A Shelf of One's Own

Following her w(h)imsey

2012-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night opens with its heroine, the crime-novelist Harriet Vane, thinking back on her time as an undergraduate at Shrewsbury College, Oxford. Shrewsbury, a fictional college, is located on St. Cross Road. Vane thinks of the college fronted ‘by the trees of Jowett walk, and beyond them, a jumble of ancient gables and the tower of New College, with its jackdaws wheeling against a windy sky.’ Shrewsbury, then, is just across the road from my own college, also in the shadows of New; a propitious beginning to a book.

I read Gaudy Night while I should have been revising for my collections. Mischievously, each chapter is headed by an epigraph from a Renaissance work: prose by Burton, stanzas from Sidney or Spenser. I told myself it was revision, but it was a heady escaping plunge into the allure of golden age detection.

Harriet Vane, once accused of the murder of her lover, since liberated by the aid of Sayers’ gentleman-detective Lord Peter Wimsey, returns to Oxford to celebrate Shrewsbury’s Gaudy Night. When a poison-pen and poltergeist begins to wreak havoc on the women’s college, Harriet is summoned to lend a detecting hand. But, while Harriet is a mystery writer, she is no detective; we must wait for the appearance of the dashing Wimsey to set all to right. (Sayers’ female power only takes her so far. We are not sorry because Lord Peter is always a welcome guest.)

Sayers writes with charm, though she betrays her class. Snobbery is a virtue in Lord Peter, who carries it off with self-deprecating aplomb; in Sayers it is regrettable.

Aside from it's bon-vivantish 30's atmosphere, the novel’s strength is its timely addressing of the Woman Question. Published at 1935 by a recent Oxford graduate of Somerville (Sayers was of the first women to be awarded a degree by the University), the novel is set at a time where women have not been fully integrated into the university and their position is a tentative one. The female dons of Shrewsbury discuss their own position: can they as intellectual women expect to enjoy a domestic life?

Miss Hillyard, the high-strung history tutor believes ‘everyone in this place has an inferiority complex about married women and children. For all your talk about careers and independence, you all believe in your hearts that we ought to abase ourselves before any woman who has fulfilled her animal function.’

And a student, when asked how she will keep her fiancé from knowing of her academic success in her final examinations, says ‘…it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.’

Must they subjugate their public lives as intellectuals to the personal sphere of mother and wife? Are they unfeminine? Are they psychologically repressed virgins? Harriet is no longer a virgin, which makes her the target of some unpleasant attention.)

Though no longer as urgent as they were in 1935, these questions are still appropriate. The unoriginal answer to which Harriet arrives will not be a surprise.

Gaudy Night is, sadly, a novel without blood. And I think the conclusion to its mystery betrays the excitement to which the reader is lead. Still, it is an enjoyable read, a tantalizing mystery, an excellent panegyric to Oxford. It will be beloved by anyone who loves a good ‘What ho, Jeeves’ breeziness mixed with the sharpness of a woman who isn’t afraid drawing a little blood with a scratch of her pen.

Travelling Lit

2011-12-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

Today, two more gifts: Jean Genet's Thief's Journal and Evelyn Waugh's When the Going was Good, which is subtitled 'Everything the author wishes to preserve from his pre-war travel books'. This seems revisionary.

It has a fabulous beginning, from 'A Pleasure Cruise in 1929':

In February 1929 London was lifeless and numb, seeming to take its temper from Westminster, where the Government was dragging out the weeks of its last session. Talking films were justbeing introduced, and had set back by twenty years the one vital art of the century. There was not even a good murder case. And besides this it was intolerably cold...People shrank, in those days, from the icy contat of a cocktail glass, like the Duchess of Malfi from the dead hand, and crept stiff as automata from the draughty taxis into the nearest tube-railway station, where they stood, pressed together for warmth, coughing and sneezing among the evening papers.'

In his introduction of 1945 Waugh says pessimistically that 'There is no room for tourists in a world of 'displaced persons'. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport...and feel the world wide open before us.'

Simultaneously, I am reading Gulliver's Travels, in which each of his trips (at least so far) are about estrangement, isolation, oddity, partial communication, and exploitation. So is Robinson Crusoe. Travelling is adventure, aventure, chance. It is about the perenially displaced.

I'll be Home for Christmas

2011-12-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

My parents still live in George, a small city on the south western South African coast, flat and spreading, named for George III and celebrating its two-hundredth anniversary this year. Provincial and predominantly Afrikaans, George was a pleasant place to grow up, but young adults move to larger cities like Cape Town, Durban, or Johannesburg if they can.

Like many provincial cities, I suppose, it is an intellectual dry-spot. We weren’t taught to relish reading or studies at school; we didn’t have a library of our own, and the school system encouraged parroting, not critical thinking. People here live outdoor lives. The beach is so nearby; the mountain so close. You can drive your bakkie across the pass to the Karoo and to the hot springs.

When I went regularly to the George library as a girl – a flat-roofed, squat building which was trying very hard to be Cape Dutch, but obviously built in the 60s - I’d pick crime novels, science fiction, fantasy, regency romances. I now consider time wasted. Perhaps I shouldn’t. But I wish there had been someone to suggest I try something that hadn’t occurred to me: Hemingway or Tolstoy or graphic novels or non-Romantic poetry. The librarians are slow-moving, shallow-eyed, and bored. Maybe there’s something about the yellowing light indoors and the half-closed curtains which provokes something like Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I now realize that this is not the library’s fault. Its collection is surprisingly generous. One afternoon visit in search of South African fiction yielded two novels by Damon Galgut (the new J.M. Coetzee, a crass but useful tag), short-stories by Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic, poetry by Roy Campbell (South Africa’s greatest contribution to modernism, and bête-noire of the Bloomsbury group), and a selection of Olive Schreiner’s letters edited by Richard Rive.

And the R2 library book sale brought forth a bounty: a penguin copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lawrence’s Trespassers, Lucia in London, and a tattered first edition of Nancy Mitford’s Don’t tell Alfred! Whether these will make it back to Oxford in my already corpulent luggage is another matter.

Finally, Fiction

2011-12-06T00:34:00.000-08:00

At last! The term is done and I have read a novel. Published in the last thirty years. Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot.

Avoid if you dislike narrative pretension or digressions or books which are not quite clear about their genres. Stay away if you dislike novels which point to themselves and their sisters, and which are called by their admirers post-modern.

[David Hockney's Felicite Sleeping, With Parrot: Illustration of 'A Simple Heart', for Gustave Flaubert, print, 1974]

Based on your qualifications, Flaubert’s Parrot may be only slightly a novel.. It is a pseudo-biography of the author of Madame Bovary, assembled by the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, as he explores and problematizes literary biography, characterized by his search for the ‘real’ parrot which inspired Un Coeur Simple. It is a primer of how to experimentally collect and whimsically group the data of a literary life: by chronology (Braithwaite/Barnes includes an optimist’s and a pessimist’s chronology), Flaubert and animals, Flaubert and trains, people arranged by alphabet, facts grouped by academic subject. It is a book about France and a love of French things: the light from the view north, cheese, channel crossings, pharmacies, French literary circles, the dance of the language itself.

There are other real people in the book besides Flaubert and his menage: Christopher Ricks, Ted Hughes, and the Oxford academic Enid Starkie. There are also Barnes’ fictional characters which are submerged in Flaubertiana: Geoffrey and his wife Ellen, whose biography he does and does not want to relate (by is told in Chapter 13, ‘Pure Story’).

It is well written if only that it has the good sense to quote from a master stylist. It prompts, above all, the reader to find a copy of Flaubert’s letters, which are prominent in the novel.

The only other book I’ve read by Barnes is his meditation on mortality, Nothing to be Frightened Of, which, like Flaubert’s Parrot, I read nearly in one sitting. I can only conclude (with this evidence at hand) that Barnes is at home musing on the French. And his first-person tone matched Braithwaite’s: it is the measured but self-conscious and authoritative voice of the autumnal narrator, the amateur academic, the relentless reader, men who are interested in the bizarrities of lives and of Life.

2011-11-21T04:14:00.000-08:00

I just read the following in George Herbert's Temple -

O let no that of any thing;
Let rather brass,
Or steel, or mountains be thy ring,
And I will pass... ('From The Search')

And thought of this,

the view from Camp Casey on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound. This week I find myself missing pine and mountain and salt water.

Just in Time

2011-11-15T01:43:00.000-08:00

In much of the secondary reading for my course, I find myself immured in horribly glib words like ‘discourse’, ‘signification’, ‘reified’ etc. in a way that no longer meaningfully refers to structuralist criticism but is a kind of easy way of saying nothing while looking like you went to graduate school. (‘Discourse’ has a particularly bad rep, though it is, I admit, difficult to avoid it.) Reading journal essays and Cambridge Companions one gets the horrible and hollow feeling that these were published out of the desire for tenure and not academic inquiry. And that is why I am so grateful to Helen Cooper, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature who was at Oxford and is now, alas, at The Other Place.

Her 2004 book The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare has not only saved my essay on romance this week but is proving to be a genuinely interesting read. Romance is one of those genres which can bore you to death, or tantalize with a hybrid of familiarity and strangeness. Cooper’s book – which investigates quests, sea voyages, fairy queens, and magic which doesn’t work – in engaging prose (such a rarity!) is the sort of scholarly work that you can sit in an armchair and read and lose track of time.

2011-11-13T12:49:00.001-08:00

Though I frequently lecture people on my feelings about the unhelpfulness of dividing the world into male-things and female-things, I find myself wondering about the existence of the female epic, and what that might look like?

(Image of Penthesilea from the Flemish Tapestry, 'The Triumph of Fortitude', 1525)

To Camelot

2011-11-12T10:42:00.001-08:00

This week we step away from the Renaissance into the world of Medieval Romance. The writing of a romance, a genre almost entirely consisting with arranging and juggling inherited courtly and popular motifs, seems worlds away from a modern conception of the ideal work of literature as original. And yet – the perpetuation of Arthurian-based television programs and movies seems to suggest we’re as susceptible to retellings as our medieval ancestors. G and I confirmed this by spending an inordinate amount of time on youtube watching (generally awful) trailers of King Arthur, Tristan + Isolde, Merlin, the Mists of Avalon, b, Camelot etc. The best – I tried to convince G – is obviously First Knight. It might be light on the adultery and magic, but it has cheese: tinny armour and swords, a misty Round Table montage, dark-haired Richard Gere crying, a leaf turned into a cup for forest rain-water.

I have, however, just become aware of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois. To watch these would be an excellent repeating of the past, a re-engagement with English Romance as inherited from the French whim for Celtic lore.

A Jonsonian Encomium

2011-11-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

The man of the week is Ben Jonson: ruddy, large, convivial, viciously witty, convict, convert, pedant, satirist, playwright, poet laureate. How has it taken me so long to meet him? His characters – tricksy, seamy, comic London underbelly figures – seem to be the Jacobean forebears of Dickens’. (Sir Epicure Mammon, Justice Overdo, Dol Common are the easy friends of Bumble, M’Choakumchild and Vholes).

Jonson’s best speeches, however, clearly belong to his puritans. Here is the wonderfully named Zeal-in-the-land Busy (nearly beat by Tribulation Wholesome in The Alchemist, responding to a puppet show in Bartholemew Fair (1614)

Busy: Down with Dagon, down with Dagon! ‘Tis I will no longer endure your profanations...I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the Brethren; a very great beam, a exceeding great beam...Thy profession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide and gaped, I have gaped as the oyster for the tide, after thy destruction; but cannot compass it by suit or dispute; so that I look for a bickering ere long, and then a battle.

What rhetoric.

All aboard

2011-11-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

I found Macaulay's 1926 novel at Arcadia on St Michael's St. for 75p. I shall add this to my growing Penguin stash and put it alongside Macaulay's World My Wilderness. If I could find a Penguin edition of the Towers of Trebizond, I would probably dislocate my back in a spasm of glee.

First sentence:

A Mr. Dobie, a clergyman, wearying of his job, reliquished it, ostensibly on the grounds that he did not care to bury dissenters or baptise illegitimate infants, but in reality beacuse he was tired of being so busy, so sociable, and so conversational, of attending parish meetings, of sitting on committees, calling on parishioners and asking them how they did - an inquiry the answer to which he was wholly indifferent.

2011-11-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

Wodehouse's letter's published in a new volume. I would buy this if the bank statement was more generous. And this is the most interesting sentence from the review:

'In a superlative run of clichés – "gone with the wind", "one with Nineveh", "in a word" – Wodehouse revels in, and revives, the contained sphere of an exhausted language (a "small world" of its own) and makes it a little larger.'

Incidentally, the editor of the letters, Sophie Ratcliffe, was one of my lecturers last year. She spoke on Victorian poetry and - though this seems ignorant and naive and potentially condescending of me (I hope not) - she seemed too young and pretty to be lecturing to callous freshers.

2011-10-31T16:51:00.001-07:00

Michaelmas is nearly halfway through. The trees are reluctant to shed their leaves. Though the temperature rises and falls the hours of daylight announce the deepening of autumn. On Saturday, on the river, I waited for my stroke and watched the geese, ducks, swans, gulls, the riverboats and their winsome crews. I saw Christ Church in the distance.

I have forgotten what I want this blog to be. As I become integrated into life here it’s more difficult to step aside, to romanticize and tie up. British customs have stopped seeming British and just seem expected. The blog was originally meant for book reviews, but I’m not reading enough books, at least the sort that I was practicing for. I have, however, just finished Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 trilogy. I suppose I’ll try to coalesce my thoughts on this in the next two or three days while writing on Chaucer (again) and taking tentative steps towards Milton. And I can’t help feeling that writing one’s opinions on dead authors is fraught with danger. You can’t hope to say anything new, only to add to the pile, another piece of paper in the huge repository of dead books and torn pages and loose broadsheets and there is an apocalyptic furnace.

This last paragraph is full of nots and can’ts. And this confessional tone is irksome. Perhaps this is just autumn melancholia.

Tales of the City II

2011-10-13T23:35:00.001-07:00

Barcelona as a whole, if taken from the motorway, or by train, is monstrously ugly. Its outskirts have the same shambly, cheap, urine-stained, graffitied, weedy looks of cities which are interchangeable. It could have been Johannesburg. But in the Gothic Quarter it is another city: a city of terraced balconies that jut like stiff mantillas above the streets, the damp stone tiles and the tickly smell of sewage. Clothes are strung from balconies or extended wires; ferns and spiked plants explore or gingerly poke out from between the bars; pigeons and noisy green parrot-like birds shoot up to the roofs or are keep in domed iron cages; doors of vehement graffiti overlaid by political posters or advertisements or slogans. But the rhythm of the city is exhausting, continual wearing alleviated by the home one makes in it, no refuge for tourists.

And still, we are fortunate. When winding around the streets of the Quarter, we stumble across the front of a church in a small plaza. There are well-dressed men and women milling around with flower petals in their hands, looking at the fortressed doors expectantly. In one of the terraced buildings overlooking the square, in the window on a balcony, there is a large plastic horse waiting also. The lights from the cafés in the plaza throw up beams on his muzzle and back. I beg to stay. Within a few moments the doors open, the couple emerges, the flowers are thrown, everyone – the friends, the priest, the tourists who have stopped, charmed – cheers. Beside the couple a man in a brimmed hat strikes a furious guitar and a proud Spanish babushka in folk dress and white mantilla – within arms length of the bride – begins to sing in an unwavering, gut-punching nasal alto that can be heard in all of the alleyways.

Tales of the City

2011-10-13T14:21:00.001-07:00

It’s been an embarrassing lapse of time. Spain was so vivid that it’s been almost entirely bleached out in the past weeks, from over-exposure. We were the least experienced, least prepared visitors, crippled linguistically and clinging to the dictionary and phrasebook. We tried, in order to offer some degree of cultural respect, gesture of friendship. We looked foolish.

In Barcelona, on a searingly hot day, I sought an iced mocha. We went, exhausted, into the Hotel Zurich, a rather posh place (we discovered too late) near the Place de Catalunya. I’d like an iced mocha, I said, embarrassed, flustered, thirsty. The waiter, a distinguished man of impeccable carriage, said a reluctant ‘si’ and began slowly fumbling around for the espresso machine. All of the waiters eyed me up in a tut-tut manner before a younger man approached me in order to tell me it wasn’t possible. No, no, no, said all the others, relieved that the truth had been told at last, that they could leave iced mochas to Starbucks. So I cobbled together more hesitant Spanish to suggest an iced coffee with milk instead. SI! Said the distinguished waiter with pleasure and threw himself into the creation of the coffee. Ah, said the faces of the waiters, she does it the right way, the Spanish way. This is what we drink now, in Barcelona, in the Café Zurich, on the terrace, in summer. There we go, the waiter said, handing me a cup with coffee, milk, ice, sugar, the plastic-stirrer; You have beautiful Spanish.

Claro, hablo castellano!

2011-09-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I start for Spain; a week in Catalonia. As one of my favourite parts of going on holiday is planning which books to take.

This is what’s accompanying me (you might notice a curious lack of Medieval and Renaissance titles):

As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee

A birthday gift from a friend. Lee’s autobiography from his journeys in Spain in 1934.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell

A classic of the Spanish Civil War. Long overdue.

The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing - W. Somerset Maugham

The part of which concerns Spain. Trips to China for reading variation.

After the Death of Don Juan - Sylvia Townsend Warner

An accidental find. I’m a fan of Sylvia’s, and this was written during the Civil War and apparently reflects some of the turmoil in against the backdrop of eighteenth century Spain.

Hemingway’s For whom the Bell Tolls I read in Oxford. Am very much considering – as an antidote to overindulgence – Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, but we’ll see what the good ole bags can hold. Sadly missing from the cache is Don Quixote and Federico Garcia Lorca, but perhaps I will find English books in Barcelona…

I've never been to the Mediterranean and so will be taking notes. Back in a week.

Summering in Somerset

2011-09-13T03:45:00.001-07:00

The Archers is real. I walked into the midst of it in Milverton a few weeks ago. A and I went with our friend L to visit her home in a village in Somerset. L’s mother is a popular children’s author and, even coming from Oxford, A and I acknowledged the utter unreality of life in a manor hour in Somerset during a week of fete-ing and festivities.

The Old House, as the Milvertonians call it, was once the house of the bishops of Taunton and Deane, including Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from – to – during the reigns of Henry VIII and his son Edward, and executed under Mary. The house has recently come into some excitement as, during a remodelling, a rare mural of Henry – somewhat caricatured and perhaps hastily covered up when the political climate rapidly changed - was discovered behind the plastering in the hall. For the 10 Parishes festival and in tribute to the presence of Henry, L’s mother wrote a play dramatizing the King’s Great Matter, starring the village Amateur Dramatic Society and exhibiting it in the Hall, under Henry’s wary, challenging and somewhat syphilis-y eyes.

To walk into the hall, to look up to see Henry throned and imperious, one feels under the influence. All who walk into the hall, staring at the ruddy tints and curlicues and half uncovered evangelists, admit it.

The house was gorgeously anachronistic bric-a-brac of Tudor and modern, aesthetic and utilitarian. We arrived while the marquee was being set-up on the ‘tennis-court’ and were introduced to the locals, who had pitched in enthusiastically. A and I were Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, introduced in medias res to the vividness of village life. And having dream-sequence hours where the sounds of a harp floated through the air as we sit beside the fire in the library eating smores and strawberries and cream, watching the Brit cult classic Withnail & I.

On Saturday we greeted the sun, attended an African dance workshop, walked through a bean field and through an apple orchard, visited local artists, and met a Lady who sold antiques and said ‘chukken’ to describe the domestic fowl.

It culminated in a fantasy ball in the local assembly hall to the surprisingly groovy sounds of Louis & the Iguanas. I have this to say about Milvertonians: they can rock. Every person attending from ten to sixty years of age was dancing with all their might to funk, jazz, and R n’ B, without any self-consciousness or reticence. The actor from the King’s Great Matter, still in his padded Henry costume, meandered over to us around ‘Superstitious’ and waggled his feathered hat and pointed his buckled and festooned shoes. This same actor could not put off his costume, or his newly discovered Henryisms.

On Sunday the nearby village of Wivilescombe (or ‘Wivey’, to locals) was hosting a parade.

Without question, and with great desire for tea cosies, cream tea, luxurious antiques, bacon baps, local ciders, and little children dressed up like Vikings, St. George (and his dragon), and Darth Vader, we went.

And this is a tribute to Somerset village life: I recognized many people at the fair from Milverton, from Louis & the Iguanas, from African dance class, from putting up the marquee (I'm looking at you crazy curly-haired lady all in orange, dancing hard to ska on Saturday and at the head of the English dragon posse in turquoise on Sunday.) These are people who do things, who find village life and the community it offers significant. So they show up. Of course, many Milvertonians are newcomers. They have intentionally chosen to live here, and as such, are committed to making the most of it.

On Sunday evening we watched the play from the back of a very crowded hall full of people with double-barrelled names and arch accents and Midsomer Murders faces. One woman who couldn’t get a seat (tickets had been sold out for three weeks) walked to see the mural of Henry and said ‘One feels something when one looks at him, doesn’t one?’

And after the play, when the cast and guests were mingling and enjoying the thrill of victory, we huddled in the kitchen with tea and red wine and heard an impromptu concert from the magnificent local duo of violin and double bass from teenage brothers who had scored ‘The King’s Great Matter’ with the wonderful ‘God & My Conscience’. Ben and Alfie Weedon will go places.

And so suddenly, with a gust of wind, we were back in Taunton and onto a train. Back to reality - for today.

Spain to come.

2011-09-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

Finally finished David Foster Wallace's Pale King and my review is up on the Cherwell website here . DFW has become something of a summer obsession, so this conclusion is satisfying.

Contrary Gardening

2011-09-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

The British film director Mike Leigh, as I understand it, has a reputation for depressing British naturalistic dramas (at least in HMC discourse). Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), with its ebullient heroine, Poppy, traversing a shabby London accompanied by wind instruments, had its frightening moments (Poppy in a car with a mentally unstable driving instructor) but resolved itself with Poppy and her friend swanning around in a rowboat.
Another Year (2010) seemed more of a gamble.

We were promised a cheerful movie with a bit of melancholy. It began hopefully. As the title suggests, the film is structured by the seasons. Spring begins - after a medical interview with a grim-faced woman (Imelda Staunton) who has trouble sleeping and cannot remember ever being happy - with a long-married couple working peacefully in an allotment. The gardening threads through the film and provides a competent metaphor for a script dealing with the relations between people. At the nexus of the web of relationship is Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist, and his stork-eyed counsellor wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and it is a happy marriage. Their home seems a happy beacon of light and warmth as they offer hospitality to friends whose lives require, one might say, pruning. Mary, a single woman who works with Gerri, talks and drinks too much, and vibrates with bizarre anxious energy. She falls asleep, maudlin, in Tom and Gerri’s son’s room, with the couple looking on, sharing pregnant glances. Tom’s friend Ken from Yorkshire drinks and eats too much and cries into his hands.

But towards the end of the film the couple’s influence, which seems benign and bettering at the beginning, seems ennabling and manipulative. In the last scene of the last section, Winter, Mary intrudes uninvited after offending the family, and shivering, blinking, and spiritually disintegrated, begs Gerre for a former friendship. Gerri withholds austerely and Mary looks like less of an inconvenience than a housedog. She has been trained to rely on Gerri and Tom and, without their benevolence, is lost and utterly alone. Mary, insomniac and unhappy, is the Staunton-character, and the narrative has come full-circle. Only, instead of Gerri as healer (she treated ‘Staunton’), she is an enabler, a sanctimonious observer who speaks calmly and parentally: ‘I’m not angry with you, Mary. Just disappointed.’ The film ends with Mary’s weary and wary face twitching imperturbably as the family discusses their traveling adventures, leaving Mary outside the enchanted circle, to look on with – no longer envy – but a dying, wintering, reiterated sense of aloneness.

The possible romanticism present in Happy-Go-Lucky was undone in Another Year. The former trumpeted the enchanted freedom of an energetic single in Camden; the latter featured a single – and other (self-)marginalized characters – obliterated by the happy exclusion of a couple whose influence wavers uncomfortably between friendship and condescension. Leigh’s film didn’t leave me comforted, but sad, cold, melancholic, and impressed.

A bit of night-poetry

2011-08-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe it’s the coffee, but there’s something owl-like and night-birdish about tonight. A night for contemplating one’s mortality; your ghostly reflection in a window. When the summer began, it seemed to stretch forward limitlessly. Now there’s just a month to go and half of that will be spent abroad or with family.

In preparation for Michaelmas we’ve been attacking (or rather slogging through) our lists of Middle English romance & the Renaissance. My vote is all for the latter: I may have started off wrongly by reading the most exciting: the plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Kyd, and John Marston. That leather-and-sweat world of the playhouses and the pox, Walsingham’s spies, the censors and the uneasy hand of royal favour. Elizabeth & Mary, James and Charles. The age of cross and conquest, the stake and ship. (The best line so far goes to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: ‘I will confuse those blind geographers/ That make a triple region in the world…’) And now it’s on to Sir Philip Sidney. I’m afraid to say, Sir Sidney, that though your Defence of Poesy was spirited and colourful, Astrophil & Stella’s 108 consecutive sonnets seem a bit of a snooze.

The problem is that you can’t fly through poetry. And poets would be horrified, I think, by the suggestion you should. But perhaps one reads the Metaphysical poets at night. Love is present, yes, but it is always Death which pervades, the endless unravelling the alchemy of being.

And that dear pastoral clergyman George Herbert – who should be read in bits and not all at once, because he repeats himself – has near perfect poems:

Jordan (1)

Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding star?
May no lines pass, except when the do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s lines?
Must all be veil’d, while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.

England in August

2011-08-28T03:49:00.000-07:00

Friday was my first English birthday, my golden birthday, and the day was as thoroughly English as I could have hoped. It began in a shower of rain. Disappointment tempered with the promise of Wellies. A and I went up the road, clinging to each other beneath my gaudy umbrella, to the Jericho café for a delicious English breakfast. There is nothing like being indoors and eating beans on toast with hot coffee and seeing all the poor passersby miserable and beans-on-toast-less.

From thence we braved the buckets of rain on a dirge-march to the train station, our launching pad to the morning outing to Gloucestershire. A had been to Stroud for a wedding a month before and her praise of the Cotwolds village’s sweetness and many virtues made for an excellent excuse to get out of Oxford. And who can avoid the pleasures of a train? (So fast, so transportative.) And who can deny themselves the experience of waiting at Didcot Parkway? (Or Didders, as insiders assure.)

We arrived in Stroud at mid-morning to a brief cessation of rain, and were greeted by a market with odd teacups and saucers for which we’d been hungering. Inside the Shambles, the indoor market, I found two of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening books which have recently been expensively printed. The titles, In Your Garden, and In Your Garden Again, drew snickers (especially given the relationship Sackville-West had with Virginia Woolf). I’m not a gardener myself – in fact I’ve just killed the basil plant I had high hopes for – but gardening literature, like culinary literature, is addictive. (Perhaps because of the gnostic knowledge within?)

Stroud is a treasure trove of china, books, prints, and fresh produce. The streets are narrow and steep. Though we never reached a lookout, its position within a valley promised sloping views. And sheep are never far behind. Perhaps it is on one of these hills that Gloucestershire natives chase wheels of cheese. We hiked up and down the high street visiting bookshops and antique shops and print shops. Lunch was an investigation in British cuisine with Gloucestershire beef, gravy and bubble and squeak.

We returned to Oxford – A showing me true English culture from the inside by a commentary on Heat and Closer magazines - to find the city still under a deluge. By the time I set off for a walk to Port Meadow with the Other A the rain had stopped and wellies were only barely necessary (but still worn). Along the river we spent far too long trying to photograph the Queen’s favourite bird, and then to the Perch, a pub in the minute three-house village of Binsey, for coffee & Guinness & apple-thievery.

But the slow and steady late afternoon pace was all a ruse. We reached the house near seven and I opened the door to the lounge to an eruption of friends from behind sofas and out of crevices and under blankets and the surprise Birthday Barbecue (jointly arranged by the two A’s) commenced! We had no idea our Cranham terrace house could hold up to eight in the lounge, but we were all more or less coamfortable and spent the evening eating, drinking, and dancing. If you'll excuse my sentimentality: It's hard to believe you can move to a new country and within a year have such a group of people around you, on a night like this, that you can't remember arriving, and you can't imagine leaving. Went to bed, delighted and thankful.

Thronesing

2011-08-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

An apt diptych from last week: the mornings were spent teaching the elements of plot to German high school students; the evening spent indulging in HBO's new fantasy series, Game of Thrones (indulging my respect for stoic Sean Bean with a ponytail, and and my perving over the Northern English accent).

In brief, Game of Thrones is about a kingdom on the brink of internal war. Destined for conflict are those loyal to the King and his family, and those loyal to his right-hand man, Lord Stark, Lord of the North, and his clan. The King's wife's family, the Lanisters, are gold-laden schemers, and the King, considered a usurper by some, faces another family contesting his right to hold the throne.

Game of Thrones offers nothing to the viewer tiring of convention. There is little evidence of originality in the plot (aside from the interesting concept of a winter which comes not yearly but without much warning, and after years of summer, to devastating effect), and no 'realistic' character development. We are re-engaging a medieval approach to character where all is visible and emblematic. In medieval literature the reader knows the character of a knight, for example, because of the symbol on his shield or because of his actions. In Game of Thrones we know the character because of a knowing smirk, a toss of the hair, a killing blow, or the consumption of a bloody horse heart. Game of Thrones produces a cast which is a variation on a theme of archetypes: Lancelot and Guineverish illicit lovers (the Queen and her brother), the King's loyal retainer (Sean Bean's Becket-like Lord Stark to Mark Addy's Henry II-like King Robert), and the girl who wants to be a boy (Stark's daughter Arly).
The most obviously ambivalent character is Tyrian Lanister (played by Peter Dinklage). The dwarf, brother to the queen, is sassy and likes whores, and operates strictly in his own interests (reminding us perhaps of 'The dwarves are for the dwarves' in Lewis' Last Battle).

There are savage horse-lord people, beautiful albino-blondes with Elvish hairdos, and jousting tournaments, all accompanied by a combative martial opening theme with a celtic fiddle and hooflike counterpoint. (This musical theme has been stuck in my head all weekend and makes doing the dishes epic.)

So, despite all these obviously generic conventions, dressed up in armour and dirty leather tunics and sweeping hems and peaked cloaks, the question is why we - viewers not much hoodwinked by its familiar fare - become so involved in a well-worn plot which derives its energy, like a Victorian three volume novel, from its multiple plotting?

To be continued...

Back to the Garden

2011-07-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

I watched Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World twice in one day when I had the flu. A historical drama retelling the Pocahontas legend, the film submerges the viewer in natural images and sounds, recreating a landscape in the last stages of its innocence. Malick’s new film The Tree of Life, shares with its predecessor an obsession with origins, guilt and grace, and a sensuous cinematographic style which intoxicates through fragments.

In attempting to stage the story of one mid-century American family against the creation and development of the planet, the film revives an old method of Epic: the nuclear family as a metaphor for the drama of all natural existence. The film begins with news of a son’s death, a grief still present as the adult Jack (played by Sean Penn) remembers his childhood in Texas. These are memories are lush snapshots of a southern boyhood which seesaws between domination by an authoritarian father (Brad Pitt), who asks his sons to kiss him and to call him sir, and the radiant grace of a mother (Jessica Chastain) whose whispered voiceovers haunt the film (‘Light of my life, I search for you, my hope, my child’). Split between nature and grace, the boy Jack struggles beneath his father’s oppressive discipline, praying to be good but acknowledging his tendency towards misbehaviour.

Though the Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, the reviews have been divided. Two complaints have caused the film to be heralded as a masterpiece that is inescapably flawed: its form, and its visual overindulgence. The splitting of the narrative by the Big Bang and slow development of planetary life lushly reminiscent of an Attenborough documentary, complete with dinosaurs (which caused several in the Phoenix Picture House to snigger and walk out), is almost unfathomable. The beauty of the actors and the caress of the cinematic lens prompted Michael Newton to liken the film (at its worst) in the Guardian Review to certain ‘perfume ads’, with the film’s good-looking actors as the southern equivalent of the Drapers, the central family in AMC’s Mad Men.

While I agree with Newton’s reservations and admit that the film is flawed, the film is also resonantly masterful. From the epigraph taking from Job, Malick proves that regardless of one’s personal orientation to faith, the Old Testament is still a potent source of mythmaking in a post-Christian age. The Tree of Life is a Genesis story: a tribute to innocence and fall, the family as a seed of love and life, evil, death and grief.

The camera-work is – and it is hard to avoid this word – transcendent. Paired with the soundtrack’s continuous wave-like musical cadences, the cinematography focuses on fragments of an ordinary and ecstatic life: a baby’s foot cupped in adult hands, sunlight in auburn hair, rivulets, magnolias, a toad strapped to a rocket, a ladder in the desert, a tree in the metropolis.

I believe this is a film which succeeds more than any other I have seen in fully realising the dimensions of what cinema does. In 1926 Virginia Woolf suggested that cinema ‘has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression’, The Tree of Life holds the key to the solution. In a supple working of what Wagner called ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, the unification of all the arts, Malick has produced a film relentlessly alert to microscopic beauty, to a life aesthetic which is attuned to the connection between things, between mankind and the planet, between fathers, mothers, and sons.

2011-07-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

It is a truth universally (but mostly presently) acknowledged that reading Dostoyevsky and red wine is the best thing to do at the end of the week. Sitting in the kitchen, on the third glass, with a happy heart. (Somewhere down Walton Street my friend A, wrapped up in bed with a cold, is also reading the Brothers Karamazov.)

The sudden changes of mode – from philosophical to slapstick, from passionate to comedic – are a delightful jolt. Here’s a paragraph during the dramatic (but mostly blustering) trial of Dmitry Karamazov which, with all its paranoid specificity, makes me think of Bolano and a host of East-European twentieth century writers:

‘Moreover, he himself hated his feet; for some reason he had all his life found his big toes unsightly, especially one thick, flat toenail on his right foot that curved down awkwardly like a hook and would now be exposed for all to see. Utterly ashamed, he became ever more arrogant and intentionally provocative. He ripped off his shirt.’

Picture at an Exhibition

2011-07-03T03:36:00.001-07:00

I went to the Ashmolean with a friend yesterday to see the Macedonian exhibit (was largely underwhelmed). Afterwards we strolled through a few Western art displays. Though I love museums, I find them tiring. I feel like I must see everything, but one can only ever run through and experience the whole effect (the museum as a collage of people and places and periods) or focus on several pieces but try to just stay in front of them and see them. I am bad at practicing the latter approach, and tend towards the former. But yesterday J and I took our time and it was not unrewarding if only for this piece.

This is Barna de Siena’s mid 14th century Crucifixion and Lamentation which used to be a part of a diptych. The accompanying plaque said that it is rare to find the crucifixion and lamentation as a part of a single scene, and this makes it a powerful devotional image.

I am quite unresponsive to the Crucifixion (I find the blood rather comic in it’s energetic arching), and Mary Magdalene is a bit like a Wild Thing in the right-hand corner. But I found the depiction of the lamentation of Mary over Christ moving: their cheeks pressed together with some intensity (Christ’s dead, pallid, and unresponsive), Mary’s open eyes staring with grieving accusation at Christ’s closed lids.

She looks like she’s trying to consume him, to restore him to life by the pressure of her arms. There is an intimacy to this grief that reminds me of a wounded sorrow which I think is felt commonly in moments of betrayal.

Mods (and Rockers)

2011-06-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

I write this - ejected from my well-beloved room in the eves of Rathmel – from Jericho, the trendy wine-barred Victorian bricked suburb of Oxford, overlooking a narrow overgrown garden tumescent from today’s grim humidity.

Its ninth week and most first-years have started their prelims today. The ritual begins with the layers of subfusc, the pinning of the carnation, and the mortar-board carried (never worn) into the exam hall. Once you arrive at the place of examination, you’re directed to a marquee where candidates mill around like animals awaiting slaughter, black-and-white dressed penguins with marvelously English faces who tear through notes, select the correct amount of highlighters, assume superiority (if you take PPE) or exaggerate the expectation of certain failure (English). You delay nervousness (or increase it) by looking at the large seating chart. Then there are the announcements: no bottled water with screw caps, no carbonated water, no cellphones. There are more announcements inside: only one male and one female to the bathroom at any given moment. Invigilators swan about looking alternately like severe police officers and happy sadists who delight in the misery of the young(er). And three hours later you’re forced out blinking and nauseous, paranoid and exhausted, only to know exactly what lays in store for you the following day. And knowing that prelims are just a drop in the bucket compared to the rigor of three year Finals, which might require three times as many exams, and aren’t simply pass-fail.

There is the illusion that one feels like a day and night of debauchery following the last exam. Perhaps this only evolves in Finalists. I was glad for the confetti, but was ready to fall asleep before we hit the Turf. In re-reading this I become aware of how – and everyone says it – boring exams truly are. One forgets this fact in the rush of nerves, terror, and adrenalin, becoming a hand which tries to be an immediate extension of the brain, recalling facts, data, and quotes through the medium of automatic writing. And on the long walk home, tourists take pictures of you, and you walk in front of Young Literary Men who trade ingenious arguments (made up on the spot, of course) of what Beckett really accomplished in Godot.

But then summer begins: punting with a boat of Germans who speak about Hume (in English), and making plans to read Russians, and learn Anglo-Saxon (however much your tutors believe this is not something you are likely to accomplish), and the possibility of being a barista.

June ends

2011-06-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Midsummer, the longest day of the year; over sixteen hours of light mostly masked by the rain. In coming to England I imagined that the day before, Midsummer Eve, would be my high festival. We’d go into the woods to do the rites with twigs and herbs and light a fire and dance around it wildly and yell full-throated, and drink nettle-tea, or sweet wine, and watch the smoke rise. Out on the meadow, or in a copse. Instead I was preparing for Mods. Yesterday, Midsummer’s Day, was spent writing theory in a post-apocalyptic hellhole in Summertown.

I’m going to pretend today is Midsummer’s Eve. There’s a garden party in the quad, and the wind turns a fierce corner. The sky is alternately sullen and gleeful. We might be rained out, or hear the night birds.

I will midsummer-ly console myself with my favourite part of my favourite book: Midsummer’s Eve in I Capture the Castle, which is pure indulgence to include here (but which I will do anyhow):

There wasn’t a breath of wind as I climbed the mound. The sun was down – usually I begin the rites by watching it sink, but trying the scent had taken longer than I realized. The sky beyond Belmotte Tower was a watery yellow with one streak of green across it – vivid green, most magically beautiful. But it faded quickly…

When the fire was blazing high again I felt we had better get the rites over. My self-consciousness about them had come back a little so I was as matter-of-fact as possible; I must say leaving out the verses made things rather dull. We burnt the salt and the herbs…and shared the cake with Heloise; Simon only had a very small piece because he was full of dinner. Then we drank the Vicar’s port…I hoped we could leave things at that, but Simon firmly reminded me about dancing round the fire. In the end, we just ran round seven times, with Heloise after us, barking madly. It was the smallest bit as if Simon were playing with the children, but I know he didn’t mean it, and he was so very kind that I felt I had to pretend I was enjoying it myself – I even managed a few wild leaps. Topaz is the girl for leaping; last year she nearly shook the mound.

And suddenly knew that I had been right in fearing this might be my last year for the rites – that if I ever held them again I should be ‘playing with the children.’ I only felt the smallest pang of sadness, because the glory of supper at Scoatney was stretching ahead of me; but I said to myself that, Simon or no Simon, I was going to give the farewell call – a farewell for ever this time, not just for a year….I called – and it echoed back from the castle walls as I knew it would. Then Heloise raised her head and howled – and that echoed, too. Simon was fascinated; he said it was the best moment of the rites.

Sober sub fuscing

2011-06-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

‘It is farely easy to be topp in English and sometimes you may find yourself even getting interested. If that happens of course you can always draw junctions and railway lines on your desk
- ‘How to be topp in English’, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, How to be Topp

The culmination of three terms: Mods, my first-year examinations, begin this afternoon. I am to take a taxi north to Summertown – we are taking them at Ewert House rather than the Exam Schools – for the next four days until we finish in victory, or at least exhaustion, on Friday. Intro to literature, Victorian, Twentieth Century, Medieval, finis.

Wearing, as per instruction:

(for women) white blouse, black ribbon tie, dark skirt, dark tights, both mortar board (or soft cap) and gown are worn

with the white carnation that signifies today's the first exam.

Most important is my wall of secular saints above my desk, watching me suspiciously to see if justice will be done to their work. I must say that Beckett looks the most suspicious, but Woolf looks a bit wistful, as though she rather likes the idea of timed handwritten essays.

2011-06-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Just learned of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor's death. Am somewhat heartbroken, though death at the age of 96 is not, I imagine, unexpected. I have been waiting for the third volume of his autobiography, and the news that he had decided to learn to type a few years ago just encouraged the possibility that it might appear. And now never got the chance to crash his Grecian villa. A sad day.

Fragments of Woolf

2011-05-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at my tutorial on Virginia Woolf, I stopped and thought how funny it was – (embarrassing, sentimental to note how cyclical) – that a year and a half ago I sat in a bookstore office at 6.30 in the morning with the phone pressed against my ear, listening as some person in an imaginary ivoried city read the first page of Mrs Dalloway to me and asked me to respond. And J was in the room listening to my answer on speakerphone, sitting against the same backdrop of books, the prints of the Brontës, Lawrence. And now I sit opposite him, reading my essay, quoting those same lines back to him.

(copyright Frederic Lefebvre)

It was a day for Woolf: not only did the rain thunder down, vanish, and play havoc with the light (very Between the Acts), but I saw James Wood speak on Woolf and mysticism at St. Anne’s. I’m a long-time Wood fan and found his discussion of To the Lighthouse in the light of Woolf's religious and secular mysticism engaging (if not shattering). I hadn’t thought of the connection to the Psalms, to ‘Dover Beach’, Moby Dick, or Krapp's Last Tape. And very thankful to Wood for quoting Walter Benjamin on attentiveness as the ‘natural prayer of the soul’: an elegant idea, and one that will come in handy in discussing David Foster Wallace’s Pale King.

2011-05-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

The - it seems - infinite delay: essays and mealtimes and sleep. Skating backwards, losing at croquet.

And sometimes a little something else: I saw Tom Stoppard speak at the Sheldonian ten days ago and wrote a sliver for the Cherwell here.

Audenary Afternoon

2011-05-10T07:51:00.001-07:00

I so clearly remember being moved by Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ in grade 10 English with Miss Scott and that uncomfortable corrugated iron prefabricated building next to the cricket pitch, the cheaply wrinkled photocopied handouts, it being one of the four poems we read a year (our ambitious syllabus) – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s Day?’, ‘God’s Grandeur’, and something else (we didn’t care, poetry was an inscrutable equation every now lit up by a phrase or a word that was likeable for its own sake, but there was no meaning transferred).

The immediacy of the poem, the grief (‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead/ scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead’). I spent years trying to remember whether it was W.B. Yeats who wrote it, or W.H. Auden (same number of letters, etc). Now, I suppose this gives evidence of the development of personal taste, because I find it cloying (‘I thought love would last forever: ‘I was wrong'), coloured perhaps by the poem’s popularity, in the way that Pachelbel’s Canon in D was diminished by learning that it was played at nearly every American wedding.

Now reading Auden in preparation for the essay on Thursday, I find myself poking at the knots in his other poems. His 1928 charade ‘Paid on Both Sides’ for example, a blood feud which combines the inheritance of Norse sagas and schoolboy mythology (those wonderful lines ‘Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat/ Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder’s bite…’), and also his ‘Lullaby’, which Edward Mendelsohn (Auden’s literary executor) said was the ‘first English poem in which a lover proclaims, in moral terms and during a shared night of love, his own faithlessness.’

‘Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful...

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost...’

A day of poetry. Geoffrey Hill at the exam schools tonight on ‘Poetry and Disproportion’.

A Sudden Mania for Mallets

2011-05-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Though last night brought the first proper rain in the last six weeks, the Trinity term has begun and that means croquet. The college rule that forbids sports on the quad lawns – except for croquet, in Trinity – was the reason I moved here.

So, suitably wooed with the promise of Pimm’s on the green, but without any functioning knowledge of the sport (and, let’s get this straight, it is a sport), I joined a college team. Our first practice was on Thursday afternoon in the University Parks, with our first match against Somerville on Friday afternoon, leaving the team, all relatively inexperienced, with little promise of success.

O Croquet: the idiosyncrasies of your handbook, the polite but anguished repression of your players (and instructors) upon the fertile grounds of flirtation, the pun-ability of nearly all your terminology. One is required to know when to roquet, when to croquet, and how to do a rush, a stop-shot, and a stab. This is no easy clipping of the ball through the hoop (which is only marginally, the size of a pound coin on its side, larger than the balls) with flamingos, but a ‘tactical struggle’ for mastery of the course. When the instructor told us to make sure to ‘stalk’ over to the ball so as to properly align, I heard ‘stork’ and subsequently spent the rest of the session swinging my mallet between my legs in the manner of a wading water fowl.

So it was with great trepidation and no knowledge of the rules or how the game operated that we arrived at Somerville yesterday to play two hour-long games two-by-two. And the intensity; the insidiousness debate over whether lifting the hoop was cheating or not; the contributed opinions of nearly every passer-by; A’s grave face pale with anxiety when it appeared we might lose. Our last-minute breaking success ensured that we remain in the Cuppers tournament, that Somerville has been annihilated, and demanded an instant and ostentatious celebration.

Croquet may look like a blasé hobby of horse-faced aristocrats, but it’s a cold-blooded exercise in precision. I may have a new obsession. A game tonight on the quad to perfect the roquet, croquet, continuation! It’s like pool, but better. (There’s infinitely more room for sabotage.)

Revived Passions

2011-04-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

Al men that walkis by waye or strete,
Take tentes yoe schalle no tauayle tyne.
Beholde myn heede, myn handis, and myne feete,
And fully feele nowe, or yoe fyne,
Yf any mournyng may be meete,
Or myscheue mesured vnto myne.
- Jesus, Crucifixion, York Cycle

It’s appropriate that Passion week has just finished and as I attempt to study for my collections, one of the things about Middle English Literature I’m currently most interested in are the mystery plays, those immense cycles put on by cities in Yorkshire and East Anglia, which culminate in the Passion. The cycle plays chronicle salvation history from Creation to Doomsday with individual pageants – chapters in the story of salvation narrative – written by guilds and performed on wagons traveling through the city streets.

Historically critics have treated the mystery plays as crude precursors to Shakespeare and modern drama, but there’s been a resurgence of interest in these plays (jagged, inventive, irreverent, boisterous) as national gems in their own right. The plays functioned as festival, as a display of civic pride, as a means of educating the laity, and an aid to devotion. Mystery plays were also a way for epic biblical history to condense and fuse with temporal history in a way which made the story of salvation local and particular.

There’s been a lot of coverage of Michael Sheen’s performance in National Theatre Wales’ 72-hour Port Talbot Passion, written by Welsh poet and novelist Owen Sheers. Apparently six thousand people participated as the news spread by word of mouth. It’s not strictly, theologically, a passion play (more in the spirit of the thing); but reviews are enthusiastic. The idea that interactive, local, communal street theatre is as vital and moving in the twenty-first century as it was in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries indicates that the anonymous playwrights of the Wakefield/Towneley and York plays were onto something.

Read what Sheers had to say here

2011-04-24T02:51:00.001-07:00

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’

- Eliot, The Waste Land

This April, the cruelest month has been fine and temperate. Today, the day after Shakespeare’s birthday and St. George’s Day, a day of hot cross buns and new leaves, the sacrifice is completed, the Waste Land renewed.

(failed) Day in the Life of an English Student

2011-04-23T12:52:00.001-07:00

Today I:

Checked the weather, facebook, emails, various purposeless google searches
Watched episodes of three television shows & the beginning of one 90s film
Listened to internet radio and napped
Posting here. Ashamed of myself.

Slightly atoned for by dipping into Guardian review, hilarious letters of Philip Larkin (see picture, he obviously disapproves of my lifestyle) & cookies, after which I realize that life was more easily literary pre-internet – not an original thought admittedly – and that I am crippling myself with this laptop and Ethernet cable. Ways to change this? (Besides obvious and unpleasant unplugging of Ethernet cable.)

Friday is collections. On the upside - so's the Royal Wedding. No one can stop talking about it; the papers are buzzing. Thursday evening the British monarchy caused at least three separate conversations.

Lady Novelists

2011-04-17T02:11:00.000-07:00

Apologies for anyone who’s talked to me about gender differences at all before, but this is perhaps hanging over from last night’s wine-heated kitchen conversation about gender and language (big surprise).

From The Voyage Out:

‘Persuasion,’ announced Richard, examining the volume:
‘That’s for Miss Vinrace,’ said Clarissa. ‘She can’t bear our beloved Jane.’
‘That – if I may say so – is because you have not read her,’ said Richard. ‘She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess.’
‘She is the greatest,’ he continued, ‘and for this reason: she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does; on that account, I don’t read ‘em.’

Of course, I’m not sure what I think about the ‘female sentence’, which writers like Dorothy Richardson, who I enjoy, sought to discover and perfect. I think I have less sympathy for it than I once did, because I’m not much a supporter of essentialism. I don’t think there is such a thing as an essentially female anything.

But this reminded me of this wonderful antique store in Woodstock, near Blenheim, which offers a great selection of early twentieth century writers. But – strangely the books are shelved by gender. The novels written by women oppose a shelf where all the novels by men are kept. I can’t imagine the reason for this. It makes the books seem prude.

2011-04-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve loved Virginia Woolf for a long time, and this vacation has sparkled because of her prominence on my reading list. But I’ve never found her funny, have never laughed out loud while reading, though I know she was supposed to have been a wit, a great impersonator and gossip.

I'm reading The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel, for the first time, & I've just reached the scene of the engagement ball in a South American hotel where the awkward and inexperienced protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, seizes the piano to prevent the dancing from breaking up. At first the dancers protest that they can’t dance to her music, when her aunt Helen cries ‘This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!’ and all the characters who have until now been priggish snobs begin to cavort:

‘St. John hopped with incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right…Hewet, swaying his arms and holding out the tails of his coat, swan down the room in imitation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden dancing before her Rajah…Mr. Pepper executed an ingenious pointed step derived from figure-skating…’

This kind of undignified noisy comedy seems like nothing else in Woolf and begging for Baz Luhrman to take a crack at it.

Postcards from Kerry

2011-04-10T06:08:00.000-07:00

Arrived back in Oxford from Kerry yesterday in time to catch the new flowers blooming, the sun out (and the city in an unexpected state of undress and joie de vivre), and the tail end of the Oxford Literary festival. In the space of the month in Ireland we missed the death of Liz Taylor and the publishing of David Foster Wallace’s Pale Kings (on my immediate to-read list) and had to catch stray headlines about Japan’s post-disaster recuperation and the Libyan situation on visits to the shop for milk and to the Lobster bar for the rare pool game, Guinness or glass o’ wine.

The house was in Kerry, in the tiny Charlie Chaplain-championed coastal town of Waterville. Waterville lies on the Inis Lough peninsula on the Ring of Kerry; the town is wrapped around the Banskellig bay (skelligs are, I believe, early Christian settlements on rocky outcroppings only reached by boat), surrounded by cow-and-sheep farming land, and touching Lough Currane.

Drives to Killarney and Kinsale involved deathly (and I mean deathly) Irish country roads, being trapped by slurry trucks or tractors, crossing mountains, bogland, peat, gorse, moor, and sheep country.

We became fans of Derelicte architecture.

Listened to Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Carole King, & the Eurythmics.

Days of food, tea, scrabble, cards, tea, next term’s reading list (Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Pinter, Yeats), watching the ponies on the hill, an amateur production of Importance of Being Earnest attended by cows, short walks, and tea.

The weather was unseasonably sunny on either side of the trip, but in the centre was several days of rough water, howling wind, rain, and the whole town sinking into silence.

The quiet was the best of it. Doing without much internet. Doing tasks slowly. Eating silently.

But it’s time to come back to the rattle of suitcases and clicking of smart heels on Holywell street, and the tourist-humming streets. Back to the books.

2011-03-15T02:08:00.001-07:00

I'm off to the wilds of Ireland with friends for the next month. See you in April.

Hilary Ends

2011-03-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

Went to Cheltenham this weekend to visit a friend after he finished his prelims. We met A at the bus-stop, red carnation still in his breast pocket for the coach to Gloucestershire. After a night well-spent with the best Shiraz I've ever had, admiring the almighty Aga in A's kitchen, we put on wellies, plaid scarves and November colours, grabbed the dog and headed off for a ramble in the Cotswolds. If it sounds idyllic, it's because it was - the only thing disturbing the picture was my dripping nose. A showed us where he used to live: a stone house undefended by border or fence from the woods, exposed to the late winter hills. We walked through the hawthorns and brambles to an abandoned farm where there was no sign of the promised owl, only scattered bones. A showed us his childhood swing, a leathery strap overgrown with moss, and the pheasant keep. The woods were entirely still, broken only now and then by a screaming kestrel or a startled pheasant. We walked in silence and did not grow uncomfortable.

2011-03-10T00:48:00.000-08:00

I've had Newsom's 'In California' (from Have One on Me) in my head for the last week, and eventually I gave up and looked at lyrics (which are just as supple as the music). It's a kind of poetry that seems both embodied and fluid. Even if the words didn't string together - which they do - the pleasure of saying them would be enough. The words simultaneously portray and create longing.

My heart became a drunken runt
On the day I sunk in this shunt
To tap me clean
Of all the wonder
And the sorrow I have seen
Since I left my home

My home, on the old Milk Lake
Where the darkness does fall so fast
It feels like some kind of mistake
Just like they told you it would
Just like the Tulgeywood

When I came into my land
I did not understand
Neither dry rot, nor the burn pile
Nor the bark-beetle, nor the dry well
Nor the black bear

But there is another
Who is a little older
When I broke my bone
He carried me up from the riverside

To spend my life
In spitting-distance
Of the love that I have known
I must stay here, in an endless eventide

And if you come and see me
You will upset the order
You cannot come and see me
For I set myself apart
But when you come and see me
In California
You cross the border of my heart

Well, I have sown untidy furrows
Across my soul
But I am still a coward
Content to see my garden grow
So sweet and full
Of someone else's flowers

Sometimes I can almost feel the power
Sometimes I am so in love with you
Like a little clock that trembles on the edge of the hour
Only ever calling out "Cuckoo, cuckoo"

When I called you
You, little one
In a bad way
Did you love me
Do you spite me
Time will tell if I can be well
And rise to meet you rightly
While, moving across my land
Brandishing themselves
Like a burning branch
Advance the tallow-colored walleyed deer
Quiet as gondoliers
While I wait all night, for you in California
Watching the fox pick off my goldfish
From their sorry, golden state
And I am no longer
Afraid of anything
Save the life that, here, awaits

I don't belong to anyone
My heart is heavy as an oil drum
And I don't want to be alone
My heart is yellow as an ear of corn
And I have torn my soul apart
From pulling artlessly with fool commands
Some nights I just never go to sleep at all
And I stand
Shaking in my doorway like a sentinel
All alone
Bracing like the bow upon a ship
And fully abandoning
Any thought of anywhere
But home, my home
Sometimes I can almost feel the power
And I do love you
Is it only timing that has made it such a dark hour
Only ever chiming out "Cuckoo, cuckoo"

My heart, I wear you down
I know, gotta think straight
Keep a clean plate
Keep from wearing down
If I lose my head
Just where am I going to lay it

For it has half-ruined me to be hanging around
Here, among the daphne blooming out of the big brown
I am native to it, but I'm overgrown
I have choked my roots on the earth, as rich as roe
Here, down in California

Memento Mori

2011-03-09T00:22:00.000-08:00

It’s Lent at last. I’m going to St. Mary Mags at 12.15 for the imposition of the ashes. There’s something so fantastically solemn about the rite. I’ve always loved it, even when I was in my first few years of primary school with very little experience of liturgical ritual. I went to a Catholic school and all the Catholic boys and girls would be led to the chapel – the oldest RC in South Africa, I think; it was pretty in a purple, gaudy Italianate way – and the non-Catholics would be taken to the stone Anglican church around the corner. After we returned, we’d line up in the bathroom and compare our foreheads, who had the biggest cross and whose grandparents having died that year had been subsequently recycled to make the ashes.

I think the comfort of the rite is partly the reminder of mortality, partly the beauty of penitential language (how often do we welcome imposition?), and partly the feeling of being touched lightly, officially, publicly on the forehead.

This is the time between death and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
- T.S. Eliot ‘Ash Wednesday’

In which C Meditates on Selfhood and Receives a Visit

2011-03-05T00:21:00.000-08:00

March; the end of seventh week; Kristin and Pat have gone home; the crocuses are out; Lent approaches.

In my last literary theory tutorial we discussed character and subjectivity. As with all lit theory, conversation begins with what seems like common sense and quickly deteriorates. Common sense and ‘what is obvious’ only becomes more of a target; the less evaluated an idea is, the more suspect it becomes. At any rate, the question of subjectivity – of what makes a person a person, or I an I, and if such a thing exists at all – is one I’ve been interested in for a while. It’s easy to think of yourself as a bag of characteristics, things you like, your behavioral traits and emotional tendencies. Patricia Waugh in her Metafiction writes that this is a construction created by the base (in the Marxist sense), and projected through the superstructure. It is convenient for capitalism to have subjects that can be reduced to unified tendencies, because once that subject can construct a set of desires, advertising can target that set. Virginia Woolf wrote about people who weren’t cohesive, characters (including herself) who were jumbled collections of fragments, distortions, contradictions. Twentieth century theory took this farther by exploring the ideal self (as in Lacan’s mirror-phase, desire, and lack) and the construction of self through roles (always non-essential, multiple, and existing in particular contexts).

K and I always talked through selfhood, our own and others. After knowing each other for six years, it’s a conversation that has built up quite a wealth of past material. What is continuous and what is lost from the self; what comes back, surprisingly, at times. I thought about this when coming across Hardy’s Tess:

‘As she walked along today, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’ (Tess of the D’ubervilles)

Despite the purple prose, I think this makes the point. Whatever makes a person a person, which differentiates people, it is remarkable to see how continuous people can be. Not just the other person (the not-I) but also the I that is suddenly resurrected when the other person comes into view. I ran from the lit theory tute at Corpus and stood at the market outside of Gloucester Green in the rare sunlight, and was surprised by feet and Kristin’s shout, I felt entirely, unremarkably, called back to myself.

That Time of the Night

2011-02-19T15:21:00.000-08:00

Now:

It’s a Saturday night and I’ve had my fill of morality plays and constructed subjectivity for one night. It’s been a while since I’ve written about books. I suppose that’s either because there’s no time or because I'm lazy. I'm not going to make a decision tree. I’m trying to sneak peaks at Brighton Rock in preparation for the Rowan Joffe film, and Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns but without much continued success.

Book-Related:

A few weeks ago I spoke with Penguin Great Ideas superstar designer David Pearson in an interview for the Cherwell. I found a fellow-enthusiast in David; both of us fans of Penguin’s elegant volumes. In fact I’ve been a longtime Penguin groupie. (They have a good backlist and their visual art is impeccable. And the postcards...) I’ve begun a small collection of grande dames: Nancy Mitford, Rose Macaulay, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark. My favorite title is one I picked up in Woodstock last December, Reading for Profit.

I hoped that it would spell a sure way to find a job that enabled me to read and get paid obscene amounts of money for it. Instead it is a series of lectures on literature given by an Allied prisoner of war during the Second World War. Close guess.

The Sweetness of Life now is:

Late night glass of red; Iron & Wine; A bout de soufflé tomorrow; remembering a small boy yelling on the street at the top of his lungs ‘Will anybody find meeeeeeeee somebody to love’ this afternoon; the prospect of running in the crisp misted parks tomorrow morning; visitors coming from Seattle this Thursday to nest in a warm attic -

Ides of February

2011-02-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

The blog was ready for a change. This wallpaper looks a bit garish now, but this looks vaguely Bloomsburyish.

Mid-February already, and we’re in fifth week. Shockingly, this means only three more weeks until the Easter vacation and Ireland, a house in the backwater of Killarney. The weather has been suitably miserable. Hilary is the dark term. Everyone is willing to hunker down in their rooms until Trinity, which begins in April around the time of the Royal Wedding. I haven’t done much aside from work (and avoid it by walking up and down the stairs). Reading Chaucer has led to Thomas Hoccleve and his Marian lyrics. With scattered showers of literary theory every odd Thursday. I may throw over everything in favour of Brighton Rock.

The snowdrops are out, and that means spring. (Does it?) Morning and evening birds sing. They weren’t there two weeks ago.

Last Saturday night I found I had grown restless and ached to move about. Leaving college with three friends, we walked to Port Meadow just before ten and crossed onto it while the moon and the stars were still out. Cassiopeia was visible, and the Plough (the Big Dipper). Horses loomed next to the stile we crossed onto the meadow, just on the edge of Jericho, only fifteen minutes on foot from the center of town. They watched us warily, and moved heavily like rhinos. Over the bridge; the Cherwell at night; the canal boats moored, several of them with lights on behind frowsy curtains; the river life. We stopped at the Perch for a pint, returned as the clouds washed over, and, stiff-legged, took a chocolate digestible before bed.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter

2011-02-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

The wind has been howling these three days. Anna said it reminds her of change. To me it seems like madness.

The play finished last night and it has been a spectacular run. We sold all but three tickets in the week and were supported by professors, lecturers, college members, friends, strangers. I think, astoundingly, we made a profit.

I’ve been reading T.S. Eliot and I’ve concluded that April is not the cruelest month, February is. Nothing can be more dead than it is now. Where are the roots that clutch/What branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?...

And my favorite part:

There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Nous Theatre Proudly Presents

2011-02-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

“In every corner of being myself there is a little of you left and now I must start to lose it.”

A white librarian and a coloured schoolteacher in South Africa in the 1960s discover their love is easily fractured by apartheid.

On a bare stage, the pastiche of conversations and monologues mirrors the changeability of human connection: of suddenly discovered sympathies and the chasms created by misunderstanding and shame. Fugard’s play shows the painful truth that apartheid’s most exacting humiliation was the stripping of dignity and selfhood. In sparse, resonant language the truth is clear: there can be no intimacy where there is no equality.

Tonight – after weeks of planning and fretting – is the opening night of Nous Theatre’s production of Athol Fugard’s Statements Taken After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act! It’s hard to believe somehow it's gone from germinating idea about forming a company to box office tickets already. It's been a privilege.

I’ve seen the play twice through and it’s a gutsy, intimate drama. As Marketing Director, it’s my proud duty to let people know about the play, so if you’re in the Oxford area come see Statements at the Burton Taylor Theatre from Feb 1-5th at 7.30. You really can’t have anything better to do.

Book tickets here

More information at our website and our Facebook page.

You can read Milja Fenger’s (director) interview with Athol Fugard here.

2011-01-29T01:36:00.000-08:00

I've been published in print at last! An article on Bolaño in the Cherwell here.

Can reality be transcribed? An attempt to put things into words in florid sentences:

2011-01-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

After attempting to find an outfit at the Red Cross charity shop for tonight’s bop, I made my way back to college by way of the walled winding Queen’s Lane. The sun was starting to sink and as the sky was a fading blue and the evening birds sang there was something almost like June in the air. As I passed the walls of Queen’s College, the voice of a heroic tenor erupted from one of the windows. A pause. A few steps later, the voice sang a short run, abruptly descending into a tired sigh. After passing the mysterious place where I think the journal Areté might be (where the letters of Milan Kundera are surely addressed) the unmistakable – though surprising - sound of a chord from a full orchestra.

The suddenness of this chord impressed upon me at once the sense of grasping the depth of something which, almost as soon as it was grasped, was gone. This can only be the case of something which happens suddenly. A chord from an orchestra you expect to hear can hardly unveil the same sense of fleeting possession.

(The orchestra was one with both the stability of the double bass and the serenity of the winds, and the chord it played was a tonic chord in the first inversion. In the event that you are the type of person to run to a piano to try it out, I can imagine that the sound my ears received can be transmitted by means of the internet to anyone with an instrument and the ability to play a tonic chord in its first inversion, with its third so sweetly prominent.)

Another chord succeeded it. Just two perfect chords, which lingered in the lane with the sound of graspable possibility.

---

HA! How pretentious this all sounds. I promise: this year's New Year's resolution is to write in short sentences. Like Hemingway.

Once on this island

2011-01-17T23:11:00.000-08:00

Island literature is so wonderfully stagey. Like the murder in the English village, the island is a self-contained playground for certain fantasies to run wild, and for certain conceits to be explored. I wonder who first discovered the island as the fertile ground to explore themes of civilization and degeneration? For characters to perform as a microcosm (a word I learned when reading Lord of the Flies) for society.

I traced my way to The Island of Dr. Moreau backwards: from LOST, to Bioy Casares’ Invention of Morel, to a lecture on mad doctors and vivisection (from which I learned the term apophane, or, cutting the vocal chords of an animal so that the vivisector will not be bothered by the sounds of pain by the subject under the knife), to a Penguin Classic picked up in George’s best used bookstore.

It was an unnerving and unsafe read: chanting beast-people and scientists with questionable ethics are the only companions this narrator can expect to have on a mysterious island after being rescued from a shipwreck. Moreau, a white-haired scientist who wants to transform his animal subjects into people by his knife and instruction, is attended by Montgomery, a doctor who has taken to drink and is sympathetic to the beast-people.

Prendick, the narrator, sees the beast-people exhibiting worrying signs of atavism, and the reader understands that Moreau only has the upper hand for now. Prendick is unlikeable: his lack of sympathy for the beast-people (and his despising Montgomery for his sympathy) and their animal regression demonstrates a repression and self-loathing. The beast-people are uncomfortably like him, but he is clear to emphasize their otherness. Prendick’s initial vague descriptions of the beast-people as black faced, misshapen servants wearing excited animal expressions easily mirrors the interplay of colonizer and colonized.

For Prendick, the most terrifying discovery of his narrative is how much his own civilization mirrors the beast-people’s society, how much their decay might be our own. The most uneasy part of the narrative for me was the cries of the puma in the room next to Prendick’s as she is being remade. (Moreau does not here make use of apophane.) The day after reading this I went to a craft fair and when a giant Rottweiler happily brushed by, I was unable to stop thinking about what monstrosity Moreau would have turned the dog into, and what sounds it would have made.

Blessed Bookstores

2011-01-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

A rainy, blustery day, and just after seeing the cottage of my dreams, a brick ivied house in Jericho, potential residence for next year (sadly unlikely), I popped into Oxfam and found the man of my dreams:

I've been thinking about buying this for at least four months. And this copy was only a tenner, not thirty-five pounds. Consolation, in part, for the cottage.

2011-01-13T01:43:00.000-08:00

Henry James anticipating Saussure and much of twentieth century literary theory:

'What's language at all but a convention?' said Isabel. 'She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I've met, to express herself by original signs.'

- Portrait of a Lady

Time flies

2011-01-12T00:03:00.000-08:00

Time flies. It’s 2011, Christmas break is over, New Year was beat in with pots and pans and vuvuzelas, and summer was swapped for winter as I left South Africa and returned to Oxford yesterday. Collections (exams on last term’s work) on Friday, and thus to delay study: time for the year’s review:

The Book:
The half of Cultural Amnesia I read (put on hold) and Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer

The poem:
W.H. Auden – ‘Fall of Rome’

The Film:
Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore (I am love), soundtrack by John Adams

The T.V. Show:
LOST (tied with Planet Earth)

The Album
Easy, Joanna Newsom

The signposts:

Shi-Shi, the stars

Kristin & Patrick’s wedding

Laura & Jeremy’s wedding (also known as best dance party of 2010)

A move

A surprise adventure

It’s hard to be excited for 2011. Last year felt full of so much promise. This year holds neither promise nor dread; it’s the blankest of blank.

To-night a scrambling decade ends,
And strangers, enemies and friends
Stand once more puzzled underneath
The signpost on the barren heath
Where the rough mountain track divides
To silent valleys on all sides
Endeavouring to decipher what
Is written on it but cannot
Nor guess in what direction lies
The overhanging precipice.

From Auden’s New Year Letter, Part II

Things I learned in Istanbul

2010-12-30T03:02:00.000-08:00

Istanbul on the outskirts of its heart is a place of motion: buses, speeding cars and taxies, and the trams. The buildings on either side of the wide street were like seventies apartment buildings covered in signs and placards and lights. The shops were clothes re-sellers, leather bag stalls, hairdressers, gyro-ceries, cheap wares and street food. Every so often the minarets of a mosque, a camii, would separate the stores, and through the garden grilles were grass covered sepulchers decorated with gold Arabic calligraphy.

There are stray dogs in Istanbul, but there are far more cats

Men will follow solo female travelers (but not very far)
There are far more men on the streets, men and women do not walk together, and men frequently hold hands

Don’t have Turkish coffee with sugar and baklava. The coffee is better black.
The Blue Mosque is not the Haghia Sophia. Both are bigger than they seem.

Don’t try to walk into town, use the tram. It’s cheap and easy to use.
Do take the Nostalgic Bosphorous Tour on the ferry despite its cheesy name

The streets are very clean, smell like cigarette smoke and sometimes rose perfume but not spices
Visit in December, when the weather is sunny and mild and the tourists are celebrating Christmas at home
Take the classic guide to the city Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely’s Strolling Through Istanbul
Spend more than 20 minutes at the Topkapi Sarayi, the sultan’s palace
Note to self: Learn Turkish. Come back with friends.

Flying at Christmastide

2010-12-24T05:26:00.000-08:00

Stuck at Heathrow, missed flight, stuck in Istanbul. Now home in South Africa for a green Christmas. Will write more about the voyage later but for now - Merry Christmas.

L'hiver's here

2010-12-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

The snow started at 8.30 this morning and has continued to fall, a ridiculous, exorbitant, gratuitous amount of snow for which I am both exasperated and thankful. The city is very pretty in her winter wear, but all errands must be put aside because of the difficulty of walking. Within minutes one is completely covered in snow, which sticks and makes us look like a bunch of sheepish yetis. This morning the people out quietly walking under their bright umbrellas, heads down, feet shuffling, meeting friends silently, linking arms, made me think of Lucy and the faun.

Pauline Baynes' illustration

On St. Giles

I went into Oxfam to find a copy without any luck, but I did find an inexpensive first edition of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, which has been on my mind lately.

There’s a wedding happening in the college today, so I’m keeping my head low and enjoying a lock in with Roberto Bolano, watching the snow from my window.

College Envy

2010-12-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

You can't underestimate the seethings and manoeuvers within the Oxford system. It is not enough that everyone has made it here; there are secret loyalties, secret glees, secret shames: colleges and their status anxieties.

I'm not afraid to say that we are conscious of our position as being slightly outside the ordinary Oxford experience: as mature students, even in our twenties, we stand out among teenagers. And HMC is the newest and smallest college, with a modest endowment and a humble JCR, though we do make much of the prettiness of the buildings, the few illustrious college members (Joseph Priestly, James Martineau, William Gaskell) and dissenting heritage, the Burne-Jones window in the chapel, the central location, and the food. We are only one humble step above the Permanent Private Halls, which HMC left behind when becoming a constituent college in 1996.

But when you come up against the older, formidable colleges, the well-endowed institutions, the Grandes Dames - you have to raise your hat. Gerard and I went to Christ Church last week to see the icon exhibit at the picture gallery. (The icon exhibit was disappointingly small, but I did see some Dürer woodcuts, including his 1514 woodcut of St. Jerome in his study.) Before the doors opened, we wandered the ground, sniffling.

The late Norman Cathedral is gorgeously rich. The Jonah window, with its sixteenth-century stained and painted glass.

Came upon this bust, and as I'd just remembered that Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, was librarian here, I wondered if we'd run into him. And here he is, memorialized as Democritus, his pseudonym in his Melancholy.

The altar and the ceiling above it were particularly fine, a collision of shapes, arcs, and details.

Best of all: the cobwebs in the sunlight windows, out of reach, aesthetic spiders spinning their webs near the music of the choir and the colors of the windows.

Ramblings

2010-12-11T03:24:00.000-08:00

This week, in a city suddenly emptied of its students and crammed with Christmas visitors and nervous interviewees, has had its moments of misery and fun. For the majority of it I was sick, the weather was below zero, and everything was weary. In a moment of divine inspiration, a friend told me about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s six episode show The Trip (directed by Michael Winterbottom) and I’ve watched it compulsorily every since.

In The Trip Steve Coogan has booked a trip around the north of England to write up various restaurants and pubs for the Observer magazine. Though this was planned to be shared with his girlfriend Misha, in the face of their separation he invites Rob Brydon to join him. This show combines favourite elements: improvised comedy, impressions, pompous conversation, meta-television (how much are the actors themselves?), hours spent over food and wine, Wordsworth and Coleridge, beautiful wintry northern landscapes, and inevitable piano-accompanied melancholy.

As a result, I’ve found myself itching for peregrination (new favourite word: meaning journey, travels, rambling, random movements, pilgrimage). I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a coach and going to Yorkshire for two days, wandering the heaths and moors, and warming myself by the fire. Singing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Being soaked in solitariness and loneliness, bleakness and bareness. This is only accentuated by the medieval English history I’m reading: the cold clammy castles, the marches, and the Percys of Northumberland.

This is obviously as romanticised as I always get over the unknown: but I think I’d like a bit of it – old and creaky, miserable and shabby, with the promise of hot food. Of course I’d need company to enjoy the hours of eating. Most Harris Mancunians have gone home; there’ll be five of us left this week. In the wake of a sudden stillness, I suppose it is the poets one is left with.

So I’ll take a leaf out of Rob Brydon’s book with the beginning of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

Keep your eye out for The Trip: If you’re in the U.K. you can find it on BBC iplayer, and it’s been edited into a full-length film to be released in the U.S. in 2011.

The pleasures of winter (to be fair)

2010-12-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

- Visible breath
- Frosted spider webs
- Red berries gathered with ice
- The sharp sun
- Mint mochas
- Evening ice skating!

In addition: today I stopped by the Oxfam on St. Giles and found a first edition copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Book & the Brotherhood for £1.99. It was destiny!

(Manic joy; forgive the nose red from sneezing.)

The indignities of winter

2010-12-06T11:28:00.000-08:00

- Sunset at 4pm
- the third cold in two months
- unshuttable windows and meager heating device
- thus frigid bedroom
- thus arthritic fingers
- cold toilets & showers
- not enough jumpers
- constant hunger
- hibernation instincts
- sense of the isolation of mankind
- belief in imminent destruction of the planet by comets
- walking around with an unchanging grimace

Who are these people who talk about crystalline walks in nature? And the minute perfection of frost patterns on windows? I’d like to know. I’d make them spend a night in my freezer – I mean room. Consolation: mulled wine.

Poetry as Perjury

2010-12-04T08:03:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I had my last tutorial of the term. It’s hard to believe nine week went by so quickly and now we’re saying goodbye to the Victorians, and staring straight across the table into Christmas’s sloe gin eyes. So now I have a little bit of time to I have to catch up on the things I missed.

Last Wednesday Geoffrey Hill, the newly elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, gave his inaugural lecture at the Exam Schools titled “How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester”. In our excellent seats (claimed a tad overeagerly, unsurprisingly, an hour before) we had a good view of not only the new Professor, but also of the various distinguished people, writerly people, who flooded the room in their London coats, newspapers tucked under their arms, with definitive noses and eye pouches. I recognized Hermione Lee, most of my lecturers, a man who may have been Philip Pullman – I couldn’t help wondering why everyone didn’t just come in with name tags on their lapels.

Tolstoyan, Darwinian, Hill sat in front of the microphone with a chest cold – “a stupid, stupid infection…my chest, not poetics” – and with precise, enunciated punctuated consonants gave a pessimistic, ironically rousing, lecture. As the “Professor of Perjury”, Hill compared himself to a “traumatized old man”, said that contemporary poetry does not require any encouragement from the university and compared the “national treasure” of British contemporary literature to a landfill. Hill made it clear that he would not be using his post as a podium from which to air his own poetry – saying that to do so before “a captive audience...[would be] abhorrent”. Instead, it would be a place to give a sense of his own poetics. He spoke about Shakespeare, Sidney, Eliot, and the American critics of the mid-twentieth century: R.P. Blackmur, Lionel Trilling, and Allan Tate.

“The greatest tragedy of the last sixty years is the extinction of the ontological reader,” Hill said. Like his writing, Hill's voice dripped with extreme severity.

Hill has been accused of obscurity, and he spoke clearly about his belief that “the emotion of art is impersonal”, that his advice to young poets is to be inventive rather sincere, and that “relevance and accessibility strike [Hill] as words of very slight value.”

The satisfaction of listening to a poet who is both erudite and wrathful was only increased by the various expletives Hill volcanically produced when misspeaking or misreading, crumbling the Dumbledoresque image he conjured up when peering over his glasses. I’m vastly looking forward to Hill’s next lecture.

If you’re interested in Hill, read Greg Wolfe’s editorial statement from a past issue of IMAGE, and then give Hill's daunting poetry (his newest volume is Oraclau/Oracles) a try.

Photograph by Andrew McNeillie here

Six Jesuits (one dead) and Me

2010-11-28T09:59:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on Gerard M. Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland, a sharply-wrought, uncomfortable, ecstatic poem. Hopkins had given up poetry when he joined the Jesuits, until he read of the sinking of the Deutschland in 1875, which so affected him that it wrenched open his cellar doors and propelled this beautiful monster out:

THOU mastering me
God! Giver of breath and bread
World’s strand, sway of the sea

going on to create the most radical poem of the nineteenth century. Hopkins was a student at Balliol, and I sneaked around on the internet and discovered that his juvenilia, fragments and devotional writings are housed in Campion Hall, the Jesuit Private Permanent Hall. (A PPH is not one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford). So I wrote to ask if I could take a look at them. The Bodleian, fairly, refused my request to see the mature poems.

Father Philip Endean kindly agreed to let me come to take a look, so I skived off the Decadent Victorian Gothic lectures I so look forward to with the wild-haired purple-vested Dr. Methven, and took a trip down St. Aldate’s.

Campion Hall is tucked on Brewer Street past Dorothy Sayers’ birthplace and the Christ Church Cathedral School, with rich and simple wood-paneled interiors and devotional sculptures on every way. The library is not nearly as ornate as our HMC Tate library with all of its stained-glass and smugly sitting James Martineau, but it is gravely snug, very wooden and cozy, wall to wall books (as libraries should be). Father Endean - a tall, kind and hasty man, with black button eyes and eyebrows that tend towards raised-ness - and I were joined by one, then two, three, four Jesuits. Three were students, and one a very distinguished-looking older gentleman who I thought must be a classicist. Spot the odd one out: the Protestant female in a circle of Catholic priests-to-be in this sanctum of celibacy. (What would Hopkins have said had he known how close my profane fingers were to be to his private writings?)

Father Endean started by opening an early school notebook, an intricate drawing of the battleship positions from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian war, with all the Greek and Persian ships geometrically aligned and perfectly labeled. Hopkins clearly had a mania for order and specificity (very evident in his choice of poetic language). His handwriting is miniscule, and as he is comfortable slipping into Latin, Greek and French, he demonstrates his good education. His ‘d’s’ look like lower-case deltas. In his early journal and notebook, both bound volumes each about the size of a fist, his handwriting shrinks to the microscopic.

“Even a moderately competent priest would have known to burn these,” Father Philip tut-tutted, handling Hopkins’ miniature notebook of confessional prompts. He cheerfully confessed he would have. “Though they’re for Anglican confession, so I suppose it doesn’t count.” (laughing.)

We were shown Hopkins’ sketchbook, his sermons, his personal notes on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and a draft of his vow. Father Endean left the room to collect another manuscript, and, the vow being in Latin, all Jesuits began to read it, debating the true definition of one or another of the words, ordination practices etc. When I asked awkwardly if anyone would be willing to share a translation or paraphrase, the distinguished classicist kindly jumped forward and began to translate on the spot this beautiful and moving vow for the priesthood. It was a moment to remember: the dry and locked-up words of a man long dead suddenly revived into the closeted air of that rich library.

Father Endean came back and nervously stood behind the desk, watching our nearness to the manuscript, and eventually “Fingers, Father, fingers!” When the reader paused to consider the wording of the last few stanzas, Father Endean could supply them from memory, as he is editing these manuscripts for publication.

In the last notebook we were shown, a compendium of notes, marks (for the university students in Dublin he taught in his later, most miserable years), and comments, we found an early draft of his poem 'Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves' and read in quiet admiration:

Disremembering, disremembering all now. Heart you round me right
With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us.

2010-11-25T03:44:00.000-08:00

I've just received an email to say that the Bodleian library has been closed. There have been increased student demonstrations and riots across Britain in the last few days - the first in Oxford were two weeks ago - protesting the budget cuts in university education (tuition will double within the next few years). There have been student activists inside the Rad Cam all last night. This is no Paris yet, but we'll see how it breaks down.

When I stood outside the Rad Cam in the freezing afternoon air, the police were pacing back and forth, the student newspapers were crowding in for pictures ("And get someone to ask the police how much money it's costing to keep them here all night..." in a suitably journalese voice), and everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

Meanwhile, I've heard from a few irate third-years protesting the means of protesters, displeased to lose time on their Final Honours papers. What are the protesters doing inside, one wonders? Apparently (citing Facebook) they are videoing themselves having dance parties on the desks of the Lower Rad Cam. Activism at its finest.

Sound & (non)Sense

2010-11-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Last December when I had my phone interview for Oxford, the British accents from the three academics on the other end of the line – so far away in this magical, unreal city that rained books and fellowships – the contrasts between their voices (which seemed to me like the poshest of posh Oxbridge accents) and the voices I heard every day in the bookstore (on the bus, on the streets, in my apartment) made the event even more surreal and unnerving.

It was only after weathering the first few days here that my ear began to pick up the nuances. My tutor now had an unmistakeably Scottish coloring in his voice.
The system is far more developed than I (should have) realized. I have very little idea what makes a Newcastle accent different from a Nottingham accent (if there is a difference). The different shades of Londonish don’t tell me who is from Croydon and who is from Hampstead (again, if there is a difference, and I think there is). I can tell the difference between Irish and Scot (thanks in part to my friend G and that academy award winning film Leap Year and Matthew Goode’s ‘Trow it in the wash an that’ll be grand’), but can’t articulate the difference between Brummie (Birmingham dialect) and Scouse (Liverpool). To carry on the Harry Potter references, I’ve been told that Hagrid is not North England, as I anticipated, but very likely some version of Somerset (or summer-sayt).

Today in Dr. Helen Barr’s lecture on reading verse (or perhaps, as she said, sounding verse), she mentioned the Leeds-born poet Tony Harrison, who is a example of someone with a bifurcated tongue: who grew up in a particular social environment, but was well-educated. As a result, Harris had to speak two languages, and writes about and within this peculiar form of dislocation. He intentionality uses rhyme to subvert – in his poem 'Book Ends', his rhymes privilege the North English accent and ‘lock’, as Dr. Barr said, the privileged tongues out.

Of course there is the typical Oxford rah. I went to attend a history society at Christ Church at the beginning of term, and – big surprise, no conforming to stereotypes here – I have never seen such a collection of peacockish old fogeys in my life. The tweed blazars, beardless faces and heavy-rimmed glasses (all carefully stylized to look Auden-and-Larkin-esque) have not been seen in such profusion since 1968. If you thought the Oxbridge accent was satirical it’s not. “Oh you,” said someone in a starched shirt as I was swept from my conversational partner, “I simply have someone I must introduce to you.”

Swamplandia

2010-11-20T03:18:00.000-08:00

I thought working in a bookshop made me a panicked reader. I brought my favorite books with me in the hope that a life devoted to reading - at least for the next three years - would allow me to more engage with the writers I hoped to enjoy and be educated by. Instead (big surprise) this rollercoaster of non-stop reading is rather (strangely enough) course related. This term I have dedicated myself to those funny people the Victorians. Aside from (or maybe in light of) their quirks, their categorization, their love of the miniature, their strange hobbies and anxieties, their advances and retreats, their observations and wrecks - I have found the Victorians to be an intriguing bunch. But as my tutor says, I must be warned not to lump them all into a big pot. The nineteenth century was a complex age, and just as the modern era, social attitudes changed throughout the century in small oscillations and wide leaps. Though tempted, one cannot summarize and say 'The Victorians were like this' (re: Foucault's writing on the Victorian approach to sexuality).

My weekly essays are largely self-determined. Each Friday at nine, when I go to my tutorial I am given the option of choosing the next week's study. So far it's been Browning, George Eliot, the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and now Trollope. I thought I should (as they say) curl up in bed with a Trollope, and so I picked The Way We Live Now. The last page was numbered close to 500 so I thought I could accomplish it despite its deceiving girth. Once I started reading it I realised that it was in two volumes and, in actuality, runs near to 1000 pages. I have only myself to blame. All week I sank into it. And now - now that it is over - I'd like to look around and read more Joscipovici or Geoffrey Hill or Bolano, all of which are in a pile by my bedside lamp and fill me with desire. Instead, I realize that it's not over. It's never over. There's the contextual information, the secondary sources, the essays and journal articles.

Even going down to the JCR for a coffee break to read the arts sections of the Guardian and the Times is overwhelming - there's simply no time to read all of this. It's a sad day when one has one of these What's-the-point?-I-forget-everything-I-read-I'm-just-a-needle-in-a-haystack-of-books kind of days. The only solution? More coffee, and the inevitable grim return to the stack on the writing desk.

Seasons of Mist

2010-11-16T09:39:00.001-08:00

In the last two days the temperatures have dropped to around or below freezing, and we’re suddenly puffing frosted breaths. This sudden chill is accompanied by a mist that has hung low over Oxford yesterday and today. It is not uncommon, I suppose, for mist in the morning, but yesterday the mist stayed until two in the afternoon, when it lifted for a sudden shout of blue sky, and then descended heavily two hours later. The same happened today. I made sure to get up earlier this morning and document the mist.

Here's Arlosh Quad in the morning:

En route to the square:

The Rad Cam, looking entirely fake.

The High.

The mist in conjunction with our Friday lectures on decadent Victorian Gothic and Jack the Ripper most recently has caused speculation as to which familiar face will soon loom out of the mist in a heavy coat, collar turned up, knife in hand. I have a few theories.

(Anna and Gerard on Holywell.)

2010-11-13T09:54:00.001-08:00

If you need a bit more Oxford in your life (let's face it, who doesn't?), check out this wonderful blog: Oxford Daily Photo. I'm a horrible wuss when it comes to stepping up and taking photos of things - it makes me feel conspicuous - and am so grateful the little things are being recorded.

Theatrics

2010-11-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

I posted about Harold Pinter’s Old Times a few weeks ago – I was over-the-moon when in a lecture on Tuesday on reading drama at the end of the class the lecturer asked three students onto the stage, where they read the first ten minutes of the play culminating in Anna’s monologue about London. The first read-through was done with a dominating man, a passive woman, and an ecstatic Anna; the second time was done with an anxiously affectionate husband, a laughing wife, and a dominating, deeply knowing Anna. I struggle to control my facial expressions when watching any acting (film or theatre), so I have no doubt I looked like a slaw-jawed child at Chuck-E-Cheese.

Theatre is becoming an increasing interest of mine; it’s something that’s popped up inexplicably with more and more frequency. It all started with the Tom Stoppard rash earlier this year. I saw Michael Gambon in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape on Saturday night (see photo; more later), and I’m thinking of doing a paper on Beckett in Trinity (spring) term. I’ve been reviewing plays for the Oxford Theatre Review, which is an online review (free plays, sign me up!) and saw Sir Arnold Wesker read two weeks ago. And the famous South African playwright Athol Fugard spoke in Oxford this evening as the Humanitas Professor of Theatre (more later) with the playwrights Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Her Naked Skin). And – I may be starting a theatre company with two ladies, depending on whether the play we’d like to put on next term gets selected for the Burton-Taylor theatre to stage. It’s all so sudden.

Remember, remember

2010-11-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

On bonfire night it rained. It started to spit when Anna and I went to buy jumpers to keep us warm for the evening around the fire (they wouldn’t keep out the wet). A large group of people were excited about the venture to the Isis tavern in Iffley: a long walk into the wooded area, along the river, and then the pub with its bonfire, sparklers, mulled wine, and live music. It was spitting as we left (umbrellas and raincoats on). The rain increased. We were soaked. I like being wet or dirty when it’s an outing or a story to tell later so I was quite happy by the dampness, the wet feet, the plastered hair, the wind, the splashing buses, the grim gargoyles gurgling above us, everything. It was like captaining a ship in a fine gale: a brisk trot headed south for the river, all in shipshape and thoroughly soaked.

On the Magdalen Bridge half of our number went back. Yes, they abandoned the drenched woods, the lit river, and the bonfire on the fifth of November for another evening at the college bar. Because it was raining. (I’m revoking their English cards.) Onward six intrepid travelers down the Iffley road, through quiet streets, interrupted by bangs! from sporadic hardcore fireworks enthusiasts. The clouds were so low that they reflected the city lights into the water – a clouded surface on which the ducks swam happily, uncaring of the hour or the wet weather. A puddled path. The smell of wood?

The rain was coming down so hard at this point that a bonfire – the main draw – could not be depended upon. But we got to the Isis, and surely enough there was a bonfire - a pile of large embers superficially flaming, but a bonfire nevertheless. The inside was horrendously packed (visitors sadly misunderstanding the queue system) and the mulled wine ran out three times, but eventually we had our drinks and stood under the marquee and around the fire, dripping, sizzling, sparklers in hand, and victorious. Later, in the room where the music was playing, listening to some man sing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights in falsetto (video here for the uninitiated, like me), knowing we’d have to go back outside into the unstopping rain, not knowing how much like an eel I looked (as Inman says in Cold Mountain: Ah’m wetter than a feesh. I cain’t get much wetter), happiness.

(Picture actually of Isis from the other side of the Thames. We were round the back)

Song for a Saturday Night

2010-11-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

Joni: I drew a map of Canada, Oh Canada, with your face sketched on it twice

After midnight on a bus, whispers from a couple in the fourth row sharing seats. Dark fields, sheep gathered in, no winding road, lonely twinned streetlamps suddenly go. Legs aching like all the rest, strangers asleep with wide open mouths. Drenched in guitars, the sound of deserted bars.

Joni: Oh you’re in my blood like holy wine, taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet -

For all those cat people

2010-11-04T13:11:00.001-07:00

I have to share this wonderful poem, which I was given in a lecture today. I'm not naturally a cat person, but living with two cats has won me over. This is a part of a poem called Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart, a man who wrote it while incarcerated in Bedlam for insanity (or what we would call a mental breakdown). Without further ado:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

This last line is the best ever.

All Hallows

2010-11-01T05:25:00.000-07:00

To those tempted to think that classical music is a dull, afternoon affair with sentimental violins beloved by old women with tea cozies – listen to Mozart’s Requiem. For a mass on behalf of the dead, for all its frequent pleas to rest in peace, this Requiem is a seething, tense, and dramatic exploration of the distance from the bowels of hell to the heights of the sublime. This is gut-wrenching music; music that moves you physically. Indulging in Mozart lore, one can imagine the composer scribbling furiously as the grim reaper approaches with his calling card; Mozart tossed into a pauper’s grave without the reception of his masterpiece.

The Commemoration of All Souls Requiem Eucharist at Merton College Chapel began with the Introit and Kyrie as the ministers processed in. It’s a piece that stacks up the intensity, beginning with the winds, adding strings, then the basses, tenors, altos and sopranos until what began as a whistle has become a vibrating mass of sound. The ministers entered the nave at the opening heights and the censer swung in step with the moving bass, the incense ascending with the sopranos, the timpani entering with a roll. This is high drama.

I sang the Mozart Requiem five years ago and its surprising how little of it disappears. The choice Latin phrases spring up “solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sybilla…” and the gyrating eighth notes that appear and disappear in each voice part, twisting around each other in urgent counterpoint; the quick breaths - it’s a sport. And this is what happens when you’re commanded to bounce around to your seat to the subdivisions by your conductor – years later you can’t help bouncing around in your seat surrounded by strangers who wonder if you suffer from a twitching disease.

I’ve heard the Requiem performed several times, but never listened to it as a part of a service. It was organic the way the music wove in and out of the service proper. The congregation sat in dark wooden pews facing each other, eyes to the colorfully tiled floor, or up to the painted wooden ceiling with clumsy angels and scriptural figures, all the cold stonework at the altar softened by candlelight. Elegant men with canes and famous chins; scholarship recipients identifiable by their proudly-worn full-sleeved gowns; token autumn coughing attacks; ten minutes of hearing the names of the dead recited; and free wine afterward.

Against the Picturesque Or the Purpose of This Blog

2010-10-30T00:11:00.000-07:00

Friends and family will know that I’m a born Anglophile. I looked forward to life in England with almost unmixed glee, and – as is natural – it is looks different from the other side; now that Seattle is a place beyond my reach, is looks perfect, like home.

In a city as dense with history and myth as Oxford, it is inevitable that one is lured into the city’s hazy atmosphere: the Keatsian seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Arnold’s dreaming spires, Waugh’s halcyon days, the tweed and pipe legends of Lewis and Tolkien, the detections of Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Morse, the gown-flappings and dinner halls of Harry Potter. It is in part because it is true; it is a magical enclave. But it’s also self-perpetuation, and I am guilty. Reading back over my blog posts, it’s a construction; no less true perhaps, and forgivable, but still a construction.

I am very susceptible to the picturesque. I am a fan of sheep grazing, buttons, widows with veils, rooms with views, literary people, red telephone booths etc. I might as well own up to my tendencies. It’s only fair that I inform you of my predispositions. These will probably continue. But I’m also looking for something that’s accurate. I don’t want to be another woolly (female) enthusiast.

Just down the street, opposite the Martyr’s memorial which stands out like a tiered stone Gothic cake, is a bus stop out of Oxford. Down-and-outers and their ratty dogs wait outside the grocery store, pedestrians collide with each other as they walk past with no apology or acknowledgment, schoolboys with sharp voices and cigarettes loiter. Why don’t I linger in front of Sainsbury’s and the bus stop like I dawdle in front of the Sheldonian Theatre? The two scenes form a diptych. And yet this “other” side of life is as much as the first a question of framing.

Part of my excitement at moving to a new place was the chance to exercise observation. I’m a born eavesdropper (but that’s another story). I’m fascinated by the members of the Mass Observation who after VE day in 1945 went around London recording the public’s responses. This attention involves a degree of separation and removal; regrettable – inevitable. So I’m going to do my best to attend to this. I’ll continue to write about the walled gardens, and burial places. But you deserve to know – and I should remember - about the drunken Frenchmen on the streets at night, the broken windows and break ups I can’t sleep through, the black hole of Primark, ups and downs of Harris Manchester, the Jamaican restaurants and mosques of Cowley Road and the real History Boys of Christ Church.

Second Sunday Outing

2010-10-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I and Anna and Gerard took an afternoon trip to Iffley, a village tucked inside a southern suburb of Oxford, a lovely, hushed village, with thatched cottages (with wire constraining the thatch). The sun was out at first, in wide skies. The church was on church lane, the mill on mill lane. Good sensible town naming committee.

A few weeks ago, I went to a cello performance of the Bach suites at St. Barnabus, a neo-Byzantine Anglo-Catholic church in Jericho. While I was looking around the church, which is only half-completed with mosaics, my companion remarked that he found it interesting that England, which has so many churches, should have all the churches used more and more for secular events and losing their religious ties. It’s a sad sentiment, but Philip Larkin said as much in a poem I very much like.

(From “Church Going”:

And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was…

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.)

This church, St. Mary’s in Iffley, was entirely deserted on a Sunday afternoon. We were the only ones in the thousand-year-old space, wandering down the nave, kept company by the plaques on the wall with the dates of birth, marriages and death dating from the eighteenth century. There was a note about a thirteenth century female anchorite who set up a shack against the building, but we couldn’t find her remnants, and we moved on. (I apologize for all the churches and graveyards. It seems like my sight-seeing has been quite grannyish, hasn't it? I haven't yet taken a camera to the King's Arms...)

Onward over the lock, alongside the Thames (at this lock the river is called the Isis), past the pleasure canal boats with their tiny tables and miniature lunch parties. The sun hid. Winter came. We stopped to have a cheeky half-pint at a pub called the Isis, a Georgian building with no hearty wooden sign and good Cotswalds cider. There’s folk music on the weekends here, and a bonfire planned for the fifth of November. I’m planning to return wearing a thick, ugly knitted sweater. Penny for the old Guy?

Sunday Outing the First

2010-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve come to the pleasures of walking late. Gone are the days when my family had to pull me out of the house with a rope around my neck. I’ve been converted. Two weeks ago a bright Sunday coaxed me outdoors. As I had just had coffee with an old friend from York High (those were the days), and he suggested a number of excursions, I thought I’d take meself off to Port Meadow, which had wonderful suggestions of sweet wine and rolling around in the grass. I experienced neither, but it was the perfect thing nonetheless.

I went up the Woodstock Road, past Jericho, and found it quite easily about half an hour out. I took the long way around, walked across the meadow, which was neither rolling hill nor flat field, but something in the middle. Groups of walkers in twos and threes and cyclists covered the footpaths, and happy blond children in jumpers gamboled and fell over each other on the hillocks.

I walked across the lock where the Thames crosses and past the few buildings (I must return to the Perch, which apparently is a prize-winning pub and has peacocks in the garden).

Fancy the river life? Step aboard...

Wondering if I had missed Binsey I asked a woman for directions on the road. Ten minutes further, she said. The road was deserted aside from an older gentleman on a bicycle (tweed coat, cap, and collie trotting beside) who did not acknowledge me, and a motorer or two.

To my delight, there were sheep.

And the Burrow!

Also swallows and very large cows. Eventually I found the church, St. Margaret’s, with goats grazing outside in a pen.

I did not go into the church but I did look around the graveyard and explored the healing well, an ancient site of pilgrimage attributed to St. Margaret (or of Oxford's patron St. Frideswide), supposed to be the inspiration for the treacle well in Alice in Wonderland. Instead of looking like a place where dessert is found, the well looked like a place bodies might rot for a very long time a la Lady Audley’s Secret, so I left.

I’m embarrassed to say I brought Brideshead Revisited (the dorkiest thing you can carry on your person in Oxford) with me. It seemed that sort of day. But I hid it close to myself and read it as I walked. I found the most apt exultant statement – I wish I’d hit upon it myself:

“...it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God…”

Now it's Official

2010-10-23T06:31:00.000-07:00

We might as well talk about matriculation, which happened last Saturday. Unlike high school, where we “matriculated” at the end of 12th grade, first years matriculate at Oxford to become full, official junior members of the university. This meant that we had to put on our subfusc – white shirts, black skirts or suits, velvet ribbons (women) or white bow ties (men) – and our gowns and carry mortar boards in our hands.

It meant walking down to the Exam Schools (the usual venue, the Sheldonian, alas, is closed for repairs) led by the famous translator of Anselm and the Desert Fathers, Sister Dr. Benedicta Ward, and being lined up like sardines inside the large writing hall (carpeted floors, powdered blue ceilings, the single portrait of Sweden’s favorite king trapped behind a projector screen) to await the ceremony along with the thousands of other first years who trooped into the hall in shifts.

The Vice Chancellor came in, we peered over shoulders, he waved his cap at us, recited a few lines in Latin – hocus, pocus, quanta, esse, universitas, matriculam - waved his hat again and then addressed us in English, primarily to say that this is not in fact a sardine packing factory but a dignified “rite of passage” where “you are now what you were not before”.

And then we trooped outside to catch hypothermia waiting for photographs of us looking like cold penguins and then inside for a brunch. And – I met my new friend Lois’s mother, who happens to be the lovely Angie Sage, writer of the Septimus Heap series which I read in college. A red-letter day!

Thursday Fears

2010-10-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Today has been long. I shall use a term I just learned and write about the important bits both syntagmatically (in sequence) and paradigmatically (with association).

The sun bright and early, best thing about my room is the slices of light at sunrise and sunset.

I went through a major Virginia Woolf phase about a year and a half ago, and it continued for about a year before easing off. During that year I read Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf; I loved it. Instead of adhering to an artificially rigid chronological biography pattern, it was written in the sort of cyclical organic associative way Woolf would have favored. It was massive, but I enjoyed it all.

Knowing that Hermione Lee taught at Oxford, I made sure to stop into her midday lectures on Woolf. Last week she lectured on Reading Virginia Woolf (and what Woolf thought about reading), and her lecture today was on Woolf’s pleasant, competitive, sometimes tense relationship with T.S. Eliot. Woolf was writing Jacob’s Room around the same time Eliot was writing The Waste Land; we read a passage from Woolf’s diary where they shared a taxi on the way to the theatre one night in 1921 and talked about Keats and how – though he wrote classics magnanimously – they were “trying to do something harder”. I’d forgotten how interested in modernism I’d been, and that together with Gabriel Josipovici’s book What Ever Happened to Modernism? (which I haven’t read, but look at longingly every time I go into Blackwells), is causing me to come back.

It was wonderful listening to Professor Lee. She speaks with absolute assurance and good-humored familiarity; these Bloomsbury figures are intimate acquaintances as well as significant 20th century figures. She has the mouth of Emma Thompson, narrow shoulders, high cheek bones, and a sharp chin, softened by her interested expression. It's marvelous to hear a world expert speak on her subject.

As you can tell from my new words, I had my first Mods Paper tutorial at Corpus Christi this afternoon. There is a golden pelican in their quad. Yes. We sat down somewhat nervously and then were asked about our lecture this past Tuesday on defining Literature (which is much harder than it sounds) and then whether language was necessary to thought. This sudden departure into the abstract, which is not comfortable ground for me, made us a bit queasy. We went on to talk about Literary Theory, a much neglected part of my education. In fact, I became exactly aware of how ignorant I am, despite having read Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. But now I know that the immaterial world is built by language, that language is necessary to structure time and space, that it is a system of signs: the signifier and the signified. And words like synchronic and diachronic and people like Cixous and Barthes and Saussure and ideas like the Intentional Fallacy and the death of the author…

We’re heading into new waters, where there be dragons. There can be no more television for me. I have some serious work to do.

(Man of the day: Ferdinand Saussure, pioneering Swiss linguist. Sorry, P; I know how you feel about linguists.)

Distractions

2010-10-18T04:39:00.001-07:00

You can only read so much. In the times when I am not reading or working on essays, I am enjoying one of the following: television on the internet, bookshops, coffee shops, and pubs. Each deserves to be dealt with on its own.

I am a huge BBC fan. Unfortunately (or perhaps blessedly) there were no televisions around college. And then I was told about BBC iplayer – where you can watch the last seven days’ television on your computer. I was not enthusiastic until I did it myself and can now say I’m happily converted. Whether it’s getting into Spooks (a spy drama called MI5 for U.S. viewers) for the first time or the new episode of Life (voiced over by the dear David Attenborough), this is a constant menace to my productivity. It’s just a click away.

It’s gone one step further with my discovery of ITV’s (the oldest independent commercial TV station) iplayer and their period drama Downton Abbey which combines a few of my favorite things: Dame Maggie Smith, upstairs-downstairs drama, scriptwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), pre-war decadence, Anglo-American marriages of fortune, stately homes etc. If you can get a hold of it do.

With the promise of cheese

2010-10-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

It’s just like Harry Potter, people keep saying. (And who can blame them? There’s an H on the library walls.) One of the most Potteresque of all Oxford traditions is the dining experience. Our college has two formal dinners: a lesser formal on Monday nights, when academic gowns are worn but formal dress is not required, and one on Wednesday nights when academic gowns are worn over formal attire.

Our first formal Wednesday dinner provoked the first of many clothing crises. (Whispers throughout the day: Gowns or No Gowns? Full Subfusc or Just Gowns? Ties or no ties? Skirts or pants?) We waited behind our stiff-backed wooden upright seats until the fellows and faculty members of the college processed in to the hall and took their seats at the high table which is at the front of Arlosh Hall, directly under the portrait of young Arlosh painted in early nineteenth-century Arcadian innocence, flowing-locked with a spaniel looking adoringly at his master’s hand. It is in memory of their young, dead son that Lord and Lady Arlosh dedicated this hall; the name sounds like onomatopoeiac eating noises of the Hungarian stew variety. The high table is perpendicular to three longer tables which stretch down the length of the hall under the gazes of various other portraits (upright dissenting ministers, and one maiden-faced older woman in her lace cap) and seat the students.

Unusually for a dinner meal at Harris Manchester on any other night of the week, there was wine on the table, and the hall lights were dimmed to enhance the atmosphere. There's no need to artificially create the atmosphere that the buzz of excited voices and the surprise that students seeing each other in their stringy and piecemeal regalia for the first time creates. This was, if you will, the Start of Term Feast.

Conversations halt abruptly when a gavel bangs, a short prayer is uttered like a military command, and we're welcomed to our seats by a brisk Amen and the sound of scraping chair legs. It took us a few meals in college to become accustomed to the staff who works in Arlosh, who walk around behind us putting bowls of soup in front of us (from the left) and removing them (from the right), to the cheerfully savvy Mr. W, whose portrait hangs in the foyer of Arlosh Hall, and who presides over the meal with the quickness of an stage manager.

“Doesn’t it feel strange to be served?” we said to one another the first week. “Doesn’t it feel wrong not to remove your plates yourself?” “Isn’t it embarrassing to leave half of your bread-and-butter pudding in the bowl? Isn’t it rude?”

Soup or salad, an entrée and a dessert – all vegetarian-friendly. Cheese and port on formal nights. Port, which prompts a new set of whispers (Is it to the left or the right?), indicating that life at Oxford is, at least at the beginning, a series of anxieties about whether one is transgressing or passing at this great game.

To be poor, and young, and a girl

2010-10-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

For the ladies I've lived with, and for C who told me about the play and found this wonderful passage.

ANNA:

Queuing all night, the rain, do you remember? my goodness, the Albert Hall, Covent Garden, what did we eat? to look back, half the night, to do things we loved, we were young then of course, but what stamina, and to work in the morning, and to a concert, or the opera, or the ballet, that night, you haven’t forgotten? and then riding on top of the bus down Kensington High Street, and the bus conductors, and then dashing for the matches for the gasfire and then I suppose scrambled eggs, or did we? who cooked? both giggling and chattering, both huddled to the heat, then bed and sleeping, and all the hustle and bustle in the morning rushing for the bus again for work, lunchtimes in Green Park, exchanging all our news, with our very own sandwiches, innocent girls, innocent secretaries, and then the night to come, and goodness knows what excitement in store, I mean the sheer expectation of it all, the looking-forwardness of it all, and so poor, but to be poor and young, and a girl, in London then…and the cafes we found, almost private ones, weren’t they? where artists and writers and sometimes actors collected, and others with dancers, we sat hardly breathing with our coffee, heads bent, so as not to be seen, so as not to disturb, so as not to distract, and listened and listened to all those words, all those cafes and all those people, creative undoubtedly, and does it still exist I wonder? do you know? can you tell me?

From Old Times by Harold Pinter

Photo by Blanc et Demilly found here.

2010-10-12T13:53:00.001-07:00

Alas for Mr. McCarthy; the prize goes to (if the alerts are correct) Howard Jacobson for his novel The Finkler Question. I haven't read Jacobson's novels, but he had a great article in The Guardian this week on the necessity of humor in literature (or rather, the insignificance of novels which don't acknowledge the comic.)

2010-10-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

At any moment the Man-Booker Prize will be announced. I'm on pins and needles. (Go, Tom McCarthy, go!)

Another Graveyard

2010-10-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of lectures, with Wilde, Victorian "place", and George Eliot on the menu. These lectures are all held in the St. Cross buildings, which are less than five minutes walk from Harris Manchester. Last week we had (another) library induction at the English Faculty Library, which is in the St. Cross buildings. The trees are flaming up before their annual death, and the streets busy with new students. En route to the St. Cross buildings, I saw a small gate leading away from the road and several grave stones beyond.

I love graveyards, as I've said before, so I followed under the leafy bower to what I thought was a paltry scattering of ancient stones and what turned out to be Holywell Cemetery, a venerable clearing of the dead next to St. Cross Church, a medieval church undergoing restoration. The first headstone I came to belonged to none other than Kenneth Grahame, beloved writer of The Wind in the Willows.

Apparently, the inspiration for Carroll's Mad Hatter is buried somewhere on the grounds, and though I missed the graves of the aesthete Walter Pater and art critic Kenneth Tynan, I did spy the Inkling Charles Williams.

I wandered through the untrodden grass through the slight paths, all utterly quiet and reverent, with the breeze lightly disturbing the ivy but not the sleepers, and the only sudden noise a pheasant erupting from a bush.

"And autumn grows, autumn in everything," writes Robert Browning.

Transitions

2010-10-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

I hope that at some time soon this blog will catch up to daily life, but at the moment I'm backlogged with the events as they happen.

I arrived in Oxford this past Monday. It was - of course - more complicated than I planned. But then, I should have planned for that, shouldn't I? The tube workers went on strike on Monday morning, so the Piccadilly line, which I needed to take to Heathrow to pick up my bags before busing to Oxford, was closed. When you are as ignorant as a orphan this is catastrophic. The policeman told me to take the seven to Paddington. What this meant was entirely beyond me for about twenty minutes as I lurched around like a camel with my backpack swaying behind me.

I found the bus stop eventually and took the seven to Paddington station which is as chaotic as a playground under heavy shelling. People were wheeling and running and walking and cartwheeling in every direction, and of course I bought the wrong ticket and went into the wrong platform and had to be let back out by a long-suffering conductor. I always thought I was kind of a good traveller. I now know the truth: I am completely at the mercy of directions and ticket machines.

Picked up bags, caught the x70 to Oxford.

"Where do you want to go, then?" the driver asked. "I mean - which stop. Gloucester Green?"
"Whatever's closest to the - the colleges."
"Which college, love?"
"Harris Manchester?"
"I don't even know where that is." (This is a common response, but slightly unnerving.)
"Opposite Mansfield?"
"No."
"Just down the street from the Bodleian?"
"The Boadleyan?" he said, provoking a sudden crisis of pronunciation. "Suppose you'll want Gloucester Green then."

I had it better than another passenger who asked if we were going to Gatwick Airport.
"Not going to Gatwick," the bus driver said shortly.
"Oh. It's just that's it's on the side of the bus."
"Yeah, well, I have the Taj Mahal on the side of the bus, too, don't I?"

It was a quick hour-long bus ride, and we quickly rounded into Oxford through once-familiar Headington, and as we drove past St. Clements the sun shot through the uniform clouds. And then we we crossed the Magdalen Bridge over the Cherwell and the architecture broke into chiselled faces and gargoyles and stones and figures on the roofs holding their arms aloft (to knowledge!) and the spires and gold rims and the sculpted jagged beauty on every side. The clouds disappeared and the sky was pure blue and the sun reflected off the windows and welcomed us in.

The High Street! A man in robes! Bicycles and buses and cars. The theological bookshop is still on St. Aldate's and so is the ice cream shop.

It took me, I think, forty-five minutes to walk less than a mile up George St and down Broad and Holywell with my bags. I walked for ten steps and stopped, sweating, panting, mortified. Absolutely aware of the eyes of all of Oxford watching me. I could see their disapproving faces at my over-sized luggage. They imagined them full of high-heeled shoes and hair-products; an American, obviously. There were no taxis.

I stopped a distinguished-looking man for directions - he looks pained when answering and vaguely resembles Simon Schama. (Was he Simon Schama?)

I ran towards a plain building up Mansfield Road, like the long-lost sheep, only to discover that it is a language building. I fell back onto the wall behind me; only it was not a wall, but a doorway and stairs.

Harris Manchester College. Wiping my face in disbelief and wildness, I noticed that my right hand is bloody from blisters that grew and ruptured on the walk, making shaking hands with the bursar uncomfortable.

I'm sorry to bore you with more pictures of my garret, but here are more shots of Rathmell number 12, before being strewn with - what else? - piles. Notice above how the jars of buttons survived the journey.

Now I'd better get back to my reading. The guilt begins.

Streets of London: Part II

2010-10-08T02:05:00.000-07:00

So I woke as early as I could. I planned to go to the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields for the 10am Eucharist service, so it was back to Trafalgar Square for me. Was lost several times in every direction before coming across it accidentally. I couldn’t say that the Not For Tourists London guide saved me from being wholly lost, but without it I would have laid down in a ditch somewhere and never been found again.

The service was lively with a bright and radiant choir which sung a lot of Herbert Howells-ish music, a surprisingly friendly passing of the peace (aren’t the British supposed to be reserved and hate that part?) and a Eucharist of an unhappily polystyrene wafer and grape juice but also good will. The rain and wind began and I slipped into the National Portrait Gallery to see the Tudors, Victorians, Bloomsbury set, Iris Murdoch and photos of John Taverner and Harold Pinter.

Sadly the publishing house I’d planned to see, Persephone Books, was closed, which was disappointing but not surprising after an enormous hiking expedition to find it. I did find various literary houses en route – Vera Brittain’s flat, Dickens’ house on Doughty, the house where the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed, and also the place where the first anaesthetic was administered in England – and then went to meet a high school friend and his girlfriend on Goodge Street.

Followed by a walk to Euston to see the British Library (closed) and back to Russell Square to see the British Museum (closed), and finally into the London Review Bookshop (not closed!).

In Tavistock Square at dusk I found two friends: Virginia Woolf (Bloomsbury is, after all, her hood) and Mahatma Gandhi (photographed here in honor of Kristin and the Fremont Community School).

The evening ended with Indian food and some sort of feathered licorice seed (which, on second thought, may not have been for eating. I certainly couldn’t swallow it, and left them on the table in my napkin.)

The Streets of London: Part I

2010-10-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

It’s clear now that I packed badly.

I should have listened to everyone. It would have cost less to ship the books than to carry them; and with much less hassle. I had to pay for extra baggage on the flight to London via Iceland. Sadly, I saw nothing of Iceland but the dawn above Reykavik in the distance. When I got to London, harassed with the umbrella and violin and computer and hand luggage, seeing that there was no possibility of physically moving with three additional (heavy suitcases), I ran into a storage facility, which wrapped the bags and stored them for two days. And – of course – the bags were wrapped before it was distractedly remembered that my credit card and other important papers were inside. So they had to be unwrapped and wrapped up again, and charged twice for the pleasure.

Then it was on the tube to central London, but not before I went to the wrong exit. I tried to load the Oyster card Autumn was so kind to give me, but in the rush at the machine, ended up paying twice as much as I should be a ticket on the Piccadilly Line to the Russell Square station where I was “to alight” for the hostel in Bloomsbury.

The streets around the hostel, which is on Tavistock road, are small and cobbled and English. It was raining lightly, the telephone boxes were red, there were accents of every sort. We won’t talk about the hostel. It was wonderfully situated, but gaudy in electric blue and yellow, overrun with Australian girls on their gap-year, and Euro pop. This may sound exotic, but it was tiring and I would’ve paid for a conversation with a friend.

Because I had a zone 1-6 day pass I took the tube to Leicester Square, with every intent of finding the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I found two antiquarian bookshops and left them quickly in search of more but didn’t find any. I got very quickly lost walking through the West End, the theatre district and Convent Garden.

When I came upon Covent Garden I thought my heart would jump out of my throat – so many people in rain jackets and umbrellas, out for a stroll on a Saturday afternoon, the picturesque buildings, the thoughts of Pepys (there was a sign saying that he may have watched a Punch and Judy show there), the cobbled streets, voices and babble and languages and dialects, the stray sentences that jump out of the hubbub in a counter-puntal cacophony; the movement – of buses and trains and pedestrians and cyclists and prams.

Then I was lost trying to find Trafalgar Square, but I found it eventually. The grandness of the monuments and large national buildings. I stood in awe and satisfaction until a homeless man vomited near my feet to the general applause of his friends. I popped into the National Gallery fifteen minutes before it closed (managed to see mostly Dutch masters), and then got lost meandering over to Westminster Abbey and Parliament before turning back home for dinner at a pub where I ate by myself very conspicuously, trying hard not to be so conspicuous.

12 Rathmell

2010-10-05T04:27:00.000-07:00

I'm in Oxford now. I've picked up my sub fusc (my academic robes) and moved into my room. It may sound gushing, but - I couldn't have been given a better room. Up five or so flights of narrow, creaking stairs onto a dark wooden landing to an attic under the eaves of the slanting roof, with a window that opens onto Holywell Street. Though bringing up my luggage was a nightmare, I have a bird's eye view of the spires and chimneys. I can see the cupola of the Sheldon building where I'll matriculate next week, and I hear the bells tolling every fifteen minutes. It seems invented.

I'll write more about my misadventures in London and post pictures. It seems ungrateful to say, but I miss a few familiar faces.

Before I go

2010-10-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm at the airport with too many bags. A last minute weigh in required me to pull all my books out of my bags and redistribute the weight, while the service representative had to call Iceland (where I pass through en route to London), and the fifty pairs of eyes behind me glared and grew glassy.

Though this morning the weather was pure, clear and copper-sunned, the fog has descended so low that the tips of the trees are nearly obliterated. This is Seattle. This is the city I know.

Here's something I wrote a month or so ago, an ode to this city, its literary scene, and its inhabitants.

When I graduated from a small Midwestern liberal arts college with the music degree I knew I might never use, I felt lost looking for What To Do Next. Despite the pressure I felt alongside my friends – future accountants, teachers, and doctors - to map out a life just so, a much respected professor suggested that each step in one’s life seems microscopic, a darkened footpath occasionally lit by a chance lamp. This leaves a discernible trail only after years of walking and finally looking over one’s shoulder. I knew that that the next step wasn’t – at least yet – grad school. It was getting my hands dirty and figuring out how to do the things I’d have to put in practice as an adult – paying bills, avoiding fines, eating well, cultivating small pleasures. I wanted to be part of a literary culture, and that place wasn’t New York.

Someone told me that it only takes a person a single year of living in New York to claim it as the answer to the question Where are you from? But a Seattleite will customarily give the last city they lived in. The city’s position on the northwest coast has made it a decades-old gateway to the Japanese, Thai, Laotians, Hmong, and Vietnamese, as well as Russians and Swedes, and Americans who come from all over the country to tap into the vibrant cultural life and the jobs offered by massive corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and Starbucks who use the city as a base. This is a city cobbled together from people in motion; people who affirm the significance of place. It’s changeable weather and indeterminate seasons require almost hourly conversations on the expression of the elements: the rain and its specific characteristics, the sun and whether it will show, the green profusion of flora, or the unseasonable withering heat, and devastating Christmas snow.

Though Seattle is a young city (a nineteenth century frontier timber town and gold-rush destination) in a young country, the moniker “Most Literate City in America” means something, even if it’s just to its booksellers. This city is the home to – among others - novelists David Guterson and Jonathan Raban (and claims National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie and short-story writer Raymond Carver who is buried on the Olympic Peninsula, and many other journalists, essayists, poets, and publishers. As others have said before me, the contemplative weather drives us to our notebooks and laptops.

But it’s a city still self-conscious enough to make its qualifications sound like a defiant teenager. We may not be New York but…It’s high time that the city puts aside its inferiority complex and speaks for itself.

Seattle is a good place for a transplant interested in whatever literary culture the city had to offer; a city with enough readers and patrons to know that literature and the arts is an important cornerstone of both civic culture and private leisure. (Though for some reading is less leisured than vocational.) The key to an intelligent society is the circulation of ideas (the “fresh play” as Victorian reformer and poet Matthew Arnold would say), and the key to an imaginative society is recognizing the importance of stories to communities and to the individual. And yet, for all the established organizations, writing programs, journals, and local writers - we have far to go. There is much work to do.

Amazon was spawned here on this lush rain-logged hills, and though this provides fuel to the incendiary debates over literacy and the future of the book and of independent bookstores in the marketplace, the debate over the Kindle proves nothing less than that the issue of what we read and how we read it is worth arguing about. We are not unconcerned.

Here are some of the things Seattle does right:

1. Writing Programs

Aside from local MFAs and degrees in creative writing, Seattle has several community spaces for those who want to write. The Capitol-Hill based Richard Hugo House, named after a Seattle poet who wrote about “the mysteries of ordinary life in the city and the lives of working people,” is the third largest writing program in the country and offers writing classes, residencies for writers, and community events. 826 Seattle (also known as Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co.), one of the nonprofit writing centers begun by McSweeney’s editor and writer Dave Eggers, offers students access to tutors, writing workshops and publishing projects.

2. Publications

Though the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sadly stopped their printed daily in March 2009, the Seattle Times, winner of a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News reportage during the city-wide hunt for the cop-killer Maurice Clemmons, comes out seven days a week. Though Seattle may not have literary journals to rival New York or San Francisco, it is not without effort (Seattle Review, Cranky, Swivel, Rivet, Crab Creek Review). Image, a journal which explores the intersection of religion and the arts predominantly in the Christian humanist tradition, is one of its kind and has published Nobel laureates and writers, critics, poets, and essayists from around the world at a consistently excellent standard.
And let’s not forget The Stranger, the ubiquitous free weekly publication which, despite its leftist yells and vicious slandering of all those from outside the fold, continues to be a bastian of liminal literary culture, a crusader for the marginalized, and a dependably entertaining read. Paul Constant, the books editor and writer of the Constant Reader, is the everyday espresso-drinking reader’s man-about-town critic and a welcome voice in the conversation about reading devices and the book wars.

3. Bookstores

Wallingford’s Open Books: A Poetry Emporium is one of the only poetry-only bookstores in the country. The Elliott Bay Book Company has long been a puissant force in drawing nationally and internationally acclaimed literary figures for readings and lectures as well as providing an excellent independent source of books. The University Bookstore, the University of Washington’s bookstore is another giant, and together with the bookstore I work at, Third Place Books, provide a triumvirate of communal spaces with knowledgeable staff and literary events designed to keep communities involved. Besides these stores there are an abundance of bookstores that offer the reader frequent destinations. Unfortunately, these gems are closing are an alarming rate and require champions from a reading public.

Before the modern publishing house was created, books were published through booksellers. To be a bookseller, as Samuel Johnson’s father was, was to be a publisher. The books sold were personally championed by booksellers. This relationship produced a spirited connection, a legitimate chain, between the writing, printing and selling of books. We need to recover and rekindle (lowercase “k”) that connection.

With the separation of publishing houses and independent brick and mortar stores – where publishers have stopped listening to the little Shop Around the Corner and begun to give way to the bullying price wars of large chain stores and internet companies - and advent of espresso book machines – small printing presses that can access thousands of out of print titles, as well as producing self-published works – booksellers once again have the opportunity to become personally involved with publishing.

I believe that booksellers, often low-paid workers who spend their paychecks
on the books they sell and their free time in the reading and digesting of books, have something to offer. These are often passionately minded individuals who take to heart the importance of the small work that they do. With lives that are daily, unglamorously, occupied with the parsing of good literature and the sharing of unknown or long-forgotten works that very often might fall between the cracks, these are observers of human nature (how readily people betray their deeper selves in retail situations), ideas, and beauty.

If this sounds idealistic and self-important, it is because I am one of them, and like my fellow booksellers, have to believe that the small work we do, though largely invisible, is significant to the health and continuing intellectual and creative life of the community. If this sounds idealistic and self-important, it is because I need to believe it. We may not have holidays off, or weekends; we may eat poorly because our money goes to a re-translated novel by Witold Gombrowicz; but by God we know books.

I felt that my coworkers and I, and others like us, who are by day (and by night) booksellers, and secret scribblers in those in-between times on little pieces of recycled paper hoping, sometimes fruitlessly, to join the community writers whose voices resound in their heads, have something to offer to and on behalf of their city. These apprentices of the art and craft of literature must have something up their sleeves.

So let’s toast a life of vital engagement through books. Here’s to the secret scribblers of Seattle.

Photo courtesy of http://www.findingviews.com/page/13/

Literary Pilgrimage

2010-09-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

Raymond Carver, master of the blue-collar blunt American short story, is buried at the Ocean View Cemetery, overlooking Port Angeles and the Straits of Juan de Fuca. When I went to find his grave last Wednesday, it was the first time I’d looked for the grave of someone I admired, aside from the accidental run-ins with beloved poets and historical figures in Westminster Abbey.

I’ve always liked cemeteries. There is something about them that makes one feel both surrounded and also utterly alone. It’s the best place to be alive, the graveyard. Every step and breath and laugh and word emphasizes the quickness of us above, the silence of those below. I like to think that the dead cheer us on in our youth. Do something, they urge beneath the plastic flowers, the stone, and the mulch.

When confronted with the whole cemetery, we worried we wouldn’t find Carver. But in the end it wasn’t difficult: his grave was set apart from the others, marked by a double grave (the spot for his wife, Tess Gallagher, is empty) with a metal bower supporting plastic roses and poppies and other flowers, and a few rocks laid in the dip between the two headstones, as if to weigh down the spot with quiet.

Next to a small bench, in a metal box, we found a guide to Raymond Carver in Italian (Raymond Carver e un grande scrittore…), a letter from a recovering alcoholic who found Carver a major inspiration, and a small notebook containing letters to Carver and about him from fans, pilgrims, and Tess, who writes to him regularly and with more direct intimacy than I imagine many living partners express. Her letters were warm, poetic, knowing, melancholy – “our love”, she says. She writes about giving an award in Montevideo, about a cottage in Ireland.

We left our scratches in the book and a collection of his short stories in the metal box and took our leave. The day started with surprising brilliance, but as the afternoon wore on the weather settled into that expansive, grey brooding Northwestern weather, where everything is beautiful, but sad, because all things end.

2010-09-25T23:22:00.001-07:00

I found this article by Lindsay Johns on Arts & Letters Daily on the importance of the canon for black people (and, by extension, I presume for other minority groups). I'm a sucker for discussions on the canon, and for the canon itself.

Here's an excerpt I found particularly apt:

"Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.

The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm."

It's just how I feel about the topic of "women's writing" and the feminist response to the canon. Johns may not call the limited and focused responses to the canon by previously excluded or marginalized parties the "school of resentment" as Harold Bloom does, but I have no doubt that both Johns and Bloom are allies with a great cause.

C is for?

2010-09-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

The English writer Tom McCarthy, short-listed for this year’s Man-Booker Prize for his third novel C, dropped into the bookstore yesterday to sign our copies of his books. Booksellers orbited him like bashful satellites. His cleverness, his reputation, and his involvement with semi-fictitious organizations like the Necro-Nautical Society make him an intimidating person to shake hands with. (I satellited for a few minutes and then fled.)
I did, however, see him read at Elliot Bay Book Company Tuesday evening, and the experience completely merited any parking fees I paid.

McCarthy read emphatically and metrically, with sharp spaces between the words. This is a sign of a well-educated man, a man accustomed to poetry read aloud. (I found out later he was educated at New College, Oxford.) He stood with his right leg bent up against his left, like a halfway flamingo, hunched slightly and casually over the podium. I wondered if he is surprised by his comprehensive imagination every time he reads in public, as I was.

The first passage McCarthy read was about his protagonist, Serge Carrefax, as a young “bug tapper” in 1911, who listens compulsively to the crackles and snaps which correspond to Morse code sent out by ships and harbors and newspapers around the world. He describes early wireless transmissions precisely, but uses this technology as a point of connection to unseen individuals and groups and images – comparing the vastness of radio waves to the comprehensive silence that is thought itself.

McCarthy has always been interested in radios, but, unlike Serge, did not experiment as a boy. The novel springs from an art project he did in 2002 influenced by Jean Cocteau’s Orphee, a film where Orpheus is seduced by poetry on the radio, a perfect line for every hundred lines of nonsense and numbers. The poetry is transmitted a beautiful princess, who is also death, trying to seduce him.

C, McCarthy says, is not a historical novel. There is no need to link it to the internet, he tells an audience member, because it’s too blatant. It’s a novel about encryption and crypts: technology and death. And the novel is a tribute to many (“Bad writers imitate; good writers steal” – Ezra Pound): Alexander Graham Bell and his invention which was meant to contact the dead, Freud’s Wolf Man, Copperfield born with a caul, Ovid, Marconi, Ulysses (where Bloom attends a funeral and envisions a gramophone in every coffin), Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and the Wasteland, which McCarthy calls radio poetry, with voices dropping in and out.

Robert, my boss, liked C but found it incoherent. I wonder if he heard McCarthy talk about his influences and intentions he would change his mind. Though I doubted once whether I’d find the time to read anything by McCarthy, I’ve made up my mind now and hope to make time to inhale C.

2010-09-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

To those who have had to put up with me as a morose and touchy and collicky fanatical email-checking credit-obsessed neurotic - my apologies. I've needed your support. I got the email from the British Consulate in L.A. yesterday with the news that my VISA had been approved, on the heels of the news that my loans had come through. This cannot sound miraculous enough.

So: in two weeks today I'll be on the plane to London with all of my possessions in two shabby bags. In the meantime lists are being formed. Movie Bingo Nights, compline, honey mead and Pimm's at the White Horse, museums, the continuing hunt for Raymond Carver, the quest for the perfect sweater, paying bills, seeing friends, Victoriana, and more David Attenborough.

(A still of a bird-of-paradise trying to impress a drab female. Voice over from David: "But sometimes your best just isn't good enough." I just can't stop talking about Planet Earth.)

From the Vaults

2010-09-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

My first passport.

The private lives of famous men

2010-09-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for months and today it appeared: Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. It's a play-within-a-play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, two men I admire but don't know as well as I'd like. And it's set in Oxford.

I loved Bennett's History Boys; Bennett's economic elegance and wry self-conscious Englishness makes me think of Auden (I just came across the phrase "lunefied landscape"). It's going to be hard not to justify buying this slim little book.

Hand-holding in Public

2010-09-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday morning I drove south to Tukwila to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to have a Biometrics Scan. While this sounds like an intimating test of potential robotics (and A. suggested it meant converting me to the metric system), a Biometrics Scan is simply (disappointingly) a set of finger print scans and a photograph.

It occurred to me as I sat in a chair with my number and VISA application waiting for my turn with the complex and mysterious machines that I had missed something by not working at the counter for the Department of Homeland Security. I don’t mean the money or the hours, or the unfortunate position of power in the face of hundreds of desperate individuals who need name changes, or naturalization, or extraditing. To be the person who admits or refuses the ability for people to make a new life must be a heavy thing.

But the faces that passed through the office were definite and interesting, a parade of nationalities and circumstances: the middle-aged Indian woman with her features set in an expression of patient transcendence, the two dashing Latin American men with sculpted noses and unsmiling lips under their mustaches, children in braids sucking their thumbs on their mothers’ laps. Everyone in an attitude of quiet heightened watchfulness, waiting for their numbers to be called.

The biometrics technicians work without urgency. I imagined the sameness of their days – and yet, the power they have. The things they must know about the people whose fingers they scan, the faces they photograph. The magical monotony: endlessly discarded latex gloves, hand-holding reduced to its most sterile.

When my number was called I was startled from my chair where I tried to shuffle the books I brought over my lap (I was the only one in the waiting room who had a book) and they scattered papers and pens over the floor beneath me. A Slavic woman (her name was Lyudmilla) scanned my fingers. First four at once, and then the thumbs, both left and right. Then one by one, slowly, side to side, she cleaned my fingertips and pressed them onto the scanner. “Relax,” she said softly, “hold fingers limp. Must relax fingers.” As she pressed my fingertips to the scanner, the picture appeared slowly, emerging from east to west, thousands of small dots appearing quickly to form the ridges of my print, like a time-lapse video of stars becoming visible at night.

“You go to the university?” she said to me softly. Yes, I said, and told her I was hoping to study literature. “This is something you want for a long time, yes?” she said, shyly, and I nodded, shy myself. It was moving: this stranger holding my limp hand, rolling my fingertips against the machine pad with her own latexed hand. And the constellation of my print ridges appeared and darkened and froze ten times. I let her hold my hands and grinned like a child. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so purely, childishly, and expansively happy.

(photo from The Age.)

Peering into the Vase

2010-09-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

I've heard that people who read for pleasure as adults very often had a parent who read to them as a child. What is it about settling oneself down into a relaxed position, in a bed or on a stair, and stilling all movement, inclining one's head to hear a story, that is so comforting? (Or it might be news, or a letter, or a poem.) Whatever the document and its intention, reading aloud - or being read to - is rare and rich.

Reading aloud last week led me to a rediscovery of a writer whose oeuvre I intended to read in its entirety (and haven't). I read Bolano's magnum opus 2666 (a collision of Europe and Latin America, of detectives, whores, murderers, victims, and literary critics) first. Challenged by its girth, lured by the enthusiastic reviews, and tempted by the dusky sunshine of Latin American literature, I sat myself in the corner of Allegro's on a melancholic November afternoon and began. And then I read The Savage Detectives, which I thought a better book, though less provocative and less bleak, and yet every bit as impassioned.

As Bolano's cult increases, New Directions has published translations of his earlier stories, novels, and essays for the unfortunate Anglophone public not able to digest him in his original language. (I've heard he reached his apotheosis in The Savage Detectives and 2666, so these others will be only desert or cheese and crackers after the feast.) It was the beginning of Amulet (1998) that I heard read aloud. Those first two chapters convinced me again of his talent - raw, romantic, enraged, faulty, and endlessly propagating. His narratives - both the overarching and the minute - and connections are like rabbits which breed so frequently and yet still surprise the child owners who marvel at the magic of their duplication.

Here's a passage from Amulet which caught my attention:

"...I imagined books sitting quietly on shelves and the dust of the world creeping into libraries, slowly, persistently, unstoppably, and then I came to realize that books are easy prey for dust (I understood this but refused to accept it), I saw clouds of dust gathering over a plain somewhere deep in my memory, and the clouds advanced until they reached Mexico City, the clouds that had come from my own private plain, which belonged to everyone although many refused to admit it, and those clouds covered everything with dust, the books I have read and those I was planning to read, covered them irrevocably, there was nothing to be done: however heroic my efforts with broom and rag, the dust was never going to go away, since it was an integral part of the books, their way of living or of mimicking something like life."

And also:

"And I saw my hand move forward, way from my body, and rise and hover over the vase's dark mouth, approaching its enameled lip...my arm froze and my hand hung limp like a dead ballerina's, a few inches from that Hell-mouth...Then I thought: Does Pedrito Garfias know what's hidden in his vase? Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don't they take it upon themselves to destroy them?"

Is it the image, or the book's melancholy atmosphere? Or is it the charming nature of the narrator who states and retracts endlessly, as though one is shuffling down a path, and choosing and re-choosing and rejecting each presented bend in the way. All so Bolanoan.

On recommendation from C I've just finished Bolano: The Last Interview, a quartet of interviews with the author, the finale completed just before his death. The reader of these interviews can enjoy like a fly on the wall (a position Bolano very well may have despised) the careless and heady weary revolutionary persona he projects: his carelessness for his novels and his fervor for reading, for poetry and for essential visceral living. Unlike many authors, who write but do not read, Bolano values his library far more than his own productions. (Or at least, he affects to.)

With a surprising idealism, Bolano (in the Borgesian vein) says "A library is a metaphor for human beings, or what is best about human beings, the same way a concentration is a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity."

This man is a Beat with political blood in his veins, an empirical, anarchist who is both a poseur who seeks to live the romanticized life of that which he is, and the real thing.

Beyond the gratifying answers to the usual questions writers are asked (How autobiographical is your writing? Who are your influences? etc.), the interviews feature an aloof but alert wit. Upon being asked if he should have cut pages from The Savage Detectives, Bolano says "In order to cut pages, I would have to reread it and my religion prohibits me that."

In his pessimistic but strangely (apocalyptically?) beautiful opinion: "The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That's our fortune." A sentence which deserves an entire essay. It is devastating that such an essay will never come from Bolano's pen.

Reading at Chez Ball

2010-09-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

Erin has been nice enough to let me stay at her house in the gap between now and the future (which I hope will resolve itself soon.) It's a reading house - and here's what it's inhabitants are sinking their teeth into.

That heavy tome is a symbol of the weight of the law on which E is daily feeding. Strangely enough, the texts are mostly all black and red and weigh ten pounds.

Opal (O'Mitten) is very much into the first volume of Malcolm Muggeridge's Chronicles of Wasted Time.

Brody has a surprising interest in Victorian literature, with a penchant for Hardy and Bronte. And yet, both cats have absolutely no tolerance for Tennyson. When hearing any of his poems, they both run into another room. (E says they much prefer Wordsworth...)

On Throwing a Dinner Party

2010-08-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

"What will happen at this party? Anything may happen. A man has just come in who stands charmingly on his head at parties. Perhaps he will stand on his head tonight. I hope that he will stand on his head. That is what people should do at parties of pleasure; it gives parties of pleasure the right note." - Rose Macaulay

Sadly, no one stood on their head at this dinner party. (I watched Patrick very hopefully.) And yet -

I think my desire to throw a dinner party must be linked to my predictable childhood preoccupation with tea parties. But once I saw Babette's Feast (and also Chocolat) I found the urge to feed dear friends at a table with good food, prepared with patience and intention. And Thursday was the perfect day to do it.

I stayed indoors all day, chopping and mixing, slicing, arranging, and setting everything in place. The menu was supposed to be light and vibrant summer food, to mirror the weather. But the day was morbid and grey. We had to create the atmosphere ourselves, with flowers and with wine.

The menu was as follows:

Act I:

Rosemary & sage bread with balsamic vinegar and olive oil
Olive tapenade
Artichoke & spinach dip
Truffle cheese with raspberries & blueberries (finally, a chance to indulge my truffle mania)

Act II:

Lemon Mint Israeli Couscous
Shittake mushrooms & asparagus with honey

Act III:

Strawberry ice-cream with Balsamic vinegar (entirely inspired by Molly Moon's)
Various fruits with melted dark chocolate

Various wines, coffee, etc.

And all went as planned. There was the best cheese story I've ever heard, a long discussion on belly-buttons (which is, you know, one of my specialty subjects), and warm conversation which smeared into a general celebration of high-spirits.

As I'm writing this as a faux foodie, let me quote the regnant M.F.K. Fisher: "Too few of us, perhaps, feel that the breaking of the bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, means more than satisfaction of a need."

(P performing brain surgery on a cantaloupe)

(Those dear newlyweds: kind enough to let us into their new apartment and let me break a bowl, spill a wine glass and drop balsamic vinegar all over the tablecloth I bought them as a wedding present.)

(A future lawyer and future Icelander in the party spirit)

(Birthday friends, now 24 and 25 respectively. L and I met the day after our birthday in our freshman year of college, and we're still celebrating it.)

A divine night, wholly scented with lavender. And so (Fisher again):

"Then, with good friends...and good food on the board, and good wine in the pitcher, we may well ask, When shall we live if not now?"

Poetry in the Early Morning

2010-08-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

What is Born With Me - Pablo Neruda

I sing to the grass that is born with me
in this free moment, to the fermentations
of cheese, of vinegar, to the secret
spurt of the first semen, i sing
to the song of milk which now comes
in rising whiteness to the nipples,
I sing to the fertility of the stable,
to the fresh dung of great cows
from whose aroma fly multitudes
of blue wings, I speak
without any shift of what is happening now
to the bumblebee with its honey, to the lichen
in its soundless germination.
Like an everlasting drum
sounds the flow of succession, the course
from being to being, and I'm born, I'm born, I'm born,
with all that is being born, I'm one
with growing, with the spread silence
of everything that surrounds me, teeming,
propagating itself in the dense damp,
in threads, in tigers, in jelly.

I belong to fruitfulness
and I'll grow while lives grow.
I'm young with the youthfulness of water,
I'm slow with the slowness of time,
I'm pure with the purity of air,
dark with the wine of night,
and I'll only be still when I've become
so mineral that I neither see nor hear,
nor take part in what is born and grows.

When I picked out the jungle
to learn how to be,
leaf by leaf,
I went on with my lessons
and learned to be root, deep clay,
voiceless earth, transparent night,
and beyond that, bit by bit, the whole jungle.

(Trans. Alastair Reed)

A Question of Taste?

2010-08-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

During a heated discussion over drinks with friends last week at Ballard's wonderful Noble Fir, we stumbled into inevitable discussions about the reading tastes of men and women (and how true the relevant stereotypes are), and the overwhelming popularity of lighter fiction (at best "book club books"; at worst racy genre reads from material that will quickly date and be pulped) and the difficulty of sharing the impressive lesser-known books we're passionate about with our customers.

It's less about personal pleasures, delightful periods of escape with perennial favorites, than it is about the difficulty of weaning anybody from the place where their heels are planted. Seeing a pile of books with turquoise and light pink covers featuring Manolo Blahniks or embossed Prada bags make me feel queasy. As does the steady stream of paranormal romances with Dead/Death/Dying in the title and scantily clad young women in the arms of some Eternal Fabio. There is no doubt about the power of the female consumer. The problem is the vast and stead quantity of what they consistently consume. Everyone may enjoy a Bridget Jones read now and again (I know I did; reading it out loud with Kristin made me nearly wet my pants). The problem is making this the sole substance of one's reading life.

Specifically, as a woman, identifying with a group of people who have enjoyed educational, personal, and civic liberties for only a very short period of time on the historical scale, I'm sensitive to the issue of "women's fiction". I have no misconceptions about men reading light books with little substance. I'm aware that there are plenty of men who do, and that cheap thrillers and other works of genre fiction is as popular as they've ever been. But I worry when people start to talk about lighter fiction as a "woman's book", with more serious works of fiction as being beyond that consumer base. (As in "I'm not sure you'd like this. It's not really something women would like.") Because largely – it seems that they're right. It's statistically proven that women buy more fiction than men. What does it tell us about the reading public when the books on the bestseller list are Charlaine Harris' paranormal romances and the biography of Angelina Jolie?

Let me attempt to move beyond generalizations: men and women read literary fiction. Men and women also read genre fiction; it's a spectrum. But, we asked at the Noble Fir, how could we take people from what they're comfortable reading, and expose them to a variety of good writers? How can we lead them into the depths? Is it possible, in effect, to change the reading habits of others? It’s a presumptive question because it is not my job to change the reading habits of others. Or is it?

I wondered if it would be possible to draw a physical map, a kind of Way-From-Here-To-There which would connect writers from the low brow to the very high. Could there be seven degrees of separation between Jodi Picoult and Sylvia Plath? Or between John Grisham and John Steinbeck?

This raises other questions: Why do people read what they do? Is reading for pleasure inferior to reading for other purposes? Is reading for pleasure different from reading to escape? Is doing anything to "escape" a good thing? Is escaping different than transcending? Is there some sort of reading hierarchy? And most of all - are some books intrinsically "better" than others? This is a very unpopular idea nowadays when getting anyone to sit down and read (print) seems nothing less than a prize-winning miracle. Evaluating art in terms of better and worse, presuming a value judgment, has been even less popular.

So sat around the table at the Noble Fir with our umpteenth beer and my deliciously musky wine and asked ourselves - is there such a thing as a bad book? (Is there such a thing as bad art?) And we said yes. There is such a thing as a cheaply done book, and very often bad books (like bad movies or bad music) seeks to gratify the consumer without too much effort on the consumer's part. The good book seeks to engage the reader, yes, but might not let it go without a promise of effort, or at the very least, patient attention.

Does this make me a conservative snob? I'm afraid snobbery is too easily the default setting for someone exasperated with the idea that people want to read because they don't want to "think." Because someone I overheard a few days ago said: "My thought is that if it's a good enough book, it'll be turned into a movie."

But snobbery is not the answer any more than habitually mindless reading.

So what does this mean for us as readers and what does this mean for us as people who try to recommend and sell books to other people? Do we bemoan the dwindling readership of serious fiction? Do we give up and resign ourselves to publicly promoting this week's it-books and privately drawing back to our cave with our own precious stash of obscurities?

Matthew Arnold, the Victorian essayist, poet ("Dover Beach"), and educational reformer wrote that culture is the “fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his notions and habits.” I like this definition. The inclusion of the word “play” gives it lightness and spirit. It’s a dynamic idea that culture causes one to evaluate one’s habits, and if necessary, to change them. If reading only newspapers (in Arnold’s day) or blogs (in ours) or a steady diet of guilty pleasure books enables the fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon our notions and habits, then a hierarchy of books, a magic list, is unnecessary.