Geek Love

I'm still enjoying school immensely, in case you were wondering, and my fellow students seem generally cool and smart. I remain, perhaps inevitably, the keenest, led by my all-too-many years of experience in the big bad outside world to a disproportionate enthusiasm for this educational endeavour. It'll probably wear off in the end.

The taught programme that consitutes a good portion of the first term or so of CoMPLEX involves a mix of tailored courses and routine undergraduate modules, varied depending on the student's previous experience. For me -- and most of my fellows, since the undeclared purpose of the course seems to be the recruitment of maths/physics/computational expertise into biological research -- the undergrad portion includes two chunks of basic bioscience -- biochemistry and genetics -- whose audience is frighteningly overpopulated with clueless berks who clearly have little desire to be there at all. Honestly, many of these kids need to be beaten unconscious with their own mobile phones.

Nevertheless, the lectures are mostly good fun. UCL's resident media-whore geneticist, Professor Steve Jones, teaches wide-eyed first years -- plus random interlopers like myself -- with such wit and aplomb it's impossible to begrudge his celebrity status. The Biochem teachers are somewhat less inspiring, but looking at what they have to deal with it's hard not to sympathise. Practicals have not yet begun, but those are looking promising too: as if you people didn't already know me for an irredeemable geek, I must now confess to unseemly excitement at the prospect of doing, in the next few weeks, in person, restriction mapping and gel electrophoresis experiments. I know, I know, these things are old hat, echoes of brilliance long assimilated and now so routine that muppets like us can perform them; but I don't care. Reading the details alongside discussions of the algorithmic complexities consequent on such experiments is one thing; the act of seeing with one's own eyes is -- or so I have always found in every other context and hope to here -- something else.

It was only when the lecture programmes began in earnest that it properly dawned on me that at least one sometime regular hereabouts -- and possibly more -- must have been through almost exactly the same courses in his or their time, long, long ago, auditing probably almost the same lectures given by the same people.

Can that have been wholly unknown and unintended, even unconsciously? How odd the echoes and patterns of our lives.

Meanwhile: yes, some of my fellow students are rather cute, and no, that isn't at all relevant.

No-one seems entirely clear whose idea it was -- the prime suspect absented himself long before -- but the suggestion arose on Friday to bunk off the dreary computational homework for the afternoon and instead head down for a field trip to the Tate to go on Carsten Höller's slides. What a perfect notion.

I'm not sure whether Test Site constitutes "art" in any lasting sense, but who cares? Riding the slides is fun and fabulous, a wild and dizzying new perspective on the gallery's echoing interior space, well worth the queuing time. A worthy successor to Marsyas and The Weather Project as well as the duller commissions since. Also, the wait between rides provides a good opportunity to revisit the other exhibits in this vast museum -- there's always something new to discover.

Go.

Saturday brought Brian de Palma's bombastic but disappointing adaptation of James Ellroy's horrible novel The Black Dahlia, first part of the grim quartet of which the much more successfully filmed LA Confidential was third. The Dahlia film is marginally less unpleasant than its upsettingly-brilliant source material, which is probably not surprising; also much less involving and coherent. Despite the occasional trademark de Palma grand guignol setpiece, the whole thing comes across pretty flat; the content is there, to a greater or lesser extent, but without any noticeable engagement or momentum. A shame.

Almost immediately after came Nicholas Hytner's adaptation of his own stage production The History Boys, which is great fun, sweet and intermittently moving, but so wildly disconnected from the harshness of 1980s reality as to be little more than a sugar-coated fairy tale. The ending is a dreadful letdown, but even so I'd recommend it to everyone with just one proviso: don't believe a word of it.

This evening's activity was a family dinner including, visiting from Australia, my godmother, along with her husband, daughter and daughter's partner. The lovely Samson was also, of course, present, along with Dorigen's godfather JP, so -- from one perspective at least -- it all amounted to some kind of reclamation of that peculiar institution godparenthood in our hopefully secular age. That was not, of course, the intended perspective of the evening, which was focussed only on good food, good wine and good company, but it nevertheless strikes me as the most important to take away. God, in this matter, is neither here nor there -- as in every matter, as far as I'm concerned -- but fellowship is the basis of who we are as human beings, and that must be cherished and carried on from generation to generation.

The evening wound up with the first half of the final Prime Suspect, probably the one Sunday night ITV thriller series that justifies all others. Jane Tennison's infrequent outings over more than fifteen years have always been steeped in misery, acutely cognizant of the awful consequences of monstrous crimes -- 1995's heartbreaking The Lost Child being the textbook example -- but this one seems even more upsetting than ever.

I'd like to think it's the hard-bitten content: Tennison's alcoholism, loneliness and impending retirement, death in the family, death of old friends. All those things play a part, undoubtedly. But I fear it may just be getting old that gives this stuff its power. What is past and what is to come, for all the current excitement and pretended youth of renewed studenthood.

A trick of the memory, perhaps.

A trick of the mind.
Posted by matt at October 15, 2006 11:07 PM