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).