High and Low Culture

It's has felt like a long week since I posted last. I spent most of my time in the British Library, reading promotional literature about women's education from the 1840s and then trucked out to an obscure history center in Chippenham (a little town an hour's train ride west of London) on Friday to see the recoreds of a school for training women missionaries that was founded in the 1860s. I put in a long day of travel for what turned out to be not actually that useful of a source, since there was little information about the school's earliest years. I also felt a little odd doing research there, as it seemed to be set up mostly for people working on geneologies or family histories and I and one other researcher seemed to be the only people there under forty, if not the only ones under 50.

One advantage of not finding that much that was useful at the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives was that I was able to leave by the middle of the afternoon and get back to London in time to go out for the evening. One of James's co-workers plays in the Imperial College Symphony Orchestra and Friday was their end-of-term show, so I joined James and a group of his friends in going to see them. It was a very nice program, with a range of pieces--Brahms, Berlioz, and Shostakovitch. I was a little worried that the latter would be difficult to listen to, because he is so modern, but it was actually really pleasant. It makes such a difference seeing live music played as opposed to listening to a recording especially with a full orchestra, as there are always so many different parts to watch. I don't know how the conductor keeps it all together with only two arms to direct traffic. Conducting is one of those mystery skills to me, like free diving or differential equations. I have a lot of admiration but little understanding for the people who excel at them.

It has actually been a very cultured weekend, since not only did I go to the symphony two nights ago but last night I went to see a play at the National Theater. going to the theater (or the theatre) has been one of my goals for this trip, and I decided to see "England People Very Nice," a comedy about immigration to England and the evolution of Bethel Green, a neighborhood in London, over the course of 300 years from a French to an Irish to a East-European Jewish to a Syhletti settlement. It was also a play within a play, put together by a group of inmates waiting in immigration custody for their asylum appeals to come through. It was pretty good; as James said, it was a little preachy, but that is to be expected with a play that is driven by a topic rather than a set of characters or relationships. However, it is a topic with a lot of bite, and many of the jokes made you laugh and cringe a little bit, too (although I think I would have got more of the jokes if I grew up in London; some things were inevitably lost in translation). It was also very well acted, of course. I think if I lived here is would be easy to spend a lot of money going to the theater--there are so many good options to chose from. And some options, although not necessarily good, exhibit a horrific fascination all their own that makes me want to go anyway. I keep seeing posters on the tube, for example, for a new production of Chicago staring Jerry Springer, of all people. Try to visualize that...