Hello all,
Yes, I am a month behind on these messages. I'll try to recount each week individually still, for diehard fans (I flatter myself). The rest of you, if you don't feel like vicariously re-living a month of my past, there will be no hard feelings.
I left off in Oxford, where I enjoyed the hospitality of a group of American students. I hung out at their house for the evening, venturing out to get some supper at a nearby Chinese restaurant called the Pink Giraffe. At about 11:00, my friend Christine was kind enough to walk me back to the hostel, where I called it a day.
The first order of business for Monday was a walking tour around some of the prominent sites and structures in Cambridge--the first of these was Jesus College.
Oxford was initially built at a low site where the Thames and Cherwell rivers could be crossed without bridges on the backs of livestock. While there is evidence of Roman activity in the surrounding area, the first true settlement and a monastery were established by the Saxons in the 8th Century. At some point in the course of the town's growth, Oxford became the site of education--the first account of students in Oxford dates back to the 11th Century. At that time, most English students seeking higher education enrolled at the already-established University of Paris. However, relations between England and France deteriorated until 1167, when Henry II forbade English students to study in France. As a result, English students turned to local options, and today Oxford remains the oldest surviving university in the English-speaking world, not to mention one of the leading academic institutions worldwide.
The University of Oxford works on the "collegiate" model, whereby students enroll and live in Oxford in association with one of thirty-eight separate colleges. Each college is relatively small, functioning more like a residence hall at an American school, accomodating anywhere from 200 to 400 students and providing food, lodging, and intramural involvement to students. Matriculation is centralized through the university, and rather than attend a fixed schedule of classes, students sit for discretionary lectures that relate to their discipline. The University also oversees examinations and the awarding of diplomas. The individual colleges don't specialize in particular academic fields, so even if a student isn't admitted to a particular college of his choice, he could receive virtually the same education if he is lucky enough to be admitted to another of the 38 colleges. However, the admission process (which has drawn criticism thorughout the University's history) is quite exclusive, based almost entirely on merit, and the majority of the 3,000 annual incoming students have outstanding records at elite, private preparatory schools.
The first site on the tour was Jesus College, one of the 38. It exemplified the typical layout of one of the university colleges--a gate led through impressive stone exterior walls and emptied into the quadrangle, a placid plot of lawn, surprisingly peaceful within the shelter of the building walls, despite being located within the heart of Oxford. We stepped inside the dining hall, which dated back to the 1500s and featured portraits of sponsors, founders, and prominent alumni (amongst these were Queen Elizabeth and T.E. Lawrence).
From Jesus College we passed by All Souls College, a college that holds the distinction of matriculating no undergraduates and only about 40 senior research fellows. We saw the Radcliffe Camera, a circular building used as a reading room for the University library, and the Sheldonian Theater, designed by architect Christopher Wren and serving as the site of commencement ceremonies for the entire university. We stepped into the Divinity School, which was the first intentionally-built lecture hall for use by the entire university and served as the site for all university examinations for hundreds of year. These examinations were not written tests, but instead took the form of verbal debates with one's tutor, while the chancellor of the university looked on. As if this weren't grueling enough, debates were conducted in Latin and were open to the public, who would frequently heckle the student in question. Examinations could last for up to three days (with breaks of course), but most were terminated by the Chancellor within three hours, at which point the student would either earn his degree or leave up to seven years of matriculation behind him, empty handed.
Following the tour, I joined a tour of the Bodleian Library. The Bodleian Library started out as a collection of classical manuscripts, and with the help of donations and sponsorship has grown exponentially in the six hundred years since a reading room was first built above the Divinity School. The single greatest endowment that ensures the Bodleian's growth is its standing as a legal deposit library. Since the 1600s, the Bodleian has been legally entitled to one free copy of every publication printed in Great Britain, and it receives thousands of volumes every week. In return for this free endowment, the library holds the books indefinitely for future reference for the publishers. The library is a reference library only--in the past, each volume was physically chained to the shelves, but this precaution has given way to electronic anti-theft measures. A portion of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was shot on location in the Bodleian Library.
After the library, the tour passed through the Divinity School again and into an adjoining room where the college governing body (whose name escapes me presently) used to convene from time to time. The room was intentionally modeled after the interior of the Houses of Parliament, and Parliament has convened there more than once, for issues of political expediency. Beyond that room was a small courtroom, a relic from the days when students were subject to the jurisdiction of the University and could be penalized for such transgressions as breaking curfew.
Following this tour, I wandered back through college toward Christ Church College, the largest college in Oxford and one which had been dissolved and reopened by Henry VIII as part of the dissolution of the monasteries. While trying to figure out how to kill one more hour, I abruptly came across a musical instrument collection I had been trying to find before. Pleased, I entered what turned out to be a moderately sized two-story building with glass cases running along the walls, crammed full of horns, oboes, bassoons, flutes, trumpets, recorders, pipes, clarinets, keyboard instruments, a couple pieces of percussion, and a very long alpenhorn. But probably the most fascinating exhibit to be found in the the collection was none other than the curator who let me in. This rotund individual had a prominent overbite and had a tendency to kind of growl through bared teeth rather than speak, while his eyes bugged out from behind large glasses. He led me to a couple different display cases, gesturing violently and describing different permutations of instruments with such appelations as "an exhibit from the museum of abysmal ideas". When a notion or remark struck him as funny, he punctuated his remarks with a high-pitched laugh, which occasionally climaxed with a prolonged and vehement snort. He asked me where I was from, and when I mentioned that I attended college in Michigan he rolled his eyes once more and described how he had entertained a student group from Michigan earlier in the week. Evidently these students were quick to demonstrate that Michigan (which he pronounced "Mitch-igan") somewhat resembles a mitten, an oddity that didn't strike this curator as terribly clever. I commiserated with him, agreeing that the analogy loses any vestiges of charm after the third repetition.
"Well, it awl depends on where you live, do'n't it," the curator barked. "Mitchigan is shayp'd loick a mitten, Italy is the boot-nation, i'n't it? And the UK looks loick a walrus on a skaytboard!"
Later that evening I made my way to the house that Christine actually lived in for the semester, since it was a much more inviting place to hang out than my hostel. I enjoyed a home-cooked meal and conversed with my girlfriend and her mother via webcam. I sat in a room by myself, and other residents in the house would poke their heads in and introduce themselves. Eventually a bearded, bespectacled student stepped in and immediately asked me to describe myself. He listened placidly as I stumbled through a basic introduction, then introduced himself as Carl. Jumping off of the fact that i was an English student, we then plunged into a discussion of Dostoevsky and somehow ended up on Beowulf before I walked back to my hostel with Christine, grabbing some food on the way.
The next morning I caught up on some email and correspondence at a Starbucks for an hour or two before visiting the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. One of the advantages of Britiain's colonial heritage is that any significant city has a token collection of ancient Greek or Middle-Eastern artifacts at their museum, collected at a time when the British looted such artifacts with impunity. I saw some interesting clay votive figures from ancient Mesopotamia--essentially, these figures stood in for human devotees and could keep a round-the-clock vigil even when their owners were out running errands or doing other things. There was also a nice collection of pottery collected from ancient Greece and some artifacts from European prehistory, such as some antler picks which were recovered near Stonehenge. My favorite room was hung with medieval tapestries and had a collection of violins and violas in display cases.
From the Ashmolean Museum, I walked to the Museum of the History of Science. This museum was housed in the building that had previously housed the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, and this building is widely acknowledged as the first purpose-built museum building in the world. The ground floor contained a collection of sextants, microscopes, and other navigagional instruments, the polished brass glowing inside the display cases. The basement housed a variety of instruments--most notable were Marconi's original radio equipment, a set of photographic plates and chemicals that had belonged to Lewis Carroll, a camera that T.E. Lawrence carried throughout the Arab revolt of WWI, and a chalkboard upon which Albert Einstein had approximated the size of the universe during a 1931 lecture at Oxford.
My next stop after the Museum of the History of Science was the Oxford University Press, which was located away from the center of town. The tour guide who showed four other visitors and me around was a tall, straight, pleasant man with a rich, flowing voice that you would expect to hear narrating National Geographic documentaries. As he explained each exhibit, his cadence and inflection never wavered for a second, as if he were reciting from a script. Like the guide at the Bodleian library, he succeeded in making the history of an academic press interesting, highlighting the prolonged and expensive ordeal of producing the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.
After whiling away another hour or two in town, I capped off Tuesday evening with a visit to the Eagle and Child, a pub where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and several other literary scholars used to meet to smoke pipes, sip a pint, and discuss literature. Although the Eagle and Child isn't much to look at, I found it to be a very pleasant atmosphere, and I lingered there for more than an hour. I was delighted when I encountered a patch of graffiti in the men's bathroom that proclaimed:
"In the words of the prophet of our times, Vivienne Leigh--TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY!"
After that, I chatted with Karin online before returning to my hostel and calling it a day.
I got an early start on Wednesday, catching a train back to London and checking into a hostel in the city. I then passed an hour devouring a pub lunch. I ordered a plate of sausages, mashed potatoes, and peas, which were pretty good, but the lager I had with it had a sour aftertaste which didn't agree with me. After my meal I took the tube back to the Kubrick archives--after my previous visit a two weeks prior, I had set up another appointment to see more materials. I spent four hours leafing through papers in boxes. The most interesting item was a proof copy of Stephen King's The Shining, scrawled with Kubrick's notes, representing the first stage of the process which transformed the novel into a film. Also I looked at three different fan letters Kubrick had received. One was a thesis that a group of professors had written on The Shining. Kubrick had annotated these letters as well, marking the occasional grammatical error and conceding a couple approving remarks. Another letter was handwritten on yellow legal pad sheets, most of which praised Kubrick for The Shining, but which concluded with a page or two of suggested "improvements" for the film. Kubrick had left this one unblemished.
After getting dinner, I made my way to the home of the British Film Institute, located on the south bank of the Thames River, where I saw a showing of a 1955 French thriller entitled Les Diaboliques. This film was supposed to be very influential on Hitchcock's Psycho--in fact, the story goes that Hitchcock read the novel on which the film is based, then immediately contacted the publisher to option the rights to a film version, only to find that the French director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, had only just beat him to it.
On Thursday morning I took a train to Canterbury, the center of the Anglican church. Canterbury rose to prominence as the site where St. Augustine founded an abbey upon his arrival in England in 597 AD. The Abbey has existed in several different permutations over the years, culminating in the Canterbury Cathedral that stands in the center of town today. Followint his success in re-introducing Catholic
Christianity to England, Augustine himself was recognized as the first Archbishop of Canterbury. 1500 years later, the current Archbishop of Canterbury still presides over not only his local diocese but also the worldwide Anglican church from his seat in Canterbury.
Until 1170 AD, Canterbury and York competed for dominance of the church in England. That year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, was murdered in the midst of overseeing a service of vespers in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket had been at odds with Henry II regarding the relationship of the church to the Royal government, and although the circumstances of Becket's murder were ambiguous, Henry submitted to a ritual of penance at Canterbury and Becket was canonized by the Catholic Church. A shrine was constructed in the cathedral and immediately became the destination of religious pilgrims such as those described by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. With so much religious significance ascribed to Canterbury, it beat out York for dominance of the Anglican Church.
I spent most of my time in Canterbury at the cathedral. I joined a guided tour of the Cathedral, along with a mother and her son. The youngster had recently studied Chaucer in school and was brimming with questions for the tour guide, which frankly put me to shame. Our guide pointed out the site of Thomas Becket's murder, which is marked with a modern memorial; the crypt, which is the oldest part of the Cathedral, and the quire, which featured a raised platform at the far end where devout pilgrims would finally see Becket's shrine at the culmination of their journey. The shrine no longer exists--Henry VIII destroyed it and appropriated its riches during the dissolution of the monasteries--but a perpetually burning candle lights the spot where it stood in centuries past. After the tour, I ambled around the exterior of the cathedral for a bit, enjoying the sunshine. I walked back into town, where I got a milkshake and unexpectedly stumbled across a reference to Calvin College in a novelty book that I was perusing in a toy shop.
I rode a train back to London, collected my luggage from the hostel, and boarded another train to Cambridge. The station was quite full that evening, and I'm curious whether that just represented regular train traffic for London or whether the station was swelled with travelers whose travel plans were foiled by the eruption of the volcano in Norway. I toiled over a crossword puzzle during the trip to Cambridge, where I met my friend Sam and his father at the station. We rode back to Sam's house, where I was to be hosted for the duration of my stay in Cambridge--the feeling of staying in a home rather than a hostel was sublime. Basically the evening was spent sedentary in front of a television, where I confirmed that British television really does get overwhelmed by American programming.
I slept in on Friday morning, then Sam and I caught a bus into Cambridge--he lives in a village nearby, and during the half-hour bus ride, we chatted about a variety of things. Cambridge has a quieter, more laid-back atmosphere than Oxford--it feels much more organic and less contrived. Oxford may be more accessible for a visit, but I feel that Cambridge would be a nicer place to simply exist. Sam walked me down some of the main streets, pointing out different colleges and places of interest. We wound up in the Fitzwillian Museum, which is an art museum in Cambridge, housed in a large Classical Revival building. Wandering through, Sam pointed out both his favorite paintings and those which he had never liked. After the museum, we grabbed some lunch and strolled past some more of the colleges, admiring the green grass and the narrow streams. Punting on these streams is a common pastime both in Cambridge and in Oxford, and some people were enjoying the sunny weather that afternoon by drifting along the stream. After wandering around town a bit more, Sam's mother picked us up and we drove to an American military cemetery outside of Cambridge. There had been an airbase or two nearby during the Second World War, but the American soldiers interred had been stationed all over England during World War Two. The site was beautiful, with uniform rows of monuments arranged in concentric arcs radiating out from a flagpole. There was also a chapel on the site, adorned with large painted maps of American involvement in World War Two and a mosaic on the ceiling and far wall depicted formations of bombers attended by angels, headed for some unknown destination. After spending some time there, we returned to Sam's house, ate dinner, and had a leisurely evening of television once more.
I awoke on Saturday to the sounds of a contractor installing new vinyl on Sam's bathroom floor. When I went downstair for breakfast, Sam and his mother were trying to place the contractor by his accent; at last they just asked him, but I can't remember what he said. With the bathroom once more at our disposal, we showered and rode a bus back into Cambridge.
The first stop was the Cambridge Zoological Museum, which was full of specimens of all sorts of animals. The most interesting displays were those on birds and small mammals. Sam and I speculated as to what could be on these animals' minds, based on their taxidermied facial expressions. One case in the museum was devoted to specimens that Charles Darwin had collected during the course of his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Essentially, these were old preserved fish in glass jars, and a handful of stuffed finches. Interesting, nevertheless.
After the musuem, we met Sam's mother once more in town and drove to a nearby manor house, Wimpole Estate. After parking and walking through an old stable structure, we passed a "historic bazaar", which was a variety of reenactors from different eras in costume ranging from WWII to the 1700s. Interestingly, there was a group there dressed in Confederate uniform, representing a society dedicated to reenacting British units that fought in the American Civil War. We then walked around the exterior of the manor house itself. Wimpole Hall was begun in 1640, and like most large estates has been in a state of perpetual maintenance/expansin ever since then. It changed hands several times, and the last individual to oversee significant restoration of the house was Rudyard Kipling's daughter. We opted not to enter the house, but rather set off across the grounds, which were green and rolling and dotted with trees and cattle. We moved further out, across a ditch, where the trees disappeared and the cattle were replaced by sheep and goats. We ended up at the Wimpole Folly, which was a tower intentionally fashioned to resemble a Gothic ruin--evidently this was something of a fad in 18th-century Europe. We wandered back amidst a horde of sheep--Sam threatened to attack them with a stick, but restrained himself. We then enjoyed afternoon tea at the cafe on the grounds. This consisted of English tea with a scone, strawberry jam, and clotted cream (something halfway between whipped cream and butter). Taking tea in the afternoon sun was the perfect way to end the day, and Sam's mother seemed quite pleased that I, as an American, displayed such a fondness for tea. She was so pleased that even after we returned to the house for the evening, she offered me tea no less than three times throughout the evening. The most exciting part of the evening occurred when I was obliged to kill a spider that was menacing Sam--evidently spiders creep him out.
I awoke on Sunday in time to attend the Anglican church in Sam's village with him and his father. This reminded me that small, local churches are just about the same wherever you go, for better or for worse. After church, we returned home, where Sam's mother had prepared a hearty Sunday dinner, which was marvelous. Digestion occured in front of the television for a couple more hours until Sam and his father saw me off to the train station. After three connecting trains in as many hours, I stepped out on the platform back in York, which isn't quite home, but it works for the semester.
Alright, that should catch everyone up on the final week of my break. Sorry for the delay--I've been a slave to homework yesterday. Accounts of the following weeks should (hopefully) be coming out soon.
Take care everyone!
-John Morton
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Poor Timing (April 11, 2010)
Hello all,
To those of you courageous enough to open your inboxes after the onslaught of my two previous emails, my thanks.
I last left you breathless and resentful on Sunday evening. I arrived in Bristol, walked through the twilight with a slight breeze, and checked into the Rock 'n Bowl hostel in Bristol...a hostel associated with a bowling alley. Yes, I know what you're thinking, and believe me, I was thinking the same thing too. The place was being refurbished, which it could certainly use, and I found myself in a room with five Colombians, a Hungarian, and no working lockers. I was tired, but a call from my parents cheered me up as I took a quick stroll in search of some food, which I found. After getting in touch with Karin, I called it a day.
The next morning, the fire alarm inexplicably went off around 8:30. This was kind of a bumpy start to the day, but I was surprised and pleased to enjoy a hot shower that was actually hot. I spent most of the morning listlessly browsing the internet, not really feeling motivated to do a whole lot. I finally emerged from the hostel and spent two hours in a coffee shop writing in my journal, then I attended Evensong at the Bristol Cathedral. I explored the area by the quays in Bristol for a little, then it was back to the hostel, where I realized that the tattooed man gaping at the television in the common room with a sedated expression on his unshaven face had been sitting there apparently all day. I killed time until going to bed.
The next morning, one of the three bathrooms was out of service, with the door dangling from a single hinge--as I waited for a stall to open up, a fellow patron from Istanbul remarked to me about how much she hated the hostel. I could see why.
Some quick background information on Bristol--ranking as England's sixth most populous city, Bristol's history dates back to the 12th century. The city is situated around the Avon River gorge and set on the coast of the Severn Estuary, between England and Wales; its history is linked to maritime commerce through the port of Bristol. Nowadays, Bristol is one of the major cities of the southwest and has a distinct and active culture of its own.
I set out to see what I could find, and before long I wound up at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. At this point in my trip, I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the prospect of yet ANOTHER museum, but I ducked in nevertheless, and to my surprise enjoyed my time browsing the collections. The museum wasn't huge, but it contained a variety of things, such as displays on natural history, egyptology, mineralogy, and fun collection of tigers--plastic tiger, carved wooden tigers, tiger textiles, etc. This made me think: the huge, themed museums that I'd been to were great, such as the Tate Modern and Museum of Natural History in London, but there's the hazard of becoming overwhelmed by rooms and rooms of paintings or taxidermied animals. Even the famous paintings such as Van Gogh's Sunflowers and the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait can seem stifled when surrounded by other, lesser-known works, and these works themselves can be unjustly overshadowed by their celebrity neighbors. This wasn't the case at the Bristol Museum--with just a little bit of everything, a person could take it at a leisurely pace.
Also, in a semester that's been so museum-intensive, this gives rise to another bite-sized epiphany: why the heck to we like museums so much in the first place? Playing sports or going to an amusement park are both fun and exhilirating, but what is it about going to a big building crammed full of stuff and just walking around slowly and not talking to anyone for an hour or two? It's hard to say, but I think it just speaks to a certain natural curiosity we possess as humans. Once you scratch the surface, just about everything is interesting in its own particular way, and there's an entire world of things to discover. Personally, I found myself interested in the local wildlife snarling back at me through the glass display cases because not only do I seldom see animals up close, but some of these are animals that we just don't have back in the states. It's times like those that I recall all the listless days when I just feel bored and berate myself for that.
After the museum, another stop at a coffee shop for an hour or two of journaling--yes, I find myself slowly drawn toward the coffee-shop demographic I have mocked in the past. I browsed an English newspaper for probably the first time since my arrival: I read an opinion piece by a journalist who had traveled in America and gleefully announced to his readership that all the stereotypes about American Southerners were not only true, but actually exceeded his expectations. I also read through a sports piece about Tiger Woods' latest press conference, wondering why anyone outside the US would care about American golf, then I remembered that the sport was invented on this island.
After leaving the coffee shop, I browsed my way through a couple shops (I haven't met a bookstore yet that I can resist popping in) and ended up at an independent movie theater by the Bristol waterfront where I saw a screening of a film called Double-Take. Rather than a narrative, this film was more like an 80-minute montage forming an overarching meditation on doubles and doppelgangers. It was unique, and kind of difficult to explain: the screenwriter had adapted a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, himself preoccupied with doubles in much of his work, to recount a fictional meeting between Alfred Hitchcock (who also explored themes of doppelgangers and mistaken identity in his films) and Hitchcock's own doppelganger. Intercut with this narrative was footage of Cold War press conferences, 1960s commercials for instant coffee, trailers and television footage of Hitchcock himself, and interviews with Hitchcock impersonators, one of whom supplied a voice-over for the film. I didn't completely understand it, but the director was preoccupied with comparing Hitchcock's films with Cold War politics and examining the role that the advent of television played throughout.
The only reason that I go into such detail on what was admittedly an unusual film is that footage of press releases surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis elicited a reaction in me that I reach from time to time in contemplating the past. Through my childhood, the impression I got of the past fifty years or so of American history was a bright cheery one, formed largely by the television and films I saw that dated back to that era. I imagined that I might have enjoyed living through those times. Now that I've learned more, my views have changed: with the dissolution of the USSR and the destruction of the Berlin Wall occuring about the same time of my birth, myself and all those of my generation really have no idea what it was like to live in the atmosphere of showdown between two nuclear superpowers. People aren't scared of Russians or Communists the way they used to be (why do you think Tom Clancy hasn't been able to write a decent novel for the past fifteen years?), and to watch newsreels of children participating in the infamous "duck and cover" drills seems quaint and laughable to us now. The thing is, even at that time, weren't these films and depictions of "Leave it to Beaver" society little more than hiding one's head in the sand? In the face of nuclear war, what else was there to do? When I think about the Cuban Missile Crisis especially and how close we were to plunging into catastrophe, it really sends a chill down my spine. All you older readers of these emails who grew up during these times, I've got to say, I can't imagine what it must have been like, and the closest I can imagine seems so unreal. Perhaps later generations will feel the same way about the times we're in now, and marvel at the terror of September 11 and the threat of subversive extremist terrorism, equally threatening as the nationalistic saber-rattling that was the Cold War but in different ways. It's really remarkable how we can live with the shadows of these things looming over us and still keep up with daily life--grocery shopping, going to the gym, watching sitcoms on television, and keeping track of professional sports. Somehow we dodge the bullet over and over again.
Forgive me my digression--back to Bristol:
I spent my final day in Bristol seeing more sights of the town. I walked out to the western border of the city, passing through a park with a commemorative monument to John Cabot, who came from Bristol, and past a crescent of high-class apartments, similar to one I had seen at Bath. Then I came upon the Clifton Suspension Bridge which spans the Avon Gorge. I got views of the bridge from a hillside observatory, and also descended a stone passage that emptied into a rather disappointing cave that opened on the side of the gorge. This bridge has been in place since 1864 and was engineered by a 24-year old by the name of Brunel, who is one of Bristol's most famous natives, along with Cabot. Another example of Brunel's handiwork is the SS Great Britain, described as the "world's first great ocean liner", and which I saw from a distance anchored in the inlet. This was a decent amount of walking, but the weather was sunny and warm, a recent development that was just fine with me. I got some browsed in a couple more shops, got some lunch, and talked to two different students who were both volunteering to raise funds for the same charity--one, a guy named Jake who reminded me of one of my high school friends, and the other a girl with dreadlocks whose name I can't remember. They were both friendly, and it was nice to have brief conversations with them. Then I stopped by a modern art museum called the Arnolfini Gallery, which was a venue for rotating exhibits, but they were in the midst of installing new exhibits, so there wasn't much to see. I camped out in Starbucks yet again (for those of you keeping count at this point) until catching my train for Stratford-upon-Avon. I felt like I was just getting to know Bristol, and I was a little sad to leave it.
In order to get to Stratford-upon-Avon, I had to change trains at Birmingham, where I had previously spent an unplanned night in the city following an error with my rail tickets. I admit, I was somewhat relieved to pass through that city without incident the second time. It was dark by the time I arrived in town, and I hired a taxi to drive me to my hostel, which was four miles out of town.
After breakfast on Thursday morning, I caught a bus into Stratford, which is a verdant and picturesque city located right on the banks of the Avon River (one of many rivers named Avon in England, I might add, since the name "Avon" originates from the Celtic term used to describe any old river). After getting my bearing, I immediately headed off to the main purpose of my visit: William Shakespeare's birthplace and childhood home.
Shakespeare requires no introduction. The house where he grew up is now managed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and is referred to in many publicity materials by the grandiose name of "The Birthplace". To a satirical mind (such as my own), it conjured notions of a site not associated with any specific person, but with perhaps some unknown but notorious quality of fertility--namely, I pictured a warehouse or factory building, humming with industrial noises, with a perpetual stream of infants crawling out a trapdoor. Or perhaps a genetic laboratory where mass batches of babies are "grown", like in Brave New World.
In reality, the visitor to The Birthplace first goes through the Shakepeare Center, which is little more than a series of three or four introductory videos in different rooms with a few token artifacts, such as a signet ring thought to belong to Shakespeare and a copy of the First Folio, the seminal first published collection of the Bard's plays, surreptitiously undertaken by a pair of Shakespeare's friends without his approval and peddled on the streets of London in the 1620s. The video presentations were impressive, featuring excerpts of different filmed productions of Shakespeare's works with such figures as Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Set all this to Mendolssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and the result was much like theater itself--it got the viewer excited and stirred up, without really a whole lot of substance behind it.
The birth house itself is presented alongside gardens that are planted with flora described in Shakespeare's works. Inside the house, once can see the rooms furnished in a probable Tudor style, although what was a lavish accomodation during Shakespeare's childhood seemed very primitive according to modern standards. The workshop where Shakespeare's father would have crafted gloves is furnished accordingly, as well as the master bedroom where it is believed Shakespeare was actually born. There is also a room describing the house's past as tourist mecca of sorts, relating how Shakespeare's offspring retained at least partial ownership of the house until the 1800s, during which time the structure served as an inn and fell into disrepair. In the mid-19th century, the house was purchased by a trust and restored, and has drawn tourists ever since, including numerous famous literary figures.
After the birthplace, my next stop was the Church of the Holy Trinity, the site where Shakespeare was baptised and also the site of his grave, which bears his famous exhortation that his remains not be disturbed. Having thus gotten the "bookend" view of both the beginning and end of Shakespeare's life, I walked along the River Avon back into town, passing the Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare Memorial Theater, currently undergoing renovation and expansion. I checked by the nearby Courtyard Theater where the Company performs in the meantime, but was disappointed to learn that there were to be no performances that evening. This was in keeping with an exasperating trend throughout my break of missing out on performances--neither the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields nor the London Symphony Orchestra were present in London at the same time as I, and now I had missed the Royal Shakespeare Company as well. Typical, but not too discouraging.
At this point, I figured out that there wasn't really a whole lot to do in Stratford once the Shakespeare sites were checked off one's list. I retreated to a bookstore and spent a few hours paging through different books there...which gives rise to: Pretentious Digression #3 for this Email (don't worry, this is the last one):
I've made a lot of references to authors, artists, and other talented figures through the course of these emails--this is because I'm pretty fascinated with the creative process. I never get tired of trying to figure out what makes these people "tick", what sets them apart from everyone else, and if they're really all that different from all the rest of us. And not only that, but do go about their craft so skillfully and apparently so effortlessly. Here I was in Shakespeare's birthplace--Shakespeare, who is praised for his vivid descriptions of nearly every character one is likely to encounter in life--and I found myself perusing works by Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkein. In order to do what these men do, not only must you somehow reach an understanding of the world and what makes it ring true, but also in Tolkien's case, take it a step further to expand this knowledge to a world of one's own invention. I wish I understood how people are able to do that.
I got dinner in Stratford and returned to the hostel, where I messed around on my harmonica for a bit and took a nap before Skyping in Karin, despite the interference of a mob of French tourists.
Friday morning passed uneventfully in a coffee shop, researching Shakespeare and confirming more details for the rest of my trip. Then I migrated to the local library and filled out another page or two in my journal, while an elderly gentleman sitting across from me at the table worked diligently on some mysterious project--he meticulously wrote out a letter, whispering each word too himself as he wrote it, and enclosed it in two separate envelopes, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings. As I walked through town to the bus stop, I also saw a steet musician decked out like a one-man band, with his dog sitting on a folding chair beside him. At intervals in his performance, he would pause the music and cue the dog, who would then obediently contribute a short howl or a yip to the music.
For some reason the bus wasn't running according to regular schedule, and I ended up having to call a taxi to the hostel at the eleventh hour to get to the rail station. I missed the train I had intended to catch, but luckily I was able to catch a later service with my same ticket. This service entailed another transfer at Birmingham, which went off uneventfully, thank goodness. My next destination was Oxford, and I found myself seated next to an Oxford native on the train, who was kind enough to give me some pointers about the town. I spent the rest of the ride reading Papillon. Upon arriving at Oxford, I checked into my hostel, a self-described "funky" hostel which plays hit music continually, has barbarians painted on the walls, and has a plaque stating "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" mounted on the door to the sleeping wing.
I ventured out into Oxford yesterday morning, pretty much just to scout out the lay of the land, and inevitably found myself drawn into a bookstore before long. It seems like overall there's a much better selection of reading material around here, and in rail stations and tube stops, there are full-sized posters advertising recent novels, just like how movies are advertised in the States. The weather was perfect, and I had a leisurely stroll through town. I'll save a more in-depth description of Oxford for my next email, since this one is already ridiculous. After spending a couple hours in town, I returned to the hostelf for a nap, then back into town to grab some supper and attend a performance of Handel's Messiah at Christ Church Cathedral. I enjoyed this greatly. The bass soloist was outstanding, and the alto soloist was, quite literally, a man. I was kind of thrown for a loop when the Hallelujah Chorus began but the audience didn't immediately stand. However, about half of the spectators ended up awkwardly on their feet. I called it a day after that.
I slept in this morning and attended Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral, where I happened to run into an aquaintance and fellow Calvin student who's been studying in Oxford all year. We had intended to meet at some point during my visit, but as we hadn't worked out anything specific, this meeting was a surprise. Walking through the town afterward, I was surprised to see the exact same street musician I has seen in Stratford-upon-Avon jamming with his dog, a crowd gathered around him. After an interval in a Starbucks typing out much of this email, Christine, my aquaintance, showed me to a house outside of town where about thirty American students from different colleges around the US live in the course of studying at Oxford through an association of Christian colleges whose name escapes me at the minute. I met one guy who's from South Bend, and a girl who is familiar with Ivanhoe's in Gas City. After traveling on my own through England for the past two weeks, it was nice to meet a bunch of Americans and hear people speak in a familiar accent.
So I've been camped out in this house for American students for the past couple hours, feverishly hashing out this email as some of them feverish barrel through their final theses for their semester, which ends after this week. I get the feeling that a considerable current of brain power flows under this roof.
Another long email. Hope everyone enjoyed reading it! If you didn't, I apologize--it must be the academic atmosphere of Oxford getting to my already-swollen head.
I hope this finds everyone doing well! Hopefully the weather is as nice for all of you as it's becoming for me. I think of you all often!
God bless!
Sincerely,
John Morton
To those of you courageous enough to open your inboxes after the onslaught of my two previous emails, my thanks.
I last left you breathless and resentful on Sunday evening. I arrived in Bristol, walked through the twilight with a slight breeze, and checked into the Rock 'n Bowl hostel in Bristol...a hostel associated with a bowling alley. Yes, I know what you're thinking, and believe me, I was thinking the same thing too. The place was being refurbished, which it could certainly use, and I found myself in a room with five Colombians, a Hungarian, and no working lockers. I was tired, but a call from my parents cheered me up as I took a quick stroll in search of some food, which I found. After getting in touch with Karin, I called it a day.
The next morning, the fire alarm inexplicably went off around 8:30. This was kind of a bumpy start to the day, but I was surprised and pleased to enjoy a hot shower that was actually hot. I spent most of the morning listlessly browsing the internet, not really feeling motivated to do a whole lot. I finally emerged from the hostel and spent two hours in a coffee shop writing in my journal, then I attended Evensong at the Bristol Cathedral. I explored the area by the quays in Bristol for a little, then it was back to the hostel, where I realized that the tattooed man gaping at the television in the common room with a sedated expression on his unshaven face had been sitting there apparently all day. I killed time until going to bed.
The next morning, one of the three bathrooms was out of service, with the door dangling from a single hinge--as I waited for a stall to open up, a fellow patron from Istanbul remarked to me about how much she hated the hostel. I could see why.
Some quick background information on Bristol--ranking as England's sixth most populous city, Bristol's history dates back to the 12th century. The city is situated around the Avon River gorge and set on the coast of the Severn Estuary, between England and Wales; its history is linked to maritime commerce through the port of Bristol. Nowadays, Bristol is one of the major cities of the southwest and has a distinct and active culture of its own.
I set out to see what I could find, and before long I wound up at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. At this point in my trip, I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the prospect of yet ANOTHER museum, but I ducked in nevertheless, and to my surprise enjoyed my time browsing the collections. The museum wasn't huge, but it contained a variety of things, such as displays on natural history, egyptology, mineralogy, and fun collection of tigers--plastic tiger, carved wooden tigers, tiger textiles, etc. This made me think: the huge, themed museums that I'd been to were great, such as the Tate Modern and Museum of Natural History in London, but there's the hazard of becoming overwhelmed by rooms and rooms of paintings or taxidermied animals. Even the famous paintings such as Van Gogh's Sunflowers and the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait can seem stifled when surrounded by other, lesser-known works, and these works themselves can be unjustly overshadowed by their celebrity neighbors. This wasn't the case at the Bristol Museum--with just a little bit of everything, a person could take it at a leisurely pace.
Also, in a semester that's been so museum-intensive, this gives rise to another bite-sized epiphany: why the heck to we like museums so much in the first place? Playing sports or going to an amusement park are both fun and exhilirating, but what is it about going to a big building crammed full of stuff and just walking around slowly and not talking to anyone for an hour or two? It's hard to say, but I think it just speaks to a certain natural curiosity we possess as humans. Once you scratch the surface, just about everything is interesting in its own particular way, and there's an entire world of things to discover. Personally, I found myself interested in the local wildlife snarling back at me through the glass display cases because not only do I seldom see animals up close, but some of these are animals that we just don't have back in the states. It's times like those that I recall all the listless days when I just feel bored and berate myself for that.
After the museum, another stop at a coffee shop for an hour or two of journaling--yes, I find myself slowly drawn toward the coffee-shop demographic I have mocked in the past. I browsed an English newspaper for probably the first time since my arrival: I read an opinion piece by a journalist who had traveled in America and gleefully announced to his readership that all the stereotypes about American Southerners were not only true, but actually exceeded his expectations. I also read through a sports piece about Tiger Woods' latest press conference, wondering why anyone outside the US would care about American golf, then I remembered that the sport was invented on this island.
After leaving the coffee shop, I browsed my way through a couple shops (I haven't met a bookstore yet that I can resist popping in) and ended up at an independent movie theater by the Bristol waterfront where I saw a screening of a film called Double-Take. Rather than a narrative, this film was more like an 80-minute montage forming an overarching meditation on doubles and doppelgangers. It was unique, and kind of difficult to explain: the screenwriter had adapted a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, himself preoccupied with doubles in much of his work, to recount a fictional meeting between Alfred Hitchcock (who also explored themes of doppelgangers and mistaken identity in his films) and Hitchcock's own doppelganger. Intercut with this narrative was footage of Cold War press conferences, 1960s commercials for instant coffee, trailers and television footage of Hitchcock himself, and interviews with Hitchcock impersonators, one of whom supplied a voice-over for the film. I didn't completely understand it, but the director was preoccupied with comparing Hitchcock's films with Cold War politics and examining the role that the advent of television played throughout.
The only reason that I go into such detail on what was admittedly an unusual film is that footage of press releases surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis elicited a reaction in me that I reach from time to time in contemplating the past. Through my childhood, the impression I got of the past fifty years or so of American history was a bright cheery one, formed largely by the television and films I saw that dated back to that era. I imagined that I might have enjoyed living through those times. Now that I've learned more, my views have changed: with the dissolution of the USSR and the destruction of the Berlin Wall occuring about the same time of my birth, myself and all those of my generation really have no idea what it was like to live in the atmosphere of showdown between two nuclear superpowers. People aren't scared of Russians or Communists the way they used to be (why do you think Tom Clancy hasn't been able to write a decent novel for the past fifteen years?), and to watch newsreels of children participating in the infamous "duck and cover" drills seems quaint and laughable to us now. The thing is, even at that time, weren't these films and depictions of "Leave it to Beaver" society little more than hiding one's head in the sand? In the face of nuclear war, what else was there to do? When I think about the Cuban Missile Crisis especially and how close we were to plunging into catastrophe, it really sends a chill down my spine. All you older readers of these emails who grew up during these times, I've got to say, I can't imagine what it must have been like, and the closest I can imagine seems so unreal. Perhaps later generations will feel the same way about the times we're in now, and marvel at the terror of September 11 and the threat of subversive extremist terrorism, equally threatening as the nationalistic saber-rattling that was the Cold War but in different ways. It's really remarkable how we can live with the shadows of these things looming over us and still keep up with daily life--grocery shopping, going to the gym, watching sitcoms on television, and keeping track of professional sports. Somehow we dodge the bullet over and over again.
Forgive me my digression--back to Bristol:
I spent my final day in Bristol seeing more sights of the town. I walked out to the western border of the city, passing through a park with a commemorative monument to John Cabot, who came from Bristol, and past a crescent of high-class apartments, similar to one I had seen at Bath. Then I came upon the Clifton Suspension Bridge which spans the Avon Gorge. I got views of the bridge from a hillside observatory, and also descended a stone passage that emptied into a rather disappointing cave that opened on the side of the gorge. This bridge has been in place since 1864 and was engineered by a 24-year old by the name of Brunel, who is one of Bristol's most famous natives, along with Cabot. Another example of Brunel's handiwork is the SS Great Britain, described as the "world's first great ocean liner", and which I saw from a distance anchored in the inlet. This was a decent amount of walking, but the weather was sunny and warm, a recent development that was just fine with me. I got some browsed in a couple more shops, got some lunch, and talked to two different students who were both volunteering to raise funds for the same charity--one, a guy named Jake who reminded me of one of my high school friends, and the other a girl with dreadlocks whose name I can't remember. They were both friendly, and it was nice to have brief conversations with them. Then I stopped by a modern art museum called the Arnolfini Gallery, which was a venue for rotating exhibits, but they were in the midst of installing new exhibits, so there wasn't much to see. I camped out in Starbucks yet again (for those of you keeping count at this point) until catching my train for Stratford-upon-Avon. I felt like I was just getting to know Bristol, and I was a little sad to leave it.
In order to get to Stratford-upon-Avon, I had to change trains at Birmingham, where I had previously spent an unplanned night in the city following an error with my rail tickets. I admit, I was somewhat relieved to pass through that city without incident the second time. It was dark by the time I arrived in town, and I hired a taxi to drive me to my hostel, which was four miles out of town.
After breakfast on Thursday morning, I caught a bus into Stratford, which is a verdant and picturesque city located right on the banks of the Avon River (one of many rivers named Avon in England, I might add, since the name "Avon" originates from the Celtic term used to describe any old river). After getting my bearing, I immediately headed off to the main purpose of my visit: William Shakespeare's birthplace and childhood home.
Shakespeare requires no introduction. The house where he grew up is now managed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and is referred to in many publicity materials by the grandiose name of "The Birthplace". To a satirical mind (such as my own), it conjured notions of a site not associated with any specific person, but with perhaps some unknown but notorious quality of fertility--namely, I pictured a warehouse or factory building, humming with industrial noises, with a perpetual stream of infants crawling out a trapdoor. Or perhaps a genetic laboratory where mass batches of babies are "grown", like in Brave New World.
In reality, the visitor to The Birthplace first goes through the Shakepeare Center, which is little more than a series of three or four introductory videos in different rooms with a few token artifacts, such as a signet ring thought to belong to Shakespeare and a copy of the First Folio, the seminal first published collection of the Bard's plays, surreptitiously undertaken by a pair of Shakespeare's friends without his approval and peddled on the streets of London in the 1620s. The video presentations were impressive, featuring excerpts of different filmed productions of Shakespeare's works with such figures as Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Set all this to Mendolssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and the result was much like theater itself--it got the viewer excited and stirred up, without really a whole lot of substance behind it.
The birth house itself is presented alongside gardens that are planted with flora described in Shakespeare's works. Inside the house, once can see the rooms furnished in a probable Tudor style, although what was a lavish accomodation during Shakespeare's childhood seemed very primitive according to modern standards. The workshop where Shakespeare's father would have crafted gloves is furnished accordingly, as well as the master bedroom where it is believed Shakespeare was actually born. There is also a room describing the house's past as tourist mecca of sorts, relating how Shakespeare's offspring retained at least partial ownership of the house until the 1800s, during which time the structure served as an inn and fell into disrepair. In the mid-19th century, the house was purchased by a trust and restored, and has drawn tourists ever since, including numerous famous literary figures.
After the birthplace, my next stop was the Church of the Holy Trinity, the site where Shakespeare was baptised and also the site of his grave, which bears his famous exhortation that his remains not be disturbed. Having thus gotten the "bookend" view of both the beginning and end of Shakespeare's life, I walked along the River Avon back into town, passing the Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare Memorial Theater, currently undergoing renovation and expansion. I checked by the nearby Courtyard Theater where the Company performs in the meantime, but was disappointed to learn that there were to be no performances that evening. This was in keeping with an exasperating trend throughout my break of missing out on performances--neither the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields nor the London Symphony Orchestra were present in London at the same time as I, and now I had missed the Royal Shakespeare Company as well. Typical, but not too discouraging.
At this point, I figured out that there wasn't really a whole lot to do in Stratford once the Shakespeare sites were checked off one's list. I retreated to a bookstore and spent a few hours paging through different books there...which gives rise to: Pretentious Digression #3 for this Email (don't worry, this is the last one):
I've made a lot of references to authors, artists, and other talented figures through the course of these emails--this is because I'm pretty fascinated with the creative process. I never get tired of trying to figure out what makes these people "tick", what sets them apart from everyone else, and if they're really all that different from all the rest of us. And not only that, but do go about their craft so skillfully and apparently so effortlessly. Here I was in Shakespeare's birthplace--Shakespeare, who is praised for his vivid descriptions of nearly every character one is likely to encounter in life--and I found myself perusing works by Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkein. In order to do what these men do, not only must you somehow reach an understanding of the world and what makes it ring true, but also in Tolkien's case, take it a step further to expand this knowledge to a world of one's own invention. I wish I understood how people are able to do that.
I got dinner in Stratford and returned to the hostel, where I messed around on my harmonica for a bit and took a nap before Skyping in Karin, despite the interference of a mob of French tourists.
Friday morning passed uneventfully in a coffee shop, researching Shakespeare and confirming more details for the rest of my trip. Then I migrated to the local library and filled out another page or two in my journal, while an elderly gentleman sitting across from me at the table worked diligently on some mysterious project--he meticulously wrote out a letter, whispering each word too himself as he wrote it, and enclosed it in two separate envelopes, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings. As I walked through town to the bus stop, I also saw a steet musician decked out like a one-man band, with his dog sitting on a folding chair beside him. At intervals in his performance, he would pause the music and cue the dog, who would then obediently contribute a short howl or a yip to the music.
For some reason the bus wasn't running according to regular schedule, and I ended up having to call a taxi to the hostel at the eleventh hour to get to the rail station. I missed the train I had intended to catch, but luckily I was able to catch a later service with my same ticket. This service entailed another transfer at Birmingham, which went off uneventfully, thank goodness. My next destination was Oxford, and I found myself seated next to an Oxford native on the train, who was kind enough to give me some pointers about the town. I spent the rest of the ride reading Papillon. Upon arriving at Oxford, I checked into my hostel, a self-described "funky" hostel which plays hit music continually, has barbarians painted on the walls, and has a plaque stating "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" mounted on the door to the sleeping wing.
I ventured out into Oxford yesterday morning, pretty much just to scout out the lay of the land, and inevitably found myself drawn into a bookstore before long. It seems like overall there's a much better selection of reading material around here, and in rail stations and tube stops, there are full-sized posters advertising recent novels, just like how movies are advertised in the States. The weather was perfect, and I had a leisurely stroll through town. I'll save a more in-depth description of Oxford for my next email, since this one is already ridiculous. After spending a couple hours in town, I returned to the hostelf for a nap, then back into town to grab some supper and attend a performance of Handel's Messiah at Christ Church Cathedral. I enjoyed this greatly. The bass soloist was outstanding, and the alto soloist was, quite literally, a man. I was kind of thrown for a loop when the Hallelujah Chorus began but the audience didn't immediately stand. However, about half of the spectators ended up awkwardly on their feet. I called it a day after that.
I slept in this morning and attended Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral, where I happened to run into an aquaintance and fellow Calvin student who's been studying in Oxford all year. We had intended to meet at some point during my visit, but as we hadn't worked out anything specific, this meeting was a surprise. Walking through the town afterward, I was surprised to see the exact same street musician I has seen in Stratford-upon-Avon jamming with his dog, a crowd gathered around him. After an interval in a Starbucks typing out much of this email, Christine, my aquaintance, showed me to a house outside of town where about thirty American students from different colleges around the US live in the course of studying at Oxford through an association of Christian colleges whose name escapes me at the minute. I met one guy who's from South Bend, and a girl who is familiar with Ivanhoe's in Gas City. After traveling on my own through England for the past two weeks, it was nice to meet a bunch of Americans and hear people speak in a familiar accent.
So I've been camped out in this house for American students for the past couple hours, feverishly hashing out this email as some of them feverish barrel through their final theses for their semester, which ends after this week. I get the feeling that a considerable current of brain power flows under this roof.
Another long email. Hope everyone enjoyed reading it! If you didn't, I apologize--it must be the academic atmosphere of Oxford getting to my already-swollen head.
I hope this finds everyone doing well! Hopefully the weather is as nice for all of you as it's becoming for me. I think of you all often!
God bless!
Sincerely,
John Morton
Natural Laws (2 of 2)(April 5, 2010)
Hello everyone,
Continuing where I left off...
Last Monday, March 29: I moved from the hostel that we had corporately inhabited as a Calvin group and moved to the hostel I had booked for the next couple days, situated in the Bayswater Area northwest of Hyde Park. This place turned out to be kind of a dump, and I found myself in a bunk room with eleven other patrons of varying European nationalities. I stashed my stuff and headed out for the day.
I rode the tube to the far side of Hyde Park where my first destination was the Natural History Museum. This was housed in a large 19th Century brick building and was overrun with noisy school groups. Navigating the hordes, the first gallery I investigated was an exhibit on marine life, which was probably my favorite. The exhibit of replica dinosaur fossils was the most congested with frantic, over-demonstrative children. A catwalk funneled visitors past the skeletons, which rested on platforms suspended from the ceiling, and led them past a large animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex. There was also an exhibition on human anatomy and physiology, which gave a much more nuanced and explicit presentation on human functions than children would encounter in an American museum.
From the Natural History Museum, I proceeded next door to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the largest collection of the decorative arts in the world--a person could easily spend a week surveying the varied collections in that massive building. I only saw a fraction of the items on display; I most enjoyed a collection of sacred metalcraft, such as jeweled chalices and eucharist services; an exhibition on performance costumes and production design, where I saw costumes that had been worn by Laurence Olivier and Mick Jagger; and best of all, a dim gallery hung with medieval tapestries along the walls, depicting episodes from folklore and vignettes of hunting expeditions and pastoral games.
Outside the V & A (as it's colloquially known) I had a chance meeting with Prof. ward and his wife, who were staying in a hotel nearby for a couple more days. From there I trudged past Royal Albert Hall and trying to imagine what it must have been like during the filming of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. I walked through part of Hyde Park, passing a memorial erected to the memory of Prince Albert--a Gothic revival-style pavilion with sculptures commemorating the arts and sciences as well as the major regions of the world. I wandered a bit from there, ending up at Harrod's, which is larger than a department store but smaller than a shopping mall, incorporating elements of both and all crammed in one large building. They had everything, from souvenir chocolates to Ralph Lauren apparel, Wedgwood place settings and a small art gallery with original paintings for sale, modestly described as "home decor". At the junction of a stairwell, there was a pedestal supporting a large blank book in which shoppers wrote messages and dedications to Princess Diana.
I then wandered from Harrod's to Piccadilly Circus, which is the closest thing London has to Times Square--a traffic circle formed by the intersection of four major roads, with a sculpture of Cupid offset in the middle. From there I attempted to reach Trafalgar Square, and I did make it to the backside of the nearby Admiralty Arch, but I didn't realize where I was and instead tramped across the parade grounds of the Royal Cavalry Museum, where I found myself within a stone's throw of Downing Street. I boarded the tube near the Houses of Parliament and rode back to my hostel, where I checked my email and got in touch with Karin.
Tuesday began with a shower and a spartan breakfast at the hostel, after which I rode the tube to the bank of the Thames, which I crossed on foot. I arrived at the Globe Theater in time to view their associated museum--which described the climate of the south bank area of London during Shakespeare's Day and the procedure of building the replica of the original theater--and catch the first tour of the day. There was only a small group for this tour, and as such, our guide took us into some of the upper tiers of the theater rather than just confining us to the ground floor, which evidently is the standard procedure for the tours.
After the Globe, I walked next door to the Tate Modern art gallery, a large, slab-like building which houses an extensive collection of modern art. I arrived just in time for a 45-minute highlights tour of surrealist paintings, viewing works by artists such as Picasso, Dali, and Pollock. Again, this gallery was overrun with noisy school groups, a fact which our tour guide repeatedly lamented.
When I emerged from the Tate, the sun had likewise emerged from the clouds for the first time since Sunday evening, so I took advantage of the cheerful weather to walk along the Thames, passing a replica of The Golden Hind and the Southwark Cathedral, as well as several large office buildings. I crossed over the Tower Bridge back to the North Bank of the Thames and got an outside view of the Tower of London, deciding to defer my visit until the next morning. I made my way back to where I had got off the tube that morning and rode to Trafalgar Square, just in time for the sunshine I had been enjoying to dissipate. With the rain coming down, I retreated into the National Gallery.
The National Gallery was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Within it's walls, I saw Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (which I had scrutinized ad nauseum in my art history class), a pencil sketch by da Vinci, some paintings by Claude Monet, Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, and Van Gogh's Sunflowers...not to mention a handful of other paintings by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio.
Coming out of the National Gallery, I killed some time photographing the sculpture of Trafalgar Square before riding the tube to catch Evensong at St. Paul's Cathedral. I craned my neck, hoping to catch sight of the monument to T.E. Lawrence that resides somewhere in the cathedral, but to no avail. The service was gorgeous, as I've come to expect from Anglican services, and it afforded a sublime respite from the rain outside after a day spent on my feet.
Following Evensong, I spent an hour sipping a mocha and filling out postcards in a Starbuck's near St. Paul's, then rode the tube back to Piccadilly Circus to end my day with a performance of "Les Miserables" at Queen's Theater. I got a cheap ticket for an upper balcony seat, from which point the nuances of the performances were lost on me but I got a good overview of the action.
I had wanted to see "Les Miserables" ever since I devoted an entire summer to reading Victor Hugo's novel four years ago. Obviously, it would be impossible to render either the total scope of the narrative or the contemplative and digressive tone of the book on the stage, but the musical was moving, focusing on the emotional highlights of the story. I enjoyed it a lot, and it was a stark contrast from watching Wanted a week prior.
I started Wednesday with a visit to the Tower of London, a castle originally built by William the Conqueror to solidify his power over London following the Norman Conquest. Over the years, several monarchs have relied on its defensible location and strong fortifications to project power, house valuables, or retreat in times of political turbulence. After poking around on my own for a bit, I joined a free tour supervised by one of the Yeoman warders that still oversee the Tower and reside on-site with their families. Alan, as our guide was named, had a great sense of humor, teasing the children on the tour and threatening decapitation as punishment for the slightest annoyance or disruption. Under his guidance, I saw the tower where Sir Thomas More was imprisoned after his refusal to support the Act of Succession, the site where Anne Boleyn was beheaded, the White Tower which had housed the Royal Observatory in years past, and a chapel housing the remains of several distinguished and tragic personalities who had entered the Tower for various reasons, but all bound for a common fate. After the tour, I visited the armory exhibits in the White Tower, which weren't terribly exciting, and then joined the throng surging into the Jewel House to catch a glimpse of the Crown Jewels. The lines were long, but projectors showed footage of Elizabeth II's coronation and detailed views of the Crown Jewels on the walls of the antechambers. Slowly but steadily, the line lead into a vault where crowns, scepters, lavish mantles, and table services were in display in glass cases. I would have liked to remain longer, but I had to get going in short order.
I grabbed some lunch and boarded the tube for my next engagement, the Stanley Kubrick Archives housed at the communications branch of the University of Arts London. Unfortunately, I hadn't adequately looked up directions to the archives, and to make a long story short, I spend half my allotted appointment time going to two separate incorrect sites before I finally got in touch with the right institution and got good directions. It is from this experience that the title of this email is derived, because it seemed at that time that a natural law was in effect that guaranteed that I, John Morton, would meet any given situation where I given a seemingly innocuous but significant choice--namely, which way to turn down a given street--with what would inevitably prove to be the wrong decision. But I digress.
The Archives were housed in a facility kind of on the London outskirts, in an academic building that seemed to be past its prime. I had made a prior appointment to view the archives, and after registering as a visitor I was led into the archive office where the attendants had readied some previously-requested materials for me to inspect. I spent two hours shuffling through publicity stills and casting memos for Dr. Strangelove, including correspondence between Kubrick and different talent agencies, and what I found most interesting--a file of notecards, some typed, but most written in Kubrick's own hand, with notes ranging from two or three terms to a series of bullet points outlining working concepts for characters or scenarios from the early stages of Dr. Strangelove's development, when Kubrick was still attempting to make a serious film rather than the black comedy that audiences saw in theaters in 1963. After the Dr. Strangelove materials, I examined a publisher's proof of the novel Wartime Lies, a novel which Kubrick had considered for a project on the Holocaust, complete with Kubrick's annotations. Finally I took a look at an editing outline for The Shining, which didn't really reveal anything. Once the archive closed, I returned to Bayswater and ended the day with dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
On Thurdsay I awoke early and bade farewell to London as I rode a train to Portsmouth, where I checked into a hostel not far from the seaside and trudged across the town to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Portsmouth has a naval history extending back to the days of Henry VIII and still docks some of its vessels there during times of peace. It's this naval heritage that brought me there.
I purchased a ticket to the dockyard attractions and immediately headed to the dry dock housing the HMS Victory, the flagship of Admiral Horatio Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar, and the most warship in the history of the Royal Navy. First I visited a small museum dedicated to the Victory and Trafalgar specifically, then I boarded the ship herself. Although she's undergone several refurbishments and restorations throughout her 250-year lifespan, the Victory is permanently displayed how she would have appeared in 1805 under Nelson's command. When we were kids, my brother and I spent hours poring over a book that presented a page-by-page cross section view of the HMS Victory, and it was incredible to see all the details I had absorbed as a kid presented in real life.
By 1805, Nelson had already achieved celebrity status for multiple famous victories against the French navy, which constituted the main threat that Napoleonic France could wield against England. In the course of pursuing a combined French and Spanish fleet to to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean, Nelson ended up on one side of the French and Spanish near Gibraltar, with another English fleet lying in wait just outside the English Channel. By merit of bravado and superior training, the resulting battle constituted a decisive naval victory for the British and ensured Nelson immortal fame, although at the cost of his life.
The Victory is an example of a "first-rate ship of the line", i.e. she was the aircraft carrier of her day. As I wandered her decks, I saw the the elaborate captain's and admiral's cabins, the lines of cannon on her gun decks, the massive anchor cables, the iron stove in the galley that cooked all the crew members' meals, and the dark hold of the ship, where supplies and ballast were stored. I also saw the spot where Nelson was struck by a French sniper's bullet, marked by a small plaque on the quarterdeck, between the helm and the mainmast, as well as the likely location on one of the gun decks where Nelson expired despite the efforts of a naval surgeon.
In addition to the Victory herself, the Historic Dockyard also has the fore topsail which hung from the Victory's mainmast during the Battle of Trafalgar--removed after the battle, this huge sheet of canvas featured in different displays and exhibitions over the years, finally winding up in an old building in the dockyard before its "rediscovery" in the 1960s. Riddled with holes from French projectiles, the sail has undergone extensive conservation and is now on display in a warm dim room, lying flat for visitors to see. It holds the distinction of being the largest surviving original artifact from Trafalgar.
After that, I walked through a gallery devoted to the different trades that would have flourished in the dockyard over the years, such as producing iron, rope, and brass, and headed out of the dockyard for the day. I wandered around Portsmouth a bit, grabbing some supper and browsing in a bookstore for a while, before taking a circuitous route back to my hostel, where I took advantage of the free wireless internet access to upload a ton of pictures to my Facebook profile dating back to the first or second weekend here in England.
I started Friday off with a leisurely walk along the coastline--it was chilly and windy, but I enjoyed it nevertheless and took pictures of the different monuments and fortifications that dot the shoreline. Eventually I ended up back at the dockyard as it started to rain, where I enjoyed a tour of the harbor in a small ferry. I dried my shoes in front of a space heater on the ferry as the guide pointed out various aspects of the harbor and how they had evolved over the years, as well as some current Royal Navy vessels, from a brand new, state-of-the-art destroyer and an aircraft carrier to older training frigates and mothballed vessels awaiting an unsure fate.
After the tour, I hurried to shelter myself in a museum dedicated to the wreck of the Mary Rose, one of the first ships intended from it's construction for military service. Commissioned by Henry VIII during the infancy of England's navy, the Mary Rose saw over thirty years of distinguished service in multiple battles and was the personal favorite of Henry VIII. Then during an intimidation showdown in the waters just off Portsmouth, the Mary Rose inexplicably capsized during the midst of a maneuver. She remained on the ocean bottom for 400 years, preserved in silt, until the site of the wreck was re-discovered in the mid-1960s. An underwater archaeology project was undertaken, which culminated in raising the remnants of the ship itself out of the water in 1982. Since then, the wreck--almost the entire right side of the ship remains intact--has been undergoing a long process of rinsing, preservation, and drying at the hands of conservators, and is scheduled to go on display housed in a new museum by 2016. Obviously, I was unable to view the remains themselves, but I was fascinated by the story of this shipwreck--I don't think I had ever heard of the Mary Rose before, and I had no idea that the remains were in Portsmouth. I was able to view many well-preserved artifacts recovered from the wreck, such as clothing, weaponry, everyday tools and utensils, and the skeleton of the ship's dog.
The sun had come back out by the time I left the Mary Rose museum, and boarded another vessel docked at Portsmouth, the HMS Warrior. The Warrior is a Victorian Era iron battleship, capable of traveling under sail power or steam power. On board, I saw a brief demonstration on small army by a Scottish sailor who had nothing nice to say about the Royal Marines, then I wandered the ship at will. Unlike the Victory, there was no set route through the Warrior, and apart from the cabin of the ship reserved for a wedding party, I could poke around as much as I wanted to.
I had to walk back to the hostel to recover my luggage, then return to the dockyard area to catch my train, which took over an hour, then I got some food while I waited to board the train to Salisbury. After arriving in Salisbury, I had to take a detour to my hostel to get around a Good Friday processional that was going through town. I checked into a room with four young boys who were part of a swim team, and as a result of my arrival, their coaches had to move them to another room. Although I assured them that I was a nice guy, liability issues prevailed. I did laundry and took it easy for the evening.
Saturday was wet and overcast. I slept in, snatched a meager breakfast right before the hostel kitchen closed, then set out into town. After browsing in a couple stores, I wound up in the local library where I concentrated on updating my journal (which was outdated far back into the last semester) for a couple of hours. When the library closed, I relocated to a Starbucks and continued working amidst the bawdy jokes and exclamations of a group of local teenagers, until the manager banished them from the premises. I returned to the hostel and got in touch with Karin; then I tried to help a fellow American traveler get connected to the internet, but with no success. The kid in the bed bunked on top of mine snored loudly through the night.
Sunday morning was sunny and consequently warmer, which was perfect for Easter. I made it to the kitchen for a full hot breakfast, then consolidated my luggage while listening to a bespectacled middle-aged man with a high-pitched voice; he kind of mumbled, and it was hard to tell when he was talking to me and when he was talking to himself. He mentioned that his mother didn't approve of him traveling on Good Friday, and I wondered if his mother hung out in the basement of a small motel he manages along the highway between Phoenix and Las Vegas...
I attended an Easter service at the Salisbury Cathedral, complete with chanting and a lot of incense. Afterward, seeing as most of the shops in town were closed for Easter, i hiked to the nearby site of Old Sarum, which was a built-up hilltop settlement of some prominence in the area before it was eclipsed by the development in Salisbury. This was a pleasant walk following a river much of the way, cutting through town until I hopped on a horse path that led up the sides of the hill. On the far side of an earthen embankment, the foundations of several buildings, including a cathedral, are still visible, as well as the ruined fortifications of an old fort.
After checking out Old Sarum, I took the same path back into Salisbury and hung out back at my hostel for an hour or two before catching a train to the town of Bristol, where I write to you now.
Thanks for bearing with me through a long and detailed message. It's now past my bedtime, so I'll say goodnight and thank you for all your prayers and well wishes. Happy Easter to everyone!
Sincerely,
John Morton
Continuing where I left off...
Last Monday, March 29: I moved from the hostel that we had corporately inhabited as a Calvin group and moved to the hostel I had booked for the next couple days, situated in the Bayswater Area northwest of Hyde Park. This place turned out to be kind of a dump, and I found myself in a bunk room with eleven other patrons of varying European nationalities. I stashed my stuff and headed out for the day.
I rode the tube to the far side of Hyde Park where my first destination was the Natural History Museum. This was housed in a large 19th Century brick building and was overrun with noisy school groups. Navigating the hordes, the first gallery I investigated was an exhibit on marine life, which was probably my favorite. The exhibit of replica dinosaur fossils was the most congested with frantic, over-demonstrative children. A catwalk funneled visitors past the skeletons, which rested on platforms suspended from the ceiling, and led them past a large animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex. There was also an exhibition on human anatomy and physiology, which gave a much more nuanced and explicit presentation on human functions than children would encounter in an American museum.
From the Natural History Museum, I proceeded next door to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the largest collection of the decorative arts in the world--a person could easily spend a week surveying the varied collections in that massive building. I only saw a fraction of the items on display; I most enjoyed a collection of sacred metalcraft, such as jeweled chalices and eucharist services; an exhibition on performance costumes and production design, where I saw costumes that had been worn by Laurence Olivier and Mick Jagger; and best of all, a dim gallery hung with medieval tapestries along the walls, depicting episodes from folklore and vignettes of hunting expeditions and pastoral games.
Outside the V & A (as it's colloquially known) I had a chance meeting with Prof. ward and his wife, who were staying in a hotel nearby for a couple more days. From there I trudged past Royal Albert Hall and trying to imagine what it must have been like during the filming of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. I walked through part of Hyde Park, passing a memorial erected to the memory of Prince Albert--a Gothic revival-style pavilion with sculptures commemorating the arts and sciences as well as the major regions of the world. I wandered a bit from there, ending up at Harrod's, which is larger than a department store but smaller than a shopping mall, incorporating elements of both and all crammed in one large building. They had everything, from souvenir chocolates to Ralph Lauren apparel, Wedgwood place settings and a small art gallery with original paintings for sale, modestly described as "home decor". At the junction of a stairwell, there was a pedestal supporting a large blank book in which shoppers wrote messages and dedications to Princess Diana.
I then wandered from Harrod's to Piccadilly Circus, which is the closest thing London has to Times Square--a traffic circle formed by the intersection of four major roads, with a sculpture of Cupid offset in the middle. From there I attempted to reach Trafalgar Square, and I did make it to the backside of the nearby Admiralty Arch, but I didn't realize where I was and instead tramped across the parade grounds of the Royal Cavalry Museum, where I found myself within a stone's throw of Downing Street. I boarded the tube near the Houses of Parliament and rode back to my hostel, where I checked my email and got in touch with Karin.
Tuesday began with a shower and a spartan breakfast at the hostel, after which I rode the tube to the bank of the Thames, which I crossed on foot. I arrived at the Globe Theater in time to view their associated museum--which described the climate of the south bank area of London during Shakespeare's Day and the procedure of building the replica of the original theater--and catch the first tour of the day. There was only a small group for this tour, and as such, our guide took us into some of the upper tiers of the theater rather than just confining us to the ground floor, which evidently is the standard procedure for the tours.
After the Globe, I walked next door to the Tate Modern art gallery, a large, slab-like building which houses an extensive collection of modern art. I arrived just in time for a 45-minute highlights tour of surrealist paintings, viewing works by artists such as Picasso, Dali, and Pollock. Again, this gallery was overrun with noisy school groups, a fact which our tour guide repeatedly lamented.
When I emerged from the Tate, the sun had likewise emerged from the clouds for the first time since Sunday evening, so I took advantage of the cheerful weather to walk along the Thames, passing a replica of The Golden Hind and the Southwark Cathedral, as well as several large office buildings. I crossed over the Tower Bridge back to the North Bank of the Thames and got an outside view of the Tower of London, deciding to defer my visit until the next morning. I made my way back to where I had got off the tube that morning and rode to Trafalgar Square, just in time for the sunshine I had been enjoying to dissipate. With the rain coming down, I retreated into the National Gallery.
The National Gallery was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Within it's walls, I saw Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (which I had scrutinized ad nauseum in my art history class), a pencil sketch by da Vinci, some paintings by Claude Monet, Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, and Van Gogh's Sunflowers...not to mention a handful of other paintings by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio.
Coming out of the National Gallery, I killed some time photographing the sculpture of Trafalgar Square before riding the tube to catch Evensong at St. Paul's Cathedral. I craned my neck, hoping to catch sight of the monument to T.E. Lawrence that resides somewhere in the cathedral, but to no avail. The service was gorgeous, as I've come to expect from Anglican services, and it afforded a sublime respite from the rain outside after a day spent on my feet.
Following Evensong, I spent an hour sipping a mocha and filling out postcards in a Starbuck's near St. Paul's, then rode the tube back to Piccadilly Circus to end my day with a performance of "Les Miserables" at Queen's Theater. I got a cheap ticket for an upper balcony seat, from which point the nuances of the performances were lost on me but I got a good overview of the action.
I had wanted to see "Les Miserables" ever since I devoted an entire summer to reading Victor Hugo's novel four years ago. Obviously, it would be impossible to render either the total scope of the narrative or the contemplative and digressive tone of the book on the stage, but the musical was moving, focusing on the emotional highlights of the story. I enjoyed it a lot, and it was a stark contrast from watching Wanted a week prior.
I started Wednesday with a visit to the Tower of London, a castle originally built by William the Conqueror to solidify his power over London following the Norman Conquest. Over the years, several monarchs have relied on its defensible location and strong fortifications to project power, house valuables, or retreat in times of political turbulence. After poking around on my own for a bit, I joined a free tour supervised by one of the Yeoman warders that still oversee the Tower and reside on-site with their families. Alan, as our guide was named, had a great sense of humor, teasing the children on the tour and threatening decapitation as punishment for the slightest annoyance or disruption. Under his guidance, I saw the tower where Sir Thomas More was imprisoned after his refusal to support the Act of Succession, the site where Anne Boleyn was beheaded, the White Tower which had housed the Royal Observatory in years past, and a chapel housing the remains of several distinguished and tragic personalities who had entered the Tower for various reasons, but all bound for a common fate. After the tour, I visited the armory exhibits in the White Tower, which weren't terribly exciting, and then joined the throng surging into the Jewel House to catch a glimpse of the Crown Jewels. The lines were long, but projectors showed footage of Elizabeth II's coronation and detailed views of the Crown Jewels on the walls of the antechambers. Slowly but steadily, the line lead into a vault where crowns, scepters, lavish mantles, and table services were in display in glass cases. I would have liked to remain longer, but I had to get going in short order.
I grabbed some lunch and boarded the tube for my next engagement, the Stanley Kubrick Archives housed at the communications branch of the University of Arts London. Unfortunately, I hadn't adequately looked up directions to the archives, and to make a long story short, I spend half my allotted appointment time going to two separate incorrect sites before I finally got in touch with the right institution and got good directions. It is from this experience that the title of this email is derived, because it seemed at that time that a natural law was in effect that guaranteed that I, John Morton, would meet any given situation where I given a seemingly innocuous but significant choice--namely, which way to turn down a given street--with what would inevitably prove to be the wrong decision. But I digress.
The Archives were housed in a facility kind of on the London outskirts, in an academic building that seemed to be past its prime. I had made a prior appointment to view the archives, and after registering as a visitor I was led into the archive office where the attendants had readied some previously-requested materials for me to inspect. I spent two hours shuffling through publicity stills and casting memos for Dr. Strangelove, including correspondence between Kubrick and different talent agencies, and what I found most interesting--a file of notecards, some typed, but most written in Kubrick's own hand, with notes ranging from two or three terms to a series of bullet points outlining working concepts for characters or scenarios from the early stages of Dr. Strangelove's development, when Kubrick was still attempting to make a serious film rather than the black comedy that audiences saw in theaters in 1963. After the Dr. Strangelove materials, I examined a publisher's proof of the novel Wartime Lies, a novel which Kubrick had considered for a project on the Holocaust, complete with Kubrick's annotations. Finally I took a look at an editing outline for The Shining, which didn't really reveal anything. Once the archive closed, I returned to Bayswater and ended the day with dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
On Thurdsay I awoke early and bade farewell to London as I rode a train to Portsmouth, where I checked into a hostel not far from the seaside and trudged across the town to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Portsmouth has a naval history extending back to the days of Henry VIII and still docks some of its vessels there during times of peace. It's this naval heritage that brought me there.
I purchased a ticket to the dockyard attractions and immediately headed to the dry dock housing the HMS Victory, the flagship of Admiral Horatio Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar, and the most warship in the history of the Royal Navy. First I visited a small museum dedicated to the Victory and Trafalgar specifically, then I boarded the ship herself. Although she's undergone several refurbishments and restorations throughout her 250-year lifespan, the Victory is permanently displayed how she would have appeared in 1805 under Nelson's command. When we were kids, my brother and I spent hours poring over a book that presented a page-by-page cross section view of the HMS Victory, and it was incredible to see all the details I had absorbed as a kid presented in real life.
By 1805, Nelson had already achieved celebrity status for multiple famous victories against the French navy, which constituted the main threat that Napoleonic France could wield against England. In the course of pursuing a combined French and Spanish fleet to to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean, Nelson ended up on one side of the French and Spanish near Gibraltar, with another English fleet lying in wait just outside the English Channel. By merit of bravado and superior training, the resulting battle constituted a decisive naval victory for the British and ensured Nelson immortal fame, although at the cost of his life.
The Victory is an example of a "first-rate ship of the line", i.e. she was the aircraft carrier of her day. As I wandered her decks, I saw the the elaborate captain's and admiral's cabins, the lines of cannon on her gun decks, the massive anchor cables, the iron stove in the galley that cooked all the crew members' meals, and the dark hold of the ship, where supplies and ballast were stored. I also saw the spot where Nelson was struck by a French sniper's bullet, marked by a small plaque on the quarterdeck, between the helm and the mainmast, as well as the likely location on one of the gun decks where Nelson expired despite the efforts of a naval surgeon.
In addition to the Victory herself, the Historic Dockyard also has the fore topsail which hung from the Victory's mainmast during the Battle of Trafalgar--removed after the battle, this huge sheet of canvas featured in different displays and exhibitions over the years, finally winding up in an old building in the dockyard before its "rediscovery" in the 1960s. Riddled with holes from French projectiles, the sail has undergone extensive conservation and is now on display in a warm dim room, lying flat for visitors to see. It holds the distinction of being the largest surviving original artifact from Trafalgar.
After that, I walked through a gallery devoted to the different trades that would have flourished in the dockyard over the years, such as producing iron, rope, and brass, and headed out of the dockyard for the day. I wandered around Portsmouth a bit, grabbing some supper and browsing in a bookstore for a while, before taking a circuitous route back to my hostel, where I took advantage of the free wireless internet access to upload a ton of pictures to my Facebook profile dating back to the first or second weekend here in England.
I started Friday off with a leisurely walk along the coastline--it was chilly and windy, but I enjoyed it nevertheless and took pictures of the different monuments and fortifications that dot the shoreline. Eventually I ended up back at the dockyard as it started to rain, where I enjoyed a tour of the harbor in a small ferry. I dried my shoes in front of a space heater on the ferry as the guide pointed out various aspects of the harbor and how they had evolved over the years, as well as some current Royal Navy vessels, from a brand new, state-of-the-art destroyer and an aircraft carrier to older training frigates and mothballed vessels awaiting an unsure fate.
After the tour, I hurried to shelter myself in a museum dedicated to the wreck of the Mary Rose, one of the first ships intended from it's construction for military service. Commissioned by Henry VIII during the infancy of England's navy, the Mary Rose saw over thirty years of distinguished service in multiple battles and was the personal favorite of Henry VIII. Then during an intimidation showdown in the waters just off Portsmouth, the Mary Rose inexplicably capsized during the midst of a maneuver. She remained on the ocean bottom for 400 years, preserved in silt, until the site of the wreck was re-discovered in the mid-1960s. An underwater archaeology project was undertaken, which culminated in raising the remnants of the ship itself out of the water in 1982. Since then, the wreck--almost the entire right side of the ship remains intact--has been undergoing a long process of rinsing, preservation, and drying at the hands of conservators, and is scheduled to go on display housed in a new museum by 2016. Obviously, I was unable to view the remains themselves, but I was fascinated by the story of this shipwreck--I don't think I had ever heard of the Mary Rose before, and I had no idea that the remains were in Portsmouth. I was able to view many well-preserved artifacts recovered from the wreck, such as clothing, weaponry, everyday tools and utensils, and the skeleton of the ship's dog.
The sun had come back out by the time I left the Mary Rose museum, and boarded another vessel docked at Portsmouth, the HMS Warrior. The Warrior is a Victorian Era iron battleship, capable of traveling under sail power or steam power. On board, I saw a brief demonstration on small army by a Scottish sailor who had nothing nice to say about the Royal Marines, then I wandered the ship at will. Unlike the Victory, there was no set route through the Warrior, and apart from the cabin of the ship reserved for a wedding party, I could poke around as much as I wanted to.
I had to walk back to the hostel to recover my luggage, then return to the dockyard area to catch my train, which took over an hour, then I got some food while I waited to board the train to Salisbury. After arriving in Salisbury, I had to take a detour to my hostel to get around a Good Friday processional that was going through town. I checked into a room with four young boys who were part of a swim team, and as a result of my arrival, their coaches had to move them to another room. Although I assured them that I was a nice guy, liability issues prevailed. I did laundry and took it easy for the evening.
Saturday was wet and overcast. I slept in, snatched a meager breakfast right before the hostel kitchen closed, then set out into town. After browsing in a couple stores, I wound up in the local library where I concentrated on updating my journal (which was outdated far back into the last semester) for a couple of hours. When the library closed, I relocated to a Starbucks and continued working amidst the bawdy jokes and exclamations of a group of local teenagers, until the manager banished them from the premises. I returned to the hostel and got in touch with Karin; then I tried to help a fellow American traveler get connected to the internet, but with no success. The kid in the bed bunked on top of mine snored loudly through the night.
Sunday morning was sunny and consequently warmer, which was perfect for Easter. I made it to the kitchen for a full hot breakfast, then consolidated my luggage while listening to a bespectacled middle-aged man with a high-pitched voice; he kind of mumbled, and it was hard to tell when he was talking to me and when he was talking to himself. He mentioned that his mother didn't approve of him traveling on Good Friday, and I wondered if his mother hung out in the basement of a small motel he manages along the highway between Phoenix and Las Vegas...
I attended an Easter service at the Salisbury Cathedral, complete with chanting and a lot of incense. Afterward, seeing as most of the shops in town were closed for Easter, i hiked to the nearby site of Old Sarum, which was a built-up hilltop settlement of some prominence in the area before it was eclipsed by the development in Salisbury. This was a pleasant walk following a river much of the way, cutting through town until I hopped on a horse path that led up the sides of the hill. On the far side of an earthen embankment, the foundations of several buildings, including a cathedral, are still visible, as well as the ruined fortifications of an old fort.
After checking out Old Sarum, I took the same path back into Salisbury and hung out back at my hostel for an hour or two before catching a train to the town of Bristol, where I write to you now.
Thanks for bearing with me through a long and detailed message. It's now past my bedtime, so I'll say goodnight and thank you for all your prayers and well wishes. Happy Easter to everyone!
Sincerely,
John Morton
Natural Laws (1 of 2)(April 5, 2010)
Hello all,
The last two weeks have been busy--hence the delay in sending out this email. Strap yourselves in for a long one, folks.
Picking up from two Mondays ago:
In fact, I can't recall anything remarkable that happened on Monday the 22nd; we had class, continued discussing Middlemarch ( I have to confess that I daydreamed through much of it), and that was about it.
Tuesday saw the weekly Commonplace book reports, followed by the presentations for the Tapestry. The period in question was the World Wars, and being a cinephile, I took advantage of this opportunity to do a presentation on Hitchcock. We were joined in class by Ken Bratt, who is a Classical Studies professor at Calvin; he is to oversee the semester in York next year, and he had just arrived for some preliminary coordination with York St. John.
On Tuesday evening, I hung out with members of my small group, taking an evening just to chill in celebration of the imminent Easter holiday. There were about six of us altogether; we ordered pizza and watched "Wanted", a film based on a graphic novel that chronicle a white-collar worker bee's discovery of purpose and self-determination once he's inducted into a clandestine fraternity of vigilante assassins known as...The Fraternity. Oh, and these trigger-happy punks discern the identities of their next targets by interpreting imperfections in a continuously-weaving bolt of cloth. Mix in some gratuitous violence, frequent profanity, and dialogue that would have meshed nicely with a Saturday morning cartoon, and you get a notion of what "Wanted" is like. I had seen it before.
I was sitting next to Ben, who's kind of the black sheep of the small group. He likes to dress up in striking black costumes and attend rock and metal concerts. Before the film, he was mixing drinking vodka and apple juice; he said he normally doesn't drink so much alone, but he had bought the vodka just for the bottle--a limited-edition monstrosity that came in a metal-studded leather sleeve--that he intended to add as a complement to his goth costume. Ben likes to talk, especially to debate, and somehow he started rambling admiringly about how easy it is to obtain firearms in the United States compared to the procedures in Great Britain. I think he expected me to engage him in political discussion, but I was ill-equipped to do so. I merely lampooned the movie instead.
Wednesday morning brought the second class period on the British empire--the motives of empire, running the gamut from missionary initiatives to the naked greed of conquest and imperialism. This gave rise to some other meditations on empire that I'll cover later in this email. I returned briefly to my flat, took care of a few things, then returned to the campus for a Q & A session with Prof. Bratt. After an hour of that, the entire group boarded a charter bus and we visited Castle Howard, which is half an hour from York.
Castle Howard is not, in fact, a castle--it's a manor house that was constructed in two phases by members of the Howard family, who used to possess the title of Earl of Carlisle. (Incidentally, the Howards trace their lineage to Catherine Howard, ill-fated wife of Henry VIII, and two other noblemen who were executed by that capricious monarch.) As we waited to enter the grounds, all the girls in the group mobbed one of the students whose boyfriend had come to visit her and taken advantage of the situation to propose. As the girls admired the trinket, the five guys in the group--six if you include the visiting fiance--stood off to the side and tried our best to be aloof.
We got admission to the grounds and immediately strolled out into gardens surrounded by walkways, just waiting for spring to go into bloom. A person could easily spend an hour or two just wandering those grounds. There was a large lawn sprawling out in front of the house edged hedges and boasting a large fountain, with a bronze Atlas on one knee, supporting the globe on his shoulder. At the far ends of the lawn, other statues depicting Proserpine's abduction by Pluto (as Cerberus snarls and looks on) and Hercules' wrestling match with Antaeus.
The interior of the house was phenomenal. After mounting a large staircase inside a side wing entrance, one encounters a portrait of the current owner and resident of the house, who inhabits one wing of the house with his wife and twin children (a boy and a girl who have wonderful, original names which I can't remember now), while the rest of his house remains open for tours nine months out of the year. There are portraits, lavishly furnished rooms, and ancient copies of classical sculptures that previous members of the Howard family collected on trips to Europe over the years--all displayed in the hallways that bring the entire estate together. A grand central room sits beneath a dome that collapsed in the mid-1940s following a fire that swept through one of the wings--this space was restored, but much of that wing remains in its damaged state. A suite of three rooms remain as they were dressed for two adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that were both filmed at Castle Howard. As if all this wasn't enough, the house boasts its own chapel, complete with painted walls, mosaic floors, and a pipe organ. In short, it was incredible--definitely one of my favorite destinations of the semester so far.
Following the grandeur of Castle Howard, the entire group bid adieu to Middlemarch in class the next day, and I sat through my final class before break, Grammar and Text. I spent that evening doing laundry and hoping like mad that I could accomodate a week's worth of supplies in a single suitcase.
I awoke Friday, spent the morning finishing packing, and met the Calvin students on campus at 2:00 to walk to the York Rail station. We were quite a spectacle, walking as a mass, loaded down with suitcases, duffel bags, and internal-frame backpacks--I could just imagine pedestrians fleeing before us, crying "To arms! To arms! The Americans are coming!" We boarded our train to King's Cross only to discover that the railway hadn't marked our seats as reserved, so Professor Ward and one of the rail staff had to spend some time evicting disgruntled passengers from seats that were supposed to be reserved for us. Our route to London was direct; I read Henri Charriere's Papillon for most of the ride. When we pulled into King's Cross, some of the Harry Potter fans in the group kept their eyes peeled for Platform 9 3/4.
The hustle and bustle of London was evident right from the start as we took a short walk down the street to the British library. I joined the first of two shifts of students to enter the library in search of intriguing and famous manuscripts as the second shift waited to look after our luggage. Turns out that there's a single gallery that's open to the public, and all other materials require an appointment to view--but we didn't know that. We walked out 20 min. later having seen nothing. From the British library we took the London subway, or "tube" as it's colloquially known, to our hostel. For this we were issued Oyster cards, which are plastic passes that one can use indefinitely to ride the tube, just "topping up" more fare on the cards at automatic machines from time to time.
Our hostel was situated in northwest London, not far from the Abbey Road studio made famous by the Beatles. We checked in and got situated, then I joined some fellow students in going out in pursuit of dinner. We ended up at a nearby Italian restaurant, where I split a calamari, mussel, and prawn pizza with another student--it was a lot more appetizing than it sounds. Five of us dropped in at a pub after the meal to end the day with a pint of ale, then retreated back to the hostel and called it a day.
We began the day on Saturday by arriving as a group at Westminster Abbey, emerging from the tube to find Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament staring down on us immediately. The current structure of Westminster Abbey is the second to occupy the site; the previous abbey housed an order of Benedictine monks and was the site of Harold II's spurious coronation just prior to the Norman conquest. The current structure was begun in 1245 under Henry II, and somehow the Abbey has managed to ride out the waves of religious turbulence that have marked English history like the growth rings of a tree. Its proximity to the royal palaces of London prompted a continuous relationship with royalty, and became the burial site of certain English monarchs. Henry VIII spared Westminster from the dissolution of the monasteries, and Elizabeth I established Westminster as a Royal Peculiar--a religious institution under the leadership of the monarch rather than a diocese. Traditionally it has served as the site of coronations, since William the Conqueror, and burials of prominent English citizens. At the Abbey, I enjoyed an audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons, and saw the resting places of Elizabeth I, "Bloody Mary", Chaucer, Dickens, Darwin, Handel, Pitt, Purcell, Gladstone, Kipling, Tennyson, and Olivier.
From Westminster, we walked through a gentle rain to nearby Green Park and saw the grand structure of Buckingham palace before embarking on a walk through London, stopping at a couple big sites. Passing through intermittent rain, we passed streets with stores ranging from high-end designers to stalls peddling touristy gimmicks. We set aside an hour and a half for the British Museum--I grabbed some Chinese carryout with some other students, then delved into the cavernous museum, chock full of goodies stolen from other countries by the British during the heyday of the empire. Most notable were the famous Elgin Marbles, the vast majority of the pediment sculpture from the Acropolis in Athens. These were "collected" by an Englishman in the early 1800s and shipped to England, and no matter how vehemently the Greeks protest, they haven't managed to get them back yet. I also saw the famous Rosetta Stone, with the parallel Greek, coptic, and hieroglyph text that allowed researchers to decipher Egyptian symbols.
From the British museum, we made our way to Covent Garden, where we poked around the different vendors' stalls for half an hour before walking to Leicester Square and stopping in the National Portrait Gallery, where many famous paitings that end up in textbooks or on dust covers are housed, and then just took a peek at Trafalgar Square from the porch of St. Martin-in-the-Fields before catching the tube back to our hostel. From the hostel, a group of us took a circuitous route to Camden Market--we got some Chinese food from one of several vendors and checked out the square we were in, which appeared to have been converted from a stable complex to merchant's stalls (they were all closed by this point in the day, though). With every other place closed at this point, we stepped into a pub called "The End of the World" and killed some time there before taking an equally circuitous tube route back to the hostel. We later learned that Camden Market is actually within managable walking distance from the pub, but we had just consulted the wrong maps.
I started off Palm Sunday in search of the famous Abbey Road intersection, pictured on the cover of the Beatles' album of the same name. We found it...or at least what we thought was it, and posed for a photograph. Then we caught the tube for a morning service at St. Paul's Cathedral. The service began with a procession from a nearby square, complete with onlookers waving palm branches and a pair of donkeys. A mass of worshipers swarmed up the steps of the cathedral and filled most of the interior of St. Paul's. Myself and my five or so fellow students stayed through about half of the service, leaving just as the clergy were about to administer Eucharist to make it to the train station.
From Victoria Station, the entire Calvin group caught a train to the nearby town of Rochester, where Charles Dickens spent much of his childhood and upon which multiple locations in his fiction are based, notably the village in Great Expectations. We viewed the eclectic collection of the Rochester Guildhall Museum, the highlight of which was a variety of model ships and decorative boxes that had been crafted out of bone, wood, and straw by convicts and prisoners of war confined in the floating prison ships anchored in the nearby river (previously these prisoners would have been transported to the American colonies, but obviously this was no longer feasible after 1781). After the museum, our professor showed us an inn and a house that feature prominently in the novel, as well as the house that was the inspiration for the decrepit mansion inhabited by Miss Havisham. From there, we were officially released on our own for Easter Break--I spent the evening by returning to Camden Market once more to see it in the daytime, then getting a view of London Bridge, the Tower Bridge, and St. Paul's Cathedral in the twilight.
That wraps up the first part of this email, covering the first week that I have to catch up on. I'll bring everyone up to speed on this past week's goings-on in the second half.
Sincerely,
John Morton
The last two weeks have been busy--hence the delay in sending out this email. Strap yourselves in for a long one, folks.
Picking up from two Mondays ago:
In fact, I can't recall anything remarkable that happened on Monday the 22nd; we had class, continued discussing Middlemarch ( I have to confess that I daydreamed through much of it), and that was about it.
Tuesday saw the weekly Commonplace book reports, followed by the presentations for the Tapestry. The period in question was the World Wars, and being a cinephile, I took advantage of this opportunity to do a presentation on Hitchcock. We were joined in class by Ken Bratt, who is a Classical Studies professor at Calvin; he is to oversee the semester in York next year, and he had just arrived for some preliminary coordination with York St. John.
On Tuesday evening, I hung out with members of my small group, taking an evening just to chill in celebration of the imminent Easter holiday. There were about six of us altogether; we ordered pizza and watched "Wanted", a film based on a graphic novel that chronicle a white-collar worker bee's discovery of purpose and self-determination once he's inducted into a clandestine fraternity of vigilante assassins known as...The Fraternity. Oh, and these trigger-happy punks discern the identities of their next targets by interpreting imperfections in a continuously-weaving bolt of cloth. Mix in some gratuitous violence, frequent profanity, and dialogue that would have meshed nicely with a Saturday morning cartoon, and you get a notion of what "Wanted" is like. I had seen it before.
I was sitting next to Ben, who's kind of the black sheep of the small group. He likes to dress up in striking black costumes and attend rock and metal concerts. Before the film, he was mixing drinking vodka and apple juice; he said he normally doesn't drink so much alone, but he had bought the vodka just for the bottle--a limited-edition monstrosity that came in a metal-studded leather sleeve--that he intended to add as a complement to his goth costume. Ben likes to talk, especially to debate, and somehow he started rambling admiringly about how easy it is to obtain firearms in the United States compared to the procedures in Great Britain. I think he expected me to engage him in political discussion, but I was ill-equipped to do so. I merely lampooned the movie instead.
Wednesday morning brought the second class period on the British empire--the motives of empire, running the gamut from missionary initiatives to the naked greed of conquest and imperialism. This gave rise to some other meditations on empire that I'll cover later in this email. I returned briefly to my flat, took care of a few things, then returned to the campus for a Q & A session with Prof. Bratt. After an hour of that, the entire group boarded a charter bus and we visited Castle Howard, which is half an hour from York.
Castle Howard is not, in fact, a castle--it's a manor house that was constructed in two phases by members of the Howard family, who used to possess the title of Earl of Carlisle. (Incidentally, the Howards trace their lineage to Catherine Howard, ill-fated wife of Henry VIII, and two other noblemen who were executed by that capricious monarch.) As we waited to enter the grounds, all the girls in the group mobbed one of the students whose boyfriend had come to visit her and taken advantage of the situation to propose. As the girls admired the trinket, the five guys in the group--six if you include the visiting fiance--stood off to the side and tried our best to be aloof.
We got admission to the grounds and immediately strolled out into gardens surrounded by walkways, just waiting for spring to go into bloom. A person could easily spend an hour or two just wandering those grounds. There was a large lawn sprawling out in front of the house edged hedges and boasting a large fountain, with a bronze Atlas on one knee, supporting the globe on his shoulder. At the far ends of the lawn, other statues depicting Proserpine's abduction by Pluto (as Cerberus snarls and looks on) and Hercules' wrestling match with Antaeus.
The interior of the house was phenomenal. After mounting a large staircase inside a side wing entrance, one encounters a portrait of the current owner and resident of the house, who inhabits one wing of the house with his wife and twin children (a boy and a girl who have wonderful, original names which I can't remember now), while the rest of his house remains open for tours nine months out of the year. There are portraits, lavishly furnished rooms, and ancient copies of classical sculptures that previous members of the Howard family collected on trips to Europe over the years--all displayed in the hallways that bring the entire estate together. A grand central room sits beneath a dome that collapsed in the mid-1940s following a fire that swept through one of the wings--this space was restored, but much of that wing remains in its damaged state. A suite of three rooms remain as they were dressed for two adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that were both filmed at Castle Howard. As if all this wasn't enough, the house boasts its own chapel, complete with painted walls, mosaic floors, and a pipe organ. In short, it was incredible--definitely one of my favorite destinations of the semester so far.
Following the grandeur of Castle Howard, the entire group bid adieu to Middlemarch in class the next day, and I sat through my final class before break, Grammar and Text. I spent that evening doing laundry and hoping like mad that I could accomodate a week's worth of supplies in a single suitcase.
I awoke Friday, spent the morning finishing packing, and met the Calvin students on campus at 2:00 to walk to the York Rail station. We were quite a spectacle, walking as a mass, loaded down with suitcases, duffel bags, and internal-frame backpacks--I could just imagine pedestrians fleeing before us, crying "To arms! To arms! The Americans are coming!" We boarded our train to King's Cross only to discover that the railway hadn't marked our seats as reserved, so Professor Ward and one of the rail staff had to spend some time evicting disgruntled passengers from seats that were supposed to be reserved for us. Our route to London was direct; I read Henri Charriere's Papillon for most of the ride. When we pulled into King's Cross, some of the Harry Potter fans in the group kept their eyes peeled for Platform 9 3/4.
The hustle and bustle of London was evident right from the start as we took a short walk down the street to the British library. I joined the first of two shifts of students to enter the library in search of intriguing and famous manuscripts as the second shift waited to look after our luggage. Turns out that there's a single gallery that's open to the public, and all other materials require an appointment to view--but we didn't know that. We walked out 20 min. later having seen nothing. From the British library we took the London subway, or "tube" as it's colloquially known, to our hostel. For this we were issued Oyster cards, which are plastic passes that one can use indefinitely to ride the tube, just "topping up" more fare on the cards at automatic machines from time to time.
Our hostel was situated in northwest London, not far from the Abbey Road studio made famous by the Beatles. We checked in and got situated, then I joined some fellow students in going out in pursuit of dinner. We ended up at a nearby Italian restaurant, where I split a calamari, mussel, and prawn pizza with another student--it was a lot more appetizing than it sounds. Five of us dropped in at a pub after the meal to end the day with a pint of ale, then retreated back to the hostel and called it a day.
We began the day on Saturday by arriving as a group at Westminster Abbey, emerging from the tube to find Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament staring down on us immediately. The current structure of Westminster Abbey is the second to occupy the site; the previous abbey housed an order of Benedictine monks and was the site of Harold II's spurious coronation just prior to the Norman conquest. The current structure was begun in 1245 under Henry II, and somehow the Abbey has managed to ride out the waves of religious turbulence that have marked English history like the growth rings of a tree. Its proximity to the royal palaces of London prompted a continuous relationship with royalty, and became the burial site of certain English monarchs. Henry VIII spared Westminster from the dissolution of the monasteries, and Elizabeth I established Westminster as a Royal Peculiar--a religious institution under the leadership of the monarch rather than a diocese. Traditionally it has served as the site of coronations, since William the Conqueror, and burials of prominent English citizens. At the Abbey, I enjoyed an audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons, and saw the resting places of Elizabeth I, "Bloody Mary", Chaucer, Dickens, Darwin, Handel, Pitt, Purcell, Gladstone, Kipling, Tennyson, and Olivier.
From Westminster, we walked through a gentle rain to nearby Green Park and saw the grand structure of Buckingham palace before embarking on a walk through London, stopping at a couple big sites. Passing through intermittent rain, we passed streets with stores ranging from high-end designers to stalls peddling touristy gimmicks. We set aside an hour and a half for the British Museum--I grabbed some Chinese carryout with some other students, then delved into the cavernous museum, chock full of goodies stolen from other countries by the British during the heyday of the empire. Most notable were the famous Elgin Marbles, the vast majority of the pediment sculpture from the Acropolis in Athens. These were "collected" by an Englishman in the early 1800s and shipped to England, and no matter how vehemently the Greeks protest, they haven't managed to get them back yet. I also saw the famous Rosetta Stone, with the parallel Greek, coptic, and hieroglyph text that allowed researchers to decipher Egyptian symbols.
From the British museum, we made our way to Covent Garden, where we poked around the different vendors' stalls for half an hour before walking to Leicester Square and stopping in the National Portrait Gallery, where many famous paitings that end up in textbooks or on dust covers are housed, and then just took a peek at Trafalgar Square from the porch of St. Martin-in-the-Fields before catching the tube back to our hostel. From the hostel, a group of us took a circuitous route to Camden Market--we got some Chinese food from one of several vendors and checked out the square we were in, which appeared to have been converted from a stable complex to merchant's stalls (they were all closed by this point in the day, though). With every other place closed at this point, we stepped into a pub called "The End of the World" and killed some time there before taking an equally circuitous tube route back to the hostel. We later learned that Camden Market is actually within managable walking distance from the pub, but we had just consulted the wrong maps.
I started off Palm Sunday in search of the famous Abbey Road intersection, pictured on the cover of the Beatles' album of the same name. We found it...or at least what we thought was it, and posed for a photograph. Then we caught the tube for a morning service at St. Paul's Cathedral. The service began with a procession from a nearby square, complete with onlookers waving palm branches and a pair of donkeys. A mass of worshipers swarmed up the steps of the cathedral and filled most of the interior of St. Paul's. Myself and my five or so fellow students stayed through about half of the service, leaving just as the clergy were about to administer Eucharist to make it to the train station.
From Victoria Station, the entire Calvin group caught a train to the nearby town of Rochester, where Charles Dickens spent much of his childhood and upon which multiple locations in his fiction are based, notably the village in Great Expectations. We viewed the eclectic collection of the Rochester Guildhall Museum, the highlight of which was a variety of model ships and decorative boxes that had been crafted out of bone, wood, and straw by convicts and prisoners of war confined in the floating prison ships anchored in the nearby river (previously these prisoners would have been transported to the American colonies, but obviously this was no longer feasible after 1781). After the museum, our professor showed us an inn and a house that feature prominently in the novel, as well as the house that was the inspiration for the decrepit mansion inhabited by Miss Havisham. From there, we were officially released on our own for Easter Break--I spent the evening by returning to Camden Market once more to see it in the daytime, then getting a view of London Bridge, the Tower Bridge, and St. Paul's Cathedral in the twilight.
That wraps up the first part of this email, covering the first week that I have to catch up on. I'll bring everyone up to speed on this past week's goings-on in the second half.
Sincerely,
John Morton
Thursday, 25 March 2010
To the Victor Goes the Spoils
Hey everyone (and by everyone, I mean my single subscriber at this point),
First of all, I want to assure everyONE that I don't want this blog to just degenerate into a litmus test for my mood swings. I have a journal for that sort of writing, and that carries the dual benefits that nobody will try to pry into my personal life, and neither will they feel as though I'm trying to ram those selfsame thoughts down their throat(s).
That being said, I will use this blog as an outlet for meditations that I think merit release. I will try to record these in a fair and rational manner, though.
So here's a little introspection: anyone who knows me will say that I'm not really a competitive guy. For the most part; at times I show a competitive streak, but only infrequently. I'm trying to think where that facet of my personality comes from--competition wasn't really emphasized in my household when I was growing up. No allegiances to sports teams were espoused. My brother and I played pretty calmly; he would always beat me in board games and the like, and since I didn't like losing, I just gradually learned to stop challenging him. Most of our play was collaborative or independent rather than competitive, and even in the midst of competition, I remember him as a very impassive opponent, and as a young kid, frequently I didn't realize how badly I was being beaten or just kind of emulated his passivity in victory with a similar passivity in defeat. We just read books more than anything else, where your only opponent is yourself...but then, how much of a rise do you really get from completing a book? Not exactly invigorating.
Growing up in a household where sports were virtually absent, I'm still pretty clueless about most sports. I can remember attempts by my parents to teach Andrew and I to throw a football or the proper way to catch, but neither of us were interested, so there was no point for my parents--neither of whom are sports enthusiasts themselves--to persist in this way. I played soccer at the YMCA for a couple years, but the coaches had this brilliant strategy of neglecting to explain the game to the stupid six-year-olds and instead just turning us loose to roam the field. I remember receiving the ball during one such game and literally stopping in my tracks: this had never happened before, and I was completely at a loss. No worries, though; the coach's daughter managed to put the ball in the goal, which was ample cause for obligatory celebration.
The "Don't Ask, Don't Teach" policy was in full swing throughout all my years of elementary school--bear in mind that if you're a youngster at a Christian school in the midwest, it was assumed that you know how to play sports, because there's no pastime in which the Good Lord takes more unadulterated delight than seeing the sheep of His flock putting the ball through the hoop. Then by middle school, if you don't know how to play these games, you're just a lost cause; the question of learning, much less being taught, is stupid.
This wasn't entirely the case. I started playing on the school soccer teams in fifth grade, and after a year, I finally began to get a grasp on the game. Of course, this didn't happen until the coach gave me some pointers, just the most elementary principles of the game, that enabled me to at least act like I knew what I was doing. (Funny thing is, these tips only took a couple minutes to explain; I suppose all my coaches and physical education teachers in previous years just didn't have those few minutes to spare to help the kid who obviously didn't know what he was doing...but then again, they are busy, important people, aren't they?) Middle school soccer was a fun experience--lots of my friends were on the team as well, and even though I wasn't very good, I still managed to enjoy playing, and as a defensive player I even blocked a couple of shots throughout the season.
Soccer stopped after middle school, though; during our practices, I could see the ordeal that was varsity soccer practice, and I had no difficulty deciding that the returns I would receive weren't worth the blood, sweat, and tears I would have to invest in order to join that proud fraternity.
I should clarify that I don't intend to blame negligent instructors for my ineptitude at sports. I mean, as an American male child, teenager, and now young man, I'm definitely the oddball for still being ignorant of the technical rules of the major sports. If I had been like most other young boys, I would have learned these almost as a part of growing up, and that would have been a good foundation for more competence. But, for whatever reason, I didn't, and I was never interested enough in them to learn independently.
In high school, I dabbled in the fine arts and literature. I played trumpet in the school concert band from 5th grade through my senior year (like in soccer, I was never outstanding, but I did alright); I got good parts in the school plays for five years and performed occasional skits as a part of the school drama club; I read extensively, and took an interest in writing. During my freshman year, a keen interest in film sprung up in me, and that combined with my lifelong reading habit to form a general love of stories and a curiosity into the different ways to effectively tell a story. I suppose I viewed myself as something of a nonconformist, and perhaps I was, but not in an overtly intentional way. I mean, let's face it--high school is a weird time of life.
During this time, I gradually came to really regret that fact that I didn't really know aything about sports. This can leave you isolated in a lot of ways in current American culture, obviously; I couldn't contribute to digressions on the annual NCAA tournament or even just step in to join an improptu game of basketball in the gymnasium. This is something that I'm still really self-conscious about, and even though it's probably too late to substantially change things, I want to at least learn the rules and conventions of different sports--undertaking at age 19 what most boys learn by age 7--and try to get more active and try some different sports. I'm late, but hopefully not too late.
Now, to rope this all back in: I'm not competitive (a fact that I'm attributing to both nature and nurture after everything I just typed). I'm okay with that. I feel that I'm a pretty pleasant guy to be around. Of course lots of other people are really competitive--heck, my girlfriend is one such person--and I'm cool with that too, I really am.
Maybe it's just that I don't see winning as most interesting part of playing a game. To me, the most interesting thing about a basketball game or billiards or whatever is the way that the players willingly submit to arbitrary rules for the duration of the game and watching what results. It's like a science experiment, and the players are the variable values. I think it would be interesting to try out different variables just to see how the games ended up...but of course, the most common variables are those used just to obtain different permutations of victory.
Nobody likes losing a game, and I admit that I still get upset about losing at games sometimes. But most of the time I don't mind losing a game until I feel as if my opponent is just drawing attention to their victory. Then I get indignant--of everything that the game entails, it seems like a pretty dull thing to focus on when all's said and done. I prefer to enjoy the process of playing the game. Admittedly, sometimes I take action that may slow my chances of victory, but isn't the actual game more fun than the outcome? Half the time when I play Settlers of Catan, I don't worry much about winning, but instead just set other goals for myself, like just trying to get the longest road or arrange my settlements in a certain pattern. I feel like if I played with victory as my sole objective, the game gets a lot more repetitive the more I play it. Granted every game is intrinsically different, but still, I like more originality. I like to challenge myself more than my fellow players, and sometimes that means adding my own personal arbitrary rules, such as completely avoiding tiles that yield grain or maybe placing the robber on my own territory every chance I get. If I alter the equation of the game, what's the result? I like to play just for the sake of playing.
If I complained about my losses after these strategies, then I would just be a moron. But I honestly don't think I do complain about my losses. A fellow player may think the way I play the game is stupid; I may think the way he plays the game is terribly dull. So what? Perhaps winning is the objective of the game; well, even if it is, if I defy that objective, the only person I hurt is myself (unless it's a team game, obviously).
I could say more about this, but this has grown to a monstrous post already, and I'm losing focus.
The Bottom Line: I'm not competitive. I don't see anything so wrong with that. I try not to dislike people who are more competitive than I, and I feel like I can make that work most of the time. However, if they want to criticize my philosophy, what's to stop me from turning right around and criticizing theirs? Let me be myself, and enjoy being who I am; I'm only too eager to return the favor.
First of all, I want to assure everyONE that I don't want this blog to just degenerate into a litmus test for my mood swings. I have a journal for that sort of writing, and that carries the dual benefits that nobody will try to pry into my personal life, and neither will they feel as though I'm trying to ram those selfsame thoughts down their throat(s).
That being said, I will use this blog as an outlet for meditations that I think merit release. I will try to record these in a fair and rational manner, though.
So here's a little introspection: anyone who knows me will say that I'm not really a competitive guy. For the most part; at times I show a competitive streak, but only infrequently. I'm trying to think where that facet of my personality comes from--competition wasn't really emphasized in my household when I was growing up. No allegiances to sports teams were espoused. My brother and I played pretty calmly; he would always beat me in board games and the like, and since I didn't like losing, I just gradually learned to stop challenging him. Most of our play was collaborative or independent rather than competitive, and even in the midst of competition, I remember him as a very impassive opponent, and as a young kid, frequently I didn't realize how badly I was being beaten or just kind of emulated his passivity in victory with a similar passivity in defeat. We just read books more than anything else, where your only opponent is yourself...but then, how much of a rise do you really get from completing a book? Not exactly invigorating.
Growing up in a household where sports were virtually absent, I'm still pretty clueless about most sports. I can remember attempts by my parents to teach Andrew and I to throw a football or the proper way to catch, but neither of us were interested, so there was no point for my parents--neither of whom are sports enthusiasts themselves--to persist in this way. I played soccer at the YMCA for a couple years, but the coaches had this brilliant strategy of neglecting to explain the game to the stupid six-year-olds and instead just turning us loose to roam the field. I remember receiving the ball during one such game and literally stopping in my tracks: this had never happened before, and I was completely at a loss. No worries, though; the coach's daughter managed to put the ball in the goal, which was ample cause for obligatory celebration.
The "Don't Ask, Don't Teach" policy was in full swing throughout all my years of elementary school--bear in mind that if you're a youngster at a Christian school in the midwest, it was assumed that you know how to play sports, because there's no pastime in which the Good Lord takes more unadulterated delight than seeing the sheep of His flock putting the ball through the hoop. Then by middle school, if you don't know how to play these games, you're just a lost cause; the question of learning, much less being taught, is stupid.
This wasn't entirely the case. I started playing on the school soccer teams in fifth grade, and after a year, I finally began to get a grasp on the game. Of course, this didn't happen until the coach gave me some pointers, just the most elementary principles of the game, that enabled me to at least act like I knew what I was doing. (Funny thing is, these tips only took a couple minutes to explain; I suppose all my coaches and physical education teachers in previous years just didn't have those few minutes to spare to help the kid who obviously didn't know what he was doing...but then again, they are busy, important people, aren't they?) Middle school soccer was a fun experience--lots of my friends were on the team as well, and even though I wasn't very good, I still managed to enjoy playing, and as a defensive player I even blocked a couple of shots throughout the season.
Soccer stopped after middle school, though; during our practices, I could see the ordeal that was varsity soccer practice, and I had no difficulty deciding that the returns I would receive weren't worth the blood, sweat, and tears I would have to invest in order to join that proud fraternity.
I should clarify that I don't intend to blame negligent instructors for my ineptitude at sports. I mean, as an American male child, teenager, and now young man, I'm definitely the oddball for still being ignorant of the technical rules of the major sports. If I had been like most other young boys, I would have learned these almost as a part of growing up, and that would have been a good foundation for more competence. But, for whatever reason, I didn't, and I was never interested enough in them to learn independently.
In high school, I dabbled in the fine arts and literature. I played trumpet in the school concert band from 5th grade through my senior year (like in soccer, I was never outstanding, but I did alright); I got good parts in the school plays for five years and performed occasional skits as a part of the school drama club; I read extensively, and took an interest in writing. During my freshman year, a keen interest in film sprung up in me, and that combined with my lifelong reading habit to form a general love of stories and a curiosity into the different ways to effectively tell a story. I suppose I viewed myself as something of a nonconformist, and perhaps I was, but not in an overtly intentional way. I mean, let's face it--high school is a weird time of life.
During this time, I gradually came to really regret that fact that I didn't really know aything about sports. This can leave you isolated in a lot of ways in current American culture, obviously; I couldn't contribute to digressions on the annual NCAA tournament or even just step in to join an improptu game of basketball in the gymnasium. This is something that I'm still really self-conscious about, and even though it's probably too late to substantially change things, I want to at least learn the rules and conventions of different sports--undertaking at age 19 what most boys learn by age 7--and try to get more active and try some different sports. I'm late, but hopefully not too late.
Now, to rope this all back in: I'm not competitive (a fact that I'm attributing to both nature and nurture after everything I just typed). I'm okay with that. I feel that I'm a pretty pleasant guy to be around. Of course lots of other people are really competitive--heck, my girlfriend is one such person--and I'm cool with that too, I really am.
Maybe it's just that I don't see winning as most interesting part of playing a game. To me, the most interesting thing about a basketball game or billiards or whatever is the way that the players willingly submit to arbitrary rules for the duration of the game and watching what results. It's like a science experiment, and the players are the variable values. I think it would be interesting to try out different variables just to see how the games ended up...but of course, the most common variables are those used just to obtain different permutations of victory.
Nobody likes losing a game, and I admit that I still get upset about losing at games sometimes. But most of the time I don't mind losing a game until I feel as if my opponent is just drawing attention to their victory. Then I get indignant--of everything that the game entails, it seems like a pretty dull thing to focus on when all's said and done. I prefer to enjoy the process of playing the game. Admittedly, sometimes I take action that may slow my chances of victory, but isn't the actual game more fun than the outcome? Half the time when I play Settlers of Catan, I don't worry much about winning, but instead just set other goals for myself, like just trying to get the longest road or arrange my settlements in a certain pattern. I feel like if I played with victory as my sole objective, the game gets a lot more repetitive the more I play it. Granted every game is intrinsically different, but still, I like more originality. I like to challenge myself more than my fellow players, and sometimes that means adding my own personal arbitrary rules, such as completely avoiding tiles that yield grain or maybe placing the robber on my own territory every chance I get. If I alter the equation of the game, what's the result? I like to play just for the sake of playing.
If I complained about my losses after these strategies, then I would just be a moron. But I honestly don't think I do complain about my losses. A fellow player may think the way I play the game is stupid; I may think the way he plays the game is terribly dull. So what? Perhaps winning is the objective of the game; well, even if it is, if I defy that objective, the only person I hurt is myself (unless it's a team game, obviously).
I could say more about this, but this has grown to a monstrous post already, and I'm losing focus.
The Bottom Line: I'm not competitive. I don't see anything so wrong with that. I try not to dislike people who are more competitive than I, and I feel like I can make that work most of the time. However, if they want to criticize my philosophy, what's to stop me from turning right around and criticizing theirs? Let me be myself, and enjoy being who I am; I'm only too eager to return the favor.
Ancient History (March 24, 2010)
Hello all,
You're in luck--this week wasn't nearly as interesting or eventful as its predecessor--cross your fingers and hope that I manage to keep it concise.
First of all, for those of you with Facebook profiles, I feel like I should apologize for not keeping remotely current on uploading photographs to my profile. I've always had problems with the photo-uploading utility when I access my profile using Internet Explorer, and it just so happens that Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for York St. John. Thus I'm restricted to uploading a mere five photos at a time, on a good day, and my "good days" have been few and far between. Suffice to say that this makes the readings I've done about the Luddites' demonstrations during the industrial revolution all the more potent.
Monday slipped by in a flurry of trying to bring my thoughts to bear on an essay I was assigned to write for my history class on Empires--an objective no less concise and no less daunting than: "What was the secret of the Roman Empire"? Admittedly I had been putting the assignment off for a while; I had taken the initiative to get a couple of books from the library beforehand, but with such a broad topic, it was daunting to know where to begin. However, I did have some idea where to begin, having studied the Romans relatively recently in my Calvin history and art history classes. With the imagery of the ruins of Pompeii in mind, as well as anecdotes we had covered in class, I hit upon pragmatism, self-preservation, and dynamic leadership as three crucial elements of Roman conquest...just a drop of water in the ocean, I know, but for the purposes of the assignment, I figured these three would do.
Tuesday morning brought British Culture class, as usual. For the first half, the class divided into groups and each person displayed their "commonplace books"--a kind of mandatory scrapbook assignment we have, which is intended to emulate journals which were in vogue in Europe starting in the 1600s--to the rest of their group members. My commonplace book is comprised of printouts of these weekly emails, augmented with papers and brochures, all compiled in plastic display sheets in a ring binder. We've been exchanging anecdotes from our commonplace books in weeks past, which is really neat, because that way the little tidbits that individuals discover in their encounters with the culture are diffused throughout the whole group. During the second half of class, the different focus groups gave their presentations for the tapestry, describing the class systems in place during the Edwardian Era, the suffrage movement for women at the time, and turbulence surrounding Welsh and Irish affairs at the time. Part of one demonstration had a student submitting Prof. Ward to a "How Snobbish Are You?" test online--I think we were all relieved when the test results were tabulated and we found that, although Prof. Ward exhibited the pernicious vestiges of snobbery, he was not beyond reclamation. Doubtless I have now aroused an eagerness on your part to evaluate your own snob index--here's the link for the quiz: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/quiz/game.html
I spent Tuesday evening spinning a web of words about the Roman empire...not too exciting.
In the Wednesday morning Empires class, we turned our backs on Rome and began talking about the British empire. This class kind of brought to a variety of thoughts and realizations that I had been mulling over to a head. All my reading of literature and education of history had formed in my mind this image of the British empire as something grand, impregnable, and reproach--certainly with anomalies at certain times and places, but no major ones. As we began to look at roots of the British empire, my views started to aquire a different shade. First of all, my notions of British impregnability have been shaken by learning just how precarious British history has been, from the invasion by the Romans to attacks by Vikings and the Norman Conquest. The notion of the invincible British Empire was formed relatively late in English history, and in many ways was a response to England's history of subjugation to other powers; as such, it has been widely propogated in the Western hemisphere, where England has traditionally exerted such strong cultural influence. And even at the height of the British empire, the British homeland was still beset by all manner of domestic problems, and the image of the empire was soiled by defeats and humanitarian abuses that were largely suppressed. I look forward to the rest of the class for the semester.
Thursday and Friday passed pretty uneventfully. I turned in my essay and took it easy for most of those two days, hanging out in my room, watching a movie or two online, and dinking around with my ukulele (I can now stumble my way through a rough phrase of "Wipeout'). Also, a prolonged game of Battleship that had been raging back and forth online between one of my readers and me came to a denouement--I regret to report a defeat on my part, but in negotiations with my opponent, it seems that another battle is brewing, so I have a chance to redeem myself. On Friday evening, I joined the rest of the Calvin students for another social evening at our professor's house, enjoying a birthday cake prepared in observation of three birthdays of our groupmembers occuring within the span of a week or so. It was rainy that evening, and once back to my flat, I streamed a jazz radio station on my laptop, brewed some tea, and savored the gloom as best I could.
On Saturday we boarded a bus once more to visit some sites in Yorkshire not far from the town. Our first destination was the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132 by twelve Cistercian monks, and as the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, it served as a base for missions in the north and up into Scotland. The monks raised sheep and sold the wool, and also mined ore nearby to generate their livelihood; and Rievaulx Abbey became not only one of the best-known abbeys in the north, but also one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Eventually it was destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
Set in the countryside against a hilly backdrop of bare trees, the abbey ruins were impressive. It was an overcast morning, and a light misting rain made the setting all the more placid. I wandered around some of the foundations of the buildings associated with the abbey, all that is left of them, and admired the extant structure of the abbey itself, which was much better preserved than the Whitby Abbey.
After about an hour at Rievaulx, we took the brief ride to the nearby town of Helmsley to view the ruins of a castle that had stood there at one time. Construction on Helmsley Castle began in 1120 by a local nobleman and continued for the next 200 years or so. It changed hands several times throughout the next 400 years and was besieged during the English Civil War, after which Parliament ordered that it be partially destroyed. All that remains of the castle today is one side of a tower, the foundations of the walls, a couple of the front battlements, and one extant hall; these remains are now managed by English Heritage, a department of the British government tasked with historical preservation. Although there wasn't much left of the castle itself, the moat was well preserved, and approaching the castle I got a real feel for just how defensible a position a castle could be. It was neat to poke around, but by that time, my shoes were soaked through, and the chill and damp were starting to get to me. After thoroughly checking the place out, I joined six other students and we walked into Helmsley, where we got some food; then three of us stepped into a secondhand book store, where we amused ourselves by reading the inscriptions in several old books that had been given to previous owners as Sunday school rewards and the like. After whiling away some time in another shop or two, we boarded the bus and returned to York. Back in my flat, I busied myself with folding laundry, taking care of small chores, and Skyping with Karin.
I slept in a bit on Sunday morning before going into town somewhat early for breakfast and some errands. The breakfast was successful, as I grabbed a fruit pasty from a bakery for the third day in a row, but it hadn't occurred to me that no shops would be open at that time on a Sunday morning. So I wandered around a bit, pausing on the old walls to admire the sunny morning until an elderly gentleman walking along the wall advised me that I would get a better view from atop the central tower of York Minster. I agree with him, and then headed that way for Sung Eucharist. En route, I was stopped by a large grizzled man who was shuffling laboriously down the street, hunched over his walker. He asked me where I was from, and while he cited something vague about having worked building oil pipelines in Texas, mysterious reference to Vancouver, and some connection to J.P. Morgan, in an accent so thick it could barely be understood, his unkempt appearance and shabby clothes didn't corroborate his story at all. He insisted that he was a representative of some charitable relief organization (producing a crumpled postcard of said organization as a sort of validation), and offered me some of his "artwork" in return for a donation. The artwork in question was a crumpled pile of what appeared to be finger paintings perched atop his walker, and while I knew at the time that I was undoubtedly subsidizing nothing more than an evening pint for that gentleman, I gave him a donation and collected a piece of artwork, just for the novelty of the experience. Looking back, I feel silly for indulging in this novelty, and I'm not going to reveal what I gave this gentleman for his scrap of paper; suffice to say it will look lovely displayed in my commonplace book. He then asked me where I was having lunch, but I simply told him I didn't know, perceiving that he wished to prolong this relationship in which he only stood to gain.
I arrived at the Minster right as the service was starting and found a seat near the back next to my friend Sam. The service was beautiful, as usual, although the very beginning and end were interrupted by a couple of noisy toddlers who got a kick out of beating their plastic ponies on the seats of the wooden chairs. After the service Sam and I spent an hour or so at a nearby Starbucks, where he gave me advice on what to see in London next week. At one point he whipped out a pen and drew a personalized map of central London for me, noting the relative positions of all the must-see destinations. He was also gracious enough to offer me free lodging in Cambridge, which is where he hails from.
After coffee with Sam, I returned to my flat and spent the next three or four hours in a frenzy of booking hostels for my Easter break. I had hoped to travel on the continent throughout break, but having failed to plan sufficiently in advance or coordinate plans with anyone, I didn't feel ready to travel solo in Europe. Instead, I'll be visiting a handful of cities in the southeast of England, not too far from London. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it. Sunday evening ended pleasantly with conversations with my parents and Karin.
I had intended to send out this email at that time, but time had kind of escaped me for the past couple days.
I hope this message finds all of you well! I ask for your prayers as I set out on my Easter Break for the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on all my comings and goings throughout that time.
I miss you all, and think of you frequently.
Sincerely,
John Morton
You're in luck--this week wasn't nearly as interesting or eventful as its predecessor--cross your fingers and hope that I manage to keep it concise.
First of all, for those of you with Facebook profiles, I feel like I should apologize for not keeping remotely current on uploading photographs to my profile. I've always had problems with the photo-uploading utility when I access my profile using Internet Explorer, and it just so happens that Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for York St. John. Thus I'm restricted to uploading a mere five photos at a time, on a good day, and my "good days" have been few and far between. Suffice to say that this makes the readings I've done about the Luddites' demonstrations during the industrial revolution all the more potent.
Monday slipped by in a flurry of trying to bring my thoughts to bear on an essay I was assigned to write for my history class on Empires--an objective no less concise and no less daunting than: "What was the secret of the Roman Empire"? Admittedly I had been putting the assignment off for a while; I had taken the initiative to get a couple of books from the library beforehand, but with such a broad topic, it was daunting to know where to begin. However, I did have some idea where to begin, having studied the Romans relatively recently in my Calvin history and art history classes. With the imagery of the ruins of Pompeii in mind, as well as anecdotes we had covered in class, I hit upon pragmatism, self-preservation, and dynamic leadership as three crucial elements of Roman conquest...just a drop of water in the ocean, I know, but for the purposes of the assignment, I figured these three would do.
Tuesday morning brought British Culture class, as usual. For the first half, the class divided into groups and each person displayed their "commonplace books"--a kind of mandatory scrapbook assignment we have, which is intended to emulate journals which were in vogue in Europe starting in the 1600s--to the rest of their group members. My commonplace book is comprised of printouts of these weekly emails, augmented with papers and brochures, all compiled in plastic display sheets in a ring binder. We've been exchanging anecdotes from our commonplace books in weeks past, which is really neat, because that way the little tidbits that individuals discover in their encounters with the culture are diffused throughout the whole group. During the second half of class, the different focus groups gave their presentations for the tapestry, describing the class systems in place during the Edwardian Era, the suffrage movement for women at the time, and turbulence surrounding Welsh and Irish affairs at the time. Part of one demonstration had a student submitting Prof. Ward to a "How Snobbish Are You?" test online--I think we were all relieved when the test results were tabulated and we found that, although Prof. Ward exhibited the pernicious vestiges of snobbery, he was not beyond reclamation. Doubtless I have now aroused an eagerness on your part to evaluate your own snob index--here's the link for the quiz: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/quiz/game.html
I spent Tuesday evening spinning a web of words about the Roman empire...not too exciting.
In the Wednesday morning Empires class, we turned our backs on Rome and began talking about the British empire. This class kind of brought to a variety of thoughts and realizations that I had been mulling over to a head. All my reading of literature and education of history had formed in my mind this image of the British empire as something grand, impregnable, and reproach--certainly with anomalies at certain times and places, but no major ones. As we began to look at roots of the British empire, my views started to aquire a different shade. First of all, my notions of British impregnability have been shaken by learning just how precarious British history has been, from the invasion by the Romans to attacks by Vikings and the Norman Conquest. The notion of the invincible British Empire was formed relatively late in English history, and in many ways was a response to England's history of subjugation to other powers; as such, it has been widely propogated in the Western hemisphere, where England has traditionally exerted such strong cultural influence. And even at the height of the British empire, the British homeland was still beset by all manner of domestic problems, and the image of the empire was soiled by defeats and humanitarian abuses that were largely suppressed. I look forward to the rest of the class for the semester.
Thursday and Friday passed pretty uneventfully. I turned in my essay and took it easy for most of those two days, hanging out in my room, watching a movie or two online, and dinking around with my ukulele (I can now stumble my way through a rough phrase of "Wipeout'). Also, a prolonged game of Battleship that had been raging back and forth online between one of my readers and me came to a denouement--I regret to report a defeat on my part, but in negotiations with my opponent, it seems that another battle is brewing, so I have a chance to redeem myself. On Friday evening, I joined the rest of the Calvin students for another social evening at our professor's house, enjoying a birthday cake prepared in observation of three birthdays of our groupmembers occuring within the span of a week or so. It was rainy that evening, and once back to my flat, I streamed a jazz radio station on my laptop, brewed some tea, and savored the gloom as best I could.
On Saturday we boarded a bus once more to visit some sites in Yorkshire not far from the town. Our first destination was the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132 by twelve Cistercian monks, and as the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, it served as a base for missions in the north and up into Scotland. The monks raised sheep and sold the wool, and also mined ore nearby to generate their livelihood; and Rievaulx Abbey became not only one of the best-known abbeys in the north, but also one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Eventually it was destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
Set in the countryside against a hilly backdrop of bare trees, the abbey ruins were impressive. It was an overcast morning, and a light misting rain made the setting all the more placid. I wandered around some of the foundations of the buildings associated with the abbey, all that is left of them, and admired the extant structure of the abbey itself, which was much better preserved than the Whitby Abbey.
After about an hour at Rievaulx, we took the brief ride to the nearby town of Helmsley to view the ruins of a castle that had stood there at one time. Construction on Helmsley Castle began in 1120 by a local nobleman and continued for the next 200 years or so. It changed hands several times throughout the next 400 years and was besieged during the English Civil War, after which Parliament ordered that it be partially destroyed. All that remains of the castle today is one side of a tower, the foundations of the walls, a couple of the front battlements, and one extant hall; these remains are now managed by English Heritage, a department of the British government tasked with historical preservation. Although there wasn't much left of the castle itself, the moat was well preserved, and approaching the castle I got a real feel for just how defensible a position a castle could be. It was neat to poke around, but by that time, my shoes were soaked through, and the chill and damp were starting to get to me. After thoroughly checking the place out, I joined six other students and we walked into Helmsley, where we got some food; then three of us stepped into a secondhand book store, where we amused ourselves by reading the inscriptions in several old books that had been given to previous owners as Sunday school rewards and the like. After whiling away some time in another shop or two, we boarded the bus and returned to York. Back in my flat, I busied myself with folding laundry, taking care of small chores, and Skyping with Karin.
I slept in a bit on Sunday morning before going into town somewhat early for breakfast and some errands. The breakfast was successful, as I grabbed a fruit pasty from a bakery for the third day in a row, but it hadn't occurred to me that no shops would be open at that time on a Sunday morning. So I wandered around a bit, pausing on the old walls to admire the sunny morning until an elderly gentleman walking along the wall advised me that I would get a better view from atop the central tower of York Minster. I agree with him, and then headed that way for Sung Eucharist. En route, I was stopped by a large grizzled man who was shuffling laboriously down the street, hunched over his walker. He asked me where I was from, and while he cited something vague about having worked building oil pipelines in Texas, mysterious reference to Vancouver, and some connection to J.P. Morgan, in an accent so thick it could barely be understood, his unkempt appearance and shabby clothes didn't corroborate his story at all. He insisted that he was a representative of some charitable relief organization (producing a crumpled postcard of said organization as a sort of validation), and offered me some of his "artwork" in return for a donation. The artwork in question was a crumpled pile of what appeared to be finger paintings perched atop his walker, and while I knew at the time that I was undoubtedly subsidizing nothing more than an evening pint for that gentleman, I gave him a donation and collected a piece of artwork, just for the novelty of the experience. Looking back, I feel silly for indulging in this novelty, and I'm not going to reveal what I gave this gentleman for his scrap of paper; suffice to say it will look lovely displayed in my commonplace book. He then asked me where I was having lunch, but I simply told him I didn't know, perceiving that he wished to prolong this relationship in which he only stood to gain.
I arrived at the Minster right as the service was starting and found a seat near the back next to my friend Sam. The service was beautiful, as usual, although the very beginning and end were interrupted by a couple of noisy toddlers who got a kick out of beating their plastic ponies on the seats of the wooden chairs. After the service Sam and I spent an hour or so at a nearby Starbucks, where he gave me advice on what to see in London next week. At one point he whipped out a pen and drew a personalized map of central London for me, noting the relative positions of all the must-see destinations. He was also gracious enough to offer me free lodging in Cambridge, which is where he hails from.
After coffee with Sam, I returned to my flat and spent the next three or four hours in a frenzy of booking hostels for my Easter break. I had hoped to travel on the continent throughout break, but having failed to plan sufficiently in advance or coordinate plans with anyone, I didn't feel ready to travel solo in Europe. Instead, I'll be visiting a handful of cities in the southeast of England, not too far from London. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it. Sunday evening ended pleasantly with conversations with my parents and Karin.
I had intended to send out this email at that time, but time had kind of escaped me for the past couple days.
I hope this message finds all of you well! I ask for your prayers as I set out on my Easter Break for the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on all my comings and goings throughout that time.
I miss you all, and think of you frequently.
Sincerely,
John Morton
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Rocks On Top Of Other Rocks (March 14, 2010)
Hello All,
The spring weather has not abated, and while a history paper keeps me in close proximity to my laptop at the moment, once class obligations abate somewhat, I hope to enjoy the weather to the fullest.
I left off on Monday morning.
On Monday night, I joined one of my British pals (or "mates") for his birthday dinner. After class, I met him near campus and walked to a house that he shares with six or seven other students. It was kind of a large, rambling terraced building that probably served as apartments in the past, cluttered with clothing, food containers, empty bottles, and the other paraphernalia that piles up in college housing. We played videogames for maybe half an hour before three of us walked to the restaurant: The Lettuce and Slug, which I understand is a chain across England. All food is half off on Monday nights, and evidently the occupants of this house dine there nearly every Monday. This led us to eye the menu all the more greedily as more guests trickled in, some of whom I recognized from Christian Union meetings--there ended up being about twenty in our party. Before the food arrived, we were bantering back and forth, debating whether England or the United States is superior--at one point, one of my arguments was met by the retort: "Pardon me? I can't hear you over our free healthcare!" Following a massive dish of appetizers that I split with two other guys, my main course--a chili burger--arrived, and needless to say, I was stuffed. After the meal, the rest of the guests were going to a bar and then to a club, but I had homework to take care of, so I walked back to my flat and busied myself with that for the rest of the night.
On Tuesday morning, we proofread assignments that we had prepared for class. Mine was on the attraction that draws people to history. After some more spit and polish, perhaps I'll send it out as a separate email. Then the weekly tapestry presentations commenced. Since this time period covered the mid-Victorian era, there was a substantial presentation on Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species, and with Darwin occupying such an established niche in modern culture, it was intriguing to try to imagine the impact of his work at the time of initial publication. There was also a presentation about the ordeals of Victorian dress. Another girl presented on the macabre practice at the time of posing the deceased for keepsake photographs, and I said a few words about the Crystal Palace. In the evening, I attended Small Group; I was the only one there apart from the group leader, so we discussed the commandment not to murder between ourselves before another guy showed up near the end. Then I returned to my flat and started reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.
My single Wednesday class was cancelled to allow the students time to work on their essays, so I spent Wednesday morning taking care of things around the flat and running an errand or two. In the evening, I met the same kid whose birthday I attended, Jared, for some soccer ("football" to the British, of course). We walked with a couple other guys from the house to the outdoor soccer "pitch" (field) where about twenty other players were assembled as well. Initially I had thought that this was a league of players that all attended the same church, but it may have actually been intramurals for the university. We played on astroturf under floodlights, since dusk was rapidly giving way to night. There were two half-field matches going on, with teams of about six players each. I had warned my comrades that I hadn't played soccer since middle school, and not only had I been mediocre at that time, but I had been mediocre by American standards. They reassured me that people came with a range of different skill levels. Stick to what you know, was their advice.
Needless to say, I was out of my league. I admit that I'm rusty on the rules and conventions of soccer, but it seemed like nobody was playing a set position and people ranged all over the pitch. The game seemed much more dynamic than my memories of its American counterpart. I played defense most of the time, with little distinction, although I managed to work in a couple of stabs throughout the course of the game. All the players rotated through the goal throughout the game, and at least I didn't get scored on during my short time as keeper--probably because the benefit of replacing me with a more competent player on the field gave my team an added edge. Most of the players were student age, but there were two or three adults, who seemed to be university faculty. As we played, a crowd of youngsters and a couple of teenagers gathered outside the pitch fence, waiting to use the field once our game was concluded. After about an hour of play, we were done; I think my team lost.
As I approached my apartment complex in the dark, I looked off to my right to see that the entire time I had been playing, I had only been about a hundred yards from the gate. I had seen that athletic pitch before, coming and going from my flat, but it was funny to think that I had to make a twenty-minute walk to get around the river that separated the pitch from the road. I finished up Wednesday by doing homework and talking to Karin via Skype.
Nothing much happened on Thursday morning; I slept in and puttered around my room. I went to class at 12:30 where we started our discussion of Middlemarch. George Eliot is our professor's favorite author, and he warned us beforehand that any dissatisfaction with the novel should be hidden from him. The picture he presented to us of George Eliot intrigued me--I knew nothing about her beforehand, so it was all new information to me. Evidently Eliot possessed a very sharp mind, and she managed to accomplish a monumental amount of work as the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a publication that served 1850s England much it the same way as The New Yorker or Harper's in contemporary America. She published a prolific number of articles, covering a comprehensive array of contemporary thought and trends. On top of all of this, she took up fiction "on the side" at the recommendation of a friend; her books were well-received, but she only published eight novels over the course of twenty years, essentially the opposite of writers like Dickens or Trollope. In the intervals between novels, she would research her material exhaustively, traveling to her settings to take accurate notes and even learning Hebrew in order to better construct a Jewish character. Immediately I made the comparison to Stanley Kubrick and the obsessive quantity of research he would do in preparation for his films. There's something that attracts me to such singular and meticulous inquiry, although it also does seem simultaneously overwhelming and impersonal.
After class, I had just enough time to pack a bag, grab some food, and have a quick word with Karin before meeting two other students for a weekend excursion. We walked to the railway station in York and boarded a train outbound to Bath. I discovered that I had forgotten to bring my youth discount card, but as there was no time to return to my flat to get it, I figured I would just go with the flow and see what happened.
I spent much of the four-hour ride reading Middlemarch and observing some of our fellow travelers. I was most interested by a young man who sat across from me for an hour or so; as soon as the train departed, he hunched over a notebook and began feverishly copying notes of some sort from a webpage he had accessed on my cell phone. This student had an intense, even timid expression on his face; he was silent the entire time, and when he finally finished his writing, he promptly shut the notebook, put away his phone, and collapsed back in his seat, arms crossed, almost as if the completion of his task had stricken him with profound melancholy.
Thankfully none of the rail staff asked to see my youth pass for the entire transit, and we arrived in Bath with no difficulty at about 8:00. We checked into a hostel, which was associated with a pub and was located in the second and third floors of the building. We declined an invitation to join in celebrating one of the bartenders' birthday, and instead struck out to see Bath by night. It didn't take us long to figure out that Bath is a pretty small place, and pretty much everything worth seeing is concentrated in a relatively small area. We saw the complex of buildings built around the mineral springs that feed the eponymous mineral bath, as well as the elegant structure of the Bath Abbey. A couple of block over, we saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent, two stately Georgian apartment complexes built to host the rich who would travel to indulge in the mineral waters. As the names suggest, the Circus is a circular arrangement, and the Royal Crescent forms a half-ellipsoid atop a hill, overlooking much of the rest of Bath. Standing by the Crescent at night with lights dotting the horizon was a gorgeous sight, and it made me lament the fact that my girlfriend was 4,000 miles away. Back at the hostel, we sat up and talked for a while before calling it a day sometime after 11:00.
Friday dawned overcast and chilly; I awoke to the percussive sounds of the window washers' implements agains the bunk room windows. After a shower and some breakfast, I sent off a couple of letters, then the three of us checked out the Bath Abbey. It was a gorgeous structure, like most abbeys are. At 10:30, we joined a free walking tour of the city, who showed us around, explaining Bath's history from its foundation by the Romans and conquest by different factions (both foreign and domestic) to its more recent history as a resort town, with all the accompanying social machinations. From the sound of it, most of Bath's patrons were the idle rich, who would visit the bath daily to converse, gossip, and flirt, before returning to their lodgings, dressing in their finest costumes, and venturing back out to promenade around the city for the sole purpose of attracting attention and keeping up appearances. However, there was also some medical practice in Bath for those suffering rheumatic afflictions, and stories of the common people as well. Our tour guide was entartaining and very knowledgable, and despite chilly winds and intermittent rainfall, it was two hours very well spent.
After the tour, I grabbed some lunch and wandered into an indoor flea market, where I got a cheap secondhand copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The three of us then headed to the Roman Bath museum for the afternoon.
I'll attempt to give the history of Bath in a nutshell. Rainwater falls on the Mendip Hills to the north of bath and percolates through the limestone in the region to a depth of 9000 feet, where it absorbs geothermal energy and finds its way back up through the rock to gush through a fault line in Somerset at the rate of a quarter million gallons per day, at a temperature of 109 degrees Fahrenheit. According to scientists, this whole process takes about 10,000 years. Prior to Roman presence in Britian, the site of the mineral springs was nothing more than a steamy marsh, venerated by the indigenous people for whatever mysterious force caused hot water to issue from the ground. With the Romans happened upon the mineral springs in the 1st Century AD, they ascribed a supernatural significance to the site as well, but also saw a chance to build a little piece of home in the cold, soggy wilderness that Britian must have seemed to one accustomed to life in Italy. (The Romans valued cleanliness, and public baths were a staple throughout the empire.) Thus the Romans built a complex on the site of the mineral spring, including not only a temple to Minerva--the Latin equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena, who shared similarities with the local god Sulis--but also a reservoir to collect the mineral water and a large enclosed bath house. An entire settlement developed around the hot spring complex, known as Aquae Sulis. This settlement existed in a couple different permutations until the Romans withdrew from Britain, when it fell into ruin. Like most old British cites, Aquae Sulis endured the cycle of Saxon, Norman, and local rule, with new structures and streets built on top of older ruins through each phase of development. Bath enjoyed a revival as a spa during the Elizabethan Period; new bathing facilities were constructed and the city enjoyed a rise in popularity that peaked in the late 1700s with patronage by the Royal Family. Since that time, the mineral springs are no longer used by patrons, but Bath remains a popular destination. Excavations and preservation efforts in the 1980s unearthed the remains of the last Roman bathing facility, twenty feet below the current street level, and these remains are now on display to the public.
The Bath Museum was outstanding. It led through what remains of the foundations of the temple area, all laid out in an engaging way, with screens situated at different points depicting what space would have looked like during Roman occupation. Artifacts uncovered at the site were displayed and accompanied by filmed demonstrations of the people and events that took place at the site. In contrast to the corny and unimpressive video segments one sees at many museums, the production values on these segments were top quality, with the actors frequently speaking in Latin. The whole exprience was tied together with a portable audio tour device, which visitors could use to listen to commentaries that corresponded to different parts of the museum. Not only were these devices availaible in a variety of languages, but they enabled visitors to pick and choose their topics of interest and replay them at will. The information about the site was thorough, covering the particulars of worship at the temple of Aquae Sulis, profiles of the various people who would have visited the baths. My favorite artfacts on display were small scraps of pewter on which the ancient Romans inscribed curses and threw into the bubbling reservoir. These curses solicited harsh punishments--bloody death, blindness, and skin disease--for seemingly petty transgressions, such as the theft of clothing.
It's hard to describe the site of the bath itself. Basically it was a large, elaborate in-ground pool, fed from the mineral spring by original Roman lead pipes. The arched roof that would have housed the structure 1700 years ago is long gone, but portions of it were on display in the museum. As I said, all the original drainage and plumbing installed by the Romans still exists and allows the bath to funcion just as it did in Roman times, although the bathwater has turned green from algae and obviously no one uses them anymore. Arranged around the main bath were a series of smaller rooms that housed other pools, sweat rooms, and furnaces, all contributing to an experience much like a modern Turkish bath.
The final thing I did in the museum was swill a glass of the mineral water, which anyone could obtain for 50 pence but comes free with museum admission. The water is sterilized and clear but comes out of a fountain still warm. The verdict: not bad. No different from some of the more robust drinking fountains I've used over the years.
After the museum, I spent about half an hour in a free art gallery in town, then walked over to a house that allegedly was inhabited by Jane Austen during one of many trips she made to Bath with her rheumatic brother. After puttering around town for a little bit, we got some takeout fare for dinner and settled down in a pub by the hostel do get some reading done. I ordered a pint of Bulmer's pear cider--my first alcohol over here, excluding wine for eucharist--to sip as I read Middlemarch, and managed to get a lot read despite the loud music and enthusiastic karaoke performances by other patrons. Shortly before 10:00, I returned to the pub beneath the hostel to join one of the other Calvin students who had left earlier to check out a live band that was performing that evening. Had I known before that it was a Blues Brothers tribute band (only appropriate, as the name of the pub was "Belushi's") I would have been there for the outset, but I remained for the last 45 min. or so, bobbing my head to such songs as "Mustang Sally", "Build Me Up Buttercup", and "Jailhouse Rock". It was more or less the perfect way to end the day.
After a quick shower and breakfast on Saturday, the three of us caught at train from Bath to Salisbury, then proceeded by bus to Amesbury. From Amesbury, a two-and-a-half mile walk along green pastures and sunlit roads brought us to the imposing site of Stonehenge. The Stonehenge site is much less built up than Bath, but it was still impressive. After passing through a reception area, one walks beneath the highway and takes a circular path along the Bronze Age monument. You can't get any closer to the monument than about probably 100 yards, but it remains impressive nevertheless.
Unlike Bath, Stonehenge predates the Roman occupation by nearly 3,000 years. The first monument erected on the site was a circular formation of upright timbers surrounded by a low trench, and over the next 1,000 years, large stones were brought to the site and arranged in a series of about seven different configurations, all roughly circular, with some stones simply standing like upright monoliths while others support horizontal lintels. Two types of stone were used to construct the monument; one type, called bluestone, was transported all the way Wales--this stone is unique in that it always feels warmer to the touch than other stone, which perhaps explains its usage in the monument. The largest stone at Stonehenge weighs in at seven tons; the stones stand erect with one-third of their total length buried underground, and the best theories that experts have on the construction of the monument boil down to simple machinery and a lot of brute strength. The builders of the monument, as well as its intended purpose, remain shrouded in mystery, although different theories abound--some of the more extreme theories credit construction of the monument to Merlin, the devil, and extraterrestrials.
After spending a good hour and a half at Stonehenge, we made our way back to Salisbury, where I checked out the local cathedral. At this point, a realization that had slowly been dawning upon me for the last month suddenly sprang into crystal clear focus: the exploration of history is largely a matter of looking at different arrangements of rocks piled on top of other rocks--cathedrals, walls, abbeys, castles, ancient ruins. I don't mean to imply that this makes historical research more enriching, but perhaps lends the whole affair an air of regal simplicity.
To resume, the Salisbury cathedral was imposing, with a central spire--the tallest church spire in England--jutting high into the sky. One side of the cathedral was obscured by scaffolding, part of a restoration effort begun in the 1980s and scheduled to continue until 2015. With admission at the rate of a discretionary donation, I paid one pound to enter the cathedral and gawk. An added bonus that I didn't find out about until I arrived at the cathedral was one of four original copies of the Magna Carta on display in the Chapter House, an octagonal building adjoining the nave of the cathedral. The Magna Carta was a very plain document to behold---small, neat lines of Latin script covering a sheet of parchment smaller than the front page of a newspaper. I was more impressed by the architecture of the chapter house, and was particularly drawn to small sculptures running along the walls depicting Old Testament stories, from the Creation to Joseph's reunion with Jacob in Egypt.
We made it back to Bath with no problem, stepping on the train at the last minute. On this trip I was reprimanded by one of the rail staff for not having my youth pass. Back in Bath, we recovered our luggage from the hostel and sat in a coffee shop for an hour before boarding our first train back to York at 7:00. At this point my luck ran out, and being unable to produce my railcard, I had to purchase an alternative fare back to York, via three or four different connections. The employee who did this transaction for me emphasized that he was giving me the best possible deal, because the employees on the later trains were less understanding than he. Another employee who was standing nearby--apparently just to watch--chimed in that the other staff were "Hitlers" compared to them, a point which he was quick to reiterate twice or thrice during the transaction. Thus I bade farewell to my two companions at a smaller station where I waited half on hour for a connecting train. There I came face-to-face with one such "Hitler"--in this case, a grey-haired, soft spoken Indian man.
This train left me in Birmingham, where I was supposed to catch a connection to Sheffield. I frantically searched for the appropriate train on the timetables in the station, and after fifteen minutes, I learned at an information desk that the next connection to Sheffield wouldn't depart until 8:37 the next morning. The next hour I spent wandering around the heart of Birmingham, searching in vain for the bus station before resigning myself to buying another train fare, and then looking for lodging for the night. Thankfully one hotel provided me with a contact list for several other hotels in the area, and I was able to book a room without much trouble. As I recounted my situation to my cab driver on my way to the hotel, we both conceded that the best course of action was to handle things philosophically (although in cab driver lingo).
I got six hours of sleep in a double-bed at the hotel, caught a taxi back to the train station, and spent most of the ride to York reading Middlemarch. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved to be back "home" shortly past noon today.
Whew! Another long email. Thanks everyone to all your patience in bearing with me through these messages--perhaps this coming week will be less eventful, and ergo easier to type out. I hope all of you are well!
I miss you all and think of you frequently. Take care!
-John Morton
The spring weather has not abated, and while a history paper keeps me in close proximity to my laptop at the moment, once class obligations abate somewhat, I hope to enjoy the weather to the fullest.
I left off on Monday morning.
On Monday night, I joined one of my British pals (or "mates") for his birthday dinner. After class, I met him near campus and walked to a house that he shares with six or seven other students. It was kind of a large, rambling terraced building that probably served as apartments in the past, cluttered with clothing, food containers, empty bottles, and the other paraphernalia that piles up in college housing. We played videogames for maybe half an hour before three of us walked to the restaurant: The Lettuce and Slug, which I understand is a chain across England. All food is half off on Monday nights, and evidently the occupants of this house dine there nearly every Monday. This led us to eye the menu all the more greedily as more guests trickled in, some of whom I recognized from Christian Union meetings--there ended up being about twenty in our party. Before the food arrived, we were bantering back and forth, debating whether England or the United States is superior--at one point, one of my arguments was met by the retort: "Pardon me? I can't hear you over our free healthcare!" Following a massive dish of appetizers that I split with two other guys, my main course--a chili burger--arrived, and needless to say, I was stuffed. After the meal, the rest of the guests were going to a bar and then to a club, but I had homework to take care of, so I walked back to my flat and busied myself with that for the rest of the night.
On Tuesday morning, we proofread assignments that we had prepared for class. Mine was on the attraction that draws people to history. After some more spit and polish, perhaps I'll send it out as a separate email. Then the weekly tapestry presentations commenced. Since this time period covered the mid-Victorian era, there was a substantial presentation on Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species, and with Darwin occupying such an established niche in modern culture, it was intriguing to try to imagine the impact of his work at the time of initial publication. There was also a presentation about the ordeals of Victorian dress. Another girl presented on the macabre practice at the time of posing the deceased for keepsake photographs, and I said a few words about the Crystal Palace. In the evening, I attended Small Group; I was the only one there apart from the group leader, so we discussed the commandment not to murder between ourselves before another guy showed up near the end. Then I returned to my flat and started reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.
My single Wednesday class was cancelled to allow the students time to work on their essays, so I spent Wednesday morning taking care of things around the flat and running an errand or two. In the evening, I met the same kid whose birthday I attended, Jared, for some soccer ("football" to the British, of course). We walked with a couple other guys from the house to the outdoor soccer "pitch" (field) where about twenty other players were assembled as well. Initially I had thought that this was a league of players that all attended the same church, but it may have actually been intramurals for the university. We played on astroturf under floodlights, since dusk was rapidly giving way to night. There were two half-field matches going on, with teams of about six players each. I had warned my comrades that I hadn't played soccer since middle school, and not only had I been mediocre at that time, but I had been mediocre by American standards. They reassured me that people came with a range of different skill levels. Stick to what you know, was their advice.
Needless to say, I was out of my league. I admit that I'm rusty on the rules and conventions of soccer, but it seemed like nobody was playing a set position and people ranged all over the pitch. The game seemed much more dynamic than my memories of its American counterpart. I played defense most of the time, with little distinction, although I managed to work in a couple of stabs throughout the course of the game. All the players rotated through the goal throughout the game, and at least I didn't get scored on during my short time as keeper--probably because the benefit of replacing me with a more competent player on the field gave my team an added edge. Most of the players were student age, but there were two or three adults, who seemed to be university faculty. As we played, a crowd of youngsters and a couple of teenagers gathered outside the pitch fence, waiting to use the field once our game was concluded. After about an hour of play, we were done; I think my team lost.
As I approached my apartment complex in the dark, I looked off to my right to see that the entire time I had been playing, I had only been about a hundred yards from the gate. I had seen that athletic pitch before, coming and going from my flat, but it was funny to think that I had to make a twenty-minute walk to get around the river that separated the pitch from the road. I finished up Wednesday by doing homework and talking to Karin via Skype.
Nothing much happened on Thursday morning; I slept in and puttered around my room. I went to class at 12:30 where we started our discussion of Middlemarch. George Eliot is our professor's favorite author, and he warned us beforehand that any dissatisfaction with the novel should be hidden from him. The picture he presented to us of George Eliot intrigued me--I knew nothing about her beforehand, so it was all new information to me. Evidently Eliot possessed a very sharp mind, and she managed to accomplish a monumental amount of work as the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a publication that served 1850s England much it the same way as The New Yorker or Harper's in contemporary America. She published a prolific number of articles, covering a comprehensive array of contemporary thought and trends. On top of all of this, she took up fiction "on the side" at the recommendation of a friend; her books were well-received, but she only published eight novels over the course of twenty years, essentially the opposite of writers like Dickens or Trollope. In the intervals between novels, she would research her material exhaustively, traveling to her settings to take accurate notes and even learning Hebrew in order to better construct a Jewish character. Immediately I made the comparison to Stanley Kubrick and the obsessive quantity of research he would do in preparation for his films. There's something that attracts me to such singular and meticulous inquiry, although it also does seem simultaneously overwhelming and impersonal.
After class, I had just enough time to pack a bag, grab some food, and have a quick word with Karin before meeting two other students for a weekend excursion. We walked to the railway station in York and boarded a train outbound to Bath. I discovered that I had forgotten to bring my youth discount card, but as there was no time to return to my flat to get it, I figured I would just go with the flow and see what happened.
I spent much of the four-hour ride reading Middlemarch and observing some of our fellow travelers. I was most interested by a young man who sat across from me for an hour or so; as soon as the train departed, he hunched over a notebook and began feverishly copying notes of some sort from a webpage he had accessed on my cell phone. This student had an intense, even timid expression on his face; he was silent the entire time, and when he finally finished his writing, he promptly shut the notebook, put away his phone, and collapsed back in his seat, arms crossed, almost as if the completion of his task had stricken him with profound melancholy.
Thankfully none of the rail staff asked to see my youth pass for the entire transit, and we arrived in Bath with no difficulty at about 8:00. We checked into a hostel, which was associated with a pub and was located in the second and third floors of the building. We declined an invitation to join in celebrating one of the bartenders' birthday, and instead struck out to see Bath by night. It didn't take us long to figure out that Bath is a pretty small place, and pretty much everything worth seeing is concentrated in a relatively small area. We saw the complex of buildings built around the mineral springs that feed the eponymous mineral bath, as well as the elegant structure of the Bath Abbey. A couple of block over, we saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent, two stately Georgian apartment complexes built to host the rich who would travel to indulge in the mineral waters. As the names suggest, the Circus is a circular arrangement, and the Royal Crescent forms a half-ellipsoid atop a hill, overlooking much of the rest of Bath. Standing by the Crescent at night with lights dotting the horizon was a gorgeous sight, and it made me lament the fact that my girlfriend was 4,000 miles away. Back at the hostel, we sat up and talked for a while before calling it a day sometime after 11:00.
Friday dawned overcast and chilly; I awoke to the percussive sounds of the window washers' implements agains the bunk room windows. After a shower and some breakfast, I sent off a couple of letters, then the three of us checked out the Bath Abbey. It was a gorgeous structure, like most abbeys are. At 10:30, we joined a free walking tour of the city, who showed us around, explaining Bath's history from its foundation by the Romans and conquest by different factions (both foreign and domestic) to its more recent history as a resort town, with all the accompanying social machinations. From the sound of it, most of Bath's patrons were the idle rich, who would visit the bath daily to converse, gossip, and flirt, before returning to their lodgings, dressing in their finest costumes, and venturing back out to promenade around the city for the sole purpose of attracting attention and keeping up appearances. However, there was also some medical practice in Bath for those suffering rheumatic afflictions, and stories of the common people as well. Our tour guide was entartaining and very knowledgable, and despite chilly winds and intermittent rainfall, it was two hours very well spent.
After the tour, I grabbed some lunch and wandered into an indoor flea market, where I got a cheap secondhand copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The three of us then headed to the Roman Bath museum for the afternoon.
I'll attempt to give the history of Bath in a nutshell. Rainwater falls on the Mendip Hills to the north of bath and percolates through the limestone in the region to a depth of 9000 feet, where it absorbs geothermal energy and finds its way back up through the rock to gush through a fault line in Somerset at the rate of a quarter million gallons per day, at a temperature of 109 degrees Fahrenheit. According to scientists, this whole process takes about 10,000 years. Prior to Roman presence in Britian, the site of the mineral springs was nothing more than a steamy marsh, venerated by the indigenous people for whatever mysterious force caused hot water to issue from the ground. With the Romans happened upon the mineral springs in the 1st Century AD, they ascribed a supernatural significance to the site as well, but also saw a chance to build a little piece of home in the cold, soggy wilderness that Britian must have seemed to one accustomed to life in Italy. (The Romans valued cleanliness, and public baths were a staple throughout the empire.) Thus the Romans built a complex on the site of the mineral spring, including not only a temple to Minerva--the Latin equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena, who shared similarities with the local god Sulis--but also a reservoir to collect the mineral water and a large enclosed bath house. An entire settlement developed around the hot spring complex, known as Aquae Sulis. This settlement existed in a couple different permutations until the Romans withdrew from Britain, when it fell into ruin. Like most old British cites, Aquae Sulis endured the cycle of Saxon, Norman, and local rule, with new structures and streets built on top of older ruins through each phase of development. Bath enjoyed a revival as a spa during the Elizabethan Period; new bathing facilities were constructed and the city enjoyed a rise in popularity that peaked in the late 1700s with patronage by the Royal Family. Since that time, the mineral springs are no longer used by patrons, but Bath remains a popular destination. Excavations and preservation efforts in the 1980s unearthed the remains of the last Roman bathing facility, twenty feet below the current street level, and these remains are now on display to the public.
The Bath Museum was outstanding. It led through what remains of the foundations of the temple area, all laid out in an engaging way, with screens situated at different points depicting what space would have looked like during Roman occupation. Artifacts uncovered at the site were displayed and accompanied by filmed demonstrations of the people and events that took place at the site. In contrast to the corny and unimpressive video segments one sees at many museums, the production values on these segments were top quality, with the actors frequently speaking in Latin. The whole exprience was tied together with a portable audio tour device, which visitors could use to listen to commentaries that corresponded to different parts of the museum. Not only were these devices availaible in a variety of languages, but they enabled visitors to pick and choose their topics of interest and replay them at will. The information about the site was thorough, covering the particulars of worship at the temple of Aquae Sulis, profiles of the various people who would have visited the baths. My favorite artfacts on display were small scraps of pewter on which the ancient Romans inscribed curses and threw into the bubbling reservoir. These curses solicited harsh punishments--bloody death, blindness, and skin disease--for seemingly petty transgressions, such as the theft of clothing.
It's hard to describe the site of the bath itself. Basically it was a large, elaborate in-ground pool, fed from the mineral spring by original Roman lead pipes. The arched roof that would have housed the structure 1700 years ago is long gone, but portions of it were on display in the museum. As I said, all the original drainage and plumbing installed by the Romans still exists and allows the bath to funcion just as it did in Roman times, although the bathwater has turned green from algae and obviously no one uses them anymore. Arranged around the main bath were a series of smaller rooms that housed other pools, sweat rooms, and furnaces, all contributing to an experience much like a modern Turkish bath.
The final thing I did in the museum was swill a glass of the mineral water, which anyone could obtain for 50 pence but comes free with museum admission. The water is sterilized and clear but comes out of a fountain still warm. The verdict: not bad. No different from some of the more robust drinking fountains I've used over the years.
After the museum, I spent about half an hour in a free art gallery in town, then walked over to a house that allegedly was inhabited by Jane Austen during one of many trips she made to Bath with her rheumatic brother. After puttering around town for a little bit, we got some takeout fare for dinner and settled down in a pub by the hostel do get some reading done. I ordered a pint of Bulmer's pear cider--my first alcohol over here, excluding wine for eucharist--to sip as I read Middlemarch, and managed to get a lot read despite the loud music and enthusiastic karaoke performances by other patrons. Shortly before 10:00, I returned to the pub beneath the hostel to join one of the other Calvin students who had left earlier to check out a live band that was performing that evening. Had I known before that it was a Blues Brothers tribute band (only appropriate, as the name of the pub was "Belushi's") I would have been there for the outset, but I remained for the last 45 min. or so, bobbing my head to such songs as "Mustang Sally", "Build Me Up Buttercup", and "Jailhouse Rock". It was more or less the perfect way to end the day.
After a quick shower and breakfast on Saturday, the three of us caught at train from Bath to Salisbury, then proceeded by bus to Amesbury. From Amesbury, a two-and-a-half mile walk along green pastures and sunlit roads brought us to the imposing site of Stonehenge. The Stonehenge site is much less built up than Bath, but it was still impressive. After passing through a reception area, one walks beneath the highway and takes a circular path along the Bronze Age monument. You can't get any closer to the monument than about probably 100 yards, but it remains impressive nevertheless.
Unlike Bath, Stonehenge predates the Roman occupation by nearly 3,000 years. The first monument erected on the site was a circular formation of upright timbers surrounded by a low trench, and over the next 1,000 years, large stones were brought to the site and arranged in a series of about seven different configurations, all roughly circular, with some stones simply standing like upright monoliths while others support horizontal lintels. Two types of stone were used to construct the monument; one type, called bluestone, was transported all the way Wales--this stone is unique in that it always feels warmer to the touch than other stone, which perhaps explains its usage in the monument. The largest stone at Stonehenge weighs in at seven tons; the stones stand erect with one-third of their total length buried underground, and the best theories that experts have on the construction of the monument boil down to simple machinery and a lot of brute strength. The builders of the monument, as well as its intended purpose, remain shrouded in mystery, although different theories abound--some of the more extreme theories credit construction of the monument to Merlin, the devil, and extraterrestrials.
After spending a good hour and a half at Stonehenge, we made our way back to Salisbury, where I checked out the local cathedral. At this point, a realization that had slowly been dawning upon me for the last month suddenly sprang into crystal clear focus: the exploration of history is largely a matter of looking at different arrangements of rocks piled on top of other rocks--cathedrals, walls, abbeys, castles, ancient ruins. I don't mean to imply that this makes historical research more enriching, but perhaps lends the whole affair an air of regal simplicity.
To resume, the Salisbury cathedral was imposing, with a central spire--the tallest church spire in England--jutting high into the sky. One side of the cathedral was obscured by scaffolding, part of a restoration effort begun in the 1980s and scheduled to continue until 2015. With admission at the rate of a discretionary donation, I paid one pound to enter the cathedral and gawk. An added bonus that I didn't find out about until I arrived at the cathedral was one of four original copies of the Magna Carta on display in the Chapter House, an octagonal building adjoining the nave of the cathedral. The Magna Carta was a very plain document to behold---small, neat lines of Latin script covering a sheet of parchment smaller than the front page of a newspaper. I was more impressed by the architecture of the chapter house, and was particularly drawn to small sculptures running along the walls depicting Old Testament stories, from the Creation to Joseph's reunion with Jacob in Egypt.
We made it back to Bath with no problem, stepping on the train at the last minute. On this trip I was reprimanded by one of the rail staff for not having my youth pass. Back in Bath, we recovered our luggage from the hostel and sat in a coffee shop for an hour before boarding our first train back to York at 7:00. At this point my luck ran out, and being unable to produce my railcard, I had to purchase an alternative fare back to York, via three or four different connections. The employee who did this transaction for me emphasized that he was giving me the best possible deal, because the employees on the later trains were less understanding than he. Another employee who was standing nearby--apparently just to watch--chimed in that the other staff were "Hitlers" compared to them, a point which he was quick to reiterate twice or thrice during the transaction. Thus I bade farewell to my two companions at a smaller station where I waited half on hour for a connecting train. There I came face-to-face with one such "Hitler"--in this case, a grey-haired, soft spoken Indian man.
This train left me in Birmingham, where I was supposed to catch a connection to Sheffield. I frantically searched for the appropriate train on the timetables in the station, and after fifteen minutes, I learned at an information desk that the next connection to Sheffield wouldn't depart until 8:37 the next morning. The next hour I spent wandering around the heart of Birmingham, searching in vain for the bus station before resigning myself to buying another train fare, and then looking for lodging for the night. Thankfully one hotel provided me with a contact list for several other hotels in the area, and I was able to book a room without much trouble. As I recounted my situation to my cab driver on my way to the hotel, we both conceded that the best course of action was to handle things philosophically (although in cab driver lingo).
I got six hours of sleep in a double-bed at the hotel, caught a taxi back to the train station, and spent most of the ride to York reading Middlemarch. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved to be back "home" shortly past noon today.
Whew! Another long email. Thanks everyone to all your patience in bearing with me through these messages--perhaps this coming week will be less eventful, and ergo easier to type out. I hope all of you are well!
I miss you all and think of you frequently. Take care!
-John Morton
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