Three views.

Window boxes are everywhere, even outside of windows. And the flowers love the rain.


Memorial gardens beside Christ Church Cathedral.



Quintessential Oxford.

Mind at ease.

I’ve been blissfully oblivious about the recent goings-on in London and while the times we live in are certainly fraught with fear and danger, rest assured that Oxford remains an enchanted kingdom of dreaming spires, safe, if not by distance then at least by frame of mind, from the perils of the big city. While that’s not reassuring in any practical sense, I am comforted by the fact that Turf Tavern (“The Turf”) continues to operate since the 14th century and that yesterday I drank a beer there, or that “The Inklings” (Tolkein, CS Lewis, and friends) met at The Eagle and Child (“The Bird and Baby”) in the first half of the last century and read The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia aloud for the first time there and that yesterday I drank a beer there, and that there is a pub underneath the dining hall of our very own college, and that yesterday I also drank a beer there. The full moon suspended over the spire of All Saints and an evening of clear, mild air were magical. Small comfort, perhaps, but comfort indeed.

Breathing room

…has been in rather short supply so far. The first few days of Bread Loaf are always a bit disorienting: keeping track of the new faces, realigning your sleep schedule and stomach to new routines, juggling the spirit of seeing and doing everything immediately (blast you type-A BL-ers!) with anxiety about your first paper. Determining the level of madness associated with total immersion at Lincoln College requires some mental calculations (not unlike the conversion of Centigrade to Fahrenheit (14°? Really?) or pounds to (gulp.) dollars). Add to this equation stewed fruit, a complete absence of anything that even closely resembles a stable weather system, and “Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage,” a course that elicits the following response to “So, what class are you taking?”, that most ubiquitous of Bread Loaf questions: “Oh, you’re one of those people.”

In fact, “Page to Stage” has taken up a chunk of time that others have spent holed up in some corner of the Bodley, incapacitated by the Rube Goldberg-esque conveyor belt system that delivers books from the stacks or deep storage (i.e., a salt mine in Cheshire. Seriously.), directing their own research in true Oxonian fashion amid the eight million books available to them (including the entire English literary canon—where to begin?), and getting yelled at by guards who accuse them of smuggling bombs or other contraband (kerosene, lighter fluid, a hibachi). My first days of class have involved watching film clips of The Taming of the Shrew, going to the theatre, and running around amid the “dreaming spires” of Oxford or performing staged readings of Macbeth with a bad Scottish accent in my free/homework time. Last night, the church bells tolled eleven to coincide with Macbeth’s line, “The bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.” In short, things have been busy, for sure, but also (aside from the weather) bloody brilliant.



The most I'll ever see of the Radcliffe Camera. Inside: every book every written in the English literary canon. Ever.

Ah, yes. Oxford.

Right. So, what is Oxford like? Well, it’s a college town. There are mimes who paint themselves silver from head to toe and perform on street corners. There are tourists buying overpriced pink hoodies with varsity lettering emblazoned across the chest. There are teenagers with mohawks wandering the streets at a relatively late hour. There are cute stationery stores. There’s a Gap.

But, it’s also a college town that is nearly a millennium old. We eat our meals in a dining hall that was built in 1427. And looks like it. Everything has spires and turrets and gargoyles. A lot of famous people spent time at one of Oxford’s many colleges, so there is a tremendous sense of literary history here. (Which sometimes translates into the JRR Tolkein equivalent of “Washington slept here.”) Occasionally, you see stodgy-looking white haired men walking around in Master’s robes. Or young women from a far-flung corner of “The Empire” in the same attire.



Oxford quotation of the day: "You remember, of course, Somerset Maugham's description in 'The Vessel of Wrath'... This reference wouldn't make it in America."

A fog machine. And a quad.

Wait, what day is it?

I think I’m over jet lag, and re-reading my previous entry, I recognize how completely scattered a dispatch it was, a sure indication of the fact that my body thought it was 27 o’clock on some day of the week that has not been named by the Gregorian calendar. Though I’ve had a little trouble sorting the days, I have solved some heretofore unsolved mysteries.

1. The jet-lag induced fit of hysteria that ensued yesterday? afternoon? at approximately 3:23 pm local time? over how to properly set a dime-store alarm clock may have been unfounded, though I find it completely unnecessary to make a snooze bar that cannot be properly activated from the usual position one finds oneself in while sleeping.

2. The Radcliffe Camera is apparently a part of the Bodleian Library (where yesterday I took an oath not to kindle any fires amid the books). I’m still not sure what purpose it serves, except that it was still lit up last night but you couldn’t get near it because of all the road blocks in the way. We caught a sliver of it over the heads of some pub-goers eager to sneak a peak of Nicole Kidman and a tamarind monkey.

3. Speaking of pub-goers… Where is The Purple Turtle, you might ask? As it turns out, I still don’t know, but I spent a little time wandering around trying to find it last night. Anyway, if you were a pub with such an atrocious name, you would hide too.

Why does sleeping on an airplane suck?

Perhaps it was sleeping for three hours on the plane with a perpetual sunrise on the horizon and a perpetual crick in my neck or perhaps it was the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the late-night salad I ate at the airport in Montreal that has made this first day a might surreal. It’s not just driving on the wrong side of the road or being silently sneered at by the rest of the stiff-upper-lipped motorcoach passengers (“We haven’t seen each other in a year. It’s not just because we’re obnoxious Americans.” –Kris) or looking at sheep grazing on the side of a six lane highway. That’s just, “Hey, I’m not in America.” It’s also the enormous fog machine that whirred like a jet engine lodged directly in my cerebral cortex, apparently a special effect for the cinematic adaptation of one of Philip Pullman’s books. So they’ve lit up the Radcliffe Camera (which is a dome of some great import which I have yet to discover) but it’s too cold and windy to go outside and look at it, though, frankly, I would be very surprised if they didn’t light the thing on a regular basis (because isn’t that just what’s done with old buildings in quaint foreign towns?) and I would be equally surprised if Nicole Kidman and a tamarind monkey didn’t show up at breakfast tomorrow (which will, by the way, undoubtedly have heavy cream as a main ingredient). Furthermore, if the steps to my dorm don’t kill me (it’s like climbing the great pyramid at Teotihuacan. With luggage.) then the steps to Chrissy’s dorm room will because they are about two inches square and abutting each other at crazy angles. I’m pretty sure the steps to my room are from the thirteenth century, and the armoire is at least from the 1920s because it has drawers labeled “collars” and “handkerchiefs.” (None for ascots; I’ll have to improvise.)

But all in all, this little penthouse apartment affords lovely views of a quad on which people in suits played croquet in the few hours of sunshine we got today. There are flowers in the window boxes downstairs and huge peachy-orange roses growing on the rose bush. The lawn is cut in a precise crisscross pattern and everything feels delightfully historical.

An epigraph for the motorcoach.

"The Mail Coach was streaking along the side of a narrow ravine. Up ahead the road swung so sharply to the right that it seemed they must plunge over the edge. Roadside notices warned of the extra danger, in words so severe they no longer rhymed. DRIVE LIKE HELL AND YOU WILL GET THERE was one... Just then a thick cloud, shot through with impossible, shifting colours, a cloud from a dream or a nightmare, hopped up from the gorge between them and plopped itself down on the road."
--Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

"The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey."
--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities