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...

Swing Dancing and Library Security

Last night I went to a swing dancing club on Oxford St. in central London. It may seem odd to be doing something that has been described as a "quintessentially american dance form" on this side of the pond, but this is the age of global culture after all, and further, the size and enthusiasm of the crowd suggested that it has a pretty strong following over here. It was actually a little too crowded and warm (it has been really balmy the past couple days), but it was a lot of fun nevertheless. It's been a couple weeks since I've been dancing, and it took my a coulple songs to get my 8-count back where I would like it, but I got back into the, ahem, swing of things pretty quickly. If course, the styly was a little different from what I was used to; nobody seemed to be doing swivels, and at one point the Shim Sham music came on and people just kept dancing to it--nobody started doing the line dance, which would never have happened in the New York scene. I wanted to do it anyway, but I am afraid I learned it too recently, and without another member of CU Swing to follow, I couldn't remember the order, alas.

The best part about the night was the music, which was live. The band was called Laura B. and the Moonlighters, and it was the first big band I've danced to that has been fronted by women. And, boy, did she front it with style. She was dressed like Heady Lamarr, or some other silver sceen diva of equivalent Glamour, with glittering jewels, and slinky black gown, and long gloves. Sadly, I could not take her picture in the club, but the front page of the band's website gives some idea of how she looked (http://www.laurabandthemoonlighters.co.uk/)

I did not stay that late at the club, since I needed to get up early this morning and start my proper work at the British Libary. I feel as if the libraries I have visited this trip have been gradually increasing in importance and levels of security from the library at the university of Brimingham, to the Bodleian, to this one. Doing research there feels a little bit like going to work for the Feds. I come in, leave my bag in a locker room with a crowd of other people all doing the same thing, put my computer and notes in a clear plastic bag, and go up to the floor where my books that I ordered on line have been pulled out of the archive and reserved for me. When I enter the reading room I have to present my reader's pass, and when I leave I have to open my laptop to show that I am not trying to smuggle anything out in it. It's intense. Unfortunately, I am not finding anything here that is as important-seeming as the letters that I was reading at Oxford or Birmingham, but it is still useful and I have another few days to poke around.

Murder, She Wrote

Due to a conflation of circumstances, I have been exposed to an unusually high number of whodunnits in the past 24 hours. Generally speaking, I like mysteries, but I am feeling a little blood-spattered right now.

Part of that exposure has come from a book of Dorothy Sayers's short stories, which I got in Oxford and started reading this morning. She is, as always, a witty writer, but I thought that they would all be Whimsey tales, and instead have turned out to be a collection of generic mysteries with different protagonists--entertaining, but not as much fun without Lord Peter or Bunter.

Further, I went to see "State of Play" with James at the theater---excuse me, cinema--last night. This was an american film, a thriller about reporters from a Washington newspaper uncovering a heinous corporate scandal involving shady politicians, military contracts, and dead bodies. It was good; every time you thought that you could see how high up the corruption went, it turned out you were wrong. It also struck me, from my limited experience of working at the Spec, as being an accurate portrayal of newsroom culture, both the the old-fashioned, male-dominated world of contacts, old-boys' networks, and stripes earned staking out offices and visiting morgues and the new world of the blogsphere and the overnight sensation. (And it reminded me why I don't want to work in either.)

My final brush with crime this weekend was in the form of some episodes of the TV show Castle, which I have been watching at James' house this afternoon. I had been wanting to see the show since it premiered this spring because it is the new vehicle for Nathan Fillion (a.k.a. Capt. Malcolm Reynolds), a man of parts.... Suffice it to say that the show would not work half as well as it does if it had used an actor without his charisma. It is about a partnership of sorts that forms between a homicide detective (female), who enlists the assistance of a famous crime novel writer to help he solve her cases. It's pretty fantastic, but fun to watch. I have to say, though, that by the end of the afternoon, I had seen enough bodies for the time being.

Also, although it may seem that I have been holed up reading about an watching crime scenes this weekend, I have also intermittently been out touring London. This morning I wandered through Covent Garden, across the Thames on the waterloo bridge, and along the South Bank under the London Eye. I forebore from going up in the Eye, however, or from buying the discounted Eye and Madame Toussaud's. That seems like it would be more horrifying than a pack of murder mysteries.

Planet Harrod's

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon getting my reader's card at the British Library before they closed for the long weekend (which is not memorial day in this country, but the somewhat opaque observation of a "bank holiday"). Registration is quite a process, involving application forms, paper documentation, and an interview--almost like getting a green card, but not quite. I finished with that late enough in the day that I didn't have enough time before closing to start work (or much inclination really, it being a Saturday afternoon) but early enough that I didn't want to go straight home. My solution: go to Harrod's.

To say that Harrod's is a department store is like saying that China is populous, or Barack Obama is iconic; it expresses the truth of the matter, but it hardly does it justice. Harrod's is a store on such a scale that it probably has its own weather and ecosystem. It takes up an entire block in six floors, and when I say you can buy anthing you want there, I am hardly exaggerating. In my stroll through yesterday I saw a range of items for sale from designer perfumes to live puppies, from silver spoons to horse's saddles, from chocolate truffles to elliptical training machines. The variety of restaurants alone is astonishing: I passed by an oyster bar, an american-style diner, a lebanese restaurant, and a charcuterie, to name a few. Everything in Harrod's is on an unprecedented scale. Other stores have restrooms; Harrod's has "Luxury Ladies' Washrooms." Other stores have uniformed attendants; Harrod's has suited assitants in the colthing department and sales clerks with white vests and boaters in the food court. Other (upscale) stores have piano players to entertain the customers; yesterday afternoon Harrod's had a soprano standing on a balcony in the middle of the central escalator gallery serenading the shoppers as they glided up an down. This gallery is also phenomenal in and of itself, since it must have been built in the 1920s and it decorated in high art deco style, with egyptian motives and rose-colored lighting. Even if you don't mean to shop there, Harrod's is a sight to be seen.

Of course, it can't please everybody. On the way in I passed a small but outspoken group of agitators, protesting the selling of fur products at Harrod's and armed with a bullhorn and some very unpleasant posters of skinned animals. It is really noteworthy the extent to which, much more than in America, you can be confronted with painfully graphic images in public places. I commented on this to James, and he agreed, saying that there are infomercials for car safety on TV here that he can't watch, showing children getting run over and people impaled on steering wheels. It's funny, since in some ways the British seem so much less confrontational than what I'm used to. People apologise when they bump into you on the tube, which I gave up doing after a year of living in New York since no one seemed to care or even acknowlege it. And yet there is this tradition of incredibly in-your-face imagery. Strange. I think you are better able to notice inconsistencies when you are a stranger in a country or a culture than you ever can about the habits that you have grown up around, although no doubt they are equally varied.

Food and Drink

Well, I went to the White Horse two nights ago, the bar that apparently has existed in the same form since the 16th century (not to be confused with a dive on Telegraph Ave. in Oakland, CA fo the same name...). It was a few steps down from street level, narrow, low-ceilinged, and paneled in dark wood. I wondered if, in its earlier days, it was a ploughman's bar, with day labourers coming in out of the sun to wash donw their lunches with a pint of bitter, or if it was a scholar's bar, with vague dons di[[iong the sleeves of their robes in the puddles of spilled ale as they contemplated the ancients. These days it seems to be a place where people in suits come to unwind after work, or at least that was the crowd there at seven in the evening the thursday before a bank holiday weekend. It was odd to be eating my meal and having my humble half-pint of cider in the middle of so many chatting, socialble groups of people, and I wished I had a friend to enjoy the experience with, but at least the meal was good. It is not easy for me to make new acquaintances at the best of times, and hostelling does not seem to provide the opportunities that it is reputed to in terms of passing friendships--of course, the particular hostel I was staying at in Oxford seemed to be hosting not one but several children's summer camps, and for the whole week most of the residents were around ten years old. Not really the crowd to hit up bars with.

I should be eating far fewer meals alone now that I am back in London, though, since I am going to stay for the rest of my trip with my friend James from Berkeley (It is a great boon to me that I am able to ditch the hostel experience for a while and take advantage of his hospitality for so long!). James has been working at Imperial Colllege for the past couple years and lives in Wimbledon, of tennis fame. Through him I seem to be gaining a more authentic experience of after-hours British socializing--I got back to the city yesterday evening just at the end of the day, and we obsevered the end of the work week by going to a neighboring pub with some of his co-workers and then to late dinner of indian food. The restaurant, which was tasty, was referred to by James and his friends as "The Man's," to distinguish it from "The Man's Wife's," a sister restaurant apparently run by the owner's significant other, and presumably not far away.

A Singularity Among Bookstores

I just got back from Blackwell’s Bookstore, the self-proclaimed best bookstore in Britain—and I wouldn’t presume to doubt them. The place exerts a pull on me like an interstellar body. I pass it every day on my way to the library, and I’ve already been in twice (more if you count their art and poster branch across the street). Every time I go I see more titles to add to my summer reading list, and I seem to come away with a title or two (with the unfortunate side effect of simultaneously weighing down my bags and lightening my wallet).

Honestly, though, I could get used to this routine—wandering around Oxford, exploring and peering into the courts of the different colleges, eating lunch at cute little sandwich places, going to fabulously well-stocked bookstores…even the hours in the library, although it is surprisingly tiring to spend all that time going over documents, considering that I am sitting down at a desk all day. Time is going by pretty fast; I only have one more night here before I go back to London, and that is only because I extended my stay at this hostel by another 24 hours. I ended up finding a lot more to look at in this archive than I thought I would. I am even going to try to go into the library again before I leave tomorrow. However, I am planning on celebrating my last night in town by going to the White Horse, a pub that has apparently been around since the 16th century...

Chiaroscuro

I should start by saying that Oxford is amazing-looking. Even though I can't say I see everything here in a positive light (more on that below), and much as I realize the deep problems inherent in the University system due to its medieval nature, and as much as I see the flaws in the whole idea of a privileged canon of western education, it is still cool to be here where those traditions more or less started and where they have been going on continuously for the last 800 years, give or take a bit. Oxford is pretty much the ultimate college town--it is small enough that the best and most common form of transport seems to be bicycling; it is ridiculously picturesque, steepled and storied, with spreading lawns and stooping willows draping their bows over old stone walls to skim the surfaces of the glassy streams.... It's enough to make anybody succumb to maudlin sentimentality.

The building where I am studying, which houses the special collections for African and the British Commonwealth, is completely over the top: it looks like a castle placed in the middle of a walled garden. The inside is even more palatial seeming, with arched ceilings, carved newel posts, and tapestries on the wall. I wanted to take some pictures of the inside, but I was totally intimidated by the security guards (and didn't want to advertise my tourist status. At least I got one of the outside.

However, this building also seems stand for a particularly piebald moral heritage. It is called "Rhodes House," and I think they have the events for Rhodes scholars here, but it is also full of pictures and busts of colonial administrators of South Africa, which is a little disconcerting. The antechamber that I have to pass through to go up to the library on the second floor has and inscription over the arch to the memory of the "high ideals of Cecil Rhodes"--I assume that the authors were NOT referring to Apartheid, but it's not a happy thing to contemplate.

I feel like the more I learn, and the more aware I become, the less I can take anything at face value, and the more I realize the dark undersides of even those things that have always seemed fine to me. It is not always a pleasant realization, although it suppose it is an inevitable one.

A Brush with Claustraphobia

I had some adventures getting to Oxford this morning.

I checked out of my hostel in what I considered plenty of time to get to Paddington station to make the mid-morning train for Oxford, even given the fact that I chose to go by a more indirect tube route to avoid excessive walking in my dromedary-impersonation mode (backpacker pack and laptop case). I was going to take Northern to St. Pancras and then change for Hammersmith, but when I got to St. Pancras and got off the train, I became aware of a siren blaring, and a pleasant, disturbingly-calm female voice repeating over and over, "An emergency has occured, please exit the station at once." My first, and an somewhat freaky thought was of summer 2007 on the London tube, and my second, and possibly even-more terrifying was that this might be one of the stations many flights underground which usually is exited by elevator. Thank God this was not the case. However, trying to get a monday morning rush-hour crowd out of a central transfer station in the heart of London can't be anything but a slow process and, laden down as I was with my 35-odd pounds of luggage, I felt distinctly immobilised in the middle of the press of people. It was not fun. I still don't know what the emergency was (although all signs suggest that it was not terrorism), but I definetly did not make it to Paddington in time for the 10:20 train. I had to take a bus across town, which was very slow, although I did get to sit on the top level of the double decker, which I had never done before. Consolation prize of sorts. Actually, I was able to catch at train half an hour later, so I was hardly delayed at all (unless you measure time by all the extra heartbeats).

I am in Oxford now, writing from the lobby of my hostel, which is definitely the most well appointed of the three I have been to so far (there is actually soap in the bathrooms). It is also the most aptly named a Youth Hostel--I think most of the people here are under 18 and most more like 16. The music also reflects that. I was just serenaded by Hannah Montana over the lobby sound system--"I can't wait to see you again!" Oh, Miley.

Walking Around

I feel as if I have had more visual input than I can properly digest today, although I suppose that that is pretty much standard for tourism. I have also been on my feet for about ninety percent of my waking hours so far, and am now bushed, although I think it was a day well spent.

My hostel is about three blocks from Regent’s park, and so I decided to go try going for a run there when I woke up this morning. The last time I ran abroad was in India, which necessitated overcoming a certain number of physical and social barriers, which thankfully were not in place here, and it turned out to be a great place to run—lots of winding paths through green manicured lawns and beds of flowers, with glimpses of the zoo at the center of the park as I jogged past.
After I got back to the hostel and started my day properly, I decided to go to the East End of the city, where there are a bunch of street markets open on Sunday. The first of these was the Columbia St. flower market (picture), which was unbelievably crowded, and noisy, with cockney barkers calling their wares and the fronds belonging to a few ambitious purchasers waving above the throng. It was actually a great destination for me; since I could fully admire the beauty of the wares without feeling the least desire to buy (I couldn’t very well take a potted plant back on the plane!). After cruising through the flower market for a while I walked back to my tube station via Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane, two other locations of street markets with a range of things for sale from leather jackets to women’s shoes to cell phones. Some things looked authentically vintage and some looked authentically fenced.

I also ended up going through what must be the main Bangladeshi community in London. I passed many signs in a (to me) frustratingly almost-readable Indic script, as well as sweet shops, curry houses, and posters advertising namkeen and international calling cards. I hope I will get a chance to come back at some point and try one of the restaurants.

Today, instead, I went back to Trafalgar Square to have afternoon tea at the café in the crypt (second time turned out to be the charm), and then hit up the National Portrait Gallery. Despite the fact that I already went there when I was here before, it was cool to go back, especially since I know a lot more British history now than I did then, and was able to put back-stories to faces. Some figure it was cool to see and finally know who they were (Emmeline Pankhurst, David Lloyd George), others, now that I know who they are, I’m kind of ashamed to see their portraits hanging in state (Judge Jeffries, Robert Clive, Cecil Rhodes). Of course the greatest fun of the portrait gallery is coming face to face with figures I feel I already know so well from literature—Keats, Eliot, Austen, the Brontes…it’s always good to see them.

Although all of these activities were perfectly reasonable uses of my time here, I feel as if doing them back to back I did not quite think through the total amount of time I would end up walking today, with the result that my back and legs are pretty tired tonight, but I will be sitting in a library (although it will be a historic one at Oxford) for the next couple days, so it should all balance out eventually.

Rembrandt in the National Gallery

I got to London this afternoon, and am boldly commencing with the not-for-school portion of my trip, figuring that I can't get a reader's card at the British Library over the weekend. I can do that when I get back from Oxford at the end of the week, so the next two days are just for tourist purposes.

In that spirit I went to Trafalgar Square as soon as I had let off my luggage at my hostel (which is is a little farther out of the city than I would like, but in a very pretty suburb area called Belsize Park). I went to the crypt cafe under st. Martin in the Fields, my all-time favorite place to eat in London, although I have to say the savory food let me down a bit (but the desert was excellent). From there I went to the National Gallery, pushing my way through a crowd gathered in the square to protest the occupation of Palestine--sometimes it feels as if I never left Columbia.

I had come to the National gallery mostly because it is one of the places that I didn't make it to in 2003 when I was here before, and I was not feeling very diverted by anything I saw (too many renaissance paintings, which don't seem to pack much punch now that I have actually been to Italy) until I got to the Rembrandt room, and then I was very glad I came. Not only do I have some context to appreciate Rembrandt because he is one of the Art Hum artists, but because he was so important in On Beauty (which I just finished). I can see the reason he was so important: in a book with so many ugly feelings portrayed, that is yet still about beauty, Rembrandt is a perfect foil. He is also about beauty, even when he pulls it from as ugly a source as the creases in an old man's face (self portrait painted in 1669--the year he died). It's cliche to say this, but he has the most amazing way with light. The illumination in the Gallery switches on and off every few minutes (presumably to extend the life of the paintings, not my eyesight) and when it comes on the pictures change. Their highlights glow.

I saw the painting of Hendrickje, Rembrandt's mistress, that Z. Smith ended the book with a description of, but the one I loved best is the portrait Rembrandt painted of her the same year (1654). Its very sensual--despite the fact that she is wrapped in fur, you can see a lot of her skin, and both skin and fur are painted with wonderful, fuzzy edges so they seem to spring off the canvas. The painting's blurb speaks of the "affection with which she is represented," and although that sounds like a critical affectation, you can really see it. It's painted as if he wanted to touch her, and it makes you want to, too. He was almost 50 when he painted it, and when they met she was a servant in his household--I hope she like him as well as he did her and the power was not all on one side.

Of Rain, Bad Handwriting, and a Good Book

I just realized I can see a rainbow through the window of Hatter’s Hostel computer room where I am sitting. It is just a little bit of an arc, very faint, sandwiched between the top of a brick wall and the spire of a radio tower and fading fast, but it is by far the nicest thing that the weather has done all day. One of my fellow-hostellers said that the good thing about the rain in England is that it usually stays light and misty, like the rain in Seattle. That may be true, but today must have been the exception to the rule—it has been intermittently pouring, with claps of thunder at 5 o’clock just as I was about to leave the library, accompanied by an especially wet and plonking rain burst that lasted while I waited for the train back into town, which was delayed fifteen minutes. Shiny.
I have been in Brimingham two days now, but I have not had a chance to see much of the city. I was in the library from ten am to seven pm yesterday, and from ten to five today. Most of that time was spent trying to comprehend the loops and squiggles of the nearly-two-hundred-year-old handwriting of the British missionaries of Calcutta. It’s pretty intense to spend such a solid chunk of time working on this stuff, and I partly wish that the archive was not going to close for the summer so that I could justify spending less time each day on it, but at the same time I am glad to have a time limit that is forcing me to get through it. I am not sure how useful what I have found will be, but I have taken copious notes, and something should come out of them.
Outside of the library, you would think that I would be done with reading for the day, but I have become totally engrossed in On Beauty, a book I had been meaning to read for a while and picked up on a whim for the plane. It is really great, and it is so nice to have a book you don’t want to put down—a state I that used to be much more common for me than it has become in recent years. It is loosely based on Forester’s Howard’s End, and although it doesn’t follow the plot slavishly, I can see the suggestion of the other novel under its surface, like the similar bone structure of a pair of sisters. It is a story about the divisions between class and culture and age, the extent to which we can reach across them and the extent to which we are sundered from each other by our own humanity. It makes me feel both amused and discomfited, and sometimes both at once. Its also a lot about American and British culture clash (as well as the clashes within those cultures) so it seems a very appropriate read for where I am right now.

First Post--at Hatter's Hostel in Birmingham

By arriving in London this morning, taking the tube to Euston train station, the train to Birmingham, and my somewhat shaky feet to my hostel I have officially completed the first leg of my journey today. It seems amazing that only 24 hours previous to the time I was finding my way to the University of Birmingham Main Library this afternoon, I had been taking my History of the South final in 301 Fayerweather in Columbia University in the city of New York… but that’s another story, a serial that is currently (and fortunately) between installments right now.

Meanwhile, here I am in the UK, part of a story that feels much more as if I am making it up as I go along. I am here, ostensibly, to complete primary source research for my senior thesis, a project that has been changing in my hands like the old man of the sea since I started trying to plan it months ago. I am still not sure what I will find, or if the idea of it that I have in my head bears even the closest relation either to the reality of the things I will (may?) find, or to the product that I will create with them. That is one reason I called this blog “imaginary research”—I hope that the work I do here will bring some of the aspects of this project out of my head and into the real world.

I also mean that the idea of doing nothing but research on this trip is equally a figment of fantasy. I plan to spend some quality time hanging out here.

So far, I seem to be making progress in both the research and the fun departments. As mentioned above, I did make it to the University of Birmingham this afternoon, got my reader’s card, and got set up in a properly dusty corner of the library with a box of hand-written letters, circa 1822—so far so good. Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated how difficult it is to decipher early-19^th century handwriting. I feel like I need a forensics expert! It’s going to take me longer than I thought to go through the letters, but it’s pretty cool. I feel like a detective, in a very detail-obsessive way. I think it will be a long day at the library tomorrow.

As far as the fun goes; mostly I’m enjoying the overt English-ness of everything—regional accents overheard on the train, signs that suggest two countries separated by the same language (“way out,” “kindly do not stand forward of this line”), pubs that serve chips and warm beer, rolling green fields with the occasional horse to be glimpsed out my train window. I’m also enjoying the more unexpected parts. Birmingham seems a pretty nice city, even if it does not have the same kind of attractions as London. Although the city center where the train station is located is a mass of chain stores that seem to be the bastard progeny of Ross and Forever 21, once you get out of there it is much more town-y feeling. It is also a city with a lot of immigrants. I keep hearing Hindi spoken as I walk around, which really puts in perspective the paper I wrote about UK immigrants this past semester.

The only two things which could stand to improve are the weather, which is damp, and my mental alertness, which is suffering from a week of finals and moving plus an overnight plane ride. It’s amazing how the dumbness starts to take over after I reach certain levels of sleep deprivation. I actually gave a train conductor my credit card receipt instead of a ticket, tried to board the train in the kitchen car, and locked my key in my hostel room in three separate incidents today.

I will sleep well tonight!