Byromania

Today we went to visit the family seat of the Byrons. One of the more rapacious members of the family, George Gordon (the wascawy poet) lived there and wrote a bunch of poems about it. None of his biographers suggests that he was mentally ill, but it sure seems like he was from his behavior. I think a person can be literate and mentally ill at the same time.

The abbey is, of course, quintessentially gothic both in terms of the medieval structures and in terms of the literary sense of decay, transgression, and darkness. The great ruined arch that has stood since Henry VIII (having his 500th anniversary) ravaged the church has moss and plants growing all over it, but it seems sound enough in 2009. However, there are little cattle guards all around it, so I suppose it may have been dropping some bricks lately. Still, 500 years is a pretty good run. The gardens are in great shape now, better I suppose than when Mr. Romantic Decay was in charge, but a lot of the ruin of the family seat is attributed to the "Wicked Baron", the 5th Lord Byron, who deliberately let the place fall into ruin out of spite. It is sure is hard to be rich and titled: work, work, work. George Gordon referred to the place as a "massy pile" and seemed to feel oppressed by the history of the place, a history he felt he could not live up to. It's not like he yeilded to that pressure much: he just seemed to complain about it. The next set of owners, liberated from the pressure of the Byron name, seem to have done quite well by the place, fixed it up, and now it is quite pleasant and full of people who come to enjoy the place. One of the guides insists that Byron haunts the place and on Bryon's bithday all kinds of weird things happened like lights going out and "other uncanny events." She was a very enthusiastic guide. She also related the story of two young girls who saw the "black monk" in the upper chambers. Creeeeeeepy.


The most entertaining part of the house tour were the two dress-up rooms. In one room you could put on Byronic robes and pose. While in another room, you could put on dresses and pose. We had great fun in both rooms.


The gardens were lovely. I'm a sucker for any landscape view, and there were so many. There were the neoclassical gardens, the English jumble gardens, and the Japanese garden, which I believe is a new resident of the grounds. It was easy to wander around the grounds for two hours, each view more lovely than the next. But they were so very very manicured and carefully walled in. Sherwood Forest and the Yorkshire moors, being open areas where plants did what they wanted, had a less constrained feel. These gardens, while outside, still had an interior feeling to them as if they were green rooms. The gift shop, in stark contrast was the most chaotic gift shop ever. There was apparently no theme, no consistency to the offerings on the shelves, and no organization them either. There were recipe books, jam, candy, coasters, plastic things stamped "Newstead Abbey", Beatrix Potter books, and a few books by and about Byron. Oh, and magnets and book marks with quotes by other American and British authors. Clearly, this was a token gift shop because one is required to have one. What really counted here was the experience, and not the material culture.

I think this is quite a propos of Byron's experience of Newstead. I get the impression from his poetry that the Abbey was more about the idea of his family history than a nice place to live. His poems addressed to Newstead are all about the history of the place, not the place itself.

Now that the estate has passed to the public domain, it is all the better for it because we common people can enjoy it for itself, not the weighty history nor the aristocratic limits.

Raspberry Turd

This is the next installment of "Desserts that Have Confused Me (but which I ate anyway)". Behold the delicious Raspberry Turd.
I cannot tell you, Gentle Reader, what was in this besides raspberry. The flavor was tart, the mouth-feel smooth but punctuated with raspberry seeds, and the texture was slippery. One diner, sitting to my right, commented that it looked like a fresh human heart. I think the chef may have named this, but I neglected to find out the technical appelation of the Common Raspberry Turd since I am still recovering from it. Hot Banana Tacos, Batman, it's the Ambiguous Raspberry Turd!

Picturesque, Romantic, Sublime and Modernist

Today our Merry Band went to Sherwood Forest and Nottingham in quest the spirit of Robin Hood. As we have been studying the different genres of perception, in addition to studying the interpretations of the the Robin Hood Cycle by visiting the locations associated with him, the visual assignment for today was to take four photographs in Sherwood. One should communicate the picturesque (merely pretty), one should embody Romantic Ideas (strong emotion, emphasis on the individual experience of the world), the Sublime (images that are bigger than the individual, an element of horror mixed with beauty that pulls us out of ourselves and into the greatness of the divine), and finally a modernist image (one that not only makes you feel, but also makes you think). Here are my photos in this conceptual essay.

For the picturesque, I am strongly attracted to the landscape, but also the human participation in the landscape. What could be more pleasing to the eye than two young ladies enjoying a forest stroll. It almost has an Austen-like feel to it in the symmetry and natural setting of good friends having a proper chat.

For the Romantic, I think if you take the people out of the scene, then the viewer becomes the inhabitant of the image, and the path becomes an emotional location for the unknown and the adventure, rather like Kiplings "something lost behind the mountains, lost and waiting for you, Go!". Thus, the winding forest path is a Romantic image for me. Also, making it black and white seems to make it more evocative because it seems less real and more like imaginative food.

Another Romantic image I saw that I found profoundly moving was this oak tree that had clearly seen better days at least a hundred years ago, but which was still refusing to die. This tree heroism, I felt, was quite striking. I thought of that famous sculpture, The Dying Gaul, and figured that this tree was just an arboreal Dying Gaul who just would not die. Byron wrote a poem mythologizing an oak tree as surviving long after the brief of the poet was given up. In a poem, To an Oak at Newstead, he complains that the little oak is decaying. Hey, dude, check this tree out: decay might make an attempt on a oak, but it takes more than a little decay to do a Real Oak in.

The modernist ideas were interesting to consider. I finally went for the modernist idea that we interpret what we see as symbols representing reality. To play with this kind of reality, like Magritte's "Ce N'est Pas Une Pipe" picture, this image from inside the visitor's center seemed like an hysterical commentary on the foolishness of modernism. This is not the forest, this is a fire extinguisher, there is and is not danger here from fire. I was entertained by the conceptual twisting this image created for me.

But finding an image of the submlime was the most challenging of all. I think that because the sublime is something that extracts a person from herself, and causes a feeling of awe or the melancholy of beauty or the hand of the divine, it is really hard to photograph. I came up image after image of the sublime in the forest, but as soon as I tried to take a picture, it was lost. I found that maybe, to photograph the sublime, I needed to get small, not large, and these foxgloves seems to move towards the sublime. But to truly find an image of the sublime, I think the picture of it itself is not going to really work. In film, they know that if they want to really creep out the audience, they show a character reacting to the horror, not the horror itself, so that the more powerful imagination of the viewer can conjure its own special image of what is happening. This little gargoyle provided me with the perfect reaction to the sublime, so she is my image to represent the perception of the sublime.

The Green Man Lives

Today we talked about how the medieval mindset conferred a lot of animistic power on nature, and the Green Man (Herne, Cuernunnos, Pan, whoever) had great power in the Forest domain. I neglected to mention in class, that our "English" word "Forest" does not come from the latin for woods (silva) but from "Forestis" meaning "outside", also where we get the word "foreign" and "foreigner". Thus, the forest was the mysterious and unknown "outside", the beyond, "lo mas alla" of magical realism. Interestingly enough, "wood" is an Old High German word "wudu" that just means tree, what a tree is made of, and a bunch of trees all together. No symbolic judgement for them. A fairly old and generic term. The Forest was where the grail knights had to go and enter only where there was no path so they could be tested for the purity of heart required by the quest. Robin Hood has alternately been identified as the trickster forest god, Herne of the Wild Hunt, a guy from Huntington, or a guy from Locklsey who really did beat people up in the woods. But, like Arthur before him, he has become a conglomeration of what we need to help us make sense of our world when we tell stories about him.

In class, we read the Howard Pyle version of the medieval songs. There were very medieval parts of the stories, but Pyle has offered them through a romantic lense. We get the medieval forest trickster god who makes a mockery of the powers of Town. We get the romantic hero who uses his individual sense of personal justice to guide his actions in giving succor to those in need and avenging injustice against the wronged. We get the medieval timeless trackless forest where social rules are lifted, and the romantic notion that every individual is free and equal to express hs talent. There are also some oddly homophobic parts like where Robin and Little John criticize Will Scarlett for his clothing, but then they shut up when he rips a tree out by the roots and kicks Robin's butt. In general I love the Howard Pyle version, and I enjoy the humor he injects, but the mysogynistic ending where the Prioress of Kirklees bleeds Robing to death because she is afraid of losing her position really irritates me. Howard, we didn't need that. You should have stuck to the trickster forest god. It's kind of like the American remake of Godzilla where they actually kill the monster. Hey, you don't kill forces of nature: they just continue on. Robin shouldn't be killed off: he should keep living happily in the Greenwood for as long as we need him.

Hot Banana Taco

I am not making this up. This was dessert at The Manor tonight. It was Mexican night, you see, and there was rice, chili, and a taco into which one could put some guacamole and salsa. It was a fascinating interation of some general basic food concepts all sort of slightly out of synch. But the "hot banana taco" won the prize for truth in advertising. It is a hot banana wrapped in a tortilla. That's all. No chocolate, no cream, nada mas. I would never have put those three words together unless the ever so creative chef had not shown me the way. It tasted, no kidding, like a hot banana in a taco. WTF.

Odyssey of the Moors

This weekend we went to north Yorkshire to do the Bronte pilgrimage. I had last been there in 2006, and in three short years, the winds of change have sprinted through the countryside, like the sprouting wind farms on the ridges. Blake’s “dark satanic mills” are now “dark satanic condos” called things like Bronte Square or Moorside Flats. On walking down the main road into Haworth, one passes an old mill set prominently in the hill side. Behind, the mill, crawling like a fungus, are housing developments, but none have reached the heights yet. Where do these people work, I wonder? Not in Haworth, that’s for sure. Perhaps they live in the grey, blocky Town nearby called Keighly. It would be a 15 minute commute on sweet twisty road, so I suppose Haworth and the little towns around like Stanbury, Oxenhope, and Hebden Bridge are bed-room communities for Keighly. Nevertheless, given the settlement patterns, as soon as you are out from the influence of the housing developments in the dales, and start to stretch into the further dales, there are still sheep farms with untidy working yards and enthusiastic dogs.

Haworth itself banks a lot on the steep 19th century main street which is lined with shops and pubs. The shops are much swanker now, with up to date fashions and hair stylists who advertise moussey young men pouting on the window posters. The weekend we were there, Haworth was having 60’s weekend. All the people who remembered the 60’s (do the math) were dressed up in flowered bell bottoms, polyester wigs, and short plastic mini-dresses (did you do the math for the full visual of the plastic mini-dresses?) I almost expired from the juxtaposition of conflicting genres. There was a band hired to play 60’s tunes, but they got tired of that part way through my walk down the main street and unaccountably finished “I only want to be with you ” to WWII German oompah tunes. What?!

In my personal Byronic quest for the sublime, which I often inflict on my travelling companions, I felt that Emily and Charlotte Bronte could not be fully comprehended without the experience of walking in the moors. Therefore, in the patchy rain and blowing wind, the ladies and I hiked off over Penistone Country Park, around Round Hill, and up across Haworth Moor to Top Withins. The wind blew, the rain was patchy, the sky was billowing grey clouds, and it was cold. It was wonderful!
Perfectly sublime. Looking back, one could see the gentle dales with their manicured lawns, but here on the heights it was all bracken and heather. And poop. I did forget to tell my companions about the poop. I had warned everyone to bring raincoats and sturdy walking shoes, but I neglected to mention that all hill walking involves navigating a panoply of poop. Sheep poop (liberally distributed), rabbit poop (less intrusive), and horse poop (always right on the path). Poor Thelma mourned the fact that she needed to keep looking down so as to avoid the poop such that she could not look up and enjoy the moor. Note to self: mention poop issues next time.

When we reached the Bronte Falls, time was waning. I suggested we forgo the final mile to Top Withins, but this set up a howl of protest. “No, no, we can’t come this far and not get to Wuthering Heights!” And so we set off at a swifter pace up the last mile to Top Withins. Despite the blustery weather, it was so populated at the top that it was hard to find a seat for a proper snack. There was a also a particularly aggressive ewe who demanded lunch-tribute from every human at Top Withins. It was just a sheep, people! However, she did manage to intimidate (!) several people into giving her their lunch. She tried to get lunch from one of my companions, but I (gently) kicked her so she lost interest.

We flew back down the hill and off the moor, through town via the bakery, and everybody got on a bus to send them off to Edinburgh in a whirlwind of travel favoured by the young. Damage: fourteen wet muddy feet, five blisters, one swollen knee, one "slightly" twisted ankle.

I really think that to understand these two novels, it is important to get the feel for the Town vs. Moor dichotomy. The close cobbled street is in stark contrast to the open moors. At the time of the novels the parsonage was right on the moor. The next day I attended the service at the church where Patrick Bronte (nee Padraig Brunty) preached. It was dark and cold. I walked out into the sunshine and openness of the walk up the hills and over the moor to Ponden Hall. The contrast was striking: the limits of the house vs. the freedom of nature. Also, Ponden Hall is quite humble, really. Its grandness is quite exaggerated in the movies. It is also an easy walk from Haworth to Stanbury, so it was no trial to go there for books, as the sisters are said to have done.

I think this time around, I have a greater sympathy for Emily in her reserve and her love of dogs and walking. As I crossed the moor early Sunday morning, it was clear that 150 years later, it is still local tradition to walk with your dog out on the moor. I can more clearly see so much of Heathcliff and Cathy both in that one person. When I read it again, I will try to think about how Isabella and Linton Heathcliff fit in.

However, I MUST mention my Byronic moment of heroism. I was walking back from Ponden Hall on the Penine Way, and I saw that one of the local Highland cows with big pointy horns had gotten loose and was standing indecisively in the road. Big. Black. Pointy Horns. Very Shaggy. Think Hound of Baskervilles with horns. No big deal, I thought, its just a cow. So I raised my arms to look big and used my "voice of command" (that I use on misbehaving dogs), and I said, "Get on, get on", and the cow turned around and trotted off down the road. Yay, I thought, problem solved. When I came to the place where I had to turn up the hill, there was Hairy Black Cow with Big Pointy Horns. Drat, I thought, raised my arms, and said, "Get on, get on with you." Alas, HBC with BPH turned up the Penine Way, and with nothing else to do, I followed the deep hoof prints up the track. This made sense since I knew his pasture was in this direction. He was just going home. As I rounded the turn in the walled lane towards HBC with BPH's pasture, I saw a large group of walkers coming down the lane in the opposite direction. HBC was caught in the classic pincers movement Napolean used to defeat so many enemies. He stood indecisively again and pranced a bit. Now, I have read the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, and I tried to recall the advice it gave about how to fight a bull. I think it said to wait until the last minute as it charges you, and only then turn because cows cannot pivot on their front feet (but buffalo can). This was my plan B. Plan A was to raise my arms and calmly tell BHC to "Get on" since it had worked before. Luckily, this convinced the confused bovine to jump back into his pasture and then bellow his displeasure. The walkers who had witnessed this "drama" came out of their terrified huddle and told me I "had the Right Stuff" and thanked me for saving them from the Wild Bull. Of course I refrained from telling them about my Plan B since they liked the results of Plan A so well. I just gave them the "Yorkshire Nod" said, "Right enough." I spent the next 10 minutes of my walk feeling awfully rugged.

Americans learning reserve

Several people have noticed that emotional expression here is different from the American norm. In general, social life is slightly more reserved and often, in public interaction, more rule oriented. Students have noted the lack of public displays, and the effect of social-misteps. I think the naive American cheerfulness can get a person a long way towards forgiveness, but only so far. I certainly feel the difference in volume, but the lack of eye contact seems normal to me as that was the norm from the east. Already, in public, I can feel our group volume going down.

Happily, our classroom discussions are not muted. We had a great conversation this morning about Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. We talked about the dichotomy of interior and exterior in Wuthering Heights where the interior was the repression of social rules, and the exterior is the freedom of nature personified in the moors. Even on the OS maps, this interior/exterior dichtomy is clear. The towns are thick with roads and the black symobls for structures, and huge swaths of the map are empty moor populated only the names of each contour of the ground: Peniston Crages, Dove Stones, Hall Hill, Round Hill, Withins, lower Withins, Haworth Moor, etc. It is a wasteland that is densly populated by the thoughts of poeple who posessed the empty land by naming it. The footpaths wind around the edges of the trackless moors but no footpath crosses the empty spaces.

We also talked about how in Wuthering Heights, all characters could be seen as fragments of the author's psyche. Cathy IS Heathcliff, Heathcliff cannot live without his life. Wuthering Heights is an interesting maze of book because the plot is twisted, it defies genre, and the characters share the same names, just in different orders. Some critics have called it a prose poem of Emily Bronte's internal conflicted state. At the time, contemporary critics complained that there was no way a young lady could imagine a person of such depravity as Heathcliff so someone else must have written the text. But no matter how dystopian and confusing the novel is, we still buy it, and it stays in print.

Jane Eyre is a bit more coherent, but the conversation was less unanimous about what to conclude about Jane. It seemed like Jane was compelling because we all identified with her in our own personal ways. While Wuthering Heights had a distincly psychological critique in this group, Jane Eyre got more Reader Response. One person commented that if Jane hadn't had Helen Burns' influence, she would not have forgiven her Aunt Reed and responded in such a compassionate way. It was also suggested that if Jane had not escaped from Reed's influence at Gateshead, then she might have ended up like Heathcliff. Or, if Heathcliff had gone away to school, he might not have been so tortured/torturing. All this is moot because the sisters wrote the same story but with different takes. It is entertaining to see the two as autobiographies because then one has a distinct image of each person not reflected in the surviving painting of the sisters.

Rochester got a lot of air time also. Was he handsome? Was Adelle really his child? Was Jane as ugly as she says she was? Why didn't he just divorce Bertha? We resolved these questions as plot devices and social commentary. We also discussed Jane's rather 21st century resolve to remain independent and under no one's control. Interestingly enough, in this group of young women, the topic of marriage is neglible. The most extended discussion of marriage has been concerning dresses while the issue of the husband acquired along with the dress has been a decidedly secondary issue. During the end of the evening at the pub, the general conclusion was that men were exasperating. I think Jane and Emily might have like to have joined us at the Blue Pig. Emily might actually have said something and Jane might have felt right at home.

Only three rabbits on the lawn this morning, but there was one huge rook eating an ex-rabbit. I did not count the rook's breakfast in my morning rabbit count.

Gazing at the Landscape

I walked out the side door of the manor this morning at 6:30 am. Thrushes were singing, the poppies were still wet, and the great lawns were full of rabbits at flayrah. The clouds were low, and a fresh breeze from the south promised rain. I walked down to the pond to see the great blue herons and the moor hens. In the grey morning, the white beaks of the moor hens seemed too bright to belong to such dark birds. At home, my morning walk is a brisk trot with my faithful hound, Max, around our suburban working class neighborhood. There are no thrushes to hear, but the air sometimes feels the same. But here, on the long drive, with the manor hulking on the hill behind the fields of grain and poppies, there was a more open feeling that encouraged me to think more widely. Later in the morning I would talk about the nature of the sublime accessed through the landscape, and I was so full of joy to feel that sublimity of space, treeline, skyline, and poppies waving in the green fields under fast grey clouds.

In class today, I outlined the waterfall of reasoning that leads from myth to landscape and how we create landscapes through a deliberate guiding of gaze to reify our beliefs. The manor is a great example of the guided gaze from the carefully constructed gardens to the deliberate long drive. Behind the manor is a work area where they are repairing the Grotto. It is such a juxtaposition of conflicting genres to see the Work in all the studied leisure.

I am impressed by the energy of the students. They have excellent commentary, and a refreshing willingness to engage with the material. I am very much looking forward to hearing what they have to say about the Bronte texts we are reading. We discussed the different literary lenses with which to see the texts, and we have some devoted Reader Response people here, as well as some Historical/Biographical critics. We are also fortunate to have a visual artist among us. Her photos are well worth checking out at the Sea and Color blog. If you look at the Verbivore blog, you will see hysterical pictures of how Grantham honors its famous native son, Sir Isaac Newton.

We are here, we are here

The flight was blissfully uneventful. The movies on the flight were formulaic trash which was made all the more obvious and tragic due to the fact that I did not put on the headphones to listen. Every time I looked up, some smooth faced young hero was being thwarted in his or her efforts to defeat evil cop/cia agent/dog catcher/general bad guy whatever. It was the hero's story perverted to its most reductionist pulp. I read literary theory instead. Heathcliff is a terrible person, but far more compelling than the cab driver in Race to Witch Mountain.

Harlaxton welcomed us with a little snack and nice lecture from Earl Kirk, the interim director of student services. Lesley Meese and Jan the Librarian met us at the door. They made us feel we were coming home after a long absence. John the bus driver continued to marvel over the prominent lack of luggage belonging to the "American Girls" and declared them the poster children of packing. I'm not sure he meant the reference to Easter Seals poster children: I think he meant that in the Wheaties sense.

Everybody has lovely rooms with lovely views of the gardens. Well, Josie and Chirsty (I think) actually have a lovely view of the men working on the back garden fountain. They have not yet reported if it is, in fact, a lovely view or not. However, Melissa has a great view of the Rabbit Lawn in front of the Italian garden. I look forward to hearing how many rabbits she will count out on the lawn in the mornings.

Thelma and Natasha instantly wanted to check out bikes and ride to town, but I mentioned the opposite side of the road thing going on here, and they revised their plans to a walk until they could get a look at the route. I have not seen Laura or Katie since everyone was dropped off in their rooms, but I am sure that Katie is leading her own tour, so I'm sure they are having a good time.

A few more paintings

Here are a few more paintings I did as a way of getting ready for the foxgloves in the Italian garden at Harlaxton.  Once I've dealt with the foxgloves, I might branch out to including a little corner of the manor.   Here is one I did of "reflective items".  I call it Food of the Gods. Look just above the olive oil jar, and you will see the hand of Jupiter reaching down to grab the bottle so he can make spaghetti for his dinner. 

As I work up to the mighty Harlaxton foxgloves, these are little tiny versions in my backyard: 

And as a sort of way to build up to painting the manor, I painted my tiny little house in Deer Park.  This will prepare me for painting a little tiny corner of the manor house.  I'm sure it is not as good as the paintings that Mr. Rochester praised that Jane did, but well...Jane had more time to spend on this than I did. 

Two Weeks to Lift-off

I have all my clothes, but I still have to decide what to do about all the books I need.
I have notified all my credit cards that I'll be using them in the UK.

I'm looking forward to
...tea and biscuits while watching the sun set down the manor drive.
...walking along the canal path and hearing all the new birds.
...painting foxgloves in the Italian garden.
...having a pint at the Blue Pig and at the Blackfriars.
...going to the Globe and the Barbican theaters.
...eating food someone else cooks AND cleans up.
...hanging around with people who actually WANT to talk about literature.