badly? Certainly, Corbyn’s complete inability to have any clear position on Brexit or bizarre obtuseness about antisemitism[4] didn’t help. But I think there’s a more fundamental reason: a Labour party running on an actually Socialist platform is just not electable in the UK as things stand. Mainly because of our inexplicably-vaunted electoral system of first past the post. FPTP means that you have to get the most votes, otherwise you get nothing. So, to be successful under FPTP, you have to try to appeal to as broad a cross-section of voters as possible. Which a socialist Labour party can’t do. Enough people in the UK grew up in the Cold War that anything that looks a bit Red is not going to do well, and the centre of UK politics usually tends to be a bit more to the right than in a lot of continental Europe, so socialism here is always something of a minority position. In much of Europe, where you have a more proportional electoral system, there are usually several leftish parties that occupy different niches on the spectrum and, between them, sometimes they get more votes than the spectrum of centrist and right-wing parties and form a leftish coalition government, sometimes not. So, in that system, being Actually Socialist is a viable choice for a political party.

On top of that, the Conservatives have a hegemony on the right of UK politics – there’s always the lunatic fringe of far-right parties, but they never have much of an electoral impact, because we’re mostly not that mad as a country[5] – but the left and centre is split between Labour and the Lib Dems. Unsurprisingly, far more people voted not-Conservative than Conservative in the election, yet we ended up with a strong Conservative government because the not-Conservative vote split in half was less than the Conservative vote. The wonders of FPTP….

Tony Blair and New Labour realised this was the case, appealed to the middle-ground, and were electorally very successful[6]. The last time Labour went with a socialist manifesto was 1983, and that document was described as the longest suicide note in history after what turned out to be something of a disastrous night, though not as much as 2019, we now know. So, it seems to me, Labour now need to make a choice between being a minority-interest socialist party of long-term opposition, leaving the centre to the Conservatives, or a centre-left, if not outright centrist, party of potential government that could command a broad cross-section of support. Eventually, the pendulum may swing back in their favour – after all, Attlee got elected in 1945 on a rather socialist platform, but that was in the aftermath of WWII and before the Cold War, so one feels (hopes) those conditions are unlikely to come around again anytime soon – but socialist Labour could be waiting a long time for it to do so. The next leader may have rather a weighty choice to make: principles or government….

[1] And the Lib Dems sort of stood still. Let’s not forget about them.

[2] The hypocritical love child of Ann Widdecombe and John Bull.

[3] I managed to remain neutral for nearly a whole paragraph. I couldn’t take it any more.

[4] Look, when Ken Livingstone feels he has enough moral high ground to criticise you for your position on antisemitism, you know you’ve messed up.

[5] Or you might argue that it’s because the Conservatives just shift rightwards if the current of popular opinion is heading in that direction.

[6] I find myself increasingly nostalgic for Tony Blair. Sure, he was a war criminal, but at least he had charisma and vision. Compared to the last decade of British leaders and hangers-on, he looks positively Churchillian.

Live. Read. Repeat.

It’s that time of year where I get away from Cambridge for a week or two and read a lot of books. Specifically, I mostly attempt to re-read all of Tolkien’s fictional fantasy oeuvre; i.e. The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tales from the Perilous Realm, Unfinished Tales and a few bits of The History of Middle-earth. I don’t try to read the whole lot in a fortnight – that would be insane – it takes me a whole month. But that week or two away from Cambridge gives me the opportunity to get through a big chunk of it. I’ve done this every year for about the past decade, so I’ve now read them all a lot of times. To the extent that I’m slightly worried about how much of it I can remember.

Why do I bother doing this? Partly, it’s because I enjoy it, obviously. Partly it’s because I’ve always been a big fan of Thomas Huxley’s aphorism “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something” and, for me, Middle-earth is the second part of that. And partly it’s because the Tolkien Varsity Quiz is coming round towards Easter and if there’s one thing I feel I should be really good at, it’s that. The last thing I want is to not re-read everything and then have slightly forgotten a crucial footnote from Unfinished Tales[1]. That would be very disappointing. On the other hand, forcing myself to sit down and power through everything year after year can get a little wearing. Especially when I get to the index to The Silmarillion or bloody Túrin bloody again[2].

Of course, next year, unless things go very badly wrong, I won’t be a student any more and will be recusing myself from the quiz forever more. Most likely, I’ll be writing it instead. So, I might spend Christmas and New Year reading some different books for once. I’ll only re-read Tolkien every couple of years, perhaps. Such freedom! I’ll just have to hope no one needs an urgent ruling on the exact height of Elendil the Tall or every placename mentioned in Tal-Elmar….

[1]This isn’t entirely a paranoid nightmare – last year, the fact that I have, for no particular reason, a disturbingly good knowledge of random ships named once in Unfinished Tales turned out to be really useful. If I hadn’t re-read it last year, I might have forgotten one or two of them….

[2]If you read The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and all of HoME, you get the Túrinssaga about 10 times in slightly different versions. No matter how many times you read it, it still boils down to: Túrin was really bad at making life choices. Really bad.