The Bodleian Library

There are over a hundred libraries in Oxford. Most belong to the individual colleges, and can only be used by members (for example, we can use the Wycliffe Hall library, but not the Trinity College library). Others are more widely accessible, such as the faculty libraries (there is one for every subject). You have to be a university member, and you have to register with each library individually (I'm registered with the English, Classics, History, and Theology faculty libraries) but they allow you to check books out, which is hugely helpful.

And then there is the Bodleian. The Bodleian is the only actual "university" library, and it is HUGE. Several of its main buildings are clustered in the general vicinity of the Radcliffe square (the Old Bodleian, the New Bodleian, the Radcliffe Camera, etc.), and they are constantly building on.

This library, while gorgeous and amazing (you feel like you've stepped into history when you walk through the doors) is hugely complex. There are books located in each individual portion of the library, called "reading rooms." These cannot be reserved, and must simply be found on the many shelves of glorious knowledge. The vast majority of books in the Bodleian's collection, however, are found in "the stacks." The stacks are a mysterious entity, location unknown, where literally thousands of books wait to be requested. To get a book moved from the stacks to somewhere you can actually access it, you look it up on their database, and have it requested to a specific reading room. Within a specified amount of time, your book will arrive, and you go to that room to pick it up and read it there (my reading room of choice is the lower rr of the Old Bodleian). The Bodleian does not allow books to be taken from the premises, or moved from room to room.

This, though it sounds easy enough, was really difficult to get used to. Not the system per se, but the inability to check books out. The necessity of always reading in the library. Getting your books at the beginning of the day, claiming a table (by an ancient window, overlooking the towers and spires of Oxford), having to leave your books behind every time you needed a coffee break or food (there is a coffee shop in Blackwells, a really famous bookstore across the street), and then handing them back at the end of the day (you can have them held for you, or returned to the stacks). It was especially tricky during the British Landscapes course, because the library was still on holiday hours, and closed down at 7:00pm, and wasn't open during the weekend. However, it has definitely driven home the importance of taking good reading notes. =)

One really cool thing about the Bodleian is that it was England's first copyright library. This basically means they get a copy (or can if they want) of every book published in England since 1610. This, needless to say, has made the Bodleian a world famous research library (and is the reason it's constantly outgrowing its space allotment). The library was named after Sir Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), who secured its copyright status (and left his fortune to it) after he refurbished, and reopened, the Oxford Duke Humfrey's library in 1602. The Duke Humfrey still exists within the confines of the Old Bod., and is where the forbidden section of the Hogwart's library was filmed for the Harry Potter films. If you want to see some amazing pictures, I highly recommend you search Google images for "bodleian library."

A little archaic, but I think the following poem is cool just for the realization that every book written by every English scholar, poet, or novelist will stand tribute to this creator of libraries. What a legacy!:

Most noble Bodley! we are bound to thee
For no small part of our eternity.
Th' hast made us all thine Heirs: whatever we
Hereafter write, 'tis thy Posterity.
This is thy Monument! here thou shalt stand
Till the times fall in their last grain of Sand.
And whereso'er thy silent reliques keep,
This tomb will never let thine honour sleep.
Still we shall think upon thee; all our fame
Meets here to speak one Letter of they name.
Thou canst not dye! Here thou art more than safe
When every Book is they large Epitaph.
-Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)

(the passage to Radcliffe Square)

(the Radcliffe Camera, with the University Church in the background)

(the Radcliffe Camera, with All Souls College in the background)

(the Radcliffe Camera -- the upper reading room has a reputation for looking like Bell's library in Beauty and the Beast)

(in the Old Bodleain courtyard)

(a door inside the courtyard of the Old Bod.)

(by the "Visitors May Not Pass Beyond This Point" sign in the Old Bod.)

Virginia Woolf and Cambridge: why she isn't there

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that Virginia Woolf loved Cambridge. She was in awe of its wealth and history -- the heritage of learning it represented and embodied. Of walking there, she wrote: "The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning" (Oxbridge is the term used to sum up all that Oxford and Cambridge together represent). And of course, there is her description of the aftereffects of lunching at King's (a multi-course feast of partridges and ducklings and salmon and soup and cream and salads and potatoes and puddings and wines): "And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

This week, for my primary tutorial, I'm rereading A Room of One's Own (for the third time). It's an amazing text, filled (anti-feminists may be surprised to hear =) with compassion, good humour, and a lot of common sense. I've loved it every time I've read it.

My tutor assigned a piece of secondary literature, however, that's been making me realize how intensely ironic it is to be reading/studying A Room of One's Own in the context of Oxbridge.

On the one hand, Woolf was intensely aware that she, as a woman, was an outsider. Women were not allowed to receive degrees at Cambridge until 1948 (about 30 years after Oxford students), and in 1921 (just 7 years before Woolf gave her historical address at Girton) a mob of male students destroyed Newnham's beautiful bronze memorial gates, in celebration of voting "overwhelmingly" to prevent women from receiving degrees. "The symbolic and real violence of this chilling scene is mitigated in most accounts and turned into a joke to shame the women" (J. Marcus).

To add to this, there is Woolf's own account of visiting Cambridge -- an account riddled with exclusion: "He was a beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me" . . . "[A] kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library" . . . "and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge."

And of course, there is her less than shining description of dinner at Fernham (Oxbridge's female counterpart) to compare to lunch at King's, and her conclusion: "The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp of the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

While this is disturbing enough, and the starting place for Woolf's discussion of women and fiction, there is the added peculiarity that Woolf, the uneducated daughter of an educated man, never truly belonged at Fernham either, and, as Woolf, has never been accepted at Cambridge. Jane Marcus, the author I was reading (Virginia Woolf, Cambridge, and A Room of One's Own), states that nowhere in Cambridge is there a single plaque to commemorate Woolf's work, and that none of her manuscripts are available in the university's libraries (being held in open collections, instead). All her male relatives, and all her Bloomsbury friends (with the exception of her husband), figure prominently in library and college, and even her female cousins are well respected at Cambridge, having served as librarians and presidents for the women's colleges. Virginia, on the other hand, has only the remembrance of absence and trespass. She -- who visited Cambridge often to see brothers, friends, and a Quaker aunt (the famous Friends' theologian, Caroline Stephen), and delivered one of the century's most celebrated feminist lectures within its confines -- she is only an outsider:

"It is October, 'October, the birth of the year,' as Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own. It is Michaelmas Term in Cambridge, the birth of the academic year. How differently Woolf's elegy for the lost history of women writers echoes on these ancient stones. Why did I expect that she would have left some trace in this town, some mark on its walls? . . . Why is it such a terrible reality to face the facts of Virginia Woolf's analysis of the university as a patriarchal institution, to feel her discomfort here, her sense of being a stranger, as she complains in drafts of the essay? Not much has changed. I itch to take out a tube of the lipstick she so disdained and write 'Virginia Woolf Was Here' all over the walls that bear the names of the great dead who studied here, men's names of course."
-Virginia Woolf, Cambridge and A Room of One's Own: 'The Proper Upkeep of Names' by J. Marcus (1996)

A Week in the Life . . .

So, I'm not sure how much information people actually want about my life, but I'm going to give it to you regardless. =)

My week schedule (approximately) is as follows:

Sunday:

* Either high mass at St. Mary Magdalen's or unprogramed worship at the Oxford Friends meeting (which is right next to the Eagle and Child, where Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams used to hang out).
* Tea at Crick (where I live) from 4:30-5:30. Jonathan (our Jr. Dean -- basically, an RA/RD) serves, and we have lots of biscuits. There's even a tea faerie who takes our orders, which involve secret codes such as "Dracula's Dream" and "Fat Cow."

Monday:

* Every other week I have a paper due at 9:00pm.
* Some weeks there's a Young Friends meeting, which involves 30min of silence, and free dinner.
* I was going to WomCam (Women's Campaign) meetings, but I've been busy.

Tuesday:

* 10:00am lecture on Virginia Woolf ("Contextualizing Woolf") with Dr. Whitworth, author of Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context.
* Every other week, my secondary tutorial (Classical Literature) at 11:30. It's with Jonathan, and involves coffee, and sometimes biscuits. They've tended to run about two hours (rather than the designated one), and have been a lot of fun. Which is great, because Classics is, frankly, terrifying. I have absolutely no background in the discipline and it's so HUGE. But Jonathan asks great questions, gives me time to process and gather my thoughts, and has very enlightening opinions (and an amazing store of knowledge). I've learned a ton.
* Tea at Frewin Court (where the program's offices are) from 2:00-4:00. This involves a ridiculous amount of chocolate, and lots of cheese puffs. Simon, our Tutor for Student Affairs (dean of student life) serves, and most of the 60-some students pass through his office during the two hour period. Kind of crazy.

Wednesday:

* Seminar lecture at Wycliffe Hall (the actual college we're members of) from 2:30-3:30, followed by tea. The subject is "Faith and Scholarship," which they are very quick to emphasize is different than "Faith and Learning." Unsurprisingly, it's about pursuing Christ, and academic excellence, at a research university (such as Oxford) -- especially long term.
* Movie night at the Vines (the other house), which I go to if I can. They're usually playing something that has something to do with England (e.g. Fawlty Towers, A Man for all Seasons, etc.).
It's about a 40min hike, out into the sort-of-country, through fields lit by old-style lanterns, under an Oxford sky. Really beautiful and silent. Reminds me, for some odd reason, of Narnia.

Thursday:

* A Virgil lecture at 11:00, with Dr. R.W. Cowan. He's in his mid-twenties (I would guess) and loves to jump around a lot, have goofy pictures on his slide shows, and read ancient texts in different voices. He was very disappointed last week, 'cause we ran out of time before he could impersonate Venus. =)
It's held in the Examination Schools, a gorgeous, huge, old building where Tolkien used to lecture.
* "Contesting Texts" lecture at 3:00, with Dr. Methven. It's a small lecture (held in a big room, but not many students go), but really interesting. Basically, the point is to demonstrate literary criticism in action, and the professor analyzes two texts every week, looking at them through various lenses.
* Then, at 6:00, I have my primary tutorial on Virginia Woolf. It's been a challenge. I love Woolf's writing, so have really enjoyed the primary texts and getting familiar with criticism and secondary sources. However, I feel a complete lack of connection with my tutor. I don't think I approach the texts the way she wants me to, but I'm never sure what she does want, and she's given me barely any feedback on any of my work so far. It's a bit frustrating, but I'm hoping I will get better at understanding her expectations and communicating my ideas as the term progresses (though, freakily, I'm already half-way done).

Friday:

* 9:00am lecture on sexuality and gender in ancient Greece and Rome, with Dr. T. J. Morgan. This is for my "long essay" due the week after term finishes. My subject is something along the lines of interpreting Medea as a feminist text within its historical context, and whether that's even possible.
* 11:00am lecture on Homer, with Dr. R. B. Rutherford. If truth be known, I tend to fall asleep slightly in this one. It's fascinating, but the week is long, and it comes at the end. Need I say more?
* Best part of the whole week: Taruithorn, the Oxford Tolkien Society! So fun. Depending on the week, we might be doing dramatic readings, mock trials, or hobbit dancing. =)
Next week is Gandalf's fireworks. But, sadly, I'm going to miss them.

Saturday:

* Totally depends on the week. If I'm going into a two-tutorial week (like this one is), Saturday is spent trying to crystallize the ideas for my Monday classics paper. If not, exploration is in order.
And even though last Saturday should have been spent studying, I went to an open-air French market and bought Turkish delight.
(I went with a friend I met at the Tolkien Society -- she happens to be Egyptian, and we recently discovered that we have HCC and CCS connections, amazingly enough). =)

Overall, this may not seem like that much, but our handbook is infamous for saying that most tutors will assign more weekly reading than U.S. students are used to reading in a semester. Since I'm a lit. major, that's not exactly true, but the load is definitely not light. I read most of my primary sources this summer, so that's been very helpful, but I'm still getting used to the process of spitting out research papers. I'll let you know if I ever manage mastery . . .

But overall, a fun challenge. Such a different way of doing education -- completely research based, and dependent on the student's own quest for knowledge. Reminds me of home schooling, just a bit. =)

Northern Ireland

Between British Landscapes and Full Term (the normal 8-week Oxford term) we had a five day break, and Kohleun and I went to visit Megan in Northern Ireland. Well, first we slept all day Friday (at least, I did -- having pulled at least two all-nighters the week before), and then we flew on Saturday. We had a good amount of time in the airport (due to bus schedules) so we pretty much walked around, ate, sat and read, and bought warm hats. =)

We then spent a lovely time in Belfast. Sleeping on the floor, under wonderful comforters, and watching House at night. So relaxing.

On our last day, we took a train to the coast, drank coffee, and soaked in the beauty.

(in Belfast)

(at the train station, waiting)

(at the coast)

(colorful houses)

For a slightly more serious post about Belfast (and the murals on Shankill Road) here's a link to my other blogsite: Belfast Murals.

London's Imperial War Museum

This is a bit impersonal, but here's a link to some of my impressions from the Imperial War Museum in London: In Memoriam: The Great War.

During the first four weeks I was here, I took a course called British Landscapes, created especially for SCIO students. It was an amazing class, integrating aspects of history, literature, philosophy, theology, political science, and physical geography. We averaged about two lectures a day, one from dear old Simon Schama, and one from an Oxford guest lecturer -- a specialist in whatever discipline we happened to be studying. We also wrote three intense research papers.

Anyway, getting back to the War Museum, we had a field trip every Thursday, in which every student on our program, as well as professors, would pile into a double-decker bus, and go gallivanting across England. Our last trip was to London's war museum, which happens, ironically, to be hosted in the hospital that used to be called Bedlam. That's right, the insane asylum.

At the time, I was writing a paper on women poets of the world wars, dealing with issues of propaganda and the voices we get (and don't get) to hear. I was deeply impacted (and exhausted) by the sheer volume of death and pain. I walked into an exhibit called The Children's War, and started crying just looking at a wall-sized portrait of a child who lived, and perhaps died, during World War II.

I couldn't even bring myself to enter the Holocaust exhibition.

And through it all, the deep nagging feeling, what are we doing here? Commemorating bombs and steel and awful death. Watching children (there were several school groups present) running and laughing through the exhibits, climbing on the fighter jets (there to be touched and enjoyed), and enthralled by the missiles taking up the center of the atrium. I felt sick, but unable to do anything. Sick that we forget; sick that we pretend it was a game; sick that boys and girls still go off to die in gruesome ways. Sick that 90 years after World War I (the anniversary of the Armistice is the 11th of November) we still don't seem to grasp the horror of war's impact.

* * *

On a slightly different note, World War I is still called the Great War in England. Although I've always been taught about its horrors, the gas and pointless death, the lost generation, etc., World War II has always been the real war in my mind, partially, I think, because of the Holocaust. The Great War, however, had an affect on Europe that, as Americans, I don't think we're ever taught, or fully understand. In our psyche it's simply the prelude -- a war we barely fought. But though everyone here will admit that World War II was awful, it doesn't seem to have had the scarring affect of its predecessor. In some ways, World War I was and is the only war:

Whenever the November sky
Quivers with a bugle's hoarse, sweet cry . . .
I remember,
Not the war I fought in
But the one called Great
Which ended in a sepia November
Four years before my birth.
-Vernon Scannell, from The Great War

The Last Five Years: a Musical

Tonight, I went to watch the closing performance of The Last Five Years at Keble College. I had heard the music before, but never seen the show. So good. So powerful. So heartbreakingly tragic.

A two person musical, it's the story of the characters' marriage, told forward from the moment they meet (by Jamie), and backwards from the moment it ends (by Cathi). They sing together only once, at the very middle, when they decide to spend forever together.

Though heartwrenching, I actually find the show incredibly hopeful. Their love, and joy in each other, is so palpable. So real. And though it is SO painful to watch them reach out, and draw back, and fail over and over again to truly connect, the potential for reconciliation is potently present. And even though they fail to ultimately save their marriage, the play is in no way a testimony to the inevitability of that failure. Nor is it a trivializing of heartbreak, or a cheapening of love.

This particular rendition was performed in a tiny black box theatre, and we had incredible seats (front row of a balcony that was maybe 10ft off the ground). The actors were great. So full of energy. They drew you in and became the characters -- melding their reality with your own. Their vocals struggled a bit (at times), but they were so real that it was hard to mind. We were also right next to the musicians, who were great, but tended to drown them out a little.

Overall, such a full experience. And I can't get it out of my head. How, oh how, do I concentrate on my Aristotle, Oedipus, and Bacchai essay?

And Keble, like all colleges at Oxford, is beautiful behind its stone facade.