Legends

From its foundation in 1209 until the late 19th century Cambridge University dedicated itself unabashedly to the spreading of complete and utter nonsense.

Just to get a degree you had to had to pass a 'religious test' and swear allegiance to the Church and non-faith based bachelor's degrees only became available after 1856.

Even Isaac Newton used his position to promote what he called chymistry, some combination of alchemy and occult ceremony.

In my day, there was King's College, ground zero for all sorts of ideological affectation and the Anthropology part of Arch & Anth, it then seemed to me, only existed in order to shout down anybody who dared to suggest that human biology could play any role in the formation of our societies.

But surrounded as we were by cretinous charlatans, we somehow failed to enter into any kind of dire, dribbling moral panic about it all.

Read the 'papers' today and you'd think that they had pinpointed poor Jason Arday as some sort of canary in the academic coal mine, a harbinger of barely veiled decay if not imminent cultural collapse.

I'm not sure I was even aware Cambridge had an Education Department during my undergrad years. So if this is now somehow a den of opportunists who could never get a 'proper' MA Hons Cantab, this locus of what Dicky Dawkins calls 'obscurantism' remains somewhat obscure to me.

Yet the sad and somewhat foreseeable end to this over-inflated story has reminded me of a phenomenon I noticed both on arrival at Cambridge...and here in Guatemala.

Some people, faced with a wholly new environment in which to strive, socially and otherwise, choose to invent a 'legend' for themselves: in effect an essentially phoney, usually flattering backstory.

I had direct contact, friendships even, with several people who had basically made up their pre-Cambridge past and/or aligned themselves with a high viz pre-exisiting identity and its related postures as they believed this would make their life lift off in the new environment, particularly if they could lean into endemic tribal pretensions and groupthink. One of my college peers was even using a pseudonym to this effect.

And, as I suggested above, something similar seems to occur with certain ex-pats who show up down here.

In most cases having a legend, as I put it, is harmless. But in certain circumstances the combination of personal and collective dishonesty can turn a little more toxic.

And the degradation of a phoney backstory tends to happen a bit like bankruptcy as Hemingway characterised it — gradually then suddenly.

I suppose that when it comes to teaching standards, the big change since my time is thay today's students have to pay for this fraudulent crap, at least personally.

Which raises more pressing issues about deceit and impersonation on perhaps a more obviously legal level.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

As reasons for wanting to turn vegetarian go, wanting to — in effect — turn vegetation is probably an uncommon one.

The summary on The Complete Review of Han Kang’s novel is ‘Nicely done, with some exceptional moments’.

That is also pretty much how I ultimately felt about Nolan’s The Odyssey. In both cases I kind of knew in advance that I’d find the composition of the work enthralling enough to overcome any deeper reservations. And so The Vegetarian was the only book I took with me on this trip.

I’ve mentioned before that I warm to literature which presents as apparently un-filmable. I was going to note that Han’s book falls into this category for a slightly unusual reason in that it consists of a triptych of narratives — one told in the first person, two in the third — each of which would be difficult to render as a conventional drama in its own right and collectively even more so — but then I learned that film-makers have already attempted to get around these difficulties, with two of the sections adapted for the screen separately, most notably the first as Chaesikjuuija (2009), which duly notched up a not-very-impressive IMDB score of 5.7.

Han originally published the three parts as separate novellas and they all derive from an earlier short story entitled The Fruit of My Woman. This reminded me a little of the five parts of Bolaño’s 2666, which lack the explicit unification around a single titular character, yet somehow fit together just a little bit better as a whole novel than the three here. (Dramatised — five hours — if not yet filmed.)

Whilst there is patently a gender-based perspective underlying this story (or stories) there are wider lessons here for anyone pondering a belated assault on the inflexible structures of society, some of which may have previously seemed ‘natural’, or at least unthreateningly conventional, along with a sense of the implied costs involved in any human battle for self-ownership, not just in the context of the Korean social ambience, but elsewhere too, especially when the aforementioned structures have an ingrained tendency to respond with violence.

A fine iced coffee con crema de that.

FOMO Danger

Another tourist died last night on Acatenango.

In previous years some have been washed away by torrents of water at this time of year, but 2026 has been comparatively dry and this one took the cardio-respiratory shortcut.

Prior to England's match in the Azteca last month there was a lot of detailed examination of just how oxygen-starved the players' bloodstreams would be and how much time might be needed to acclimatise in advance of the fixture, and that was just CDMX at 2240m above sea level — compared to Acatenango's 3976m.

Peer pressure mediated by social media is driving visitors up the volcano slopes often within a couple of days of arrival in Guatemala. The FOMO starts on the shuttle from the airport.

I've been here for years now and don't really feel the altitude at city level (1545m), but when I was coming in and out more I very definitely did.

Aged just 28 I participated in a Christmas expedition up to El Hato, carrying gifts up to what was then a very under-developed settlement on top of that hill. I'd only just arrived in Antigua and soon found myself gasping for air like never before in my life.

Antigua used to be a place which people came to to stick around. They'd enrol in a Spanish school and use the the city as a hub for adventures beyond. Nowadays it is more common to see the 'smash and grab' groups, in and out in a matter of days, and the volcano hike is seen as the blue ribbon Tiktokable activity.

Yet many of those involved in encouraging this are locally-based travel operators (or indeed bureaucrats) who have themselves long acclimatised to both the local conditions and the endemic levels of risk-aversion, and have seemingly no real sense of the cardio-respiratory dangers to young people with limited experience of such ascents…and none of their own responsibility thereof.

This poor chap was just 17. Maybe his parents should undertake some legal action, if only to finally encourage a bit of accountability.

Last night we could very clearly spot the little lights flashing around the edge of the crater of Fuego as it experienced multiple eruptions.

One fixation to bind them all...

Recent events in Ceuta have brought out a whole load of what I like to call 'the single issue thinkers' out into the open. These people have one way of looking at every single thing that happens in the world.

So yes, you have your 'Pedro Sánchez, hijo de puta' cohorts in Spain, but elsewhere we are seeing plenty of the 'Muslim Invasion of Europe', the 'This is all Israel's doing', or indeed 'just blame Trump' mobs and there are always the so-called liberals who are quick to deploy the 'anti-colonialism' smokescreen, not because it assists with understanding or even dealing with the actual situation, but because it helps smother any anxieties they might feel about the complexities of the contemporary world.

With regards to Ceuta these complexities would seem to involve some fairly recent decisions by Spain with regard to its gas supplies, e.g. doing a deal with Algeria which the Moroccans feel is prejudicial to their own interests (all this following supply issues in the Gulf owing to the on-off shooting war transpiring over there) and so it would seem that the Moroccan government has chosen to stoke up the migratory, self-bettering instincts of its own population by way of revenge. This is almost certainly an over-simplification. Pedro Sánchez is still a bit of an hijo de puta, and so on.

In the case of Morocco the 'colonialism' issues are also a bit more complex than many are willing to acknowledge (especially those for whom colonialism is their very own single issue thought process.)

As per Guatemala, the dominant culture post-independence was basically the same as the one prior to it, albeit a Middle Eastern one not a European one (and as such possessed of its very own smokescreen).

Abuses against any internal groups who visibly showed signs of non-participation in this transferred hegemony continued long after 'self-determination' was achieved, and just as they were here, suppression leading to oppression of indigenous tendencies was arguably significantly worse in the more recent post-colonial era.

Pedro Sánchez might well be a monster hypocrite when it comes to 'settler colonialism', and yet Morocco's claim on Ceuta is beset with many of the same basic problems and double standards as say Argentina's over the Falklands, and unlike the Argies, the Moroccans are right now actively carrying on like an aggressive, old-school colonial power at the margins of their own territory — as they seek to put an end to the Sahrawi movement of national liberation.

In ancient times when the Greeks and Carthaginians were doing their settler colonialism thing, the area was known as Abylya. The Romans then named it Septem Fratres (Seven Brothers), shortened to Septem, and following Islamic conquest, this morphed into the Arabic Sebta, which the Castilians later shifted to Ceuta.