mattus.co.uk: the website of Matt Wood

As I sit, on the back of my first week in Bonn, it is difficult to banish the notion that the entire world is spinning around me. The experience has been at once all-encompassing, confusing, humbling, unnerving yet somehow comforting. With the formalities dealt with and the introductory week out of the way, I feel as if I’m finally making inroads towards feeling at home here in Germany.

Monday morning, 4am. After one final, befuddled sojourn in the bed which had stood all these years for safety and unassuming routine, it was time to make tracks. Blearily I exhaled into the sharp autumn night as the hastily-selected subset of my possessions were loaded into the car. Hearty goodbyes unbefitting of my pensive mental state resounding in my ears, it was time to draw breath and to move forwards towards the sunrise. A quivering, evolving cocoon of consternation and excitement in the ephemeral twilight, I stepped from the car onto the tarmac of Stansted airport and prepared to leave terra firma far behind.

The flight to Duesseldorf took all of fifty minutes; grappling with the thought that I held no return ticket, with my Dad by my side I stepped from the plane and onto German soil. I had worries in abundance, but now was not the time; I was on a mission; nothing which had surrounded me back home held much meaning here; having always been a reticent person, I knew that now I had to be hellbent and open and involved and involving. The train glided noiselessly through the morning sunshine, and soon I had arrived in Bonn, and that was that.

Immediately on the search for the Accommodation Office in order to sign my room contract, I happened upon Jess and Iona, the other two students from Oxford who were to be studying German in Bonn. Even in times such as these, the world proves comfortingly small. A quick chat later, I had learned that the office had closed for the day, and that it was best to proceed straight to my accommodation. Lesson One: German public services are open at odd times, the majority of these being indecently early. A taxi ride later, I was met at ‘Tannenbusch I’, my home for the next four months, by the tutor for international students, who proceeded to lead me around the facilities like a whirlwind and inform me of the many intricacies of the (over-)conscientious German recycling system, most of which I don’t remember.

And then he was gone. Lesson Two: German halls of residence aren’t really anything like English ones. I’d done a year in halls when I first came to Oxford, but nothing which that experience taught me is really applicable here. In a word, life in the German halls is much more self-centred (a pecularity which seems only to apply to Wohnheim living, rather than being an enduring impression of the effusive Germans I’ve since met.) In Oxford, everybody left their door ajar and flitted from one room to another; much-needed cups of coffee were made for all, and there was one fridge which was shared harmoniously by everybody on the floor. Here, though, all the doors remain resolutely closed, the walls reverberate to the sound of silence, and the fridge is divided into a couple of dozen locked compartments.

Day-to-day life in German student accommodation, then, repulses me. The meagre nature of the furnishings sadly extends to the social life which the hall furnishes. The only saving graces are Cathy and Holly, the lovely English girls who also reside in my block. Most have already resolved to spend as little time as possible anywhere near the place. This was what I did this week – and, as a result, I had a lot of fun.

<to be continued…>

I am leaving for Bonn in six hours’ time. In recent times excitement and anxiety have been steadily converging, and now it feels like they’re two names for the same feeling.

During the process of getting ready to leave, the thought of immersing myself in a different culture has led me to appreciate how greatly our thoughts and actions are culturally influenced. Everything I’ve done this week has seemed to reverberate in my mind with a heightened cultural resonance which has made me aware that many of the things I was wont to take for granted – and more importantly, for universal – are in fact quintessentially English. The squeezing down tiny country lanes, peering at the rolling fields and roadside hot-dog joints from the back seat of a rickety old bus; the relentless majesty of my University city of Oxford and the quiet, unassuming homeliness of the town of Leighton Buzzard where I spent my childhood years;  the bustling shops where queues are orderly and the Queen’s head is currency… and the British people! Waiting quietly at bus stops and watching the day go by outside pubs and greeting one another with that warm but reserved affection… and making me feel wonderfully like I am, and always will be, one of them.

Nevertheless, it has been said that he who has two languages has two souls…and yet how do I reconcile the aspects of my life in Britain which I yearn earnestly to take with me, with the desire not to carry too much weighty cultural baggage through the jungle of customs and traditions and attitudes which I will doubtless encounter in Germany? The problem is not dissimilar to that of packing my suitcase. Of course, I would be lost without the essentials which enable me to keep in touch with the country I leave behind, both literally and metaphorically – my list of contacts, my books and my photo collection, along with the essential materials for a fortifying cup of tea or a blast of Pink Floyd through headphones in the dark. Then there follow the features of my life which are important to me, but which do not seem culturally emblematic and should thus fit into my daily life in Germany as they do my existence in Britain, sitting at a form of crossroads. In this category: my mobile phone, my laptop and my belief that the majority of people hold fundamentally good intentions.

Finally, there are those facets of life in Britain which I will, for the most part, leave behind. As one who is rather fond of the English tongue, the most trying of these will be my language. I won’t just be communicating in German; the change of language will affect the way I think, the way I relate to people and possibly the way I feel. Expressing yourself in a new language is truly an adventure in itself.

At this point I must cut this post short, as I have to rise at 4am to make my way to Stansted airport. My thanks are due to everyone who has wished me well on my trip; I’m not sure how the next few days are going to pan out, but I’ll be sure to get online at some point to update you all with the latest.

But for now – Gute Nacht!

“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

Idlewild are a band who have never garnered the popularity and critical acclaim that their music deserves. After their early sound was memorably branded “like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs” by the NME, their subsequent transformation into more family-friendly indie rockers has been accompanied, in the most part, by a decline into rock obscurity. Mention Idlewild to the man on the street and you’re likely to win a baffled look, or else a reference to the vivid yet eminently forgettable hip-hop film of the same name; such is the failure of the Scottish quartet to permeate the wider public consciousness.

The problem with Idlewild is that they’re not quite sure who they are. It’s not that other modern rock bands have never changed their style – think of OK Computer next to Kid A, or compare the bullish early efforts of Travis to the wispy romanticising of Flowers in the Window – but that Idlewild are on the move too often to forge a lucid identity. It was precisely the success of OK Computer that allowed Radiohead later to experiment. Idlewild, meanwhile, never established themselves prior to this shift in style, and now nobody’s sure whether they’re sanguine punks or brooding melodic rockers. Faced with this dichotomy, A Distant History – which is basically a chronologically-arranged collection of the band’s B-sides – fulfils its potential to be a terribly disjointed and disunited compilation. But it does it so brilliantly that you shouldn’t care.

The tendency of the critics has been to approach this album from one end only. Rob Hastings is a fan of the ‘plaintive’ acoustic rendition of El Capitan towards the end of the album, but describes the band’s earlier, punkier efforts as ‘energetic… at worst, ridiculously inept.’ To Ben Marwood, meanwhile, the later tracks descend into a ‘borderline-Travis anthemic dirge’ in comparison with the excellent earlier songs. The point is that variety is a Good Thing; a point missed by the cabal of critics who decry Idlewild’s transformation and proceed to rave about the Stereophonics for spending ten years sounding exactly the same.

So have a listen to this album. Don’t come to it with any preconceptions, whether you’ve heard of Idlewild or not; try and appreciate the noisy, straight-out-of-school Queen of the Troubled Teens as much as the almost folksy Winter is Blue, and that acoustic version of El Capitan. You’ll see that the metamorphosis hides some degree of continuity – Woomble’s vocals have always been sincere, and the lyrics have always trodden the line between inspired and nonsensical – and hopefully also that it’s really rather good.