Random Rules

Today I gave a paper at an academic conference entitled 'New Approaches: Home, Nation, and Landedness in Modern Jewish Identity'. The conference is being held at Harvard, which is, I must admit, a rather intimidating place to deliver one's first ever conference paper. My talk was entitled 'Between Fidelity and Redlichkeit: Leo Strauss's Zionist Synthesis'. It went quite well, although I was put on a very eccentric panel; the two papers before mine were concerned with medical examinations in 1920s Palestine and suicide in Palestine in the 1910s. My paper had absolutely nothing to do with these kinds of empirical questions, and I think that the audience found it rather confusing. Half of them were only interested in the two papers on Palestine and didn't care at all about my paper on Strauss, whilst for the other half the situation was reversed. Anyway, the best thing about these kinds of events isn't so much the papers as meeting other students and academics.

After delivering my paper I received an invite from Professor Ronald Zweig to come and deliver a paper at his Israel Study Group at NYU. More than this, however, it was just nice to talk to other people interested in similar things to me. One of the things I found very difficult about being in England was the sense of (intellectual) isolation, the knowledge that I was completely alone in my intellectual interests. As absurd as it might sound, sometimes it felt as though I was the only person in the world, at least of my age, working on these particular topics and thinkers. Coming to a conference like this is both unnerving and exhilerating: unnerving because it just serves to highlight the huge gaps in my (almost entirely self-taught) knowledge of modern Jewish philosophy and intellectual thought, but exhilerating because it underlines just how many people are doing interesting and intelligent work in areas similar to my own. I've met a lot of very nice and friendly people, some of whom I'm sure I'll see around in the future (quite a few of them are also Columbia students, so that's pretty much guaranteed).

The other great thing about this conference is that it's given me an excuse to get out of New York and come back to Cambridge. The last time I was here was September 2005, when I came for some interviews at the Harvard Government Department. It rained three inches in an hour and was, to say the least, specrtacularly miserable. I distinctly remember opening my rucksack to find my notepad reduced to a watery pulp, before taking my socks off and wringing them out in the toilets. Good times! I shudder to think how bad an impression I must have made, squelching water through the offices of the Kennedy School of Government. Happily, however, the weather this weekend has been glorious, and not even a 3 hour delay to my train (on the first annual US National Train Day, no less) could dampen my mood. Last night I met some friends for dinner, before going to see the world premiere of Stephen Greenblatt's new play based on the recently rediscovered plot of a (probable) lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio. It was so terrible that we left halfway through and instead went to drink in Charlie's, a famous local bar with an excellent jukebox (Pixies, Velvet Underground, Clash).

Cambridge really is a beautiful place, and Harvard itself has an understated majesty. This evening, after the conference dinner, I took a walk through the campus, ending up outside the chapel. For some reason I really love colonial-era US architecture - there's a certain type of American house design which just sings to my English heart; not, I hasten to add, because it reminds me of home, but rather for precisely the opposite reason: there is simply nothing like that in England. Buildings like the Harvard chapel just seem so quintessentially American, and it still gives me a thrill to be amongst them.

Tomorrow night I head back to New York. I return to what I left: 14 hour work days, Kafka, a historiography paper on the futuricity of history, not enough sleep, and almost certainly not enough food. But come Thursday, one way or the other, it'll all be over. Relaxation! Normal eating patterns! A retreat from the onset of alcoholism (the graduate vice, apparently)! Resident Evil 4! Barring weather-related disasters, come Friday I will be donning shorts and a t-shirt and heading into Central Park with my headphones, a strawberry smoothie, and a some kind of non-work related book (maybe even a novel!) in tow.

Songs for the Deaf: today I visited the ever-brilliant Newbury Comics, a fantastic and fantastically cheap comic, music, and movie store. I picked up the new Cut Copy album (for $9!), Danger Doom's 'The Mouse and the Mask', and the 2CD version of Sebadoh's early '90s classic 'III'. Beyond these new purchases, I've listened to the song 'Random Rules' by the Silver Jews at least three times a day for the last ten days. The lyrics are quite, quite brilliant, mixing profundity and genuine pathos. I don't know, maybe it's just my mood right now, but the end of a relationship never sounded as true as it does on that song.