06 October 2008
memories of the apocalypse
Cheers all for attending the apocalypse kf yesterday - apologies for slightly, ahem, undermining the ending of the Herzog short by, erm, giving it away and, erm, for the minor technical fault during the early bit of Threads. Still as the glazed sky descended on a bleak dreary Sunday, I hope that the true horror of our nuclear future did not escape you (though I did worry about that little kid that was hanging around at various points, trying to catch a glimpse of the screen). Watching Threads this time round, I was struck by the brilliance of the minor details and the timing of the cuts - the way the instructions to wrap bodies in polythene or paper switches to the corpse-shaped hand-delivered milk bottles as one of the last signs of civil order; the way the printed sheet with potential war-bunker operatives contains an added hand-written 's' on the end of 'Homelessness Officer', the way Jimmy's book of birds appears quite so many times, the heart-rending scene in which the Ruth's grandmother says 'I feel so ashamed...like a little baby' as her body inevitably gives into radiation sickness.
This kind person wrote a very interesting piece about the changes in our understanding of nuclear warfare after the screening, and Carl wrote a really fucking good piece on Threads for the paper-thing (ha! I hope you all enjoyed the this-is-what-all-magazines-would-look-like-after-the-world-had-ended style of it). Owen will put the rest of the pieces up on the kf site shortly because I am too tired after five hours of talking about Parmenides, and have no time before preparing for tomorrow's Metaphysics class. Perhaps I should take a cue from one of my more evangelical students who decided he didn't like the Presocratics because they don't talk about spirit very much. Fair enough, I say, fair enough.
Currently waging a war against administration as the University have decided to ban students from accessing online resources until their fees are paid. One of my current courses has 120 students and is run entirely via 'e-learning' (whatever the hell that is). Basically, we can't use paper hand-outs, and all resources are on the intranet. Mmmm, lovely. However, given that a fair proportion of students are unable to pay their fees because their local authority has a backlog of loan payments, this means large sections of the class can't access the materials, or the exercises they are supposed to complete each week. It's as if the 'old-fashioned' lecturer with photocopies were to have intimate financial knowledge of their students and, on this basis, refuse to give copies to people in their class. It's immoral, and stupid, and cataclysmically time-consuming as I seek to find a way to get the oh-so-supposedly-bleeding-edge-of-technology materials to oh-so-old-skool-boringly-anxious students who are being punished for something that isn't their fault. It's like a surveillance camera crossed with a mean, judgemental aunt. And I hate that sort of thing.
