Well that was really fun

Both of you who read this blog, you know the haps in broad outline. The last two weeks of the course were a true challenge on a whole lot of levels. I'm typing this in the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, waiting here instead of having taken a later bus from Oxford becaus, well, you don't want to leave a damned thing to chance or traffic or any of the nine million minor f-ups that could occur and will occur if you count on people to do the right thing. Alex is temporarily engrossed in his iPod, and I should be marking papes, but I wanted to at least get a placeholder up before embarking for the European finish of this tour.

All the halflings checked out of college, and there were only a few little curveballs in the process. Nothing like the stuff that started two weeks ago as I started hearing about mutinous rumblings and then had a horrendous encounter with modern-era Mean Boy Syndrome, lots of wishing I could go back in time and clarify my expectations and accommodate he un-satisfiable, all in all a strange and sad revisitation of high school or middle school, tapping into all that old geeky stuff as you realize people are smiling to your face and stabbing you behind your back.

I am pretty confident I made a good save of the last week of the course, with a hastily but competently written explanation / exhortation of my methods and my concerns. No one really fessed up to being part of the Complaining Group (according to a mole there was a petition being readied about my running of the academic side of the course (discussion / papers at end rather than lecture-and-quiz) and the lack of organized activities (expecting them to take charge of sightseeing and college visits according to their own interests rather than follow-the-umbrella tours). The fact that the previous syllabus (such as it was) was still posted made it clear that my rendition fo the course would be different, but it provided a template for complaints. One student went to me--and to this day I do not know confidently whether she overdramatized the unrest, or whether she was the true mole who rescued the program by her courageous ratting out of her fellows. In the event: had three or four sleepless nights and complete bunker mentality before I could put this horrific episode behind me. I will try to put this into words another time.

Meanwhile, we're off to Paris, Alex and I are, to join up and send a couple of nights there before heading to see the bro and family.... More soon, as you-know-who is pissing and moaning about how much he has to wait....

London, and Family

Bit of break from the Peregrination Channel, but will try to post a few pics and paragraphs to get caught up before it gets too late. Thursday we did the London extravaganza, a little differently from the way the GT went at things--I did schedule a boat ride because that was so successful in Paris, there were some rumblings about the trip because so much time was spent in transit and going down to Greenwich. I have to say it's always a trade-off: do I give people lots of time off to manage on their own, or do I schedule events and group outings for the people who can't or won't schedule them themselves. In the end I ended up doing a weird hybrid thing where I took several events in the original inherited schedule that might have been lock-step group things, and made them into schedule-it-yourself parts of the London trip: a fixed amount to cover their own transport down, the boat pass, and a Harry Potter VII ticket. If some of them figured out cheaper ways to do various items, then more power to them.

We did luck out with the weather, and I actually had a decent time with the kids--and only a pair of them made it late-ish to the 11 AM rendezvous at Westminster Pier for the boat. I should point out that this student is one of the smartest in the class, and I totally forgive her for checking on her iPad in front of the Houses of Parliament.


The family time began with a certain amount of drama, as I discovered when I called the hotel that they had overbooked for the first night, and overflowed us into what on paper was an upgrade a few blocks away but was in fact a ghastly Ibis across the street from the Earls Court Exhibit Hall, sort of London's answer to the Moscone Center. Yikes. But with no way to warn Amelie, who was going to the original hotel after Tube-ing in from Heathrow after a layover night in New York. This meant schleppage for them and a frisson of frustration for me, compounded when we found that the breakfast that had been included in the original hotel was an extra £9.50 in the new, but we were welcome to walk back over between 7:30 and 9 and get our oh so delicious not quite British second B of the B & B. Rather than create a big stink we went with it OK, and it all turned out satisfactorily. By the time I arrived Alex was zonko and Ams was off foraging for cell phone SIM cards. Ams got to visit her old haunts in Holland Park, we had a nice but expensive dinner for which we were woefully underdressed, and got a decent night's sleep.

Next day after transferring to the other older hotel (typical warren--and the bathroom has the most spectacular plaster stalactite ceiling, with drips adorning the soap dispenser) and dumping bags we did our own Greenwich excursion, this time with more museum-ing along with an hour in a cafe by me marking blue books, and then it was back up the river to the London Eye.

London was absolutely jammed, as we were joining what seemed like hundreds of thousands of tourists who also thought the Elgin Marbles and other attractions were a good idea (it was compounded by the rain on our British Museum day--felt like the Vatican, but the guards were less pushy). In previous visits I had not bothered to drop £18 and wait in line, but the Eye was kind of cool, I have to say. Maybe not £18 cool, but I wasn't that disappointed in the end. In amongst spending money on touristic stuff we had some jet lag or blood sugar or teen angst, but overall no major meltdowns. I am vaguely concerned about how obsessive I have to be on these gigs, and worry about whether I am neglecting my family, but so far we are managing all right. I'm sure in two weeks when it is all over it will seem worth it.

Now I just have to survive tomorrow--the bus trip to Bath and Salisbury and Stonehenge, sure to provoke vomit noises from the cognoscenti. I have a set of papers to mark, and have to compose an e-mail firming up the schedule of due dates; this week we have been bumped from the classroom we had the first two weeks, and I ended up in a side-by-side seminar room with 20 chairs and 30 people, plus A & A arriving late. But we squished and things worked out. A lot of this is about Keeping A Positive Attitude so the kids thmeselves don't get psyched or skittish...

Peregrinator Slept Here

Haven't felt compulsive enough about blogging, especially because the Obsessometer was in the red zone from my sprint through the first batch of papers to mark. This group is amazing in that more than half of them have read ten times more of this literature than I have, yet they ALL have much to learn about analysis, coherence, writing style, etc. Absolutely bizarre to be so ill-read compared to my students. Food for another blog post, yes indeed.

Sunday as a break from marking I did a nostalgic loop walk past every place I'd lived while at Ox, starting from the University College Annexe at 25 Staverton Road in North Oxford, where the Pomona program spent its September before the Oxford students returned. That was an odd little scene, as the 1 of us got to know each other and met our tutors, and cooked in super-cramped quarters but enjoyed unseasonably warm fall weather.

Then it was off to 21 Leckford Road a few blocks away, where I was placed with a ghastly Danish-English couple who rented rooms and browbeat their kids--the other participant and I protested their portions and attitude so much we got out of eating with the family in the basement (I'm not kidding), and cooked on our own in the tiny dingy galley kitchen upstairs. These people definitely were hateful and mean-minded. Old codger named Yorick lived upstairs, along with a young Nigerian student who every weekend would be spirited off to London to sing in clubs--her name was Falushade but eventually her nom de stage was shortened to the last two syllables...

Then it was up to Bardwell Road, out of chronological order, where Bob J and I spent our second year after Oriel made its graduate students leave the nest. We'd met the eccentric landlady through a couple of girls from Pomona, and convinced her that we could successfully rehabilitate her garret in return for a slight reduction in rent. Must to her disbelief, my housepainting skills proved more than equal to the task (and far better than guys she had hired in other parts of the house, and my window at the top left of the house still appears lived in.

Then it was back into town and a couple of streets from the Oriel main entrance, where the college had a graduate housing annex in 4 Alfred Street. My room was on the ground floor, a few doors from The Bear pub, a few beer glasses from which launched through that window--how fitting to have the garbage bag garnish in this picture. We ate most of our meals in hall, but there was a (dark) kitchen where I taught Bob how to make bread and pancakes, and during the reading-intensive vacation we spent there, it became something of a social center for a couple of other graduate students who were similarly under the gun

That just about covers the places I actually lived. I probably spent a few nights in other places (a couple of B & B's and couple of sleepovers, heh-heh) but this was pretty much it. Odd to feel the ghosts coming back from 30-33 years back, forcing me to reflect on how different a person I was then, but in some ways how much that period shaped the rest of my life to come.

Here's a plaque almost covered in leaves in Park Town, the back of which was part of our lovely view from the Road garret-kitchen.


And now, to bed. Tomorrow's discussion is on Harry Potter, and then on Thursday we head to London for a boat ride to Greenwich, some sightseeing, and for some, a midnight showing of the last of the HP movies. For me though it will be a much awaited reunion with wife and son! And I won't even have papers to mark.

Alice's Day

My monastic existence here is somewhat removed from what is going on only a stone's throw away from my window (hmm. As I type this, however, two women with loud cockney accents are carrying on way too close by, dropping f-bombs oh about every tenth word. Most of the time this place is remarkably quiet...), but whenever I walk into town I am semi-stunned at how many people are around. As if Oxford didn't need more people on a weekend (even thirty years ago I remember gridlock in the Covered Market on Saturdays, less so on Sundays because more places were closed), today was International Alice's Day, and since Oxford is Ground Zero for All Things Alice, we had a lot more than the usual more people. There's story-telling, face-painting, charitable endeavors, trinket sellers, a babble of languages and I don't know what else.

I walked through the Oxford Castle area, a newly redeveloped site which has a lot of restaurants (including one called "Malmaison" that exploits the place's former use as a prison) as well as traveling exhibits like Britain From the Air, which I'll describe in another post. This odd-looking fellow was selling Time, quietly hawking his wares in an unctuous voice, a little too strange for me to continue the banter for more than a minute. He was ladling sugar back and forth in this cool-looking scale, and as I say had just enough creepiness to be authentically evocative of Lewis Carroll (who, by some measures, was a pretty creepy guy)(my parents loved Alice in Wonderland in particular and Lewis Carroll's works in general, but I never talked with them much about the things that made a whole lot of Oxford parents of the time keep their children from going over to his rooms for Stories and Photographs and Games...).

This is something you don't see every day either: the guy has been sitting in a bath of baked beans for four hours, and as you see at 2 PM you can buy a carton of custard to pour on his head. For charity. Now, I am wondering how the Oxfam types feel about the waste of food here, since this would be enough calories for a substantial part of a refugee camp in some parts of the world. Don't be such a buzz-kill, Peregrinator!

Talk about yer buzz-kill: I made the mistake of watching the Women's World Cup quarterfinal this evening, in which the England women lost a 1-0 lead to France in the 88th minute, survived 30 minutes of overtime, were ahead in the shootout, and lost. Yeah, I did mark one essay in the halftime, but I think this gets chalked up to procrastination. And not so monastic. More seriously, in the course of this I somehow hit a button on the remote that inexplicably has obliterated most of the functionality on the channel changer--it's stuck on BBC1, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this might be so. I can move to another channel through a convoluted series of steps involving lists and menus, but the plain old up and down button no longer works. Somewhere around this apartment is a manual, probably, but I'm not up for it. Maybe this is a sign that I should just put the whole thing in a closet and not have the temptation around for either me or for Alex, who'll arrive at the end of the week....

To recover my wits, I took a longer-than-expected run in the hills to the west of here, slow but steady, and got myself good and turned around--to the point of "whoa, the sun's setting over there, but I thought it should be more over there." Since I'd started at 8 thanks to the soccer game, this could have become a teensy bit unnerving, except for the fact that we're at the latitude of Hudson's Bay here, and it's still light after 10... I got into some really cool small footpaths, absolutely minimalist in their signage, and ended up at the Hinksey Hill Golf Course, where a nice bloke took time out from his pint to point me in the right direction. These running expeditions have been a real pleasure--I just hope I don't overdo it, especially since this one spat me out onto asphalt, which was a rude return after all the paths I'd been mincing along.

Tomorrow: I mark. I hold some office hours. I get ready for the second week of term. I compose some messages to leave with my Oriel contacts, and I hope like heck that my guy back home has indeed made the arrangements for the bus trip to Bath that I have out into my schedule...

Back to the Bodley

Although I'd procured my Reader's Ticket earlier in the week, thanks to being a graduate of this place even thirty years before, I hadn't had much in the way of time to go in and re-acquaint myself with what had been my home away from home when I was doing the scholarly thing all those years ago. Today I figured I would at the very least avail myself of the wifi connection for a while, even if I didn't really need to be in there for work-work. There's a bunch of stuff to get used to--newer chairs and tables, fluorescent lights, and gadzillions of Ethernet connections and power outlets. Back in my day... etc.

I went into the Radcliffe Camera and chatted a bit with the porter, and then found a seat and soaked it all in. There's a massive software upgrade that is taking a huge chunk out of July--no books can be recalled from the closed stacks (6 1/2 million out of the 7 million volumes I guess) from 8 to 18 July, but that's sort of no problem for me. After all, I have my hands full just getting my students familiar with the texts themselves, and I don't want to clutter things up too much with secondary stuff. From the look of it, about 1/4 of them might be able to handle critical articles, but the rest would be lost, and would be ventriloquizing somebody else instead of trying to grapple with the works themselves. I should also say that virtually everyone I've stopped to talk to has been incredibly nice, more so than I remember, if truth be told.

I need to get my students fixed up with tours, for sure, and they'll be very disappointed not to be able to take pictures of themselves in some of the most interesting places, like the Duke Humfreys Library, which is where a bunch of Hogwarts library scenes were filmed. The Schola Divinorum, just off the main entrance, is where the Hogwarts Infirmary scenes are based, and they do allow photography there. Pretty amazing ceiling, say I.

More surprising to me almost was a bizarre development, an underground passageway that has just opened, the links the Camera with the Old Library, a good 50 yards or more of airport-style tunnel under Radcliffe Square, and you pop out in the Old Library and go up the stairs to this amazing other part of the library. The smells aren't quite what I remember, and the feel of the place seems different--the bathrooms aren't ghastly and don't have grafitti in Latin and Greek in them--but I suppose all change isn't for the worse!

One feels a little like an impostor, though with this magic ticket and its mag-stripe I can beep myself past all the porters and go and sit and take it all in. The routine is still the same: if you take a book off the shelf, you put a slip in its place, with your name and the number of the seat you're in, and of course you can't remove the book from the library; if you want to photocopy something you have to sign a sheet, and if you want to photograph something you also have to deposit a sheet with one of the Authorities. Still, it's really a lot like studying in a museum, as I thought when I was first here as a 22-year-old on Semester Abroad. Damn, I really am an Old Boy.

So tomorrow I get really stuck into the paper-marking, which is the real work, and blasting through the fourth Harry Potter, which doesn't feel like real work, but I suppose it is.

First week (almost) well done

Settling into a rhythm here, and that feels good, with fewer surprises and some actual relief now as I contemplate more time "off" than I had at all on the GT either year: no class til Monday, and all I have is paper-marking and some trip organizing, but nobody to herd onto buses or trains.

Today I gave my first essay and so my weekend will be full of marking--but this group is actually a lot of fun to teach, so far: they're kind of puppy-like, and I caught a couple of them talking about Jane Austen novel-to-film right after class--not something that EVER happened the last two years. It's actually a kick to be teaching this stuff--and to discuss whether Alice is actually exhibiting classic ADD symptoms (Toad too--is he bipolar? Yes, according to a couple of them, and their argument is pretty convincing).

The past couple of days have been ultra-crowded with prospective students and their parents filling up the city and colleges on two "open days," which has made me reluctant to ask any college person for anything extra in the way of favors--hence I haven't approached the Oriel folks about a library tour yet. On the other hand, I have been continuing my runs out into the countryside, all the way up to Godstow along the main river, which is actually farther than I've run in a long while. No ill effects so far, though I've elected to rest today and not risk overuse injuries to my joints. The chest is better, my tooth is less of an issue, and even the hip that I tweaked a little following Julius around a weight room in Brussels seems to be recovering.

So--maybe I'll head down to London and visit other folks / scope out for next Thursday's trip, or maybe I will take a wee break and just grade and exercise. Weird to even have the option.... But I am going to take care of the physical side, I'm determined.

First two days of class in the bag

That last entry should have been dated the 3rd, but I don't know how to change it. Yesterday I was too damned tired, afraid to stay up any later for fear of exacerbating my chest crud, which is not bad but not ideal.

Yesterday was not just the first class, with orientation and short walking tour, but also the bumped-up punting expedition (because the weather reports were right, and it really has started raining, as it will all week, rendering my original schedule inadvisable). The students as usual seemed to enjoy it a lot, and we had a pleasant beverage at the Victoria Arms; almost everyone actually tried their hand at punting, although I didn't push that too hard. It's so nice to be out in what feels like real countryside so close to town, which is one of the wonders of this place. [The rain didn't stop me from a nice long run out to my old haunts up the river, to the ruins of the medieval priory at Godstow, eerily beautiful under gray skies at 8:30 in the long evening.]

Yesterday we also had the start of term dinner "in hall," nothing super spectacular, but enjoyable nonetheless. I am resigning myself to not having as many organized activities lined up, and actually turning that to strength, given the different nature of this program as compared to the GT of the last two years: students will get to know the town themselves, if they know what's good for them (and I will be creating some incentives for this), and I have to be comfortable with that. We elected not to have program costs cover dinners here--or even lunches--because the charges that Oxford colleges are extracting from foreign programs are pretty larcenous; we did go for breakfast, however, and that has been a success so far.

So I have my monastic little life here--I eat cheaply and simply, I do a lot of paper-marking (I have my students write in each class, keeping a set of blue books for the purpose so I don't have to deal with their idiotic scraps of paper), and I try to avoid obsessing over things I can't control. Always a tough task.

Now for a few more blue books and then bed.

Now the real work begins

Most of my ducklings have landed, and after holding a brief pre-orientation in the first quad of Jesus College (hey, I wanted to distribute their health-insurance cards, and figure out exactly who had arrived), I led a goodly number on a strictly non-required walk down through Christ Church Meadow and down to the boathouses. [Spoke too soon. Just got a call from a stray, from Heathrow, who's going to be on a 1:50 AM bus, yikes, and if she feels squirrelly when she gets to the station here, I told her to call me. Double yikes. Should I have told her just to spend £75 on a cab? Camp in the airport? Dunno.]

Of course, to file under "Things aren't what they used to be": here's the temporary sign that now warns us not to overload this bridge. The actual number is 10, but heck, these aren't plus-size tourists we're talking about. From what I can tell, it's a good group, seemingly pretty interested in the literature. What remains to be seen is whether they / I can sustain that interest for a month, or whether they'll get bored. I finally pulled the trigger on some long-delayed decisions about the way I want to structure the course, and naturally I am hoping that I will not wish for time travel as I encounter "you should have booked that months ago" when I try to arrange some of the activities like Bodleian Library tours and other delights that I couldn't decide on earlier. But as I keep saying: Improvisation Rules.

Now, just for fun, here's an odd sight from Westgate Mall. "Bubblefoot" seems to be a gimmick to relax and re-energize shopping-tired feet. I didn't want to get too close, but inside those little tubs are not only bubbles but . . . dozens of tiny fish. That supposedly tickle your feet into a state of consumption-readiness. Or something. Who thought this was a good idea? Who pays for this stuff anyway?

Ack. The first class meeting is tomorrow--orientation followed by some academic stuff followed by a walking tour guided by yours truly--and if the weather report is to be believed, tomorrow is also our window of opportunity for the punting trip on the Cherwell that I had hoped to delay until Thursday (when it's supposed to absolutely pour rain, with lightning possible).

My little slice of Paradise (Square, that is)

As I mentioned this was a part of town I never spent much time in, and with reason--it was probably undergoing ghastly Thatcher-era "renewal," which meant bunker-like blocks and parking garages. This is the view out the window of the main room--yes, the sign says "Paradise Square," and the behemoth right behind it is the main car park for the Westgate Mall, Oxford's answer to DeMallition or Mallificence or perhaps Mallpractice.

One gets a sinking feeling right after opening the door (picture me late last night, rolling my luggage along wondering what I was getting myself into). I'm not a huge devotee of feng shui, but you don't have to spend a lot of consultant bucks to know that this place is a stagnant eddy of chi, a place where chi goes to the Dark Lord for awhile: Makes ya wanna c'mon in and study fantasy literature, dunnit?

Here's the main room, minus a couple of chairs I already took out last night: Clearly whoever laid this place out should be taken out and shot.

Now for some gourmet cooking, here's the kitchen nook--the trashcan is outside next to the dining table, which I am temporarily taking over for my desk, since the actual desk is on the other wall, is about 14" deep, and essentially unusable. Yes, those tiles are 10" squares, and yes, that is the washer-dryer next to the sink. And yeah, the hinges of the fridge are on the right, so if you're in the kitchen and want to open the door, you have to step into the main room. Convenient!

I think it's kind of funny that my predecessor who found this thing believed the advert that said it was 2-bedroom--her teenage son was going to be with her, along with her husband, but he'd have had a little trouble with this room. Cozy! Lucky for us A & A will be here for only about ten nights, if I calculate correctly, and if I can find some B & B in the Cotswolds to bail out to for a night, maybe I will do that to reduce the time here even further!

As you see, the master bedroom has a wee bit more floor space (two feet) but by the way, just beyond both of the bedroom windows is the main entrance to the block of eight flats: every time someone leaves in the morning, the wall shakes. Nice. So far, the weather has been cooperative (not so blazingly hot that one absolutely has to have the windows open (the ones that do open, open about 15 degrees of the 90, which is I suppose better than nothing, and at least some of them are up far enough off of street level that I don't feel insecure leaving them open).

Moral of the story: housing in Oxford is expensive (shudder) and a mixed bag. On the plus side, I am a five minute walk to where my students are staying (haven't actually seen their digs at Jesus as the porters' lodge was a hive of activity with another US group checking in when I swung by earlier today amidst my many wanderings).

Sorry this is such a downer. Gotta get psyched to meet my ducklings tomorrow, one of whom has already e-mailed to say her delayed flight means she has missed her connection to London and will probably be a day late!

One positive: I took a long slow and steady run this evening, savoring the late light, further down river along the towpath past the scene of long-ago rowing triumphs, past Iffley Locks and the weir and all the way to Sandford; to remind me of why this place is magic, I timed it perfectly so that the great bell of Tom Tower (in Chris Church) was ringing its 101 times at 9 PM just as I finished. Hope I'm not sore tomorrow.

Summer 2011: Another Adventure Abroad Begins

About 9 PM Friday, 1st of July I'm starting this while bouncing along on the X90 bus from London's Marble Arch to Oxford. I'm chagrined that I'm later than usual both starting the re-bloggification getting into my digs for the next month: I was too casual about my Eurostar booking in Brussels that I--gasp--missed my train and had to take the next one, almost three hours later. No harm no foul, though: I made decent use of the time by going ahead and sweating out the line to get the end-of-July tickets for Am & Alex going to Paris, as well as started yet another list of topics for my upcoming course.

The time in Belgium this year was less exotic (no biking in the Ardennes, because the weather was not nearly as good as it was last June), but still very enjoyable: we seized the good weather windows and did a perfectly mixed urban-and-rural 40 miles that had me wondering just where else in the world you could blast along on a road bike for several miles through a forested park, make a couple of deft chicanes through ring-road traffic into a suburb, pass a chateau and its grounds, and very quickly end up in utterly bucolic scenes with happy cows, country churches, and of course rural-cryptic signage. We were off the detailed city map and onto a 1:200,000 Michelin sheet, which of course meant lots of guesswork, with some truly improbable moves that panned out, and a minimum of back-tracking.

It's a testimony to how vacation-like it felt that I didn't have my game face on nearly as much while I was there, to the point where halfway to the Gare du Midi I had a panicky moment of "did I bring my passport case?" which prompted a quick stop and check of the backpack in the trunk (I had brought it). It is so strange to be contemplating another month of herding ducklings, although this year will not be quite the same as the past two: staying in one place and doing day trips should not be as stressful as shepherding the little ones through Eurostar and metro and gares and buses and night trains. That's not to say I haven't had my share of sit-up-bolt-upright moments in the months since I got the news I would be filling in on this Oxford course.

Revisiting Oxford brings a flood of emotions, some good some bad: it's a town and state-of-mind where I spent two and a half years of my life, perhaps some of the most intense intellectual and emotional work I have ever done. I was right at the beginning of my adult life then, girding myself for a long-distance relationship that I knew would be tumultuous, knowing that I was academically arrogant in some ways and painfully naïve at the same time. I think back on that time and I laugh at academics who embody the Aging Masters' Athlete Syndrome of "The older we get, the better we used to be": at 22 I was so clueless about soooo many things! I had this idealistic notion of what studying at Oxford would be like, thinking it would be a crucible unlike any other.

I really hadn't done much research on the place before I went in 1978 as a participant in Pomona's semester-at-Oxford program, and I had only a vague idea of what the place would be like. I'd spent two months InterRailing around Europe, half with what was increasingly obviously my ex-girlfriend, and half on my own; in the middle there was a wonderful interlude in Florence with my mom and dad who were visiting relatives, and also a few days in the South of France with my brother, who was just beginning his expatriate life as a cellist based in Brussels but doing these ridiculously all-consuming festivals / music camps that I would later spend four different summers helping out with.

It was a very different Europe then: I had no Visa card, I had travelers' cheques, and each country visited meant another round of currency conversions. Sure the cost of travel was a lot lower then, but I was ridiculously underfunded: I schlepped around a tent and stove and sleeping bag, and stayed at campings or slept on the train--or in dark corners of city parks a few times, getting up at 5 AM to avoid being rousted, and considering any prepared food as an unjustifiable extravagance. When we didn't camp it was youth hostel time, or the cheapest bed and breakfast, and I think I saw two Shakespeare plays on a trip to Stratford, both standing room for 80 pence.

Now I am teaching a class where the students are paying an unthinkable amount of money for a single month, and it's all I can do to keep from making the calculation, how many months would I have spent living (comparatively) large with that kind of dough? My per diem isn't quite what would have sustained me for a week, but it's not far off--and my trip is not just paid for, I get a salary on top of it. I'll have a bed to stay in every night (assuming I can negotiate the contradictory directions to get to the flat and retrieve the key from the box according to the instructions I got)(this is all more opportunity for self-castigation about missing the earlier train, as I sure as heck hope I don't have to call the landlady's cell phone at 11 PM!), and I'll have 29 students depending on me to make this a memorable intellectual and personal experience.

As I've remarked to some people this spring, the teaching part is not as much of a stressor for me, but the tour-guide / camp counselor / beat cop aspects are what keep me awake at night. I'll be a father figure of sorts, and for the second fortnight I will actually be a multitasking father, as A & A join me, a potential pressure cooker that I hope I can survive better than I did in '09 (when I got hideously exhausted and sick for about 36 hours). Just as I had little idea of what I was going to be filling my days with back on my first visit, there's some of that same wide-open potentiality ahead of me now--but I'll be nailing activities down and creating the illusion of a plan even as I improvise and cover my tracks. Not knowing the capabilities of my students makes this all the more of an adventure, as does the realization that it's been six years since I last taught a literature class. I will be fighting down that impostor syndrome, knowing deep down that I have to trust myself and my teacherly Right Stuff, trusting also the magic of this place--I got off the track a bit, I know.

I did not revisit my journals from '78, though I did find one the other day from 1980 I think it was. Some of the places will have bizarre and inexplicable charges of memory for me, and I mustn't let those sentimental waves become too much of an alienating force for the students. Nonetheless, I plan to honor some of those feelings and explore their resonances in this blog, hoping to use the framework of regular writing here to produce some reflection as well as narration, in hopes of better understanding myself at what may be a late point in my career, as I revisit an important wellspring at the other end.

So I will trundle my baggage along dark streets, listen to the babble of summer-language-course students, and rejoin a set of ghosts that include my own youthful self…

OK then. Uneventfully got to this place after 11 PM, have mixed feelings, but will try to sleep now (the coffee I had with Julius at the Gare du Midi after negotiating the ticket-change must be keeping me awake, as I have unpacked and started configuring this sterile modern soulless apartment as a place I can work for a month).