Cheerio from Oxford

Counting my steps

2010-03-28T04:08:00.001-06:00

Last night walking through the courtyard of Christ Church (Tom quad), amid the throngs now allowed in for the literary festival, ourselves coming from a debate between an optimist and a pessimist taking part in the lit. fest, passing the fountain, I felt the urge of tragic outpouring begin to arise, how could it be that I won't be coming back here, how can it be that one can find the very place where one can be wholly oneself and be asked to depart, or at least not to be begged to stay, and from this perhaps you may think me aligned with the pessimist, but no, I'm not, though I often flee from optimists like they would drain all my self-attentiveness & honesty to notice without controlling and contriving what it is that swirls around my mind. Naya asked, while our footsteps echoed around that beloved courtyard, and cellos seemed to play in my head, "Are you an optimist or pessimist?" And I replied that I don't like how either of them cap, tie up, smother what they are feeling. I said I wouldn't have studied at Oxford for these three months if I wasn't the finest of optimists; yet, if I were true to optimism I would right now shove the lamenting down and make myself flutter about something else. I will flutter in time. But not until my body gives the go ahead. So I respect the pessimists because they'll often let themselves go to the places the optimists won't, i.e. deep tragic human feeling, which is utterly beautiful in its longing. I wouldn't give that up for any monotone nirvana of continual, relentless happiness. Yet, the pessimists are tiresome when they won't ride the wave that does also arise in the body and carry one away to heights that I've never known to be for me except at Oxford. So, I think there must be another term coined that better describes those that feel what it is that they are feeling, rawly, savagely, longingly, with ecstasy, twitterpattedly, forever tumbled by the rise that seems to take the breath away, capable of much awe, followed by falls from heights that feel excruciatingly hard to survive. This particular emotional aptitude is not a composition I'd necessarily wish for my daughter, but it is who I am, and it is brutally, artistically open to what actually is. I said something of all of this to Naya. Poor child. Lucky child.

Then we came around the north corner of the quad and a bowler-hat-clad porter looked up and smiled so beamingly at us and said, "Well, it sure is nice to see some familiar faces amid all of this hubbub!" Could he know how much that was what this tragic character needed most to hear---because it fanned my fire--he recognized me as one who belongs in that quad, oh sweet comfort of that! Yet he has no idea that he soon won't be seeing us, oh depth of sorrow, familiar lover of mine, why do you visit so loyally? I replied appropriately instead of all of that with, "It is so good to see you too." And it was. I will miss three of the porters in particular. Him especially. He blocked us one night and didn't believe I was a student just after our arrival...but another porter knew us and so said...from then on this porter seemed to treasure us and tip his hat, with a twinkling eye, and kind, jolly phrases always aimed to make us smile and feel welcome. We walked in the opposite direction from him.

Coming around the last corner before walking out Tom Gate, under the grand arch & bell tower & clock, here walked another familiar face, who met my gaze and smiled so wholeheartedly I found myself smiling warmly back without the usual reserve one has with strangers. He was a doctoral student I'd sat next to or across from at dinner many times, and exchanged nods and smiles many times, yet never talked. No exception now, no words passed across the gap. Yet again, this sense of belonging, of being of this quad surged me heavenward. And then the fall--I had imagined so thoroughly coming back again for dinners here in the fall that I hadn't pushed on some of these connections. It seemed there was no need to hurry and push. All would unfold. All these friendships would have chance to flower with ease. I would have the chance to learn my favorite porter's name, and befriend this doctoral student & others for a walk around the meadow, for a debate over port.

Yet Oxford says it isn't so. Or so the woman on the phone said. My letter still has not arrived. The optimist in me says aloud to Naya, "What if the letter came on Monday and said 'Congratulations, Ms. Brigette, on your admittance to the Master's of English (1900-present). You, unfortunately, have not been granted the colleges you listed on your application as Magdalen and Balliol are satiated, however, you have been assigned to Christ Church. We understand you to be of the substance of that place. We hope this pleases you. Warm regards, your fellows."

The pessimist weeps for the sweetness of such hope.

Two more days in Oxford. I feel I'm counting my steps to the gallows.

What about you, optimist or pessimist? & why or what for?

the darling buds of may

2010-03-26T12:04:00.002-06:00

a question that keeps arising in this mind o' mine:

if Shakespeare lived in England

why did he say "rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" in that favored sonnet

instead of the darling buds of March?

because these buds are budding,

or perhaps he had a certain bud in mind

like a later sort--roses?

or perhaps global warming since 1600ish to 2010

has shifted England's budding-time from May to March?

or perhaps he was scripting it for a woman from the mountains who wouldn't see buds until May?

or perhaps he was just tired of figuring out what rhymed with "How shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and so went with May?

anyhow one of the points of all of this silliness was really just to show you how lovely the buds of March are in England right this moment.

As though of hemlock I had drunk

2010-03-23T04:36:00.012-06:00

Not having been granted continued access to these behind-the-wall-things of Oxford, I am feeling a bit melodramatic and melancholy today. It is not from a pitying state, however, that I look to the TB-consumed Keats for comfort but as a reminder that what I feel is reasonable for one that wants little else of life than to be swept, tossed, drowned, picked up gently, warmed by the fire by the insatiable restless mind that is mine. This mind sighs vulnerably today making my body sorrowful that it might choose the unreasonable again as it always has. It is more devoted to itself, its intricacies, fervor, wonder, fatalistic tendencies than it is devoted to its long complacent continuation. I don't speak of hemlock, no, not that. But I do speak of listening to what it is that I am, bowing down to that, not talking myself out of it. My life is a slave to this mind that will die if it is not continually swept into a fury of emotion, into a fury of breath-paused captivation by being surrounded with the things those Oxford walls now stand against it seeing. But other doors will open, for this hand will forever knock on behalf of its weeping, longing, melodious mind that will not rest. Will not rest until this hand can no longer knock on doors.

(If you were me you would hear Terry Davies playing "Sebastian" in the background as you read the above paragraph, followed by Mark Bradshaw's "Ode to a Nightingale" as you read what is below. Thankfully you are likely not--like me.)

Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats (1795-1821)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness, -

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -

To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?

A poem I heard today upon waking

2010-03-19T01:38:00.003-06:00

My sentiments on the human-animal divide/differance/or lack thereof said well in a poem by someone else, particularly lines 12 and 13

(click on purple text, then listen to the audio vs. reading for best effect)

2010-03-18T12:25:00.002-06:00

A pretty girl I saw in Oxford

While awaiting something that will change your life one way or another, perhaps best to acquire something like Dante's 'Divine Comedy: Inferno', just in case you need a lift after the envelope and letter fall to the floor

2010-03-17T09:33:00.000-06:00

So while I await THE letter in the post
(from the Oxford English Department
on my MSt. application
due to be decided the 19th of March)
I have done just that

Prepared to descend into the bowels
of despair
where I will be reminded
that there are far worse things
imaginable (--imagination--all in one's mind--perspective--not real--fictitious--imaginable)
to the human mind
than a decline
from Oxford

dante alighieri

Yet I will read Inferno either way (& probably Paradiso & Purgatory too)
because I haven't yet
and because I want to swirl with Francesca da Rimini
in either swooning exuberance for seizing onto the thing in life that must be just like the taste of blood to a vampire (ie admittance into Oxford minds for another year)
or in sheer despair for being condemned to vegetarianism for the eternity a vampire cannot get out of (ie barred from what is behind the walls & skulls of Oxford past next week).

In the meantime
after my four day break from reading
I am compiling my own reading list for the remainder of this week:
1. Andre Gide's Strait is the Gate
2. Maupassant's Bel-Ami
3. Zola's L'Assammoir
prep work for Brussels & Paris.

Three more things:
(1) I'm ready to depart for the continent (europe),
(2) though biking around Oxford's alleys aimlessly today
with my books in my basket
I realized yet again
this place stirs me, moves me, unhinges me in very charming ways
which isn't all good because (3) After giving a presentation yesterday to Naya's class
on conservation in the Rockies--on being a backcountry ranger in Glacier--and spending hours gazing at wall-size photos of our backpacking/peak-climbing/wildlife photos from over the years, I want to go home and nestle in with nature and forget all this human stuff
that is at the very heart of it
something I am not loyal to
in any way
as much as I am
(at the end of wolf article
by Chadwick
in the current issue
of National G.)
to wolves being allowed
to be.

Okay--there's a (4) Yet
without
human minds
like those you might find in Bodleian skulls roaming over books
voraciously
wolfishly
pressing at human philosophy, etc.
we may never arrive to a place
(not even talking collectively--that would be asking too much--but just a handful)
where humanism actually
finally
recedes
enough
to see what we humans
are actually capable of
when we
are being
smart animals.

grey wolf in montana

jane goodall & friend

Dance, then, wherever you may be

2010-03-15T03:33:00.000-06:00

My little Naya bug hurt her neck quite a bit on Thursday & we've been a bit stressed since. Taking it easy, resting, stretching, massaging, hugging, watching movies, reading books... Today she's staying home from school as her neck isn't quite ready for a full day of school with swimming.

This morning I left her upstairs in bed resting & working on her new hobby of stitching with embroidery (thanks Helen!), went down to make breakfast & bring it up to her. When I came back up she was twirling around singing this song they've been learning at New Hinksey primary for Easter--so sweet to see and hear, particularly since she has seemed quite pensive and sad since her neck injury, and not in the twirling mood.

You all know, by now, my dislike for the surety of religion, however, what you may not know is that I love the sentimentalism, sweetness, hope of what is behind religion. I appreciate it most keenly particularly when standing below a statue of Mary in a cathedral or peering at the effects of oil dabbed precisely on canvas to make one sadly bow the head or brush a tear for humans hanging humans on crosses, other humans taking them down, mourning, painting, singing songs, etc. etc. Below are the sweet lilting lyrics of the song Naya was singing & below that is a video of a little old man singing the song:

I danced in the morning
When the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon
And the stars and the sun,
I came down from heaven
And I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem
I had my birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

I danced for the scribe
And the pharisee,
But they would not dance
And they wouldn't follow me.
I danced for the fishermen,
For James and John -
They came with me
And the Dance went on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

I danced on the Sabbath
And I cured the lame;
The holy people
Said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped
And they hung me on high,
And they left me there
On a Cross to die.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black -
It's hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I'd gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

They cut me down
And I leapt up high;
I am the life
That'll never, never die;
I'll live in you
If you'll live in me -
I am the Lord
Of the Dance, said he.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pRfNLW_K6Q

The things that happened today:

2010-03-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

1) Went jogging for a really long time down on the river paths & around Oxford & noted that reading 800 pages a week for 8 weeks though righteously bodacious is detrimental to one's relaxed cheetah-mimicking stride. Shrug. So. Can't do it all--all at once that is. Can do it all in stride, however.

2) Laid in bed with Aldo Leopold. Sorry. I like saying things like that on this blog. It's a cheap thrill. Studying ecocriticism & literature & what easy-on-the-mind reading to find Leopold's A Sand County Almanac in my hands among Heidegger, etc. I've been known to say that the one I seek to do life with is an Aldo Leopold/Robert Frost sort of bloke. Astounding as always to me the brilliance that precedes us well beyond what most of us have any notion of. "Progress" and the unfurling fad of progressive "consciousness" are no lovers of mine.

3) Booked the two apartments we'll be luxuriating in, tittering in, window-leaning from in Paris. One is beside the Louvre with big windows looking down on the street! click here for photos: 1st arrondisment flat And the other is on the Ile St. Louis (the island on the Seine beside Notre Dame). click here for photos: 4th arrondisment flat . We have one week in each one. (Also booked tickets from Venice to Paris April 6th---this means we must get from Oxford on March 30th to Venice by April 6th--hooray! Probably through Salzburg and Vienna, or maybe through Prague and Vienna, that's to be arranged when I find the right tickets).

4)Received word from Oxford Professor #1 that he judged my essay work/aptitude/bantering capabilities to be an "A-level" grade. I'm calling it an Oxford A, because, wow, I've never pushed it that far before. So thankful--totally didn't expect to earn more than average--the bar here is so high--weeped a bit today after hearing this. If Humble and Pride could be lovers, they would birth me at this very moment.

5) Received word from the University of Vermont that I've been admitted into their MA literature & theory program for September--Burlington, VT; and, that I'm on the waiting list for having a Teaching Assistantship (full ride, stipend, and housing costs covered). (That makes--3 yes, 2 no, so far). Come on Oxford. March 19th should be the day. I'm almost feverish over the waiting. Thankful for my other options though.

6) Found out about our friends' giant sweetheart St. Bernard, Canyon, having to be put to sleep yesterday & feeling glum. Dog friends are too amazing for such brevity. Yet, nature, life cycles, vulnerability, death are perfectly beautiful to notice so keenly as one does when loss occurs. I wouldn't like to live forever, I told Naya recently. It would create a cesspool of a world to have all the humans ever made forever clinging to it, but also I like the feeling of having to work with a finite time--it fosters the very feelings and drives that make me feel alive and lit up. I like feeling vulnerable. And I imagine becoming sick, old, injured and thus dying to be just as meaningful and captivating as any other set of moments. It is why if I come across an injured creature gasping I have a very hard time deciding what to do--because what if our idea, my idea of putting things out of their misery actually takes away the richness of something being experienced that we can't possibly understand. i want to be allowed all of my experiences, all. yet for other things i can't bear the witnessing of writhing or angst. tricky business.

7) Ate dinner in Hall with my best mate, Naya, who laid out her life plan to me as she often does now in that Hall as we eat--tonight she said, "I'm definitely going to be a philosopher and do art." Pause. Chewing of a buttered roll. Eating of spanikopita. Swallow. "And who would you be if you could be anyone up on the walls in here?" I answered, ah, tough, either Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Queen Elizabeth I, or her dad, Henry VIII. Naya said, "Well, I want to be Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway." But she's not up on the wall, I said. "Okay, then Queen Elizabeth." I said, okay then I'll be Henry the VIII and maybe I'll let all of my wives live this time around. Then I asked her where, if she could live anywhere in the world in any sort of house or situation, would it be. She gave me an elaborate multiple choice of options with very funny details to try to trick me and clue me in at the same time, with the correct choice being "A really big farm in Sweden with horses, chickens, rabbits, my kids, my husband and I'll teach art to kids in a school nearby." But then she said she was worried about this because she knew I'd want to live in Paris or Oxford or Whitefish. But we sorted that out. We'll have a dedicated spare room for each other, and we'll make lengthy visits lasting for months like happened in old Russia.

8) Went to a play about semi-old Russia, "Three Sisters," three hours long, really brilliant. They wanted always to leave their dull town for Moscow which they put on an intellectual pedestal (hmmm...sound familiar?) But they never manage it. But they always want it. It breaks their hearts in different ways that they don't, yet, of course, the meaning and purpose they seek in life, would not be found in Moscow anymore than it would in....forgot the name of their town....so let's just say it was called Whitefish. The meaning and purpose they seek in life would not be anymore readily found in Moscow than Whitefish...though perhaps other things would have been more readily found, but perhaps not. One can't help leaving the play wishing they had gone to Moscow, at least for a time. It was a meaningful play at this particular juncture in my life, to be sure.

9) Now I am going to finish the second half of the film, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Did not feel a kinship for the most part with the Sabina of the first half. Anyone reading this have any opinions of this book/film? I heard an intricately woven earful the other night from my Italian landlord, Erminia--another unexpected highlight of this wonderland called Oxford.

Feeling like Francesca da Rimini this afternoon

2010-03-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

Ary Scheffer, The Shades of Francesca da Rimini and Paola Malatesta Appearing to Dante and Virgil, 1855

Let the storm wash the plates.

(last line of Edwin Morgan's 'Strawberries')

This House believes that politicians shouldn't do God

2010-03-04T18:02:00.007-07:00

Just home from another Oxford debate--(to generalise) the UK and Europe pity us for our god-laden politics, i.e. even someone as intelligently articulate and socially aware as Obama closes every speech with 'god bless america.' whereas here in the UK, sitting in this debate room, listening to the liberal, brilliantly conscientious nature of even those in opposition to keeping god out of politics, who don't argue that god is something to believe in, but that if their politicians believe in god and are thus making their decisions based on superstitions that they want to know it and not have it hidden, thus they want 'politicians to be allowed to do God' and subsequently for them not to be voted in (the whole Tony Blair thing, for instance)--without sitting in this debate room i wouldn't remember that the US was once viewed and admired to be the most tolerant, intelligent nation. & of course w's funding of africa with the stipulation of no contraceptives with the $ (due to his faithful lack of basic tolerance and religious freedom) & resultant increase in HIV in the financed countries was brought up. makes this atheist want to put my head in my hands and say, 'oh lord.'

i feel happy to be here tonight (an ocean away from the US's bizarre religious hegemony), just to know that america's dumbed down, tightly grasping, defensive, proselytizing version of faith isn't representative of a human condition with faith. europe/the uk handles its faith and faith questions quite differently than we do. if the US could first give up thinking of itself as the most progressive nation on the planet, and forcing our kids into dogged devotion to it, we might have the chance of respectable, collective intelligence once again. for now, however, we are sending our US kids to school every morning where they pledge allegiance under one god, where we overlook the fact that not even our liberal president is brave enough to actually separate church and state, and where many of us still have to feel the oppressive pressures of religious fundamentalism forcing prayer at a holiday meal, forcing hand to heart and allegiance to a nation and a god we may or may not believe in to fit in with the group, forcing abortion, sex, etc. to be non-discussable topics between divergent views of it, for instance. oppression is wicked if anything is. i will never understand how christianity (& others) doesn't see this of itself.

i for one feel readily willing to acknowledge that we, the US, have slid into some barbarianism, and all of us that shrug it off as we pay with our 'in god we trust' money each day, etc. endorse a lowering glass ceiling, even for those that do trust in 'god'. for if we are to see those with faith as intelligible versus superstitious, they must begin to demonstrate an awareness and humanitarian tolerance that theirs isn't the only approach to being human in this complex world of finding meaning. those of faith that profess a love for their neighbor, should be the foremost advocates against forcing others into their faith. this approach would reflect actual wisdom, love, and compassion toward their fellow humans in contrast to what has always been done--heavy-handed oppression and coercion so that people will either cower and fake it, or will give up something they held dear out of fear, guilt, pressure. it almost makes me sad for christianity when i see it in this manipulative way--like the bully on the playground who never has any true friends.

i, with the majority here tonight, walked out the door that said "Aye." "Aye, this house believes that politicians shouldn't do god," and by politicians I mean anyone who has sway over anyone else. Faith should be a private matter and not a coercive, guilt-laden tactic of interacting with other humans. I daresay it would be beautiful for all faiths to evolve continually as we discover our various blindspots, intrusions, and oppressions, as it seems to me these thirteen bishops in the UK who just this week endorsed gay marriage demonstrate as a possibility, or the chaplain in an Oxford University chapel who is openly gay with a partner in a town that brings it up with pride at its debate hall. Cheers to the UK as a nation I admire more and more as I get to know it.

The Reading List

2010-03-02T13:07:00.134-07:00

Today at the Union Society Library

My Reading List for Hilary Term (since January 15)

(any not read in their entirety have been left off this list)

**not bragging (on the contrary, as it is a bit like revealing a heroin habit), but am just listing for posterity & to let you know what I've been up to & perhaps give you the backdrop on the restraint/unrestraint from previous blog post**:

A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

A Writer's Diary, Virginia Woolf

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

"Woolf's Servants Get Their Due," Anna Mundow

essay #1 (tutorial 1) on Woolf

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel

Hegel, Peter Singer

essay #1 (tutorial 2) on Hegel

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

"A Distinctly Modern Novel," Howe Irving

"Jude the Obscure as a Tragedy," Arthur Mizener

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, Dale Kramer

The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography, Paul Turner

essay #2 (tutorial 1) on Hardy

"Theses on Feuerbach," Karl Marx

"The German Ideology: Part One," Karl Marx

"Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Intro," Karl Marx

"Preface to a Critique of Political Economy," Karl Marx

Marx, Peter Singer

"Marxist Literary Theories," David Forgacs (Modern Literary Theory)

essay #2 (tutorial 2) on Marx

Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

Early Modernism, Christopher Butler

"Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper," Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

essay #3 (tutorial 1) on Conrad

"The Death of the Author," Barthes (Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader)

"What is an Author," Foucault

The Order of Discourse, Foucault

The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (Intro)

The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard (Intro)

"Universal History and Cultural Differences," Lyotard

The Postmodern Explained to Children, Lyotard

The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity...

essay #3 (tutorial 2) on Universal History

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, John Blades

Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Derek Altridge

essay #4 (tutorial 1) on Joyce

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

Murphy, Samuel Beckett

"Three Dialogues," Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit

A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner

The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera

essay #5 (tutorial 1) on Beckett

Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford

final essay #6 (tutorial 1) on Ford

The History of Sexuality, Foucault

The Greenblatt Reader, Stephen Greenblatt

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

The New Historicism, Veeser

Practicing New Historicism, Gallagher & Greenblatt

essay #4 (tutorial 2) on New Historicism

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

four+ theory books on eco-criticism (tbc),

and one final essay

(for tutorial 2)

really tired eyes (particularly the left one),

a sleep-deprived manic,

an insatiable mind smiling,

all requirements fulfilled for my BA in English lit. March 12, 2010

The Oxford Narrative (or, What the World Looks Like If You Spend Your Days at the Bodleian and Your Nights at the Oxford Union For 9 Weeks Without Reprieve)

2010-02-26T03:51:00.009-07:00

the laces are only tightened so severely in Oxford, criss crossing up the back, along the neural pathways, in the approach to essay writing or text interpretation or debate tactics or attire so that they can be released more completely with one sharp slice, directing one’s mind (with the swiftness of aufspritzen/ejaculation/a rocket) down neural corridors that it hadn’t seen before, that hadn’t been there before. the Oxbridge sex blog, underwear at busstops, "the pull," macabre bicycle seats like limbs and body parts in the bushes, oscar wilde’s sweeping of velvet in the wind that blows down cobblestoned alleys, dorian grey in every lowered lash, in between the lines of every theatre production, the physics student with a quill and red ink spilled at the bodleian, and the distraction of undone collars.

one is released from everything at oxford. one doesn’t have to smile. one can forego pats on the back for nicking the knife edge to the laces of one’s comrades. one is released from the everyday niceties in favor of argument, even the niceties of everyday banter for ripping debate that takes on the form of being brought to one’s knees by a wave of the hand and a bold, ‘no thank you.’ one is released from the nervous, isolation-oriented, how are you, i'm fine, so busy, so great, neuroses of the modern gaze, to find eyes to be direct and smolderingly-confrontational, everyone smoldering, or with bothered indifference that your smoldering or your misunderstanding is like a fly in their butter, or a twist in their lace, but still they look on with intrigue. one can be, think, act in any way at all, so long as it is truly leading to the epitome of the unrestrained, in the way that one knows restraint, precision, resolve, determination, discipline, utter withholding of basic needs like sleep, and then at some exact moment opts to cut the corset up the back, and revel in the unrestrained one can only feel in oxford.

some say oxford lives in a bubble, that it hasn’t come into the 21^st century from the 16^th, but it seems those people haven’t walked its corridors, stood in its debate rotunda, read its house-bound books, walked its spiral staircases, eavesdropped on its conversations, slunk along its puke-ridden alleys in heels, haven’t tightened the laces and sharpened the blade, or they would know that the bubble oxford dwells in is something not archaic/outdated but is a humanity that has followed a different branch from what one thinks of as our current collective state. encompassing all that humanity has ever been, holding it in the palm, aware intoxicatingly, precisely, unrestrainedly of what it is the palm holds, that it is crushable, that it is delicate, that it is kissable, that it is meaningless, that it is indestructible, that everything depends upon it, and then lifting it to warm, swollen lips to press against it so that the breath pushes out of it in agony, only to take a gasp of deepest inhale after in sweet repose.

oxford is raw genius and human wildness smoldering as it laces and unlaces, and frightens the rest of humanity that might stop in for the weekend if they look closely enough to see they are finding a version of humanity that subscribes to a different narrative than one can find elsewhere, as if it is some non-mythical, rawer avalon, athens, atlantis, the stuff of literature, arias, paintings resides here still, the renaissance yet to die off beneath the cement, plastic, wifi, facebook one-liners we've been asked to contend with elsewhere. it is frightening enough to call the lacing and unlacing one will find here a bubble. it is intoxicating enough to cling to it and weep for having to walk out its gates. or it can also just look nice in a photograph, ‘I went to oxford, here I am standing beside an ancient college where the smartest of the smart have studied for centuries in the smartest of smart attire.’ if only the lacing could be conveyed in such pictures, and the smoldering, and the sound of laces being cut with one deft maneuver, as neural pathways aren’t all that’s released, in every room, under every archway, at every busstop, along every press of lips, and in every gaze that undoes the thought that it takes a 4.0 to get in here and money. it takes a willingness to hold one’s breath, to put a foot on the dresser to pull more tightly against that which wants to be lax, and to stow a sharpened blade along your inner thigh. that’s what it takes to get into oxford. and by get into, i mean understand.

and of course there is the afternoon tea and scones if that is simply too much on occasion, or altogether.

(and this is just a post about a particularly prevalent thread woven through a town that has many other threads, i've not lost touch entirely, nor have i become a dorian grey, nor a reveler in surety, don't worry)

A few photos

2010-02-23T17:22:00.003-07:00

Naya at a pub (The Mitre) in Oxford with hot chocolate & scones

chatting with her friends Jade & Ella (in Whitefish) on the phone

Naya at the Rollright Stone Circle north of Oxford

Common bird here that I'd never seen before--the Coot

The "Old Library" in the Oxford Union Society where I've been studying the last few days,

an elitist alternative to the Bodleian,

as if one needed more than the Bodleian.

Naya and my mom in one of the Bodleian's courtyards

The entrance I use to enter the Bodleian, where most of the English lit. is

A walkway on the Christ Church grounds taken this weekend on a beautifully spring-like day

On a recent walk in the Cotswolds (Lower Slaughter to Upper Slaughter)

Naya and Opa at brunch in the Christ Church dining hall

At the Rollright Stone Circle

In the Christ Church courtyard ("Tom quad")

One of the Oxford colleges (Hertford)

at sunset this weekend

I can't stand the idea of these being memories I look back upon, so much do I love the living of it. We have one month left here & then will spend April in Paris with some side trips to Baden-Baden, Vienna, Prague...

hell, to me, is being surrounded by surety

2010-02-19T19:52:00.006-07:00

I am curious what narrative you dwell in?

(because I've spent the last four days intertwined with an aspect of this question in every manner of scenario as I've been studying postmodernism--Lyotard in my second floor bed on Wytham Street with Italians spoken in the background, Foucault at the Bodleian, seat #207, Lyotard at a cafe filled with professors and students bantering, Lyotard at the Bodleian, seat #402, Foucault at the busstop, Lyotard for eight hours straight, Lyotard tucked under my arm to keep him out of the rain, Foucault like chinese water torture spread out in timed intervals, just when I think I can't handle anymore, there Foucault is again tapping for my attention because I hadn't even read half of what'd been assigned yet).

Sorry, I digress, so to be more plain by asking what narrative you dwell in, I mean what story do you tell yourself or those around you of the way the world has unfolded, is unfolding, will unfold? As in, how do you make sense of your place in the complexity of life and the world (of postmodern life in the postmodern world)? (Please please post below, as I genuinely genuinely want to know because it is interesting, but also because I want to know your interior more thoroughly.)

To be yet more plain, when you look at your life, or your niche/passion/career, or the way you interact with people, the way you parent, the way you love, or the way of history, or humanity, in what way do you see it? Is it progressively stacking? Progressively unfolding? Does it have an overarching meaningfulness? Is it a speck amid chaos, nonlinear, without purpose, without meaning? Or are you one that tells yourself the narrative that the time for believing in purpose is past? Or are you free of even contemplating the world in this delineating way? Or are you indifferent altogether and ready to hop off this tiresome blog post (I won't at all hold it against you, as one should mostly listen to one's needs--argh, narrative!)?

I personally have dwelt (do dwell) in one particular story-telling narrative, for as long as I can remember, where I see the world's purpose (and by the world's I mean my purpose, but also the purpose of interaction, the purpose of literature/art, the purpose of education from kindergarten to oxford) to be the removal of ever more hindering layers, the removal of ever more blindspots and assumptions, to expand and push at the edges of intellect and emotional intelligence, and to move ever closer to some thorough version of brilliance for ever increasing numbers of humanity, whereby someday we might collectively stop acting and thinking on behalf of these blindspots, assumptions, and copious layers, and might once and for all act and think from some truer/less encumbered/more brilliant/softer/kinder part of ourselves.

In my narrative, the human world aims (through its art, philosophy, academia, and literature in particular; but even in its ecological mvmts, human rights developments, etc.) to arrive to its finest, its least held back, its most brilliant. I see it everywhere to the point that it is amazing that five weeks of heavy-petting of the pages of modernist novels and postmodernist theory books can undo a lifetime of surety when prodded by two genius professors: namely, that my narrative can be undone & I can step back (at least in moments) from my narrative and look at it and set it down. And even more I can admit that what to me has seemed very genius and brilliant on my part is actually something dealt with much more thoroughly millennia ago.

Some examples of narratives that humanity has told/ is telling itself: 1) the Christian narrative (certainly we could insert a Muslim narrative, and a Buddhist narrative, an atheist's narrative, etc. here as well) that seeks comfort and surety by assuring us that faith means that nothing permanently bad will happen to us because solid infinity awaits if we will only aim the gaze over the heads of those around us, up and out, heavenward; 2) the 'narrative of emancipation from ignorance and servitude thanks to knowledge' (Socrates, Plato, Kant, Hegel, (S.Brigette), etc.); 3) 'the Marxist narrative of emancipation from exploitation and alienation'; 4) 'the capitalist narrative of emancipation from poverty through technical and industrial development'; 5) the narrative I see in abundance in Whitefish/the liberal US is the abundance/mindfulness narrative--that angst and humanity's ancient sorrows and neuroses can be fixed if we are simply present with ourselves, our breathing, our blessings; 6) the postmodern scholarly narrative that there is no narrative, no unity, no cohesiveness, no objective that is universal except that, oops, now we are telling the narrative of no narratives; 7) the neo-religious narrative (modern Christian, yogi, new age, pscyhotherapy, otherwise)--that is almost precisely the same as narrative #1 except that it doesn't know it. (this is by no means meant to be comprehensive & the quotes above are from Lyotard).

I'm rambling on about this (& sorry for the slightly edgy tone on some of the above) because unfortunately I still believe in my narrative (and apparently I am still untangling myself from Lyotard and Foucault). In my narrative if we notice that we are operating under layers and heavy assumptions it counts for a whole lot more than being oblivious to those layers and assumptions, or even outright denying that they are removable ideologies. So I ask you to consider your narrative, I suppose, in the hope that the world will be a slightly less opaque place if we take on this exercise together. Though I am fairly sure that this goal, and my narrative, of making the world less opaque, is as impossible and implausible as any other unifying goal for something so vastly complex and non-unifiable as life and humanity.

Perhaps even more than all I've just said, my point is to clear up the reason that my face gets a bit cloudy and I sigh when people around me speak of their narratives like they are real. Imagine then the beautiful humility I felt today when my professor's face clouded over a bit and he sighed because before him was someone (me) who spoke of her (my) narrative unknowingly as if it were a real force in the world whilst defending part of my paper. I love that Oxford makes me acknowledge my blindspots with a rigor and swiftness that I've heard many people say (another narrative, no doubt) can only be accomplished with an intimate relationship where you are plainly mirrored for what you are and what you aren't by another who won't look away. (Turns out, like all narratives, that this is untrue, we can be mirrored by a vast number of things beyond partnership.)

I hope that all of you who read this post will find that if we acknowledge these stories we operate in, and try to look at them together, we can be even greater/more thorough friends than we are now when we silently disagree, or moodily cloud over, or judge, or fawn over, or avoid certain subjects, or talk about the surface oscillations of our lives like the weather or how pretty the Bodleian is, etc. How cool would it be if we could use some of the postmodern scholarly methods in our relationships--thorough and as free of assumption as possible, with neither party believing there will ever be a right way, just a multitude of ways to find interesting as speculation. I won't assume you are going for a humanity filled with Socratic minds if you won't assume I'm going for a life that will lead me to surety.

The mama

2010-02-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

Erminia, my Italian landlord/housemate, says that when the father dies he floats away a little at a time like a boat on the sea until you can't feel him anymore; but that the mama is part of you and so you will miss her less. When you are peeing and look down at your legs, at your nakedness, at your hands you will see your mother, she will be there in your form until you don't exist either, so you will never feel separate from her.

And we three sit at the table listening, my mama to my left, and Naya across from me, Erminia at the fourth seat. & I am happy that the mama is here. She is calming to me today. And as this is/has been rare I sit by it and notice. Though three inches shorter, the mama has my hands, my eyelashes, my frame, my curves, my way of looking down or out the window instead of always at the eyes, my tendency toward a chill, my escalation of laughing until others think 'geez, what's so funny,' my way of holding a fork, wanting endlessly more of life, etc. The mama is here. & Naya's helixed strands revel and pirouette in all the same.

& for fear of over-sentimentality, an image of another story I was once told by someone else with a heavy accent comes to mind--about the idea that when a shark swims in the water it watches for the electricity, and when a person gets in the water the shark sees the electricity, and is shocked by the person's electricity, and the shark need only follow that electrical bolt to find the person (refer back to row boat painting).

No matter the subject or content I'm a sucker for a good story in a heavy accent told with conviction, eye-contact, and precise pausing for effect. And at least one of these stories is at least partly true, but probably they are both all the way true if you hear them in the right way.

Unrelated post script--if you want to explore truly how far you want/ are willing to go with amplifying your internal world (ie presencing, mindfulness) read Samuel Beckett's Murphy because one way of reading it is to see it as an exploration of how magnified we opt to make the external world we walk in versus the internal world we are. Tell me about it if you do read it.

Love at the Oxford Union

2010-02-13T00:51:00.001-07:00

Duz, Naya, and I got decked out last night, took a taxi to Tom Gate, dined at Christ Church, then went to the Oxford Union Society & I secured two guest passes, & after drinks in the private fancy-shmancy bar we went to find a seat for the evening's debate only to find that the listed event had been a spoof to protect Courtney Love from the masses. She walked in like a rock star & spoke for the next two hours. I don't feel like posting a critique of her intellect as I mainly walked away feeling sad for an overly rocked life that has left behind a very tired woman without custody for her daughter, still missing the man she quite loves & as she alluded to in the beginning of her speech, I wish she could have attended Oxford instead because the framework of her mind would have flourished as I think she has the archways of genius, though now they've been fairly crushed and just need structural support to keep the whole place from caving in.

I feel the same gap, listening to Courtney Love trying to speak of Ovid and Virgil with prowess though ending up clumsily grasping at it before Classicist students, as I did watching the film Precious. The resounding question in my mind is why some are so supported while others are so destroyed. It's uncomfortable to look at anytime, but it is particularly uncomfortable when faced with the crevasse from the upper rotunda of the Oxford Union. I'd like to make a move, however, that we (and by 'we', perhaps I mean 'I' but really I mean we) abolish any quibbling, tired phrases such as "We are so lucky compared to--" or "I'm so grateful to live where I do/have the opportunities I've had/etc." These phrases don't do what they seem to--feeling luck/gratitude does not equal presence, it actually in large part equals putting distance so that the crevasse becomes so wide one can no longer even see what it is that the unlucky are doing over there. It stands in (disguised) as a phrase of thanks for one's own life, but it comes across much more loudly as a justification of why there will be no thorough investigation into those who we are ever so grateful we are not like.

Will we forever have a class system with elaborate ways of convincing ourselves that it just is as it is, some of us are lucky, and some of us are not? We've taken quite small steps since the Middle ages, since the Victorian era if the surface differences are seen as such, particularly if we are willing to see the world as not solely composed of that which we allow our gaze to settle on, but see that it is composed of the masses we regularly steer our gaze away from.

Poverty-mind, according to Pema Chodren, is having a mind that will feel poverty no matter the circumstance & she says that one could be in a quagmire of rape and dire poverty without poverty-mind. There is some truth there, but there is also some averting of the gaze, because I don't know that Pema will ever convince this poverty-mind that my listening to Pema recordings peacefully, well-fed, well-educated, safe will ever help a woman being raped in the Congo, for instance. But when I get tired of attempting to gaze across the crevasse, I certainly like Pema to pet my mind and tell me I don't have to worry about the others' poverty or poverty-minds, & just should attend to my own. I think Pema vs. Courtney Love or the Precious protagonist vs. an Oxford student represent the disturbing crevasse that remains gapped and uncrossable, the ancient crevasse that allowed slaves and slaveholders, the very same one.

It seems about time for a major revolution again to me.

The mourning dove outside my window concurs.

Naya just woke up. Going to start the day.

Hot Damn!

2010-02-11T17:03:00.003-07:00

Just walked in the door from my first debate at the Oxford Union Society--kicking off the heels and pin-stripe suit I was wearing. The intellects of all two hundred in the room were lit up as we hung on each word--the proponents brilliant and the opponents geniusly ripping as they hashed out whether or not the British Empire was "a good thing." My favorite intro line from a floor speaker (anyone is allowed to stand up and insert a comment/heckle/affront during the debate) was "Well, as Henry the VIII said to his wives, 'I won't keep you long'..." Though the subject was beautifully dense, the humor was liberally applied throughout, including one historian/Oxford don attempting to gain our support of the British Empire's good because it has spread Cricket throughout the world.

The crux: Do we praise Empire (not just British, but any) for the positives they offered the world's stage--education (Univ. of Oxford), democracy, societal structure, exposure to Western phil/literature/music/art, an international language, promotion of human rights--or do we denounce them for the horrors they've set up that are still playing out--complete squashing of human rights, slavery, postcolonialistic effects, demise of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction, etc.--or do we remove good and bad from the argument altogether, and see it for the complexly historical fact that Empire just was & hasn't to do with morals, never did, never will, but has to do with exploitation/gain--or do we write it off as non-judgeable because a twenty-first century mind shouldn't put the nineteenth century on trial for being nineteenth century? After two hours of heckling, laughing, hushed hanging, clapping, smiling the debate ended and we all filed out one of two doors, voting on whether we sided with the proponents or the opponents. Above one door it says 'Noes' and above the other it says "Ays." And which I walked out of is for you to ascertain/guess & post, for my amusement, if you will. & tell me for fun, though you couldn't possibly know, I assure you, since you weren't there to hear, which you'd walk out of. It was a surprisingly waffling experience, so good were the debaters.

And home now, heels kicked off, I'm still smiling from the debate & thinking "Hot damn, I love this town!" Still, after six weeks, can't believe how brilliant it actually is here. I'll lie prostrate at Carfax (where High Street, St. Aldates, Queen Street, and Cornmarket street cross at the centre) and weep if the graduate committee doesn't say "Ay." But, I counsel myself, that I'll be forever thankful for three months of what to me is what I'd need a good portion of heaven to be to want to go there. Not sure if that reassurance will work so well, however, when the three month timer goes 'ding.'

Also, visited The Dragon School this am--Oxford's prep school--& where I'd like Naya to go next fall--the art wing is a place she would flourish as she deserves to. & read Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel at the Bod this afternoon--which assured me of my stance on the erasure of the binary way of devising/dividing the world/humanity/ourselves. & went to a film (American) called 'Precious' late afternoon that made me feel embarrassed for demanding the world be more like Oxford when there are so many someones that have no need for a place like Oxford with doors for voting and heels to walk through them and taxis to ride home in and blogs to detail a world so agonizingly separate from theirs. & now I must finish the rough draft of my short story on the servant girl at Christ Church to submit to my writing group before I sleep.

Love, love, love when life is this stackedly full of exploring what it is to be a human.

As if told by smart children

2010-02-07T02:08:00.000-07:00

the three-day forecast for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday in Oxford goes like this:
Grey cloud
Grey cloud
White cloud

I'll tell you if I see a difference on Tuesday when the white cloud takes over.

Scary mofos (or rather, scary mos)

2010-02-05T16:40:00.003-07:00

(Painted in 1610, six years before Shakespeare's death.)

I'm sitting here at my desk, a plate of pasta & basil now emptied, a glass of blackcurrant juice instead of port at my right. Naya is sleeping at her friend Freya's and I've just returned from the theatre. Tonight it was Medea: like Beloved's mama (by T. Morrison) she is one of the scary mothers of literature. Medea offs her children to show her cheating husband what she is made of, for revenge, to maintain control amid chaos, or any other speculation to her motivations. & Yesterday I took a bus to Stratford-upon-Avon (birthplace & town of William) to visit The Shakespeare Institute as it is one of the places I've been accepted for grad school & thoughts of that swirl--namely that the lecture given was superb, the awareness that I could be there next September is a bit romantic, contrasted with when upon my return to Oxford it felt like home for all its rippling/brimming life and I felt like kissing the cobblestone and the prettily-scarved people jamming the "pavement" (ie sidewalk). And I met with my tutor today and presented my paper on Marx and his theory of world history, and I knew what I was talking about though press me he did to find a weak seam, and as we walked down the street in the sun post-debate he said, "that was a good essay," & I get the feeling he doesn't really say things like that. And an hour after that I leaned back on pillows and began Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because I have two days to complete it & several books on Joyce. And the entire universe seems to be mapped out in my head right now. I have loads of theories, and four or five stories/novels demanding to be written before they flitter away. I collapse at the end of each day in satisfaction for the endeavour to actually now be underway. I'm in the middle of the current here & it's one of those times when the water moves as one mass like an object of water moving down the riverbed versus endless supplies of separate liquidness. Just perspective, but nonetheless.

Here below is my favorite artistic (Delacroix/Louvre) depiction of Medea because of the soft, pretty flesh of her, including cherub-like coloring, yet note the knife. It's much more menacing from one who looks sweet than from one who looks nuts, because then we wonder something about humanity instead of just writing her off as nuts, then she becomes more like us. Unfortunately the players didn't get that part right tonight, but I felt happy in row six as I'd just had this random conversation with an old man in the foyer who had two versions of Medea propped on his lap--one translated in 1859, the other translated within the last half decade--and he and I compared lines and concurred on which got to the depths and which skimmed across distractedly. Plus, in row six, I worked out another possible dissertation topic--tracing these "scary" mother characters in literature and art and comparing intricately their varying motivations for undoing their children. At this moment, Beloved (that is Beloved's mama), is my favorite...but I'd need a year or four in Oxford to sort out all the others I don't yet know about, and to have anything meaningful to say about it.

Long, warm hugs to Blase, Gerda, and Jen--my most dedicated penpals thus far. Warmth to Melissa for the happy joy I had recently at my pigeonhole--I read your circular thoughts right there before dinner one night. All the complexity of sweetness to the one who was my undoing yesterday in the Bodleian when your lines became more compelling than Marx's, because I don't know that a gentlemen will cut it--ask Melissa for my ten-line quote that ridiculously simplifies what will. Pen-tip to pen-tip to Mary because, you know why. Safe ocean flying to Duz, because he is aloft right now & headed my way by lunchtime tomorrow. "You are completely unreplaceable" &"I feel like a happy ten year old with my best friend when I talk on Skype with you or send late night emails" to Kari who someday will perhaps wear a little red beret too in Paris, or if not, will certainly ski with me and two black fuzzies many more times before we toss in the towel! Happy (or murderous, as the case may be, & maybe, unlike Medea, the two go hand in hand in this case) cheetah sightings to my mama who is right about now in Nairobi. & to Scot, "Scotland is pulling me more and more because of the promise of mountains (albeit small ones) & the affinity I'm beginning to have for the Scottish accent via a stupid BBC show we've been watching"...so any further travel plans for you and Jack? And, lastly, cheers, with my blackcurrant juice, to being affected by absolutely everything with utmost rapture. I can't at all think of what else is the point.

Hilary Magdalene

2010-02-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

So, I mentioned before, in an earlier blog post that I'm writing a story about one of the women who serve at Christ Church dining hall--as in how did she get there of all places, what is her life, etc. Well, I've connected with one woman and her name is Hilary Magdalene. She's quite young, so lovely like a pre-Raphaelite painting, she's very articulate and it pains me a bit that she is there handing us our soups night after night. Her life has been odd no doubt, and verging on the tragic. She had been a student of Oxford University about a year ago, but things went awry in her life, namely a man, and a subsequent baby. The rest you'll have to read the story for, which I am sketching in all the margins of my books, including (hush, hush) on occasion the margins of some of my library books--in pencil!

She looks a bit like this, particularly the hanging tear:

& by the way, I haven't spoken to anyone who works in the hall beyond, "thank you," and thus you'll find that Hilary is fictitious, except that fiction never really is quite fictional.

Anyhow I'm telling you all this because it demonstrates that I am back & well (as is my incredibly socially adept daughter) & I am once again finding life to be tragically too beautiful and short for all that there is fulfilling, sweet, and intricate about it. I love how the shoulders can carry too much at times only to be followed by their articulate cartwheeling.

Much ado about nothing,

Sabine

the sun is shining gloriously in Oxford & the birds are tweeting

2010-01-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

...but my bicycle got stolen last night & perhaps right at the same moment Naya undid her stomach contents across our bed, quite thoroughly across our bed and our room still smells of HCl acid/semi-digested food though I've spent the majority of the day scrubbing & laundering with the wee tiniest of washers in a country that doesn't readily believe in dryers & also, perhaps right at the same moment the secretary for the committee of a graduate fellowship that took months for me to compose hit send to deliver a "of the 8500 applicants only 1400 were chosen, and you were not one of them" message to my inbox & now today I attempt to read the books I must, with our sheets and blankets drip drying on every possible surface around our tiny room, but my stomach is churning & I don't know if it is because of the antibiotics working me over, the layered ill-luck, or the fact that Naya and I shared a spoon about an hour before she upchu@#d. I hope, like the bargaining optimist that I am (even though I feign atheism), that this means we've somehow "done our time" and can get on with the Oxford bliss momentarily.

It's not lost on me, however, that I have been a bit exuberant, perhaps annoyingly so on this blog...so the upside of all this day's weirdness is that I will not deliver an annoying peachy blog post where I detail how perfect my life is.

P.S. Naya is eating lots of food & feels mostly normal.

Going out for moon pieces

2010-01-26T23:02:00.002-07:00

This is part of the English section of the lower Radcliffe Camera reading room (in the Bodleian) & where I spend the majority of my time midweek. Yesterday & today's reading list: Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, a biography on Hegel, Marx's The German Ideology & Theses on Feuerbach & ..., a biography on Marx, and Forgac's Marxist Literary Theories. Not kidding. The 8-9 page essay on all of this is due Thursday by 5p. Then shift quickly to my other "tutorial" whose reading list must be consumed in its entirety Friday/Saturday so that I can deliver another 9 pager by Monday afternoon: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, biography on Joseph Conrad, Kundera's Art of the Novel, Butler's Early Modernism...too many to list, as I need to get off this blog & read. Last week I read 800 pages, this week promises more & I feel I am conducting an experiment with my mind to see how many pages can be read in each 24 hour period, with as little sleep as possible to keep the lab-rat going. I have to say it thrills me (vs. frightens/fatigues) to consume pages, authors, and entire periods so voraciously. It's the only way if one has any hope of grasping what humans have thought and accomplished.

Then, in all the spare time between antibiotic doses, helping Naya sort through life, and thousands of pages of human scribblings, I have this idea for a story I'm working on. It is about a woman who works in Christ Church Hall serving the students their extravagant meals three times a day. How is it that her life has brought her to her knees there, so to speak? If you have any art in similar vein as the pic above please pass on the name of the artist/painting to me. This one is 'La Mere' by Elizabeth Nourse, 1888. &

then, of course, the other two pics are the Hall we extravagantly dine in while I peep and wonder at the servers each night, making character sketches & a view of Tom Gate from the inside. The story'll be a tragedy. How couldn't it be.

Then a bit of poetry to share that I read this morning at 4am whose last line's sentiments I adore:

One of the Butterflies

by W. S. Merwin

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

And lest you think I'm getting too arrogant and serious, some amusement Naya and I laughed rather too loudly over for our housemates last night:

"Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear your partner has been turned into Dracula. Next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham! You just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, 'Think again, batman." --deep thoughts by jack handy

& These are one of those spiral stairs in the Bodleian I mentioned before, which at this point I have stopped climbing up and down for fun. It takes me four weeks of climbing spiraling staircases and smiling childishly about it before I can notice that the stack of books I'm not attending to almost needs its own spiral staircase to reach its top.

And on that note, to Hegel!

Einstein's equations about the universe from an Oxford lecture

2010-01-24T12:21:00.002-07:00

The bottom line, I like the most, is the equation for sorting out the age of the universe.
One up from that is for the radius of the universe.
This and Thomas Hardy's tragic fatalism keep me company this very uncomfortable Sunday afternoon.

I'm quite ill. Intense, hot pain on one side of my head & jaw, and heavy, syrupy fatigue since last night, abruptly and without reprieve. I think it's a real deal sinus infection, which I now realize I've never had. Just took 6 children's tylenol after sleeping for two hours, and now I don't feel that I need to go to the hospital. I had started to think the meningitis shot didn't take & began sorting out what to do with Naya (Hardy's fatalism). Looking forward to attempting to secure a bottle of antibiotics tomorrow first thing. Thankful that unlike Jude the Obscure I have access to medicine that will prevent me from dying in a small room in Oxford whilst the bells of all the spires clang in the background & I feverishly recite poetry or physics equations before the lights go out on a mere three decade stint.

Perhaps I've been doing a wee bit too much. But who wouldn't? & on that note, must write an 8-9 page essay by 1pm tomorrow that is better than anything I've yet written (must!), must go downstairs right now and cook dinner for Naya, & very much want to attend Burns' night tomorrow at Christ Church Hall complete with haggis, pipes, and whiskey & wanted to run with the x-country team again at noon Monday. I'll start with standing first and walking down the stairs to see how that goes.

Oh, come now, human frame, no time for such a thing as weak, flimsy fatigue when I want robustness.

2010-01-21T01:38:00.001-07:00

Maybe this will help you win some future Trivial Pursuit/Jeopardy game

2010-01-19T07:02:00.000-07:00

Some Oxford trivia:

What, pray tell, does it mean when your professor writes NB in front of a phrase? Hint--the Latin is Nota Bene.

Who is the only female who is gracing the walls of the Christ Church dining hall with her presence?

What does it mean when your librarian says that the books are sometimes shelved a bit wonky?

Why do we have the double solid yellow lines in the center of the road with white lines on the edges of roads in the US, and the very opposite in England--double solid yellow lines on each edge of the road & dotted white line in the center?

How does one go about studying seriously in Oxford--nose to book without looking up for at least four hours, that is--when the archways overhead keep making one smile & walking up and down the spiral ladders and rolling ladders for fun keep distracting one from anything other than taking it all in?

I use a fob, a hob, and a pair of Wellies every single day here, why and for what?

What novel am I reading right now? Hint--Hardy's last.

_____________________________
With regards,
Your happy friend,
Who has come home to read
so that she'll stop playing with the ladders &
fawning over the titles she wishes she could read,
Sabine

varying degrees of heaven

2010-01-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

When you hear really amazing choral presentations on the radio do you tend to think the soprano voices are women, like I do? Perhaps some are but tonight we witnessed that the choir was entirely without women at Christ Church as the voices soared to angelic heights that might make the unholiest of us accept anything to be allowed to stay for more notes. They are little boys. Boys perhaps of five or six years to just over Naya's age who sing gloriously and boldly so that I kept having to bend my neck around searching for the women I thought must be hiding from my view. Now I understand the tragedy of puberty from a new angle & the reason such a thing as castrato/i might seem rational. And the tragedy of all the priest business as well, yet more fully.

Then as we left Christ Church, sweeping our long coats over ancient paths, the bell at Tom Gate (the main gate) struck seven times, with Naya saying she couldn't believe little boys could do that, and the stars overhead were grand and clear; and, I wished that the little boys could follow us all the way home and sing us to sleep. But instead we have our nightly flutist, who Naya has named "The Flutist on the Roof." Maybe he is a castrato whose voicebox has failed anyhow despite heroic efforts?

From a fellow of Christ Church who must've seen what I just saw:

The More Loving One

by W. H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

My morning realization...

2010-01-16T04:23:00.002-07:00

...is that when one travels to a new country (or perhaps even to a new town, or to a new relationship, or new pair of socks or skis, for that matter) there are many things going on, but the main one, I think, is this underlying flutter (that perches in the soul & sings the tune without the words & never stops at all) that maybe here lies the possibility of all the things you wanted the world to be--already existing--and all the things you didn't want--not existing. For example, and the very thing that inspired what is now perhaps appearing to be a convoluted, nonsensical (even slightly adolescent) thought, as I prepared omelets with Devonshire cheddar, Oxfordshire eggs, EU basil, tomatoes, peppers, kale, and green onions with a fair-trade mocha in the other hand moments ago, I realized that a country that opts not to put little irritating stickers on the peppers and tomatoes that none of us want to be there is a very good and intelligent country.

_______________________________________________________

These are photos taken the other night when we first dined in Hall (capital 'H') at Christ Church.

Underneath the coats were very pretty outfits that were never let out because the building is so old it can't exactly be properly heated on a 30 F night. Imagine the strong smell of kerosene, two-hundred British accents bouncing off the arched dome & walls, eating with unusual swiftness as the servants are arriving already with course two whether or not you are done with course one, and being seated directly beneath an original painting of Sir Thomas More (Utopia's author)--and, you'll have a hold of a tendril. I put it forth again that I am allowed to bring two guests per night, so all you have to do is get here and then you too can wrap yourself in wool and take deep inhales of kerosene just as Einstein must have. You'd be crazy (one sandwich short of a picnic) to pass it up.

One more thought, as this is a new shift--something changed yesterday for me. I never took out the map and I knew my way around and I didn't feel the previous tendency to say very clipped sentences in hopes they wouldn't place the American accent. I ordered a book from "the stacks" at the Bod to be delivered to the lower reading room of the Radcliffe Camera on Monday morning with ease. I eavesdropped on a funny conversation with a mad professor at a bookstore cafe and smiled back and forth with the woman who was enduring it. People moved aside when I walked down the various alleys and sidewalks instead of walking straight for me. One woman took photos of me outside a college where I was waiting for a meeting. I met with my tutor, Dr. Henry Dicks, for the first time and felt jovially intelligent with no need to equivocate during the literary line-drawing we were engaged in. And none of that really indicates anything, it just sounds like me listing more of how swoony I am here but in between the lines there is something different.

The reading begins

2010-01-13T15:59:00.001-07:00

It is Woolfie who planted this seed originally of inspiring me to seek out such a grandiose dream as this Oxbridge forum and of creating restlessness about absolutely everything else. When I was nineteen, inundated by nursing curricula that I feigned interest in, I took a literature class each semester to maintain a hold on myself & one professor, fresh out of graduate school, assigned us A Room of One's Own, and thought privately that none of us understood it and she wished sorely that she was back in grad school or at some weightier humanities college. Somehow I like to imagine that I wasn't the only one in that room that put life on pause to sit up and notice the vulnerable genius of that book and what it could offer people that weren't doing what they should with their lives, however. Maybe that is why our professor looked so forlorn as we read it. Maybe we all did. I hope more than one of us from that room skipped the tracks that seemed so solidly laid.

In its introduction Woolf finds herself preparing for a lecture (the lecture is the entirety of A Room of One's Own) to a women's college about Women & Fiction. She is strolling around at a prestigious university whose lawns are not to be trod upon by non-members, which, at the time of Woolf, included women. In fact, some of the Oxford colleges didn't allow women until the 1970s. Anyhow, Woolfie finds herself thinking of Women & Fiction and what she is to say to these young women at a women's college elsewhere as she trods across the sacred greens of Oxbridge (either Oxford or Cambridge) and is promptly shushed off by a Porter. And therein her scene is laid: her rub with why it is hard for women to write fiction is personified by the lawn and the shushing Porter. Women are forever being shushed off lawns if lucky (like her) while most are at home burdened by babies, fatigue, a lack of their own money, and certainly a lack of a room of their own in which they could ever dream of having the time to create anything with pen and paper and steady gaze--at least most were at the time of Woolf. As to our time, well, another blog post for that.

So, today I walked across the snow-covered lawns of Christ Church for the first time as we were inducted and was instructed by a fellow Christ Church student (British) that we were allowed to walk here, yet visitors were not and had to stay on the paths...and Woolf's lines wandered through my mind unshushed, and I smiled and enjoyed each slushy step. I whispered to my friend Dara, "It is as if we've just been given keys to Buckinhgham Palace, isn't it?" "Yes," she tittered back.

The afternoon carried on & I left Christ Church & just moments ago received word from one of my "tutors" (equivalent to professors, though here you work one on one with your professor for studies vs. the lecture format) that yes, certainly we would be able to delve into the bridge that mends the late Victorian to the early Modern (via Hardy and Woolf and others) but why not begin with a reading list of Woolf's. He suggested that I read at least one novel, or up to four over the weekend, in addition to some of her diaries, and a biography, and an essay or two, and to come with an essay ready to discuss by Monday at 2pm at his office. He was nice enough to add, if it isn't too much. The beautiful thing (& here, I totally understand if you have need of eye-rolling) is that I read all of Woolf's works chronologically a couple of years ago to prove some theory to myself about her (ask me if you want to know). So, contrary to the list being daunting, it is pure joy and familiarity and my eyes have now a secondary fever atop the viral one. In fact, since here, I've been reading A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out, at leisure, so I'll just pick it up a notch. I had hoped to spend the next couple of days in the Bodleian library anyhow...now, instead of pretending to be an Oxford student, I'll actually be one.

& The most brilliant thing of it is that after I sent off my tutorial requests months ago asking to combine Hardy & Woolf, I regretted it--why hadn't I just focused on Woolf with an Oxford Woolfian scholar? I kept asking myself. Yet now it seems I get to. How lovely, really. And next weekend there is a Woolf lecture with The British Virginia Woolf Society in London, and I am on the waiting list for a ticket, that I requested several months ago. Oh, and it was Woolfie that got me into this online English program I've been doing the last year and a half as I wrote an essay about all of this room of one's own business & my chronological reading of her works that the English faculty liked. So it is quite fitting that my time here should hone a bit in on the one I like to call Woolfie.

One last bit, she is brilliant. If you haven't read her or you think of her as only a rock-pocketing melancholic wench at the bottom of a river, then perhaps pick up A Room of One's Own, at the least. It's very short. The WF public library has a few of her things on shelf. And it is very relevant to some aspect of your life I am sure, whether or not you are a woman I'm sure you have need of a room of your own in some way that you are presently ignoring. Oh, and just a sidenote, she bottomed the river at age 59, which doesn't quite fit the melancholic wench profile you might have pegged her as.

So here I am, not in possession of the things Woolf says to the ladies of the women's college that they must have if they are to write fiction--I do not have a room of my own--and it indeed makes the writing of fiction, or the attending of Oxford much much harder. In fact, I am at this very moment lying in bed in my very small room with my sleeping child, with my Italian roommates speaking in the hallway now for about 20 minutes very beautifully and without either of them taking in air. Like everyone, I say I have very little time for myself. As a solo act avec child, fiction & creating, quite possibly, should find themselves tossed out with the laundry water. I haven't exuberant, or even exuberantly small amounts of money. But I have got insatiability and wonder and verve and a warm yet melancholic stance on humanity. I have access to walk on certain lawns. I have access to 117 miles of shelves. I have access to this insanely elite club down a secret alleyway that is no less jaw-dropping than stumbling upon Diagon Alley, I am sure. I have nine weeks with a tutor who's spent his career on Woolf. And I have a fire under me arse that causes me to write and think and smolder when I should be sleeping. Somehow what Woolf had to say about Women & Fiction is not something old hat, read already enough, fitted on its spot on a shelf, outdated, drowned. Somehow it is one of the very essences of what it is to be human captured perfectly in its pages so that it doesn't outdate because just as she thought Shakespeare had nothing in his way, neither did she.

No rocks in m' pockets. But full of gratitude for beautiful genius. She had a flawless mind for what she used it for. I'm thankful to the melancholy professor who handed out one of those thin books to my nineteen-year old hand. & to the sleeping child who inspires fiction as much as she inhibits it. & to poverty as it makes one creative in ways wealth simply couldn't.

formal, 7:20p, at Hertford Hall

2010-01-12T01:42:00.001-07:00

assigned seating, my lovely friend & Christ Church fellow, Dara, beside me (outstretched arm)

pre-drinks: champagne

first course: baguettes and three-mushroom soup, Hertford college red & white wine

second course: vegetarian pastry, brussel sprouts, carrots, sparkling water

third course: cheesecake, Hertford college port

fourth course: petits fours, cafe au lait, more port

fifth course: cheese & fruit platter, sparkling water

post-drink toasting: involved forty speeches, including one of my own, and more port

Turning water into wine

2010-01-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Stained glass window at the Oxford Unitarian Chapel this morning.

The quote below it read: "he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast"

time and its passing

Today, what started out as a simple text to our new acquaintances Claire, Marcus, Lula, and Freya asking if they could recommend a babysitter (as I have a formal dinner Monday evening at one of the college dining Halls) resulted in the solidifying of friendship. Such a cool family. They live one block from us. They're British, but they've recently lived in Uganda and Copenhagen as she heads up Oxfam and he designs roads. They invited Naya over to play & I sat and had coffee with Claire for awhile, before they headed off to London for an evening of Burlesque theatre. She kindly insisted that Naya simply come to their house whenever I'd like, including tomorrow night. & Her only request was that she get to be my guest on occasion to some of the debating events at the Union society. & then when their babysitter was 30 minutes late, I was able to stay with the kids & sit in their cool house so that they could leave for London in time. Just doesn't take much to turn strangers into friends and trust.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but such a nice reminder day that

Life can be very simply amazing and kind.

Last bit of news--we both have a slight fever tonight and I'm trying to view the replicating UK virus in my blood as something as intriguingly cultural as any other thing I've been swooning over here.

Love hand-written mail way more than electronic/phone communications...

2010-01-08T16:45:00.002-07:00

& I just received a second postal address here that feels very elitist & I'd love get to use it once or twice:

I have a pigeon-hole (mail slot) at the Porter's Lodge of Christ Church & to get your hand-written letter to it you could write on your envelope:

Sabine Brigette
Christ Church
St. Aldates

Oxford OX1 1DP, UK

Sorry, I'm a bit like a bouncing around child, not meaning to be annoyingly excited, but I simply am fairly uncontainable at the moment.

first moments within the walls of Oxford

2010-01-07T12:42:00.001-07:00

at 7am I awoke to find that New Hinksey Primary was indeed among the long list of closed schools (but no panic ensued as my Oxford comparative lit. professor landlord assured me that Oxford was very keen on being kind to students that were also mums) & so while sleeping beauty slept I prepared two backpacks--one with loads of food, water, toys, markers, paper, 3rd grade math, books, & Simpsons dvds; the other with a pen, paper, map to the orientation building, and a beautiful packet of letters for Sabine Brigette about the specifics of having the privilege of being a budding Oxonian & we set off for the 8 hour orientation after some toast, yogurt, meusli, cocoa, & mocha.

at 9am passing the Radcliffe Camera, holding Naya's hand, and detailing to her how I know she will be quiet and that it will be hard for so many hours, but how it is essential not only for me (because I so badly want to hear what they are saying and feel excited and not irritated) but for other mothers who attempt to do the same after we have come and gone.

straight ahead, through the thick locked wooden doors, into a courtyard, under an archway, turn left, into another door, up a spiraling and ancient stairway & there we sat and were welcomed to what we've all just taken on by gaining acceptance into Oxford. oh my. so happy. can't believe the privileges & expectations handed to each of us in that room by each of the speakers that came. how will i ever leave?

lunch in Hertford Hall

(sorry, quick shot, cameras didn't exactly feel appropriate)

coffee break shot out of a window

from within Hertford's walls, out the wooden door, and then heading home at 5:15p

(what I wouldn't give for one of my shovels leaning on my back porch in WF just to help scrape off this skiff of snow that everyone is slipping on for lack of simple shovels...could have helped pay for my "privileges" if I had one)

walking to our bus stop,

naya is tired and i keep rubbing her back telling her she is such a good good kid, unbelievably capable

and within my own walls there are a thousand cedar waxwings alighting & flying in joyful, impossibly intricate dances in the air.

coolest bit of local knowledge gained today: the Bodleian library owns most of subterranean Oxford to accommodate its vast shelves of books (it owns a copy of every published book as it is a copyright library) & since we have access to any one of them there is an underground train system just for retrieving the books for the students, which are then delivered to your reading room of choice.

smile.

Shoveling the arctic oscillations with a cereal box & smiling about it

2010-01-06T09:42:00.002-07:00

A snow day in Oxford is like stepping into a quaint little fairytale book (read on, not as annoying as this sounds)--

After six days of sun since our arrival, the snow began to fall in heaps last night & by morning we had over a foot covering everything. Lovely of course, & no big deal for a person from the Rocky mountains, right? Well, yes, but no one owns a snow shovel here & the last time it really snowed like this was in 1987 according to the BBC this morning. They don't really have snowplows--though I did see one guy with a jeep and a quasi-plow driving around &...not plowing. So, to Oxford it is quite a very big deal & how to handle a foot of snow? --Well, step into a fairytale world where once upon a time,

all the schools closed
all were encouraged to stay home, get out the sledges, and simply enjoy the snow
and leave work and driving and things to do for another day
followed with endearing phrases thrown out like arctic oscillations, snow villains, and Oxford at the epicenter of the worst storm ever.
Where everyone did as told, stayed home, left their teeny cars buried,
bundled up in scarves, wool coats, and rainboots,
had town-wide snowball fights,
& I mean everyone,
even the police were throwing snowballs at each other in the park near our house,
and if they weren't throwing snowballs they were carrying them in their hands on the ready,
and there were snowmen built everywhere, really giant ones
because the snow is perfectly sticky
and people made beautiful snow artwork outside of their places of business
and the only shoveling we saw was one man with a cardboard cereal box clearing an area by his gate & another with a rake attempting to rake a bus stop of snow (and making no progress whatsoever) & a third with a regular dirt shovel clearing the bank's entrance...very very sweet...with snowballs cascading all around & occasionally beaning you right in the head or on the shoulder with just a laugh and a shrug in place of apology as if to say, "it might not snow again--you might not get hit again with my snowball for another twenty years--what else would you have me do?!"

& so Naya and I slept until 10am, then walked to town centre, walked under the Bridge of Sighs, down an ancient snowy, maze-like alley, into Hertford college to pick up my orientation packet, then past the place I'll meet the x-country team next Wednesday at 1p instead of today, and all around the alleys & roads & sidewalks & bridges of Oxford with no cars driving and so so many of the jolliest people I've ever seen.

I was just feeling a little tug for Whitefish's powder & a proper winter yesterday--and no doubt, Whitefish's exuberance is no less than this...but like everything it is done from a slightly different angle...there, gear is brought out & collective jolly recreation occurs & reassures everyone why they live where they do...here, everyone is ill-equipped drastically, no gear & collective jolly wandering occurs & reassures everyone that nothing at all has changed here in the last one thousand years...they still live in the world of once upon a time that has no indication at all of going anywhere if you look into their eyes.

woman in a red hat by the Thames (Isis)

woman in a lavender hat with a new bike

view in town center

very pretty, yeah? wish I'd taken some shots of the snowballers though...the looks in their eyes was really something I would have liked to share.

P.S. Wish me luck that Naya's school is open tomorrow as I have orientation from 9a-4p in beautifully old Hertford college, in a room that I have to walk over the Bridge of Sighs to get to & I am so excited for this aspect of the adventure to begin! But begin it will either way--with or without my four foot four inch sidekick.

Fragments of the day

2010-01-04T15:24:00.002-07:00

There are vast paths, meadows, rivers, hills, and forests embedded within this city to the point that I got lost on my run today for awhile with no road in sight when I wanted one to be...and, I assure you, I was in the middle of the city.

An Oxford library card is now in my wallet. Though the town library is smaller than the one in Whitefish, the shelves are teeming with things a town library usually overlooks. In a few days I'll secure a Bodleian card & then what?!

Things that are cheaper in Oxford (in $):
-You can buy a heavy jug of port (ruby or tawny, vintage or no) for six bucks at the grocery
-Fancy soap like the sort from 17th century France for 75c.
-Running shoes with the sort of bounce that's best for pavement--notable brand, way too cheap
-Beautiful loaves of bread for 75c.
-Hummus that tastes like the kind from home & not the usual playdough at the store--heaps of it for very cheap
-Almond croissants--the sort with marzipan in the middle--perhaps 40c.
-Butter from the Queen's own cows (kidding, sort of...the Queen does seem to endorse certain products and not others though with elaborate descriptions)
-Organic, green, fair-trade, sustainable, recyclable, local, British & Euro-made products...they are quite a bit more far along on demanding these things and making them available at rates that are often less than the alternative.

Things that are not cheaper in Oxford: everything else.

Naya's first day at New Hinksey Primary today (see her blog for photos http://nayasphotojourney.blogspot.com ): She's up on a top floor in this gloriously sunny room of windows in an ancient, pretty building. Her new friends are Freya and Maple. They have "school dinner" when speaking of hot lunch. Naya had packed lunch. At the morning roll call her teacher, Mrs. Christensen says each student's name and they respond, "Good Morning, Mrs. Christensen, school dinner (or packed lunch,) please!" And she says, "Well done" so and so. They begin with a school wide assembly everyday at 9...meeting in the school "hall." Naya said that they recited poetry to them about ways to bring about newness into life, etc. I'm totally happy to forego the pledge of allegiance for poetry! Also, Naya already got some sort of main part in a play...she's a chicken in a chicken play. &They are going swimming on Mondays...French club on Tuesdays... It was quite key that this aspect (Naya's school) worked well and made her happy for my endeavor to have a go whatsoever.
& I think we have luck yet again.

For those of you that made mention of it...there are still cows in the middle of town...in the Christ Church meadows...happily munching and wearing warm coats.

130,000 can feel like 3,000 people when they are either used to, wanting to, or confined to low-consumption, heavy recycling, little parking/roads available, walking everywhere, having only a few options at the grocery store, working with small living/retail spaces in favor of meadows and hills in the middle of town, etc. (Oh, someone had asked me to note whether London to Oxford was continuous, sorry I've forgotten who--not continuous. It's the same style as in Germany & France. Super smart planning whereby the towns have strict limits of where they end. Even when they are London. Paris. Frankfurt. And when you leave the limit you are in the country and it is green and open and beautiful.)

Going running with the Oxford cross-country team on Wednesday at 1p--we meet outside the Bodleian library. I get to wear some sort of team clothing...&no doubt i'll be running all around Whitefish in that this summer being annoyingly sentimental and happy.

Ate salmon from a Scotland loch, broccoli, wild rice, eclairs, and madeira for dinner in our kitchen & then watched a unique rendition of Snowwhite on dvd in bed with Naya.

It takes me one day to get from the mountains of Whitefish to Virginia Woolf's favorite park. It takes me four days to be able to control which of the British accents I'm using. It takes me five days to recover from jet lag and a time change. It takes me one week to unweave love enough to weave fluidly with that part of my mind/emotions again &notice all the pretty threads without concern.

We're getting good at throwing an accent without much effort

2010-01-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Naya's lovely photography

(view out of our bedroom to the garden, and to a large city park & lake beyond that, and to farms & hills beyond that)

It seems to me we are in a town of three thousand so far...just not seeing the other 130,000 people from our neck of the woods. Our neighborhood seems to be in the country...with Christchurch surrounded by vast parks and meadows, including their own college cows. Feeling abundantly lucky!

One of the entrances to Christchurch. We were both compelled to giggling at the magnitude and prettiness of this place matched with the ridiculously absurd notion that we would get to go inside. That I would get to go inside one of the very old doors and smile mischievously at the tourists on my way to some room, some particular room to talk to some particular person about a particular book. (More pics to come as this one hardly does it.)

The way back to our house from town centre, one inch of Christchurch lit in the backdrop.

I learned last night of this thing called the Oxford comma--which turns out I have been rigidly & naturally drawn to since I was a child (without knowing it had a name)--it is the use of the comma before the 'and' in a list such as: scones, teas, and cakes. Much prettier to me & more consistent than the alternative: one could say scones, teas and cakes...but why forego it? Especially now that it has a name.

Our visit to the grocery.

Afternoon tea, teacakes with butter (aka clotted cream), & scones with jam--Christchurch in the background out a steamy window--& the lovely Naya.

So far we're very good at anything with the letter 'r' in it. Give us another week & we'll be able to use it to other people besides just ourselves--followed by much giggling. We're really having a great time & no longer regret that Paris didn't work out. This surely is where it feels we should be.

Enjoy the lovely heaps of snow we've heard about!

Precisely what I'd hoped to hear

2010-01-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

On the train to Oxford this afternoon we were first warned that we were about to step out of the 21st century and into the 18th--that "they just refuse to catch up to the world there." What she didn't know is that this is precisely what I'd hoped to hear.

Then upon arrival, our new Polish physicist friend, Kaz (friend of the landlord), said that he arrived here thirty years ago to study and never left & he wondered if it would be the same for me.

Later a walk through our neighborhood revealed that we live surrounded by vast parks and nature preserves with immense trees, lakes, songbirds, swans, riverways, with only bikepaths and footbridges & it seemed everyone we passed looked up and smiled with eye contact. I think we have stepped into the pages of some book--a very pretty, meaningful kind of book with characters that all have good parts and lines.

It is quite more inspiring and comfortable than I thought it would be. And we've not yet left the neighborhood. To Christ Church & the center tomorrow for groceries, running shoes, and a blanket. Truly can't fathom that these are my pages, stage movements, and lines.

And it was gloriously sunny and warm.

From a third floor room with a view in London's Bloomsbury

2009-12-31T09:52:00.005-07:00

In London. Almost didn't make it through passport controls this morning because of a public school issue/miscommunication...but because the officer said to her boss (thinking me out of earshot), "This young woman is very very nice, can't we just bend the rules a bit to make it work?" Voila! I've been issued a class two visa & Naya a class one. Which means we've just become British citizens....kidding!

After a three hour nap of deepest sweetest sleep, we're about to trek down to the South Embankment of the Thames for the festivities. The streets will be closed for New Year's Eve from 6pm to 5am, so London will be a pedestrian city. There are flowers blooming in the window boxes here & green grass & leaves on the bushes. A coat without gloves or hat is just about right. Blue sky coming through the clouds, no rain today.

I feel like I'm cheating so far--we just went into a store to buy batteries for Naya's camera & a little chocolate at another shop & I find myself surprised repeatedly that everyone speaks English. Whenever we take these out of country expeditions, I've just realized, it has always been to a non-anglo zone.

Everyone we've interacted with or sat next to so far seems to have this secret smile. They all look happy & somehow like they are amused by us. It's a bit like the first pages of Harry Potter when the magic starts infiltrating the muggle world. It feels very small town & like people are wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

I know I am. Though I'm feeling like a doe from the Whitefish range released in London, simply relying on my kind eyes to help me find my way, hoping they don't mind four-leggers on the tube & in the pubs, the transition is going well. I am tired. I am still unsure as to whether it would feel better to be here or home...but I can feel an equilibrium starting to occur. Beautiful mammalian adaptation skills at work!

Happy New Year my friends.

Oh, Ciaccona

2009-12-28T15:59:00.004-07:00

by Sabine Brigette

I played

Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Ciaccona

to allure myself

as I drove to your house

away from noticing

wanting again

Oh, Ciaccona

along my ribs

only made it worse

when you said

the words you did

that maybe

this was

perhaps

the

beginning

Oh, Ciaccona,

Partita

No. 2

Bach

hold me up

please

before what he is

reaches beneath my ribs

D Minor

hold your own

loudly

horse hair on silver

sew quickly the gaps that remain

but Ciaccona

off like a scarf carelessly put

before the pauses

of quiet breath

between

your

words

that no determined genius

no symmetrical sound

no mathematical string and needle

could keep me from noticing

that now I

want only

to call you

Ciaccona.
-----------------
I wrote this a few months back with its main point being to question trepidation over determined gaze & timing. Warding off attachments and pull, anything that might distract from this determined arc to Oxford seemed at some point worth investing thought into. But today, as is my perpetual pattern, I fall back without looking, into sweet emotion & into my warm embedment in this place of Whitefish....& yet the determined gaze double helixes with deep feeling beautifully. So that now I want only to call this beautiful human range of being, Ciaccona, as I board the plane. Listen to song no. 5 (the Ciaccona of the partita) if you get a cd in the mail from me. & please, dear friends, tell me of your own ciacconas. I can only hope that life will always be so richly tugging as it feels right now & I'd love to hear of the ways in which yours are.

9 days out

2009-12-21T07:54:00.000-07:00

Awoke again from the now recurring dream where the plane is leaving in 40 minutes and we're still at home packing with no near end in sight. Packing things like tupperware and loaves of bread & it seems I have no rational sense whatsoever.

Upon waking, as if speaking kindly to a child, I remind myself of the things that I am excited about there to ease myself into letting go of here:

In ten days I will be sleeping in Virginia Woolf's neighborhood instead of in my own. In eleven days I'll see Oxford for the first time from a train window. In thirteen days I'll be attending a different Unitarian Church in a building from 1000 c.e. and then in the afternoon Jack & the Beanstalk with Naya at the Oxford Playhouse. In fourteen days...

... & of course, in 129 days we'll be flying back to these mountains, it will be dark, the stars will be out, and I will step off the plane and smell spring and mountains, and we will arrive home to give our big fluffy puppy a hug & I will sleep in my own bed again & have dreams, perhaps of the time in Oxford. & perhaps they will be recurring & lovely.

Paris on the mind

2009-12-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today I awake to thoughts of the proximity of Paris, the steaming Gare du Nord and nearby Hauptbahnhoffs, choquettes in a bag each morning, Baden-Baden just a day trip, running along the Seine & the Thames, the novel pregnant for want of being in the places of my Oma, the sounds of Christ Church, British accents like honey in my earl grey, and seeing the look in the eyes of all the people I'm about to meet or sit across from or walk past or overhear.

Today I awake and feel my first rush of what is about to be. I am ready to go to Europe as of now. & can't even believe this moment that I get to just be there embedded in it for the entirety of winter. Eleven short days. It's a bit like coming home. That is, I feel like I'm packing to go home. Clearing off old photos from the camera's memory sticks I gazed at photos of the last trip with Naya in Hechingen, Baden-Baden, Paris, Innsbruck, Rome, Sicily. The stuff in the suitcases is making me starry-eyed to realize it is my stuff--Brunhild's watercolor sets from Berlin, the red leather journal from last time with half the pages left for this trip, six Woolf books with her apathetically passionate face staring out from my suitcase & Hardy beneath her, my umbrella with the Paris metro map printed across it (found at the Whitefish thrift store of all things), train tickets to Oxford, pillow cases, fineries, wool, passports, heels, my German & French study books...

I am many things, but this morning I feel like Brunhild's granddaughter coming home. She never wanted to leave, but it seemed her best option at the time. & now, going back to that ever-tugging continent seems my best option at this very time. & my sense of place shifts yet again. Sigh. This is a very beautiful life, wouldn't you say?

2009-12-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

Assigned to walk the halls Lewis Carroll, Einstein, & Harry Potter have walked

2009-12-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

This morning, word from Oxford that I have been assigned to Christ Church College among Oxford University's 30 "colleges." And further joy ensues because this is the one I wanted.

They are known for their literary scholars & literature focus with a library filled with original manuscripts & 160,000 books second only to the Bodleian library of Oxford proper. Lewis Carroll (actual name Charles Dodgson), John Locke, Einstein, and others we've all known of & read the works of studied and taught here. Looking through the images & descriptions of Christ Church, come to find out, this is where Harry Potter was filmed--the dining hall is utterly grand & I am "required" to eat there each evening at one of the two times dinner is served in formal dress. Allowed to bring a 9 year old side-kick to dinner--if she dresses pretty?--don't know yet.

The buildings & grounds are beautiful & grand, completed in 1532. It is the closest "college" to Naya's school and our house. They have the famous Christ Church Cathedral Choir which is being aired on the BBC Dec. 20/21 for Christmas. They have their own punts, sporting grounds/complex, meadows, rivers passing by, original Michelangelo, Leonardo Davinci, Durer, Raphael, Rubens, Tintoretto, Carracci, and Filipinno Lippi paintings and drawings. Ay, me.

http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Church,_Oxford

Feeling very glad for those fineries & heels recently purchased for this endeavour...the ones that mostly get left in the closet while I am in Whitefish, left behind for fleece, goretex, and polypropylene (which I adore when on the side of a mountain, don't get me wrong). But soon silk, wool, lace, and prettiness will be my daily dress. You'll think me daft & silly but heels under flying buttress hallways on marble--love that sound. Feeling very glad too for my insatiable drive this year with my studies & my leaning into the manic hours of overachievement--I feel sure that these heels and this exacting gaze will serve to offer me further fervor for life in the hallways, aisles, & rooms of Christchurch.

I humbly, most gracefully accept the offer of admission. (Insert deep Elizabethan-style bow here.)

We know what we are, but know not what we may be. --Shakespeare

2009-12-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

(Photo is of my favorite statue at the Louvre)

Today, 28 days out, all of these doors I've knocked upon & have had unexpectedly opened seem a bit large, ornate, and cause me to peer up at them like some mousey type as if to say, "Oh, um...I was just...um, seeing if the door would open when I knocked, that's all. Well, then, have a nice evening!" as I high tail it back to familiarity.

I find that I am reminding myself often the last few days of the last time we went to Europe. Then too I had this unexpected waffling occur--trepidation over seeing more of the world is no welcomed lover at the midnight door for me--me who jaunted off to Bangkok with a 3 year old with no hesitation, me who has insisted on climbing peaks through lightening storms, me who burns the candle at both ends insatiably, et cetera. Yet, the night before the last trip I was all too happy to give someone else my ticket and intertwine endearingly with complacency, but I boarded as if a character in a script that had to. Then five weeks later I cried all the way home on the airplane because...well, by then the Hauptbahnhoffs had become my familiarity & choquettes & I didn't feel up for the severing of new tendrils that by then preferred European soil & took some weeks to recover from the transplantation shock.

And here I am again, as if it is the night before some rough, ill-skilled gardener arrives with a bigger pot, with my roots reaching down low to make it through the winter. It certainly isn't anything words can detail very well, what this trepidation is. Perhaps to rely on Frost & Shakespeare for a moment comes closest to revealing what it is--"Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back"--not to say that I won't physically return to Whitefish, but the underlying consequence of way leading onto way is certainly pressing and tangible in ways other than physicality--"We know what we are, but know not what we may be"--that resembles it most closely. Certainly the walking through doors or down paths results in everything being different than it would have, including most of all, one's self. & at this moment I like this self very much & so perhaps grieve that her time is coming to a close as way leads onto inner way. For this reason four months is no longer just four months...it is 120 days of way leading onto way. For all of us really, yes?

Naya's School in Oxford

2009-11-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

The second half of Naya's third grade year will be at a primary school in Oxford. By their way of divising things, she'll be labeled a 4th grader & will be in Ms. Christensen's combined 3rd and 4th grade class. Super tiny school despite Oxford's 100,000 people & it looks like it'll be a good nest for her to land in. You can check out their website with a guided audio/visual tour with great accents at:

http://www.new-hinksey.oxon.sch.uk/

Naya wants me to tell you all that she is nervous about making new friends & excited about hearing people with different accents, seeing our new house, and walking past swans every day. & of course there are choquettes for the month of April in Paris to look forward to...and Eurodisney!

Our house in Oxford

2009-11-28T09:23:00.002-07:00

Just secured a small room in what looks from across the Atlantic to be a nice house, nice neighborhood, three blocks from Naya's school in Oxford.

Letters, handwriting, and knocks on doors always preferred to email & texts!

Naya's school is on Vicarage Road. See pictures & satellite map of the house here:

www.roomtorent.splinder.com

We're paying over twice the amount of our Whitefish mortgage for one double bed and to be roommates with three Oxford grad students. Though we do get to walk past swans in a lake on the walk to school. Cheers to the Great British Pound.

Six weeks until departure

2009-11-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

Today I have in hand the deposit from Ladybug's nanny who will watch her while we are away, two tickets from Kalispell to London on December 30th, a reservation at a B & B in Bloomsbury (Woolfie's stomping ground) on New Year's Eve, complete with full English spread in the morning (beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, and eggs all in one god-awful heap), two train tickets from London's Paddington station direct to Oxford on New Year's Day at 2pm. It surely is happening now!