Getting Ready for the Next Great Adventure

In September 2009, I asked my-very-good-friend Ralph if I should apply for the Fulbright Hays Seminar in Senegal or the Gulf States, in this case, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar. He promptly said, "Gulf States. That seems safer." Now he says he should have said, "Neither: the garden needs you," but that is necessarily water under the garden bridge since I'm going to the Gulf States.

As of April 15th, the US Department of Education has not been very specific about very much like where we will be when, who we will see, what we will do, how much freedom we will have to do our own research. It is a rather predictable Hurry Up and Wait. Of course, they briskly wanted to know if we had enough insurance to "repatriate the remains" and if we were healthy enough not to spontaneously require such patriation, but aside from that, not much detail. The trip leader, Dr. Jill Crystal, has sent us some readings and links of a general orientation. Great. So, in this dearth of information what does an enthusiastic, action oriented kinda gal do? Sign up for Arabic Lessons! Get a handful of books! Spend some time on Youtube! Go shopping for baggy clothes!

I am taking Arabic lessons at the local technical high school in an interesting demographic mix. More than 1/2 of the class are young women in their 20s who are married to Palestinians. 1/4 are men who want to read the Quran, and my 1/4, which is women-of-a-certain-age who are doing it for reasons that amount, essentially, to entertainment. The teacher is a former student of mine from an ESL course. She is absolutely wonderful: energetic, interactive, patient, friendly, rigorous. Thank goodness the teacher is good because Arabic makes my head spin. I have had to repeat, "Wa alaykum a-salaam" to myself over and over just to be able to respond appropriately to "Salaam alaykum." Yesterday, to my great delight, I was chatting at a reception with a colleague about the impending trip, and when we parted he said, "Salaam Alaykum." I was successfully, and only after a short pause, able to cheerily respons, "Wa alaykum a-salaam." I was so proud of myself. I guess if I get one formulaic phrase a week, I'll be able to be nominally polite to the excellent English speakers who will be hosting us. I aspire to being able to read the signs on doors, you know, push/pull, open/closed. That's about as far as I got in Gaeilge.

As for history books, I got a cool collection of modern Arabic langauge fiction (in English) for my e-reader, but it is all, not surprisingly, from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. I ordered an Emirati collection of short stories from the library, and I have roger Allen's Introduction to Arabic Literature. Thick stuff!

This brings me to Youtube: I found reference to Freej, a 2006 cartoon about four old ladies who deal with modernity. It looked really cool! I need to find the DVD with English subtitles, but I may have wait until I can go to the mall in Abu Dhabi.

But it is the shopping thing that has consumed as much time as the reading and research. Through Travel Smith, the Sierra Trading Post, Timbuktu, and Hydrochic, I have collected a sufficient wardrobe to need only one bag and be a reasonably modest professional. Still, the shoe issue haunts me.

So I wait for more information: who, how, when, how long?

Off to Towne

We are off to the Big City now. After our Country residence, we are off for our London Season. Big city living will be pretty interesting after our leisurly life here at the manor where other people make our food, and there are plenty of quiet, private spaces to sit. We are staying in the utter central area of the city across from St. Paul's Cathedral.
Luckily, we are in walking distance of the Blackfriar's Pub, the Globe, and the Tate Modern. These are Good Things. But where will I do my yoga in the morning? I may have to forgo the two mile walk and 1/2 hour of yoga each morning in this urban setting. And this also means no internet access. It is a little odd that going totally urban for us means a big jump down in technology. I have my mobile phone, but who am I gonna call (except for the proverbial ghostbusters)?

While we are here, we will see the Tate Britain and look at the lanscape watercolors of Turner and Constable. Yay! We will also visit 221 Baker St. and check out the invented life of Sherlock Holmes. After our discussions of romanticism and the gothic, I think it is fitting that suddenly we are dispossed of our 19th century country lifestyle here at the manor and, will we or nill we, thrust into the hectic pace of modern life. I hope my companions can feel this as a fun intellectual exercise rather than a brutal shock. I suppose it all depends on how grotty the hostel is...

So, our minimalist urban adventure begins. It will be a few days (okay, six) before I am able to post the summary of our fun, and the end of the journey. Cheers!

The Great Mushing Together of Modernism

Today we had our last formal class. Now comes the scary part: real learning. No more fake learning. We are going out into London to see if all this theory makes sense on the ground: the medieval sense of justice of Robin Hood, the Romantic connection to the divine, the Modernist debunking of mystery. Mush it all together and we get the 21st century. No wonder nobody can figure out what comes after post-modernism: everything does. And they have the same problem figuring out what comes after generation X. Generation Y? What happens when we hit Z? See, post-modernism with its self-referentiality, irony, and juxtaposition of conflicting genres is just one big identity crisis. Even Sherlock Holmes is a conflation of medieval justice, romantic horror, and modern scientific observation. It makes one's literary head spin. I think people's heads were spinning back in the 18th century, though, when Wordsworth was complaining about how "getting and spending we lay waste our powers/ nothing we see in nature that is ours." So in our 21st century world, we still love truth and beauty, but we also like a bit of Bahktin's carnivalesque where we "decrown" truth and beauty so we can have a bit of fun with it. Maybe the hallmark of our present day delerium is our ability to enjoy playing with ideas more than people did in the past. Irony is fun now, not just painful. We can enjoy all genres in their purity and in their mixing.

For example, I was walking in the Peak Districk, in Derbyshire, where Austen had put Mr. Darcy. Down in the valley, the little trains zipped back and forth from Sheffield to Manchester, little red, blue, and yellow two car trains, zipping up and down the dale like little toy trains. From the top of the high peak, one could see the Great Houses with their grounds down in the valley, but up on the high peak, there was *nothing*. The stark contrast of the staid world that Austen wrote about and the wild cliffs was a lovely juxtaposition of conflicting genres. I also think about how Austen never talks about Aqua Sulis in any of her referecnes to Bath. How interior was *her* life. I wonder what she thought of the water god sitting there under the Pump House where one would drink the special water. But in the 21st century we have room in our minds to fit it all in: Jane Austen and Aqua Sulis. Mr. Darcy and the mud of the peat bogs on the high peaks. So that is the good part about the mushing together of modernity. I think in our 21st century version, we are even brining back some mystery into technology as our fiction turns to robots and artificial intelligence. It is at once frightening and exciting. So if we can take the humanity and inspiration of romanticism, believe in the value of caring for the community in the medieval Commons sense, and trust in the value of scientific reasoning, we might end up with a sustainable aesthetic. In this case, maybe purism is stunting, and we get a better product by mushing it all together. We know that mutts are stronger than pure-breds, so maybe the same is true for art.

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.