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.