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.