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

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

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