After the Solstice

My friend Morgan stayed around Oxford for two days after our big day out at Ascot, and we took advantage of the lovely weather (summer is here in all its glory!) to go walk around Blenheim Palace, around 25 minutes away by bus, and around Oxford itself. However many times I go back to Blenheim, I find it a sprawling and relaxing place to walk and sit on the grass around the lake and watch people with their small children and dogs and just be.

Then, in Oxford, we tried our hand at punting again yesterday, wandered around some of the colleges, and had afternoon tea before Morgan headed out on her flight to Cape Town. It's great to be able to take a step back from the flurry of schoolwork and enjoy this beautiful city, especially with American friends who come visit.

Now I'm getting all packed, since my summer travels are about to begin. Later this week I'm off to Boston for a conference this weekend and then some traveling around New England to visit friends. On the way back, I'm stopping over in Iceland for a few days with a friend, which promises to be incredible. More travel updates in a few weeks, once I'm back in this small but bustling city of dreaming spires!

Royal Ascot 2014

My "bucket list" of things to do in the UK was pretty long when I came here, and still is, but one event that was high up the list was Royal Ascot. A five-day race meet at the famed Ascot Racecourse near Windsor, with fashion and big hats, some of the best racehorses in the world, and the QUEEN and royal family -- what could be more British?

I had heard about the high style and great fun of Ascot from a few friends who had been previously, and this past Saturday I had the opportunity to go with a group of Oxford people, as well as a good Stanford horsey friend who was in town visiting over the weekend. Call it our own celebration of the summer solstice, and a fitting farewell to the academic year. We had an absolutely fantastic day with great weather (lots of sun and the poor pale Brits who didn't wear sunscreen were roasted by the end of the afternoon), Pimm's and champagne, plenty of horses thundering by, fun dressing up in nice dresses and big hats, and enjoyable company. Ascot is only an hour from Oxford by train, so it was an easy journey to go spend a day at the races.

We got tickets for the Silver Ring rather than the considerably more posh grandstand or Royal Enclosure, but still -- I have never seen so many large, fancy, ridiculous hats in my life. We followed them all the way through the train station, on the train, and to Ascot. It was positively a river of hats flowing through the UK to this big day of fashion and finery. (Even a friend of mine who was in London that day texted me from the train station and said, "There are so many Ascot hats here!") I've also never sat so close to the rail at a big race meet before. We were lucky to get there early and nab a spot right by the rail on the grass. I couldn't believe it. After having a picnic lunch there before the royal procession began, we stayed in the same spot all afternoon and watched the races go by. The thundering of so many racehorses passing within only a few yards is breathtaking.

Oh, and I can now say I have seen the queen! That is one thing this admitted Anglophile has wanted to do for years -- and yes, I did wave and cheer at her as she drove by within 30 feet of where we were standing, accompanied by a long procession of horses and much pomp and circumstance. She looks very small, very proper, and very put together, as you would expect. Props to her for being 88 years old and still making it out to Ascot every year.

A Year of Reading

What goes into an Oxford education? Well, for one thing, a lot of reading.

And, if there's one thing I knew I would be doing a lot of once I got here -- yep, you guessed it, reading. While I had gotten used to doing a lot of reading at Stanford, this past year has indeed piled on the books at a rapid pace. Some of my momentum slipped for a while in January and February, but I've since gotten back to normal, and one of my favorite things to do is look back on the books I've read and the new ideas they've brought into my life.

Now, I did do a LOT of reading of literary theory and critical secondary texts this year, especially for my papers and my thesis, which I'm not going to list here (it'd be too much to type out, for one thing!). That's probably the bulk of the reading I've done while engaging in serious literary scholarship here. But, those texts aside, here are most of the primary texts I've read over the past year, either for fun or for schoolwork:

Michaelmas Term 2013:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1902)

Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)

Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)

Another Country, James Baldwin (1962)

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett (1955)

Blasted, Sarah Kane (1995)

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne (1956)

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (1999)

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

Collected Poems, W.B. Yeats (1912)

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

Hilary Term 2014:

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee (2009)

Saturday, Ian McEwan (2005)

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo (2003)

NW, Zadie Smith (2012)

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson (2011)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson (1986)

The Accidental, Ali Smith (2005)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid (2006)

Falling Man, Don DeLillo (2007)

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996)

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace (2005)

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max (2012)

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (1922)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Trinity Term 2014: 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers (1951)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner (1936)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1994)

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson (2013)

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell (2013)

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

The Hours, Michael Cunningham (2002)

White Teeth, Zadie Smith (2000)

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid (2013)

And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini (2013)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)


Once again, Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity are the names of Oxford's three terms, and I've divided my reading load roughly into those three terms/parts of the year, even though I did a lot of that reading over the academic breaks. Can't wait to see what great new books the next year brings into my life. I'm currently diving into summer by wrapping up Bill Bryson's fun and mind-blowingly fascinating A Short History of Nearly Everything, and am planning on reading Eleanor Catton's Man Booker-winning novel The Luminaries next. My summer reading list is exploding, but any can't-miss recs -- send 'em my way!

MSt, That's a Wrap!

And that's it! I finished, printed, and turned in my master's thesis on Friday, bringing my English MSt program at Oxford to an end. That's master's #2 for me -- and what a year it has been.

Technically the thesis was due this coming Monday, but I was in good enough shape and feeling happy enough with it that I decided not to spend another weekend agonizing over the details. Now, summer has begun. It's brought with it long days, better weather, and plenty more British oddities. I have 10 more days around Oxford until I head off on the first leg of my summer travels -- stay tuned, since a visit from a good friend and a day at the races at Royal Ascot, among other adventures, will figure in there!

Othello, and Another Horsey Excursion

Yes, I'm still working on my dissertation, but things have slowed down the last few days with my draft nearing completion. I'll have a few days of intensive working on it this week, but over the weekend I've... admittedly done nothing of the sort.

Last night was a beautiful evening (after rain earlier in the day), and so I made the last-minute decision to head over to Christ Church College, one of Oxford's largest and grandest colleges, to see the outdoor garden production of Shakespeare's Othello being performed there through the weekend. It was a good decision; the acting was dynamic and poignant, and I once again kept up by following the script on my iPad. (I am discovering that I love Shakespearean theater when I just read along!) What an evening well-spent.

Then, this morning, I headed out to cross another thing off my Oxford/UK bucket list: taking a hack/trail ride out in the open British countryside. The ground was too muddy to do much trotting or cantering, but taking a walk through a green wood on horseback, then having the wood open up to sprawling green fields of grass and wildflowers, made my heart swell. I miss riding, and it makes me feel whole every time I do it. Nothing like getting on the back of a horse and heading out through nature.

With incredibly long days and more and more sun (though it still does rain on a regular basis, of course, it being the UK), I'd say Shakespeare and horses, like punting, are among the better ways to celebrate the arrival of summer...

Punting!

What better way to celebrate a beautiful, warm, sunny summer day in Oxford than to go punting?

Funny story: some friends and I went punting another day two weeks ago, when the weather was decidedly NOT as cooperative and it poured on us starting soon after we got in the boat. We wound up pretty soaked, and today some of us decided to reverse our luck at last. Mind you, I am rather terrible at punting, but I did finally (sort of) get the hang of it after a long, long time of making the punt go in circles and run into trees... It was lovely to sit out on the boat in the warm sun drinking wine and watching the ducks and geese swim by. I have decided, if there is one otherwise useless skill I plan to have by the time I leave Oxford, it will be punting!

Bumps Going on at Summer Eights

I stopped rowing at the end of Michaelmas term in the fall, but that didn't stop me from going back out to the river this past weekend to watch a couple of friends of mine row in the highlight Oxford rowing event of the year, Summer Eights. All the colleges send out their boats and rowing squads over the course of four days to compete against each other, "bumps" racing style, a time during which the Oxford obsession with rowing reaches fever pitch.

I had never seen "bumps" racing before (and it still seems strange to me), but essentially the point is to start a length and a half or so behind another boat then row with the goal of physically bumping/running into that boat, at which point both boats can retire from the course and the boat that bumped gets to move up one spot in the order. Several of my friends, rowing for different colleges, had some good days of rowing and got in some good bumps versus other colleges, and the Oxford boathouses had become a madhouse by the time of the men's and women's finals on Saturday, so everyone had a great time watching and cheering for all the Oxford college boats.

In other news, I got to go out riding again this past Thursday, during which time I was told by the very-British instructor that I "ride like an American!" (Well, duh. But it is still good to be versatile enough to adjust your body and riding style to be most effective on the horse at any given moment.) And I finished a first full draft of my dissertation and turned it in to my supervisor last Friday, so am very glad to have reached that milestone! Over the weekend we got a respite from last week's icky and gloomy rain, so I'm feeling recharged and ready to tackle the last two weeks of the Oxford term. How can it be June already??