mattus.co.uk: the website of Matt Wood

So the first semester in Bonn is done, and I’m back in Leighton Buzzard. Germany already seems a world away.

I can see that my last post portrayed my German experience in an incredibly negative light, and I should probably point out that it hasn’t always been that way. Living in Germany has definitely broadened my horizons and forced me to adopt a kind of independence which wasn’t really required or encouraged in Oxford. When every day and every conversation has been an adventure, being back in your home town can seem a little unadventurous, albeit in a somewhat relieving and welcoming way.

It strikes me that there are ample lessons to be learned from my first semester abroad in time to apply them to the second. A lot of this is about the uneasy relationship that expectations share with reality; I tried to be open-minded about going to Germany, but I did ultimately take plenty of preconceptions with me. I’ve grown a lot wiser about the manner in which assumption and expectation creep into every prediction and judgement that you make. Expecting University life in Germany to be like University life in Oxford seemed fairly sensible before I left home, but now it seems impossibly foolish.

With that said, I will never grow accustomed to German halls of residence, predominantly because I bluntly refuse to. Open-mindedness is important, but it comes a distant second to core beliefs which are fundamental to one’s happiness, such as the conviction that people, at some basic level, share an affinity for one another – and that people share their personal and emotional space with others because they’re pleasant and gregarious and not just because it’s cheap or convenient. It strikes me that there’s no point being open-minded if you’re an island, and that it’s better to be closed-minded about something than empty-minded.

Whilst I’m on the subject of Tannenbusch: Holly, thank you. You were never anything less than lovely and I’m not sure how I’d have made it out of the ‘Busch alive without your company. I’m glad of the thought that wherever in the world I find myself, there will always be somebody in that place who cares, and the preservation of that thought on this occasion is single-handedly your doing.

Next semester, I need to live with Germans. Germans outside of Tannenbusch and the accommodation office have been unremittingly friendly and open-hearted.

Before that, though, I need to live in Oxford again. Returning for Formal Hall on Sunday was a rejuvenation; four hours there countered four months in Tannenbusch. The place certainly isn’t for everybody; the uneasy balance between the parts which are so grand as to be impersonal and inscrutable, and the parts which are so relentlessly intimate, drives some to distraction. Nevertheless it remains, to me, the epicentre of humanity… even if I will need my over-romanticised conception of the city to bring me through Finals unscathed.

Perhaps it’s something to do with escaping the silence of Tannenbusch, but I’m listening to music constantly. I’ve bought thirty-three albums in six weeks.

“Guess who’s going out with who?” gasped my housemate, swaying in my doorway. As the nugget of fresh information was proudly conveyed, it met a reception similar to that of the Olympic torch. In a mixture of consternation and disbelief, heads looked up; eyebrows were narrowed and raised. But no sooner were lips pursed and mouths opened when the collective riposte of this house of academia was pre-empted with the most irrefutable of statements: “It’s true. And if you don’t believe me, Facebook it for yourself.” And a couple of clicks later, it might as well have been gospel.

Facebook is a verb now – a verb with a capital letter, elbowing itself noisily into the public consciousness. Boasting an almost universal penetration amongst University students and booming in popularity with children and adults alike, Mark Zuckerberg’s darling of social networking sites has assumed its position alongside Google in the online élite. With over 69 million registered users, for now heavily concentrated in Europe, Australia and the Americas, Facebook is placed as the world’s sixth most trafficked website by the venerable barometer of online popularity, Alexa; with an estimated twenty thousand million pageviews per day, Facebook is the destination of nearly seven percent of internet users on any one day. Yet the impact of Facebook cannot be quantified in such a fashion, even through figures as mind-blowing as these.

Facebook is addictive and a little insidious; its power is most evident in climates such as my University house. One of its main dangers is that we feel as if we are widening our social circles, whilst in fact we’re becoming increasingly insulated. As I reflect on another hour of Facebooking which could possibly have been spent more productively by actually meeting the friends I feign to be making, I feel rather like I’ve been bitten by some form of parasitic, blood-sucking fly. There’s the initial twinge of disquiet as its jaws plunge through the meniscus of my social life and begin to suck it dry from within. Yet before the pain can be felt the anaesthetic is quickly injected, in the form of an email announcing another wall post from that nice blonde girl from the party, or perhaps a friend request from somebody for whom I held a door open eleven years ago. You know the leeching has begun when you seem to lose hours to Facebook-induced ponderings and airs of indignity: “Why did she reply to his message and not to mine? Am I supposed to be reading something into that status? And why is she courting the Incredible Hulk, anyway?”

By then, it’s probably too late; you’ve joined the Facebook Club. Like any such activity, Facebooking engenders much of its appeal through exclusivity and shared experience. This club’s membership may have grown far too wide for it to be considered esoteric, but Facebook nevertheless possesses its own language and culture. As a Facebooker, you speak of profile pictures and detags and group officerships like gamblers bemoaning that six-card 21 that was snuffed out by dealer blackjack, or tennis players revelling in the memory of that backhand winner that flashed across advantage court.

A friendship that begins on Facebook is often set to be an awkward one. That girl who finds your throwaway wall-to-wall banter remarkably endearing and struggles to repress an affable cyber-giggle at your gentle mockery of a ‘mutual friend’ (a phrase which Facebook has audaciously adopted as if it never existed in real life) will possibly not make for such a natural and prolific conversation partner in the world of face-to face interaction, where both parties lack the crutch of that ‘I Secretly Want To Punch Slow-Walking People in the Back of the Head’ group which they just joined in unison, where the backspace key is sorely missed, and where poking is just plain weird. Part of the issue is that Facebook is redefining friendship. A Facebook friend is often ’someone you know’, or what might better be described as an acquaintance, except that in this case the illusion of affinity is bolstered every time a globule from the torrent of personal information which they’re spraying all over the internet happens to land on your front page. This is the realm of the ‘News Feed’, an aggregator of your friends’ wall posts, activities and status updates which takes ‘hearsay’ to a whole new level. Never have we known of so many people without actually knowing them.

This leads nicely into the widely-publicised privacy implications of Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook features a host of privacy settings which are granular yet comprehensive. But are people using them? A sobering thought for any Facebook user: take a look at your last ten wall posts. Now imagine you’re standing in a room filled with members of your network, amongst them several dozen of the aforementioned ‘know-ofs’, and that you’re shouting these ‘personal’ messages across the room to your intended recipient. Not nice, is it? But it gets worse: the last year has seen several cases of high-profile ‘Facebook stalking’ making the news, in which job applicants found their personal lives assessed by their prospective employers, for better or for worse. Oxford University, meanwhile, has made use of evidence gleaned from Facebook to levy punishments upon perpetrators of so-called post-exam ‘trashing’ incidents. The internet, it’s said, is serious business.

Still… not to worry. It’ll all come out in the wash. Besides, I must be going… John’s become ‘It’s Complicated’ with some girl whose Interests include ‘Women’ – time to see if we have any Mutual Friends and fire off a few Messages to dredge up the gossip. If I’m quick, I might even be the one to break the news, supported all the way by the immutable authority of Facebook.

Good day! When I conceived this website, the latest of many, I promised myself that this time I would update it fairly regularly rather than backing away after the design stage and leaving it to fend for itself on the World Wide Web. A three month fallow period does seem to be pushing this mantra to its limit, but it’s good to see that you’ve stuck with me as I have plenty to report and have even been working on some new content!

So what’s been going on?

University is progressing nicely. Only the one essay each week this term, which has given me the chance to look into things in more detail (and get some more sleep…) I’m currently working on my Special Authors paper for German, trying in vain to pick up everything there is to know about Heinrich Heine and Heinrich von Kleist (nineteenth-century authors of German prose and poetry.) I think I’ve found focusing on one author at a time more interesting than papers with a broader scope; it allows me really to get under the skin of the authors and feel I understand their motivations and inspirations, and this is what I came to Uni for in the first place.

The social life is enjoyable as well. I underestimated how different living in a house would feel from the year which I spent living in Hertford College itself; I’ve lost the grandeur and the convenience, but the privacy and general feeling of homeliness more than make up for it. Living with like-minded people has been such a valuable experience, and it’s coming to the point where moving out at the end of the year will be hard to accept; this is my house! Meanwhile, I’m as inspired by the city as ever. I even tried to take twilight photographs – sadly, it having been twilight and my photographic skills being severely lacking, they’re not really worth reproduction.

My year abroad is gradually taking shape. Generally, the done thing is to teach younger children English in a foreign school for about fifteen hours per week. I decided long ago that this wasn’t for me; I’m not really a natural pedagogue, especially where eight-year-olds are concerned, and my previous time spent working in a German primary school as part of an exchange only reinforced my aversion. So I’ve gone for the easy way out; I’ll be spending two semesters at the University of Bonn, reading even more German literature. I won’t be getting paid, and maybe it won’t look quite as good on my CV as a teaching job. But I figure that I’m at University to study, and giving up the freedom to organise my day according to my wishes would be tricky for me. Besides, I have the rest of my life to go to work!

Website stuff
After having messed around with enough shades of blue and rounded off enough corners to satiate my appetite for hypertext perfectionism, I’ve seen to uploading some new material:

• I’ve gradually been uploading my University work. With the amount of time I spend reading obscure German literature and poring over dusty historical tomes, I thought it would be nice if somebody could read it other than an (invariably critical) tutor; hopefully it can give people an insight into what I do with myself.
• Timeline came about as a response to the hierarchical nature of the image galleries commonly showcased on personal websites, including this one. Whilst galleries making use of ‘albums’ certainly have their place, the convenience of breaking your personal photographs down into sets dealing with a particular time or place seems to come at a price – the sense of ‘progression’ is lost. The evocation of one’s past strikes me as central to the joys of photography, and the medium must thus be at its most powerful when it highlights change; this is the central principle of Timeline. It also seeks to reduce the egocentric element which I think is inherent to the act of posting lots of pictures of yourself on the Internet; few personal photographs have any emotional connotations for the casual observer, and Timeline is an attempt to replace what is lost by appealing to the universal human experience of growing older. It’s very much a work in progress, particularly as pictures from the pre-digital age are going to have to be digitised before I can upload them. Nevertheless, have a look at my progress so far and tell me what you think.
• I’ve also updated the standard gallery with some pictures from the last few months.

Culture
This term, I’ve been to the cinema four times and seen three Academy Award-nominated films. I think that’s more cinematic exposure than I get in the average year! One thing I’m not is an astute movie critic; I’m really more aligned with music, and simply remembering which character is which often presents me with some difficulty. Nevertheless, I’ve seen some films which I really enjoyed. I wasn’t aware that Sweeney Todd was a musical, or indeed that it was quite that gruesome – though the mention of a ‘demon barber’ should perhaps have set alarm bells ringing – but I found it to be immaculately produced and carried off really well by Johnny Depp, who I’m begrudgingly starting to admire for his versatility. No Country for Old Men was probably about half an hour too long, but chillingly enacted throughout and exceedingly atmospheric. I really liked There Will Be Blood from an artistic perspective, though it was so strongly character-driven that it lived or died through the role of Daniel Day-Lewis, who fortunately gave a consummate performance as the ruthless, forthright oil man. I really feel quite cultured – which is not something you can say very often after a trip or two to the movies.

Musically speaking, it’s all about Belle and Sebastian. I first heard their recent album, “The Life Pursuit”, and was so struck by its melodic intricacy that I ended up listening to it for most of November and December. I’ve since acquired three further albums, and am in love with all three of them. The poignancy of the lyrics, combined with soft, infectious melodies, seems to achieve something rare; B&S works just as well when I devote my entire attention to it as it does as background noise whilst I’m writing an essay (or an oversized blog post!) According to last.fm I’ve accumulated 1,052 Belle and Sebastian plays, and I recommend that you rack up a few yourself.

I think that’s all for now! I hope some of this has been interesting, and remember to check back every now and then; if I know you’re doing so, I’ll have to update more regularly!

Matt