Screeched In! And Other Oxford Adventures

Never heard of a "screeching in," have you? Well, neither had I until this past week. A few Canadian Rhodies here, including one of my friends and housemates for next year, are from Newfoundland, and like all Newfoundlanders (and Canadians) I've met, they're rather proud of it. So proud, in fact, that they cheerfully bestow the status of honorary Newfoundlander on anyone who undergoes the screeching-in ceremony. Which goes something like this:

"Screech," as it's known, is a rather cheap and nasty high-alcohol-content rum made and sold in Newfoundland, apparently similar to moonshine. A screeching-in ceremony involves taking a hearty shot of this rum, like a good Newfoundlander, and being asked by the ceremony leader, "Are you a screecher?" The proper response to this, apparently, is "'Deed I is, me ol' cock! And long may yer big jib draw!" Which means, translated from the Newfoundland dialect: "Yes I am, my old friend, and may your sails always catch wind!" (I only found this out when I looked it up this morning; last night I was scratching my head at what people were actually saying.) The ceremony leaders then take out a large cod and carry it around the room, at which point all the participants must bestow the fish with a kiss on the lips. Then that's it; you are a member of the Royal Order of Newfoundland Screechers!

For more information, see Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_Screech

(And, yes, this is something that actually happens on a regular basis all over Newfoundland.)

So, last night these three Newfoundlander ladies held a screeching-in at one of their places, a bunch of Oxford people showed up, and we all chatted for a few hours before the screeching-in began. The rum was so nasty it made me cough, and kissing a very large and very dead fish on the lips was one of the strangest things I've ever done in my life, but it was all full of laughter and good fun. (Especially watching the bunch of 30+ people each kiss the cod, which freaked a couple of the ladies and some of the gents out -- there were many attempts at fish-evasion and many grimaces to accompany the puckered lips.) And, to boot, the Newfoundlanders take this whole screeching-in thing so seriously that we got honorary membership certificates:

So, way over in jolly old England, I've been named an honorary Newfoundlander! Now I just need to make it out and visit Newfoundland...

And, in other news, the weather in Oxford has been so unbelievably, unseasonably lovely the last few days that it warrants note (like any good Brit, I'm becoming preoccupied with the weather). Temps have been up in the 60s, the sun has been gorgeously clear and blue, and it all reminds me of being back in California. Friday was a day full of lunch and coffee dates outside with friends, followed by a formal guest dinner at St. John's, and I've taken long walks with friends each of the last two days. Oxford's flowers are in bloom, the temperatures are warm and glorious, and spring is vibrantly in the air. Affect my productivity it might, but I could get used to this for sure!

The House of Lords and the House of Commons (Or, A Visit to Parliament)

Lovely to see you again, Big Ben!

Yesterday, I got to venture out of Oxford for the first time since mid-January -- it's been a roller-coaster couple of weeks here, but finally life is feeling more normal and more adventures beckon. The reason for yesterday's foray: I had signed up for a tour of the Houses of Parliament in London with a group of other Rhodes scholars, sponsored by the English Speaking Union. The ESU is an international membership organization that sponsors education and cultural programs across several English-speaking countries, including the UK. The two older (and, may I add, very stereotypically British) gentlemen who were sponsoring the tour met us in the late morning outside of the buildings of Parliament in London. It was impossible to miss them: suits, slightly tousled hair, very classic-looking British expressions and posh accents (or so I was told, re: the poshness).

The very old and very imposing Westminster Hall

We ventured inside, first walking through the giant Westminster Hall, which is 1000 years old and the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament. It alone has survived several fires, bombings, and other disasters over the centuries, and is one of the largest surviving buildings anywhere in Europe from the medieval period. Many important state functions and history-changing events have taken place in Westminster Hall: Charles II was tried here before his execution, and many world leaders have lain in state here after their deaths. Winston Churchill, the Queen Mother, George V and George VI -- the list goes on. Nelson Mandela made a global address here on the steps, and Barack Obama and other U.S. presidents have made speeches. The present Queen Elizabeth II has made several addresses on important occasions over the years, and (as our British hosts said, heaven forbid, God save the queen), when she passes she will lay in state here as well. We stood on the steps at the end of the hall, surrounded by cold and echoing stone and a heavy smell that seemed to represent the weight of the ages, and reflected upon ten centuries of history.

I wasn't allowed to take photos while inside the Houses of Parliament, after Westminster Hall, but the day went something like this: we visited the House of Commons first, going up to the gallery to witness a debate on the Stephen Lawrence scandal currently unfolding in Britain. (Fun fact: even though none of us had heard about Stephen Lawrence before, we later emerged from our tour to see news from the day's parliamentary debate all over the British evening newspapers. We were there for that bit of juicy testimony!) Then after lunch we met with a baroness and member of the House of Lords for a tour of that side of the buildings. The difference between the House of Lords and the House of Commons is rather immense -- the House of Lords is ridiculously gaudy, ornate, gold-worked and decorated, with beautiful mahogany wood panels and paintings of kings and queens and British heads of states over the centuries. Most of the main halls are Victorian, built with all manners of embellishment and splendor in the nineteenth century (after Parliament burned down in 1834). True to the times, when the British Empire was at its height and the English wished to build their parliamentary halls as a way to proclaim their might to the world, there are all sorts of paintings and statues and engravings of historical rulers and figures and British military strength. There's also a throne room, with a throne worn down by Queen Victoria's constant rubbing on the velvet arms -- for reasons of historical reverence, the cushions haven't been reupholstered or replaced, even if the rest of the halls positively shine with all their glitz. We stared at the finery for a while, then went upstairs with the baroness to have a conversation about her role as a peer within Parliament.

Entrance to the main lobby of Parliament from Westminster Hall -- where my photos of parliamentary glamour ended!

I learned quite a bit about the British government system and the House of Lords versus the House of Commons, including how members of the House of Lords are appointed or chosen (or how they gain their hereditary titles). The House of Lords serves a different function than the House of Commons; peers do not get a salary, other than having their day-to-day expenses covered, and don't get any sort of allowance for staff members. The functional requirements for a peerage are rather lax, and many peers decide the extent to which they'd like to participate in debates and day-to-day parliamentary procedures, but many of them are professionals working in other fields who take seriously the task of contributing to the future direction of their country. They are also appointed for life. The baroness pointed out several positive aspects about this system: lack of hard-line party organization and strict voting along party lines, lack of worries about getting reelected, professional experience and perspective on handling parliamentary procedures, even more diversity in the ranks (surprisingly so). The House of Commons, on the other hand, has elected members that represent different constituencies across the UK, and tends to initiate most of the bills passed or enacted by Parliament. The House of Lords can pass a bill back to the House of Commons, but only up to three times, and they mostly act to amend bills and adjust legislation.

The gang after emerging from Parliament

We went down to the debate hall of the House of Lords and watched a debate on international women's issues for a little while -- I tried to pay attention, but couldn't help but be distracted by the sheer ornateness and adornment of the House of Lords. This chamber is where the queen opens the Houses of Parliament in a ceremony each year, and the gold-gilded throne on one end of the room complemented the ornamented ceilings and plush red couches and stained-glass windows. It was more of a luxurious spectacle than the more functional and more hard-nosed House of Commons. The gallery up top (in which we were sitting) very much made me feel like I'd stepped back into a 19th-century Victorian painting. The barristers down in the debate even wore wigs. (But actually.) It all felt very foreign, very formal, and very British.

Quintessential London tourist shot, looking down from Trafalgar Square

After our visit to the House of Lords, it was back to the House of Commons for a visit with one of the MPs (Members of Parliament) there. He represented one of the districts in Oxfordshire, and answered our questions about being a MP and his duties and responsibilities. Another contrast between the House of Lords and House of Commons: members of the House of Lords don't represent any specific constituency within Britain, only the logical interests of the country as a whole, so the daily functions of taking into consideration a specific district and body of people are very different. I'll stop there with my cursory insights on the workings of British government, but needless to say it was a fascinating day! Having been to the U.S. Capitol before, I found myself contrasting this British system with our Senate and House of Representatives. The tour ended at around 4:15, after which we hoofed it through Trafalgar Square and over to Covent Garden for some burgers at Shake Shack -- a very American way of ending a very British day!

Finally Finished DFW's Infinite Jest...

BOOM.

Thence, of course, answering the question of "What did you do this weekend?" Nothing less than puzzle through questions of entertainment and addiction and consumerism and dependence and contemporary culture, and of course tennis. Lots and lots of tennis. This monolithic, immense, gargantuan, verbose novel is one I've been wanting to read for a while, and I'm glad schoolwork (and fast-approaching deadlines) made me buckle down and do it!

Now, to turn to final papers and the last three weeks of the term. You dear readers might not hear very much from me until then; I'm going into hibernation mode. Or "study cave" mode, as I like to put it.

An (Actual) Academic Update

February just marches along, doesn't it?

I spent the weekend in Oxford again, doing schoolwork, although I got to meet up with a deaf British woman from Manchester on Saturday -- she's worked in high-level jobs before in the British foreign service (which is how I met her, through a foreign embassy official I met in DC before coming to Oxford), and is now dedicating most of her energy to working toward greater access and equality for people with disabilities in the UK, particularly in the workforce. We chatted about access, equality, and the existing barriers to those two things in the US and the UK and worldwide, and I got to learn more about lipspeaking (a method of access that she uses, based on lipreading and different from sign language interpreting) with her lipspeaker who came along to Oxford. Fascinating stuff, and combined with several brunch/coffee/dinner dates with friends it made for an enjoyable but busy weekend.

Another view from another day in another library

Now the week has brought its usual flurry of working on reading and schoolwork while catching up with friends and taking care of miscellaneous other commitments. I'm feeling just about back to normal after the accident, or close enough, and have been easing back into the gym and into some yoga and more, yes, speedwalking about town -- how glorious it feels to have my body back again! I've been reminded not to take these things for granted, which is a good perspective to have, and even things that can get tiring -- such as spending all day in the library, for instance -- I need to treat as a gift. Fortunately, however, I'm working on some academic projects at the moment that really excite me, and since several readers of this blog have told me that I don't write nearly often enough about school (supposedly my primary reason for being here in Oxford), here are a few tidbits of that:

My major project of the week has been wading my way through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a true behemoth of a novel that lives up to all the hype about it -- both good and bad. It's mind-blowing and staggering in its genius (yes, I would call it genius, as one of the works that helped define a generation and a time in American literature, as overwritten as it is at times), but also mind-blowingly and staggeringly dense and excessive. I've nearly made it halfway through, with a week left to read the rest, and am already planning on writing about the character Mario Incandenza and the whole concept of the crippled/physically limited artistic muse and the wide range of linguistic registers that Wallace uses to describe those things. Along with Wallace's essay collection Consider the Lobster, my mind is a bit full of footnotes and explosive sentences and quirky specialized-cum-slang vocabulary and other Wallace-isms these days. I'm learning to enjoy the guy more and more, I admit, and as much time as I'm spending on Infinite Jest I also admit that it's a thoroughly worthwhile experience.

Infinite Jest isn't all, however. I've also been looking at e-books and digital editions of texts for a material methodology course, focusing specifically on a 2011 iPad app version of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" by Touch Press and Faber & Faber. The app raises questions about the performativity of texts and modernist poetry (or modernist writing in general), the intended audience for multimedia apps like this one, and the ways in which the reading experience changes when one encounters such a seminal work as "The Waste Land" in digital form versus in a more traditional book. As much of a hard-copy book purist as I am, I've had some fun flipping through the app during the last week and thinking of all the questions I could ask about it. I find it incredible to think about all the ways in which digital publishing could change the reading landscape, and I've never taken the opportunity to write about it (in such a case-study mode) before.

There's also been time for other things -- for instance, another Rhodes House meet and mingle on Friday night

Finally, there's my dissertation. More of it will follow after I've finished the term and these two major papers on Wallace and digital publishing, but in short I'm looking at Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to try to determine the role that disabled characters play in the novels' narrative, as well as their placement in the Southern gothic (slash grotesque) tradition in general. Disability seems to me here to be a problem of linguistic representation or linguistic access, and also a problem of oversimplification (in which one character becomes more remarkable for his/her metaphorical significance for the narrative, by virtue of his/her disability and what that represents, than he/she does for other character traits or three-dimensionality). There's been a lot of theorizing about the Southern gothic and grotesque traditions (and oftentimes a lot of overlap between those two terms), and I think understanding this exact representation of disability through language can help add another layer to determining the exact function of the grotesque. Does it need to be physical, can it be linguistic, what is its overall aesthetic, et cetera. This is all very rough, but it means that I get to continue reading more works of fiction and more critical theory on the subject, which I'm looking forward to. After classes are done this term, I'll have all of Trinity term (i.e., until the end of June) to work on this dissertation project. Prepare for more days in the library…

And, now, back to my work in the library instead of procrastinating by giving updates on what I ought to be working on. (But, not to worry, my immediate future isn't only in libraries! I'll be in Oxford until the end of the term, just to continue taking care of myself, but then after that I'll be heading off to Turkey, Albania, and Greece at various points of the spring break! Excited, and more on that soon.)

To close: a very wet, very colorful Oxford sunset

Reporting from Deep Within a Library Somewhere...

Hola! This correspondent has little to report from the last few days, except that gloomy Oxford weather does make for good studying indeed. Though we did have one or two days of sun! (I am becoming very British in my preoccupations with the weather.) I've been working on dissertation reading, other class reading, some research for the end-of-term papers coming up, and even some personal writing (yahoo!), but all that means more time spent in libraries and cafes than I'd like to admit. After falling behind earlier in the term, I've had to sprint to catch up and be where I would like to be. It's been a little frustrating, but onward!

That said, I won't bore any of my dear readers with details of my recent study spree (but if you'd like to talk about topics as diverse as enhanced ebook publishing or the blurred lines between autobiography and fiction, or about David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or the problems of language and narrative in William Faulkner, by all means shoot me an email; happy to comply). Instead, here are some views from around Oxford during the last week or so -- it's a little laughable that I took all of them en route to (or inside) some library or another, but there you go. The library tour continues, and there are many pretty study spots here.

En route to the St. John's library through the beautiful Canterbury Quad -- with sun!

Detail of Canterbury Quad, with stone grotesques. I have to remind myself to stop and soak in these quirky Oxford details sometimes.

One of Oxford's most iconic sights, the Radcliffe Camera, looking gorgeous on another sunny morning. (Yes, I usually only pull out my camera when it is sunny… false advertising, sorry not sorry.)

And my newly discovered study spot for the morning, the gorgeous reading room in the Taylor Institution Library near the Ashmolean museum. What a book lover's dream!

House Hunters, Episode 1

I'm back in a normal routine, more or less, which means that I'm back to drinking copious amounts of tea and sitting in cafes for study dates and doing a lot of reading and glaring out at the rain falling steadily from grim skies. It's been pretty incessant over the last few days, along with some gusts of wind -- this is the UK, after all. Nothing new about complaining about the weather here. Even if I've been entertaining myself with all the adjectives with which to describe it, mostly consisting of words such as hideous, gross, disgusting, soul-crushing, etc.

But how good normalcy can feel, even normal complaining about British weather, and even if I'm not 100% to "normal" yet. (I'm accepting 90% as close enough at this point.) I'm a bit worried about catching up with all this schoolwork, getting ahead on my reading again, and writing a few big term papers and starting my dissertation, and have also not been feeling so great about avoiding physical activity/intensive exercise as I attempt to rest up and let my back recover fully -- working out is one surefire way to beat the winter doldrums with all this rain, after all! I've been feeling fidgety and at times annoyed with my recent need to take it easy. The good part, though, is I've had continued good company and plenty of things to keep me busy. This past week and weekend, that meant our very own Oxford episode of House Hunters!

Right now, I am living in a college room at St. John's, which has easily the best and cheapest student housing in Oxford. It's a nice room in a very nice, new building on the main grounds of the college, with my own bathroom and a little kitchenette down the hall. I haven't gotten a bike yet because everything around Oxford is nearby and easily walkable. And, once again, it's very cheap especially compared to other college housing options and/or nearby lease options… considering all of this, why would I want to move out of college for next year?

The answer: community. Friendship. Company. Having my own house and couch to lounge on and kitchen to cook in. Not feeling like I'm in a dorm room again (I'm so over that). I've enjoyed living in St. John's this past year, but am even more excited about the prospect of living with friends in a house in Oxford next year -- so, starting last week, a group of Rhodie friends and I set out to look for a place in Jericho, a nice neighborhood in northwest Oxford, near St. John's and also near many of our other friends. I'd never really needed to sort through a serious housing search before, since all students at Stanford live on campus and the housing draw (even if much-hated and full of "drawma") took care of our room assignments, year after year. Same for the summers; I just lived at Stanford or elsewhere. So it was pretty exciting to head out and view different houses in Oxford with friends, to discuss priorities and location and amenities and rent, and also to anticipate having some of these people as roommates. Long story short, we soon discovered that many houses available in Oxford for student letting span the spectrum from run-down and gross to nicer and more expensive. After a few days of searching through too many listings and going to too many so-so viewings, we finally found a good compromise between nice and affordable and signed a lease this past Tuesday. It'll be five Rhodie women (including some of my favorite people here in Oxford) living together in a nice five-bedroom house at the heart of the Jericho neighborhood -- photos coming soon, maybe. I'm excited! And still cannot believe how quickly the time is passing here. Soon it'll be next year already, Year Two at Oxford. Eeeek.

Now, off to class! (And off to more walking through the rain. At least I can walk, hey?)

Creeping into February

How can it be February already? Okay, so the last part of January was a bit of a strange scramble, after which I'm still trying to regain my footing and my normal routine. But at least February means that the days will continue to get longer now, right?

I moved back into my room in St. John's toward the end of this past week and have been using the weekend to get back into normal-person things. Such as going out to coffee shops and actually, you know, studying, now that the aftereffects of the concussion have started to recede. And meeting friends around town. And going to a friend's crowded but still fun birthday party on Friday night. All of the activity leaves me feeling more physically and mentally tired than usual, and I have moments when I fall into a bit of brooding, but I'm on the up and up. I've continued to have great company, though -- and have also gotten into the next Oxford adventure, namely looking for housing for next year with a group of friends. (Never has the Stanford housing draw seemed any simpler, compared to sorting out properties and prices and options in the immediate Oxford area.) We're hoping to live in the popular Jericho neighborhood in north Oxford, near St. John's, and have gone to see a few options already. None are exactly what we're looking for (to put it lightly), so the episode of "House Hunters" continues!

I also suppose it's a good sign that I'm starting to look ahead and plan for future weeks and future trips and future adventures with friends for the rest of this academic year, even if I think I'll wind up sticking around Oxford until the end of this term for the most part. I'm already itching to get back out and plunge into being fully active again, but will need to give myself a bit more time before that happens. With the cold and the gloom and the rain, it's all a good reminder not to take anything for granted. February might be a bumpy month of giving myself time and playing catch-up and coping with that annual bit of winter doldrums, but I'll get myself through it. Books and tea and conversation are as good a consolation as ever. Onward!