art, up close and personal

J is wrapped in art. It’s a long, intestinal thing, made out of the stretchy flesh-coloured material used to pad actor’s bodies. The plaque on the wall tells us to play with it.

“How does it feel?” I ask.

“I think it’s trying to get to second base.”


This is the type of place that encourages this sort of thing. This is no conventional art gallery. This is SHUNT, an arts space in the arched underbelly of the London Bridge tube station. It’s dark and smells musty – the website says it used to be a wine vault. It could just have easily been home to Oliver-style street urchins.

We are somewhere along the long hallway, past the “Gothic Circus” mechanical/light/sound installation, but before the bar. In the alcoves to our right and left are the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting in, swirling around, suspended from hula hoops. “Are we allowed to talk to the art?” J whispers furtively. Someone has gotten prohibitively close and seems, indeed, to be chatting with the SHUNT urchins.

This is the type of place this is. The beer is cheap, the air is dank and some chairs are covered in Astroturf. Girls in silver hotpants and bubblewrap helmets walk past – and you can’t be sure they are in costume until later, when they sail over your head in a weirdly poetic slow-motion trapeze act.

You can be sure there will be a line. We arrived for opening at 6 pm on a Wednesday and waited around the block. The line was just as long when we left several hours later.

Weird, wonderful, wildly popular.

Appropriate for a girl's first night out in London, wouldn't you say?

no, you're a star

Feeling like a proper business woman. Hopped on the Eurostar train with dozens of other laptop-toting travelers. Watching the indistinguishable Belgian/French/English grey skies and rolling green scenery out of the corner of my eye while typing very seriously on my mini pc. Breaking only to sip from my horrendously expensive coffee (London prices effective from boarding, apparently).

I made the bold (stupid?) move of leaving my work behind. Although this is technically our break between semesters, I have a paper I swear I will finish before second semester begins on Feb 2, an article summary for Feb 6, my final thesis topic (!!) for the 10th. Not to mention the self-assigned project of deciding what to do with myself this summer.

But truthfully, I have been on holiday since last Friday, and if I wasn’t productive in Brussels – I wasn’t – I doubt I will be more inspired in London.

Not that kind of inspiration, anyways. The other kind, the kind that comes from new places and old friends, I already feel cursing through my veins (or is it the overpriced caffeine?).

Plans, you ask? Soaking up J, who I last saw about eight months ago in Brussels. Another McGill theatrical friend H, who I haven’t seen since 2006. The London Mime Festival, a musical, maybe a straight play for kicks. Lots of markets. Maybe some new shoes if the sales are friendly. The British Museum, and if I am not utterly overwhelmed, the Tate Modern. In either case, hopefully some reading and writing of the pleasurable (English!) sort.

Oh, look, we’re in the Chunnel! Boy, the train is fun.

More from London, friends.

end of exams rant

The first one was a fiasco. No invigilators, no assistants, just our crotchety old professor dictating questions from the desk at the front of the auditorium. Three questions, just the first of which could have taken far more than the 45-minutes we were given. Didn’t bother to type up his questions or check our ID cards. He seems surprised that we didn’t bring our own paper.

I regurgitated enough of his holy book to score a 15 – a B, in McGill-speak. A fittingly dull grade for an entirely dull (non)learning process. I’m just thankful that I can now erase that man and his disregard for pedagogy from my consciousness.

And burn the notes. Maybe the book, too.

I spent the entire semester fuming in this man’s class. Particularly memorable moments include watching him answer his mobile in the middle of a lecture (not just once, mind you – wrong number both times). Then that time when he chastised a chatty(?) student with a curt “I am here to talk, you are here to listen!” Oh and then when he justified his exam, extolling the virtues of memorization, reminding us that we are not yet ready for higher levels of thinking.

I had higher expectations for the other two exams. First of all, the professors are mounds better and the classes more responsibly given. And they were at least formally better – there were actual exams and paper, invigilators, even ID card checks.

The content, however, was more of the same. Both exams were three pages of true/false, identification, bullet-response-type questions, lifted directly from class notes (with an exception or two).

When was the last time you took a final with 20 questions? I think I was in high school.

Leaving my last exam, I was pissed. Shouldn’t we be beyond memorization? Why doesn’t anyone require us to think?! All these courses are 100% finals, too – what a meaningless evaluation system. There used to be something bizarrely fun about finals – show off what you know, a challenge, a chance to connect the dots across a semester of coursework. And this? An easy way to get some numbers to put on a transcript. Not that they are easy exams – I left questions blank on both. Just seems such a cheap way to qualify students.

The worst part – and I don’t like to think about it too much because it is depressing – is that the exams reflect the way most courses are given. Professors lecture, we listen. No such thing so far as conferences or seminars, or even coursepacks with readings to reflect on and prepare. I miss learning from the people around me. Feeling that we might have valuable opinions. Or that helping us establish some is an important part of why we're here.

Although writing papers in French was painful – oh God, so painful – it required the kind of brainpower I expect to be expending as a masters student. Crossing my fingers that our markers will engage sufficiently with our work to give some meaningful comments and restore a smidgen of my faith in the system.