FIELDNOTES Issue #3 21 January 2014 Turns out that Mark, whom I mentioned in my previous issue of Fieldnotes, is not an employee of the coffee joint, but a co-­‐owner (with his father, who is retired and living in Swansea). Mark’s old man has quite a story to tell. After leaving Rhodesia with his family 3-­‐4 decades ago, the job he got in Saudi Arabia was general manager for an Italian company that marketed a type of soda pop popular among the Saudis In one large shipment, a can of pop was, inside the can, missing a patch of the protective film that prevents carbonated liquid from eating its way out of the metal container. Sure enough, some pop corroded the can from the inside and leaked into a number of other cans in the shipment, thereby contaminating them. Now, in situations such a that, Saudi commercial law holds the executive in charge of relevant operations personally liable for breaking a contract, or putting consumers in jeopardy, or whatever the charge is. Not the corporate entity, but the executive. So Mark’s dad served some jail time in Saudi. And apparently, Saudi prison is not where you want to spend a few months or a couple of years. What a nightmare! Lesson for our students: If you find a job with a soda pop manufacturer, and you’re given a choice of international assignments, let someone else choose Saudi Arabia! This week I spent much time generating syllabi. A syllabus here is more often referred to as a module guide; the word “module” is what in a U.S. American university would be referred to as a “course.” For many years in the UNCW Communication Studies Department, we often teased Dr. Carole Tallant (now retired, after an award-­‐winning thirty-­‐year career at UNCW) about how long, at two dozen or more pages, her syllabi were. Here at Swansea University, though, that many pages is not uncommon. What bulks out a module guide is a detailed description—which could run to a few sentences—of the topic of each lecture, and what several readings, required and recommended, are assigned for consumption prior to the lecture. A module, spread over four months or so, consists of ten or a dozen lectures, plus weekly seminars. The latter are small-­‐group meetings of students enrolled in the module. There are some variations on those arrangements—one module coördinator (i.e., instructor of record for a course) may do it differently from another—but that’s the configuration that I personally will be favoring. I suspect that you long ago learned about specific differences between British English and U.S. American English—differences so distinctive that some who live on this side of the pond refer to the language I am writing in as “American,” not “English.” You probably can cite, even if you’ve never visited the U.K., some of the famous variations in vocabulary—“lift” versus “elevator,” “boot” as opposed to “trunk” (of a car) and so on. I have, though, directly encountered a few linguistic dissimilarities I had not known of. For example, in British English, a television “series” is what in U.S. American English is a “season.” An article in today’s Times (London’s, not New York’s or L.A.’s), for example, announced that the “third series” (i.e., “season three”) of the U.S.A. TV show Girls starts on Monday. Does the word “timetable” suggest to you a document or display board showing arrival and departure times of trains or buses? To a speaker of British English, the word means what in the U.S.A. would be called a “schedule,” specifically the schedule of commitments and appointments someone follows during a specific period of time. A student, for example, will speak of her “timetable” to refer to her class schedule for a semester. A couple of people I have encountered say hello and then, instead of saying, “What’s new?” ask “What’s news?” And today in a coffee joint, I was asked, “Would you like a brew?” meaning “hot drink,” not a beer. This past Saturday, the 60+ U.S. American college students studying abroad here this spring went on an excursion to Blaenavon coal mine. Coal mining once was a pillar of the Welsh economy—but no longer. If more than a couple of coal mines still operate in Wales, I’d be surprised. I have always had a minor fascination with coal mining; I remember in my senior year of high school giving a speech on that topic. So I couldn’t wait to go down into “the pit.” Divided into two tour groups, the five dozen or so of us donned miners’ hard hats and helmet lamps. We had to leave behind what the Blaenavon staff called “contraband” —digital watches, digital phones, digital cameras, backpacks, purses, water bottles. No device with a dry cell battery could be taken into the mine, for safety reasons. “The cage” (an elevator) sank us nine stories below ground to explore what mining operations looked like in the first half of the 20th century. Wayne, our guide, had spent 34 years as a miner. He enthusiastically detailed for us how horses went blind from being in a mine for years (too difficult and time-­‐consuming to walk them in and out day after day); how in the 19th century, seven-­‐year-­‐olds got rickets from spending so many hours a day opening and closing ventilation doors; and how the original, primitive designs and materials for underground electrical communication triggered fatal explosions when sparks ignited lingering gases. And thus the problem with dry cell cell batteries: they set off sparks under certain conditions. Lots of stooping and walking hunched over…tramping through mud and deep puddles of water…a few moments in darkness so complete that total blackness prevailed even an inch before your eyes…we got the full treatment. Then we visited the Museum of Welsh Life, about an hour away. A dozen or two buildings—cottages, old stores, small chapels—that once stood in various parts of Wales now stood at the museum…dismantled brick by brick, joist by joist, each element numbered, and reassembled at this outdoor museum. The rain made this excursion less enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Many students simply camped out in the cafeteria. Not wholly deterred by the wet weather (although I did cut my perambulations short, to allow time to dry off), I happened to spend a while in a wool manufactory. A relic of the 18th century, the woolen mill still functioned, turning out small numbers of throw rugs, shawls and scarves as a one-­‐man operation presided over by an artisan. He had the day off, though, so I could not watch him work. But each of the Museum’s buildings had at least one staff member keeping an eye on things. In the mill, Sharon had the duty. Very knowledgeable about the mill, she also had a unique personal story. Her husband, Jerry, was a U.S. American, living in Oklahoma…if you can call it “living,” because he was at Oklahoma State… Penitentiary, not University. Sentenced over 30 years ago to 147 years for armed robbery, Jerry met Sharon when she began writing letters to him in about 2002. I’d heard about them but had never met them: Women who corresponded with and then married lifers. Sharon had been working relentlessly to get Jerry out from behind bars. She had written a book about their relationship, and submitted sheaves of petitions to Oklahoma public administrators and corrections officials. Her goal: to exonerate Jerry from what they believed to be a wrongful conviction as a ringleader in a 1985 Oklahoma State Prison riot; and to end his incarceration because he, age 60, had just received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. She wanted the two of them to have a “normal” life for at least a few months; and he wanted to die in “the free world,” from which he had been separated most of his life. (He had spent time in prison for other crimes before that century-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half jolt put him in OSP.)