The British Library Reader Bulletin
IN THIS ISSUE
The Library's news on a conviction for theft
LIBRARY THIEF CONVICTED

Mr Farhad Hakimzadeh, a former British Library Reader, is due to appear at Wood Green Court today (Friday 21 November). Hakimzadeh has pleaded guilty to ten counts of theft from the Library, and asked for further charges to be taken into account. He has also admitted theft from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Sentencing in this case is expected later today and you may have seen coverage of the case in this morning's press.

Hakimzadeh used considerable skill, deceit and determination to steal leaves, plates and maps from collection items. In many instances his thefts were initially difficult to detect. The items he mutilated are mainly 16th, 17th and 18th century items, with a lesser number of 19th and a few 20th century items. The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration.

Readers should be assured that theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. As Readers will appreciate, we are a library, not a museum. We are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research, and to do this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust.

I know that Readers will share the anger we feel about this crime. The Library takes very seriously its duty to protect the collections for your use, and for the generations of Readers to come. We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.

The successful prosecution of Hakimzadeh follows a thorough and detailed investigation by Library staff and the Metropolitan Police. This led to the recovery of some of the items stolen by Hakimzadeh, and civil proceedings are now underway to recover further items and to seek financial compensation.

The Library has been heartened by the generous co-operation it has received during this investigation from a number of institutions and from other libraries in this country and abroad.

Should any Reader have a concern about the security of a collection item, please do speak to a member of Reading Room staff.

Dame Lynne Brindley

Chief Executive Officer

The British Library

While it must be true that most art thieves have a studied area of expertise, I am posting the above mainly so you can all see the context for the following sentence: "The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration." Also NB that the CEO of the BL is a Dame. Apparently, the heads of Oxford and Cambridge UP's are also either Dames or Sirs, depending.

So what have I been up to, you ask, if not slicing out items from sixteenth-century books? Let me tell you , it's been positively dialectic over here, what with the highbrow and then the lowbrow and back to highbrow again with nary a stop in between for the decidedly middlebrow pleasures of dissertation work. I imagine myself nimbly skipping over the mis en abyme that is Spenser, but alas, I feel that is both inevitable and that we need to give more studied considerations for the reasons Spenser's Chaucerian imitation in the Shepheardes Calender manifests itself in specifically lexical ways (you like that? Yeah.).

Anyway, I digress. Instead, a quick digest:

Highbrow: Impressing the Tsar, contemporary ballet from the Eighties Future at Sadler's Wells.
Lowbrow: Bonfire night! Fireworks! Really close to my head!
Highbrow: Contemporary Chinese art at the Saatchi Gallery. I hope Mr. Saatchi likes his contemporary Chinese art, since it may be a while before he can sell it at anything other than a loss.
Lowbrow: A trip of Odyssey-like proportions on the night bus back from Brixton.
Highbrow: Delirium an adaptation of the Brothers Karamazov from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Not the best play I've seen here, but perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most exciting and therefore one of my favorites. The production's focus did, um, wobble a bit with the introduction of some interpretive dancing in the second act but what can you do? They get an A for effort.
Lowbrow: Louche drinks and arguments about Freud and Chaucer with a bookseller/would-be-writer in Joycean hat and glasses. A friend of John Shurmer-Smith's, obviously.
Highbrow: Tea tasting at Samuel Johnson's house, courtesy Twinnings Tea. I sat in an uncomfortable chair for thirty minutes and learned why only Philistines drink anything but Twinnings. Then I myself drank a lot of Twinnings tea, most of which was quite nice.
Lowbrow: Taping for a BBC sit-com. To be honest, I found the show to be insipid and the taping process tedious. But, on the plus side, I don't think I'll ever have the urge to go to one of these things again.
Highbrow: Two Vaclav Havel one-acts at a theater in Richmond it took forever to get to on the Tube (it didn't help that there was "a body on the tracks at Victoria station"-- I didn't need to know that!).
Lowbrow: BOWLING! I remain obsessed with the British take on classic American culture, especially since it usually involves playing really good music and drinking decent German beer.

Going to Edinburgh with the students this weekend; it is supposed to snow. And Ben is coming in just four days!

---

In which I write blog posts all day instead of reading

Item: I took a walk down Oxford Street after dinner tonight. All the big department stores have their Christmas displays out, some of which are quite clever. In fact, the Christmas seasons starts sort of insanely early here.

Item: I have a new hat! I like it very much! It goes well with my new coat.


Item: This is not for girls, so obviously I had to try it. I don't even know what it is, yet, though I suspect it to be chocolate of middling quality.


Item: Muji. Have I mentioned how obsessed with them I am? They have a lot of small stocking stuffer type gifts for Christmas, stuffed toys, gadgets, games and the like. They also have a City in Bag building block sets: you can get Tokyo, Paris, New York, London, and the set below, which is labeled "Mystere." You've got Stonehenge, a pyramid, some Easter Island statues, the Loch Ness Monster, the Nazca Lines, the Sphinx and some sort of temple. I love it. I am happy to have it sitting on my windowsill.


Item: all of this should give you an idea of how much work I got done today.

More crisps

Walkers Sensations: Oven Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Thyme. I readily believe that real thyme was near this product at some point. The lemon is understated, mostly discernible in the aftertaste. The chicken flavor is there throughout, but not overpowering. The overall taste is savory, rather than salty, which is offset nicely by the citrus. Subtle, but pleasant, and miles away from Walker's regular range roast chicken flavor. The mildness of the flavoring means the taste of the chip itself comes through (unlike the sechuzan spice flavor, where it was completely overpowered), and the two are naturally complementary. I was concerned about how the meaty taste would mesh with texture of the crisps, but it suits the thicker kettle-chip style Sensations crisps very well.

This is the last of the Walkers Sensations range that I've been able to find in individual serving packages. I'm excited try the other flavors, especially Carmelised Onion and Balsamic Vinegar (maybe with some goat cheese?) and Vintage Cheddar and Red Onion Chutney. But there's a whole world of unfamiliar junk food out there!

Well, how about that? At least as far as I can tell from London, everything that the US media is reporting about the collective sigh of relief breathed by most of the rest of the world upon Obama's election seems spot on. There's a large news shop down the street from me that specializes (specialises?) in international papers, and I made a point of passing by yesterday to see what I could about how the international media was reporting the results. Now, I don't read Turkish or Japanese or Hindi. But, like the nytimes.com breaking out the 72-pt headline, I didn't have to: the exuberant typography conveyed enough.

The sense of eubullence will fade soon enough, of course, as it perhaps should. The bulk of the real work that remains to be done is nowhere near as direct, simple and straightforward as electing a president (and as we've certainly seen, a presidential election is none of these things to any meaningful degree), and while the two are obviously related, it matters less who is in office than the policies he enacts and the government he builds. It could all go terribly wrong. But I also think it may have the possibility to go well for once, and that's a change. For the first time sense arriving here, I took no particular delight in being the stealth American yesterday, unrecognizable as a foreigner until I open my mouth. Rather, I wanted to let those flat vowels and dropped t's. More significantly, for the first time in my politically aware life, I feel proud to be an American. I mean, I feel it, and it is a qualitatively different feeling than what I've felt before. This is a sentiment I have heard echoed again and again and again amongst friends and acquantances in the past day or two, and I think it's hard to understate its potential import. You'd have to crunch some numbers to get any true sense of the size and scope of this group (though my gut tells me it extends far beyond my de facto focus group of humanities graduate students), but there is a whole generation of people out there, under thirty, who are for the first time feeling affection, connection, and acute interest in their government.

(But, you know, think about California. Track down Judith Bulter's "Uncritical Exuberance" which makes a number of very good points and is actually quite lucid and making the rounds on various blogs. Think about the fact that total political unity is neither achievable nor desirable, particularly in a democracy. "Change," if we're going to keep harping on that word, is a dialectic, not a light switch, and I would hate to see the left turn around and prima facie shut out more conservative voices as the right did to liberals at the height of the Bush administration. The campaigns of both parties showed American political discoure of pretty much all persuasions to be incredibly fraught, and wounding, and divisive, and downright nasty and I personally think that needs to change before any other kind of meaningful progress can be enacted.)

(So exhilirating, a ride on a high horse.)

Until I and some of my fellow Americans (and also Canadians, and a stray Mancurian or two) got set up with live feeds from the US news networks, we watched the BBC's coverage. Particulary early in the evening, when they were explaining the electoral college again and again, they reported it as though it were a football match: the dossiers of key players, statistics based on past performance, an analysis of the critical moves that needed to win the match. Were I relying on vocal patterns and inflection alone, I would have believed these were sports casters. In closing, a side note: it is impossible to explain the electoral college to anyone without sounding slightly foolish. "But you already count the popular vote!" they will object. And you will be forced to acknowledge that yes in fact we do count the popular vote, but that it doesn't matter because the framers of the constitution way back in 1787 could not count the popular vote.

For Kevin

Walkers Sensations: Szechuan [sic] Spice: strong ginger smell and taste, with sweet soy underneath. Not at all spicy at first, but there's a definite cayenne aftertaste as well as citrus in there somewhere (lemongrass? lime?), and garlic. Something is a little off: I think it's that the very strong raw ginger flavor completely overpowers any taste of potato and therefore sits oddly with the texture and feel of the chips. Not bad, but definitely not paradigm shifting like the thai chili flavor. Too much ginger; more garlic would balance things out.

Dear friends:

This is the view from my window right now:


You will note the presence of a white substance on roofs, chimneys, etc. That substance is snow. Wet, slushy, sticky snow.

bonus

Monocle magazine has a wonderful little video piece on Lamb's Conduit Street, complete with interviews, that captures its charm much better than I did. Go have a look!

one month

I've been here a month now: day 31 on my spreadsheet tracking inflows (food; more than I should) and outflows (money; less than I'd feared). Like seemingly everyone else I've run into the past few days, I am fighting off a cold. In what is both cause and effect, I have not been sleeping well on my hard and tiny bed and everything feels slightly out-of-focus. My ears are all stuffed up but I talk to people so rarely that it doesn't matter much.

Last night was another great show, No Man's Land by Harold Pinter, starring, or rather sort of anchored by, Michael Gambon. Existential questions aside, it was a relief to see a play that did not end in the main character's suicide, as was the case with the last three things I'd seen. There is a certain emotional state that I associate with the opening of the second act of a drama, an eerie, drafty feeling that's half empathy with characters that one has come to know, and perhaps, identify with, and a cold appraisal of the fact that this is after all a performance and as such you are blessedly distanced from the unfolding tragedy to which, however performatively, you've passively agreed to watch unfold in front of you. Pinter starts with that feeling, with that sinister discomfort, and allows it to build unabated. The catharsis, such as it is, lies in your realization that this is, after all, only performance, only language, that the awfulness isn't intended to be taken as real in a certain sense (no one is getting stabbed behind an arras). But that, of course, is followed immediately by the realization, underscored by the play again and again, that that's really no better and perhaps ultimately no different. It's been a long time (high school?) since I've read Satre, but last night I had the desire to dig it out again. I didn't, of course, because I'm a dilettante and not a real intellectual honestly, it creeps me out and the Pinter was enough of that.

(Side note: the tickets were frightfully expensive. Pinter is a marquee hame, of course, as is Gambon: you may know him as Richard Harris's successor to the role of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. The other members of the four-man cast included David Bradley, who plays Filch in the same films and was all kinds of badass, David Williams, who is on Little Brittian, and Nick Dunning who-- exciting for me-- plays Thomas Boleyn, Anne's father, on The Tudors. He is a striking, snarling physical presence in person, and I found myself thinking of the parallels between the menacingly protective servant he played in "No Man's Land" and his scheming, ambitious Henrician courtier on TV. He looks better out of tights. Anyway.)

As I said, not reading Satre but, as I've been doing a fair amount of writing lately (a conference paper-- yuck-- but one which I think will provide some helpful internal links in the chapter I'm working on now) and I find it's good to balance these things, I've been indulging in some non-academic reading. Specifically, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, which turns out to be really, well, good. (I don't often read novels.) There is a concreteness and a specificity to her style that's immensely appealing. The last fiction I read was Anthony Trollope's The Warden (wait, I'm lying: it was Brokeback Mountain but I didn't like it so nevermind) and there's a social (rather than socialist) realism to both that I find especially compelling, a certain sense of the individual as something that exists both in and out of the community. Brick Lane is, so far, really quite charming, though I suspect I'd find almost any narrative to be so afte ra week spent poring over Gabriel Harvey's Latin verses (impressive, impenetrable, not charming) and scholarship from the 30's, 50's and 70's on the history of lexicography.

This last category, I have to admit, ranges from a bit dry to the mind-numbingly dull. Perhaps all the German essays that I can't as yet read are in fact engaging, playful, and provocative. Perhaps not. Either way, I hope that this piece I'm working on now will breathe some life into the subject matter, in this case an English grammar, written in Latin, from 1594, which is important for all sorts of reasons I won't go into. I do believe that it's always worth querying the categories we use to talk about things like language: that shit shapes reality, yo. No really: I went to my local pharmacy this afternoon, looking for whatever the UK equivalent of NyQuil is. Now, in the states, one is generally presented with a huge array of cold and flu remedies, and one generally finds the stuff that purports to decongest your nose, calm your cough, soothe your throat, and make up all the work you should have been doing while you were in fact laying on the couch watching "My Super Sweet Sixteen." Having located these products, you choose from the daytime or nighttime versions, or perhaps a combo pack, but that's stupid because it costs more per pill and you'll use them all up eventually anyway. I mean, it's not as dumb as a variety box of tampons, but still.

Not so here. One is confronted, instead, with a broad array of products identified as being either for a "chesty cough" (which makes me think it somehow has huge bosoms) or a "tickly cough" with no temporal inflection whatsoever. Eventually, I conferred with the pharmacist and left with a bottle of something labeled "for chesty coughs" and not labeled non-drowsy, but I've really got no idea what it will do (even if the 5% ABV and presence of diphenhyhydramine hydrochloride give me some clue). My point, simply, is that schematic categories have material implications, particularly across differences of time and place.

In not entirely unrelated news, I've joined a different gym. They very kindly worked out a deal that allowed me to join until the end of June only, but I had to pay up front so let's hope it works out. The one I was using, in the student union, was cheaper and had a pool (still does, actually), but the ceilings were low, there wasn't enough cardio equipment and the ventilation was very poor. It smelled like wrestling mats. This one lacks a pool, but has more machines, smells nicer, and generally appears to be a more civilized place. Plus, its location makes it impossible to avoid on my way to or from the British Library, removing a major excuse for non-attendance. An additional upside: they have a Power Plate, which I do not for one minute beleive is an effective form of exercise, but which I am excited to try none the less. A potential downside: I fear, based on passing comments, that this is the gym my advisor (who eats lunch; the other is too much to contemplate) uses when staying in London.

A splendid discovery

The poetically named Lamb's Conduit Street is becoming my favorite local respite from the mid-range hotels and their occupants that circle Russell Square. It has: a charity shop, an off-license which sells individual servings of ice cream (hard to find, here), two uncrowded coffee shops (one's a Starbucks, but what can you do), a record store, a bike shop, several bespoke tailors into whose windows I like to stare, an excellent pub called Perseverance, a wine bar, a handful of Italian restaurants I've not tried yet, and two stores full of soft woolen and jersey garments that I like to imagine I'll be able to afford someday.

It also, as I learned this afternoon, is home to Persephone Books, an amazing small press which reprints out-of-print novels, poetry and, yes, cookbooks, mostly by women, mostly from the first half of the 20th century. All very reasonably priced and all with beautiful, colorful vintage endpapers. Go look at their website and browse the selection: it's esoteric but fascinating.

I refrained, with effort, from whipping out my poor beleaguered debit card, since I've learned that it is a very bad idea for me to impulse buy books (unless they're the odd second hand EETS edition of something important), but I've got their catalogue to peruse this evening and I will most definitely be back. They Can't Ration These looks especially promising.

Hey-- I have a flickr account now. It has pictures from Cambridge and London in it.

In other news, I am eating way too much candy, and yet am also making plans to lay in a store of dolly mix for my eventual return to the states.

Lots of catch-up

If I've been quiet and largely incommudicado recently, it's because I've been quite busy. Hopefully, I'll have time to flesh this out later, but for now,

Wednesday: Had lunch with David and got really excited about various obscure things. Later, I met a book historian who lives in this building! Then I scared her away with my enthusiasm for this fact.

Thursday: Rocked the mean streets of Madia Vale and ate a home cooked meal (!). Missed having a kitchen.

Friday: Ate Indian food, browsed secondhand bookshops in Bloomsbury and observed that it is, indeed, a neighborhood well-suited to people who spend a lot of time in their head. In the evening, I took a quick trip to the British Museum and saw the solid gold statue of Kate Moss that they've recently unveiled there. It is unmitigatedly awful, but the Rosetta stone is nearby and that cleanses the palette, and the Damien Hirst piece, rows of life-size plastic skulls painted with psychadelic swirls and installed in a cabinent in the Enlightenment Gallery (which I <3, btw), is much better. In the Assyrian galleries, I stood in front of the giant doors from Nimrod's palace to show scale while a Korean tourist took a picture.

Saturday: Went to Cambridge with the Penn-in-London contingent. An extraordinarily perfect fall day, clear skies, highs around 70. We took the train from Kings Cross, then a cab to Bridge Street, where we hired a punt to take us up and down the Cam. After lunch, we toured a handful of the college grounds, and I fantasized about walking across the perfectly green, level lawns. There is something about monumental architecture that I find deeply calming, and Cambridge has an awful lot of it. It may be the perfect place, as far as I am concerned. We went to King's College Chapel for evensong and an organ concert, then had dinner at the pub where Crick and Watson supposedly hashed out the specifics of their DNA discoveries. I saw the chronophage.

Sunday: Took a long walk in the City on my own, then over to the South Bank and the Tate Modern, where we saw the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern. Then the London Eye (splendid, and yet overrated), and a dinner

I took a lot of pictures, not just in Cambridge, and am working on sorting them and uploading the most interesting to flickr. In the meantime, perhaps the most dorky photo ever, so dorky that I am not even going to explain it:

Day 17

(Playing catch up, now.)

Had lunch with my advisor, who was in town briefly, at what I think could fairly be called a boite roughly equidistant between where I'm living and the British Library. I was startled to realize that this was the first time I've been in a sit-down restaurant since arriving here, the kind where they even bring your food out to you. Guess what? It's lovely, and far preferable to being served with a ladle from a gigantic pan of stuff. I miss having a kitchen terribly: although being in a catered hall has its pluses (one never forgets to buy milk, for example, and the bananas are always fresh), planning and preparing my own meals lent a certain amount of structure to my day. And the food here, in the markets and in the grocery stores even, is really quite different from what I'm used to and therefore more interesting. I'm sad I'm not getting a chance to explore cooking in another country and extend my pallet beyond candy and crisps and beer (bitter, I've learned, is what I prefer, which according to some jackass in the pub around the corner makes me a lesbian, since it is a "man's" brew. The assumptions about sex and gender here, and the matter-of-factness with which they are articulated, are something else entirely).

But that's not where I was going with this: the food was tasty, the conversation was interesting, it was a good lunch on the whole and in many ways quite productive. In addition to kitchens (and I think I've commented on this before), I really miss the luxury of having a group of people around me on a regular basis with whom I can discuss what I'm doing and who force me to articulate my ideas in an intelligible way. It would be possible to do as much over email, I suppose, but I'm a terrible email correspondent and much prefer talking face to face. Anyway.

The weather hear has been truly lovely the past few days-- highs in the mid-sixties, sunny, all of that. Accordingly, after lunch I decided to go buy a winter coat, and planned a walk down Oxford Street (the equivalent, perhaps, of lower Broadway or Herald Square in New York) from Charing Cross to the Marble Arch tube station, shopping along the way. Oxford Street, for those of you who've not been, is perhaps the main middle-brow clothes shopping area in London, and features a lot of the large department stores and chain clothing stores you might expect to find in an American mall, or their UK equivalents. It's not that long (maybe a mile?) but many of the chains (Uniqlo, H&M, and so on) have multiple branches along the way, which lends a weird sort of capitalist deja vu to one's journey. My friends, this was madness. I made it there and back all right, but the sheer sensory overload of the stores, and more to the point the crowds of people in them, was such that I was rendered utterly incapable of summoning the critical faculties needed to select and complete a purchase.

Topshop was the heart of the storm (there was no eye). Their circus themed-decor is very apt.

Also, clothes are expensive! (Unless you go to Primark, I've learned, which case they are cheap in every sense of the term. Not necessarily a bad thing, but one that requires time and dedication to sorting out properly. And, ladies and gentlemen, what have I got but time?). The exchange thing is weird. People do say that eventually you get used to it, and your brain stops converting everything you buy from pounds into dollars. If this is indeed the case, it hasn't yet happened with me. But a certain sort of delay did set in, thanks to my totally overstimulated state. Here's a coat for fifty pounds! I'd say, flipping through the sales racks, and try it on. If it were a particular lightweight black trenchcoat at Uniqlo, I would become enamored of it and the way it makes me appear to have a waist, and I would be walking to the register before I realized, "hey! That's $100! No way!" and then put it back.

It was all very stressful, and the groups of 14-year-old girls cutting school and seemingly impervious to the crowds and noise around them made me feel old. I was very greatful to run into not one but two claques of men in chef's hats handing out free samples of Lindor truffels on my way back home to lie down in a dark room for a while before dinner.

England is a foreign country

With the notable exception of scrambled eggs, which I'm sure I could persuade most restaurants to provide for a nominal fee, there really haven't been any items I've looked for here and been unable to find, or found and discovered to be unexpectedly pricey.

Except for... Post-Notes. I've been looking for these on and off for the last week, to no avail. While many places carry the little flags (which are probably not such a good idea for actually using in books), the notepad proper is apparently a much less popular item. The reason for this became clear yesterday afternoon, when I finally found a store that carries them, and discovered that a six-pack of the plain yellow ones costs £6.59, or about $13.00. By contrast, $13.99 will get you a twelve-pack of the same item from Staples or Office Max.

Seriously, London stationers, wtf? I know the sticky stuff on the back is patented by 3M and therefore the brand name items probably have to be imported and I bet tariffs on paper products are ridiculous, but please to be coming up with some home-grown knockoff that I can actually afford!

Day 16

Saw "In the Red and Brown Water" by Tarell Alvin McCraney at the Young Vic tonight. It was an interesting and really ambitious piece, but somehow never really came together. The most dramatic thing about the production was the stage itself, which was covered in several inches of water. After some time to reflect, I think I have a sense of what was going on with that, insofar as the director was clearly going for a dream-like mood (the play itself traded heavily in archetypes) and the water both slowed down the actors' movements and reflected the lighting quite beautifully, but it was such a prominent and unusual feature of the production design that it distracted from everything else going on. Which was maybe just as well: the plot sort of went to pot in the second act, so-and-so is gay, somebody else wants a baby, there's a voodoo priestess, etc. etc. Like I said, ambitious. The actors also narrated their own movements in the third person to the audience, e.g. "she smiles, sadly," which I found incredibly distracting and really quite detrimental to connecting with any of the characters on an emotional level. Which left, then, a bunch of actors standing around in a very large wading pool.

Presently, I am eating a packet of Walkers "Roast Chicken flavour potato crisps." They are not nearly as good as the sweet thai chili flavor, but the back of the package informs me that they are suitable for vegetarians, suitable for coeliacs and contain no artificial colours. So that's something.

To the residents of the flats on the first-- sorry, ground-- floor: please put a shirt on and/or close your drapes.

To the girl on the elliptical in front of me at the gym this afternoon: yes, your pants are too big and yes, when they fall down everyone can see your thong. And most people don't wear underwear that fancy to work out in.

To American women of the fashionable sort: two words for you: harem pants. They are coming for you. You have been warned.

Day 15

Today was a good day, for many reasons.

1) No use whatsoever of AK.

2) I went to the British Library. I looked at rare books (Paul Greaves 1594 Grammatica Anglicae, which bears further consideration, and the 1553 Pierce the Ploghmans Crede, which does not, as the most interesting bits, e.g., the printed marginalia, have been cut away. Rotten 18th century collectors). I am never, ever going to get to see early printed Spenser in person, but that is neither the end of the world not a very big deal, really, when you get right down to it. Were I a hardcore Spenserian-cum-book historian, that would be one thing. But I'm not, so it's fine. For once, I'm interested in what a book says rather than what it looks like.

3) While at the British Library, I ran into Roger and Josh. We had lunch. While I would characterise myself as doing somewherer between "just fine" and "very well" here in London, it was wonderful to see some familiar faces and hear some familiar voices. I'm realizing the degree to which, back in Philadelphia, I was absolutely spoilt in terms of interlocutors, people who know about my work and topic and who have, even in a tangental way, seen ir develop over the last three years.

4) This evening, I attended a terrific talk on transgender time and the middle ages. I'm not sure I agree with everything that was said, in particular I think the categories of transgender and queer were elided in potentially problematic ways, but on the whole it was an engaging and exciting talk. The application of contemporary theory to medieval texts (here, Caxton's translation from French of the moralized Ovid) often and perhaps inevitably goes awry, but I still appauld anyone who tries. If nothing else, I think it queries in a vital way the category of "literature" as theorists often unproblematically posit it (particularly those thinkers whose primary intellectual and philosophical engagement lies elsewhere, as in gender or sexuality). I loves me some queer medievalists, which is to say I loves me some medievalists, because I think anyone who does medieval studies is at least a little bit queer.

5) I met some delightful people at the reception after the talk, and am presently tipsy in the way one can only become on red wine that one is not paying for. London is wonderful, obvsiously, but a departmental talk-- not my hall, not a bar, not the BL-- is quite clearly where I need to go to find My People.

6) There is a wonderful store on Charing Cross that sells Japanese candy in bulk. It's not the best dinner, from any standpoint, but it is delicious and very much the proper thing to munch on while one reads Bede's Ecclesiastical History.

Day 14

Today was part II of my Men Hitting Things (and Each Other) with Sticks weekend. The weather cleared up sufficiently and, after sorting out the address and realizing it was only a ten minute walk away, I went to see some bike polo played in Islington. As I've previously mentioned, it is exactly what it sounds like, people on fixed-gear bikes with mallets hitting a ball into one another's goals. In practice, it plays more like hockey, with a lot of satisfying thwacks and the incipient threat of bodily harm. The shared punk/geek affinities of fixed-gear afficianados were on full display (if you've ever spend an evening at Fiume, you know exactly what I'm talking about, for better or for worse): anyway, a lot beautiful bikes and, not coincidentally, loads of fancy digital SLR cameras in evidence, and when someone very kindly offered me coffee they assured me it was vegan.

Like comic book culture, then, cycle culture involves a lot of black hoodies and facial hair and appears to span the Atlantic. Indeed, on a dilapidated playground decorated with fantastic graffiti under the shadow (well, there would have been a shadow if it wasn't raining) of several massive apartment blocks, I could have been in Brooklyn or Philly, if not for the preponderance of british accents.

I really would like to get a bike while I'm here. The tube is expensive and the most interesting parts of the city I've explored so far are rather afield from where I live and I've got things to do besides spend hours walking everywhere. London drivers are not especially bike friendly, however, and there's the whole left-side driving thing, which I worry would cause confusion. Opinions, among those whom I've queried, have been split 50-50 on the subject of whether a temporary transport and non-avid cyclist such as myself should even bother, athough John and Joshua both had bikes while they were here and reported no difficulties in that respect.

I wonder if it's possible to spend an entire year working on one's dissertation in London and not finish a single book. I suspect it is. I also wonder if it will be possible to spend an entire year living here without visiting a single restaurant (so far, everything has been either from the hall or sandwiches from Tesco and the like). It is a sad thing that I have no one to explore London's myriad and tacky tourist trap restaurants, as well as the various US themed establishments scattered about (cf. my earlier comments about Detroit). Someone please come and visit so that we can look for vampires with perfect hair drinking pina coladas at Trade Vic's!

Day 13

Yesterday AM I went to tour Sir John Soane's museum, which every single guidebook or website I've read describes as "one of the hidden gems of London." And so it is: the museum consists of two houses on Lincoln's Field, a residential spot not far from where I'm living, that belonged to Soane, a Regency architect of some reknown. Soane had a complicated family life and died estranged from his only surviving son, leaving his estate instead to endow the museum. Soane was, apparently, an inveterate collector but a discerning one, and the meticulously preserved house--which, in addition to serving as a residence and the base of Soane's architectural practice, was designed and modified specifically to show off his collections to best advantage, mostly by playing with filtered natural light from overhead-- is filled to the brim with statues, vases, plaster casts, paintings, stone building elements, stained glass, and architectural models. The sarcophagous of the pharo Seti I is in the basement; Hogarth's A Rake's Progress series (paintings, not prints. I had no idea.) is on the walls in the picture room. It's difficult to describe the exuberant density of things in the house. In some cases, hinged panels are installed in the walls to allow multiple layers of pictures to hang. The panels can then be unhooked and swung forward to reveal additional works (or, in one case, a sort of nave with a statue and a model of Soane's design for the Bank of England). The tour took great pains to point out the ways in which the house itself is quite interesting and experimental in its use of light, mirrors, colored glass, curved ceilings and the like, but the overall impression really is the abundance of stuff on display. The collections were brought together to serve a didactic purpose, for the education of Soane's pupils and others, but there's a palpable sense of whimsy as well. E.g., Soane was notably antipathetic toward neo-Gothic trends in architecture and only one room has any such elements in it. He called it the monk's parlor and invented a fictional monk, Padre Giovanni, who lived there (with his dog!). There's a tomb for both Padre Giovanni and the dog outside. There's a shrine to Shakepeare on the landing of the staircase, all marble busts and dewey oil paintings of a young-ish Bard being attended to by the muses (who's a romantic now, hm?). The guide happily and proudly related to me how Soane-- and here's the fetishization of the material object again-- owned copies of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Folios. I certainly did not later get in an argument with this guide, who was the curator of drawings at the museum, about the Society of Antiquaries.

On my way back I stopped at the plaza outfront of the Waitrose near my hall to check out what the signs advertised as a farmers' market. I think that it does not mean what they think it means, or at least what I think of as a farmers' market, having been conditioned by the ambient slow food, organic, localvore mentality of my delightfully lefty neighborhood back home: there was only one stall selling produce, and two or three selling fresh bread. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the rest of the market, which had maybe twenty stalls altogether, was made up of vendors selling cheese, sausage, chocolate, fudge, cupcakes and numerous varieties of street food (malaysian, indian, etc.). And there were samples! I wandered around for a bit noshing on what I could and chatting with people. Cheesemongers are some of my favorite foodpeople to talk with, almost every one I met has come to it as a second career and has an interesting backstory. As it turns out, the man running the Neal's Yard Dairy table was originally from Battle Creek, and had lived in Ann Arbor and worked and Zingermann's for a number of years before coming to London-- the first Michigander, I think, that I've met here. Later, before it started to rain and I, umbrella-less, ran off, I tried some amazing harissa. "Secret recipe!" the Turk (?) behind the table assured me. Although I wouldn't dare entrust, well, anything, to the communal fridge in the tea kitchen, I'll probably make a return trip next week for items I can keep in my room to vary my peanut-butter-and-apple lunch routine and offset the rather uninspired offerings in the dinning hall. I still haven't had a restaurant or home-cooked meal in England, though I try and eat as many whole foods in the dining hall as is possible.

Later, I ventured back out, to the gym in the student union. Numerous people have advised me that gyms in the UK are vaguely "different" than those in the US and I can confirm that this is true. This one is small, and rather dingy, but I can pay over the counter month to month and it will do. It's got a 30m pool as well, which was a major selling point, but when I took a look yesterday it was really, really crowded, maybe 6+ to a lane. Hopefully, it's less busy at times other than Saturday afternoon. A helpful undergraduate alerted me earlier this week to the precence of a machine in the building at which one can buy cell phone time ("top up one's mobile") using cash, so I've now got a working cell phone. Don't have any one to call, or be called by, but it's probably a good thing to have.

After dinner, I ventured out in the ugly, nasty weather with a large-ish group of mostly postgrads from my hall to a Canadian pub to watch the Penguins play the Senators in Sweden. Apparently it was a regular season game, despite the fact that it was played in Sweden. Who knew? It was pleasant enough, if crowded, but I am always skeptical of these sort of group outings based solely on residential proximity to one another. I mean, yes, it's good to know your neighbors, and it's definitely pleasant to have people to sit with at meals and so on, but just because we are living in the same place does not mean we have anything beyond that in common with one another. There's a kind of group-think that arises in these situations that is just deadly in its banality. Everyone is encouraged to excise the most interesting and distinctive parts of their personailty and winds up becoming boring when they are really just trying to be nice. (My friends, you are my friends because you are interesting, not because you are nice. A great many of you are terrific, kind-hearted individuals but not all of you are and that's okay because you know what? There's room in life for that. We'll never be BFFs but a girl needs wit and whiskey as well as tea and sympathy.) Anyway, you wind up doing things like going to see "Dirty Dancing" the musical or agreeing to the statement "it's good to try new foods, but it can be hard" because you're hard up for social interaction and just desperate for the comfort of some kind of group formation. And it's not that you disagree because the activities and the statements are just pabulum, really, and there's no way to disagree with them, it's that at a fundamental level you just don't care and you're really quite bored and you hold back from doing the things that are uniquely, specifically, and passionately interesting to you because a big part of what makes them so personally fascinating is that they don't have wide appeal. This is me being a snob (a hipster, perhaps, that rare [or not] American creature?), but I am making a stand for quality over quanity in social activities.

So I ditched the boring group and went to another bar with three very nice Canadian boys (are any of you seeing a theme here?). The bar, called, hilariously, FREVD, had cheap drinks and minimalist techno and concrete walls and was full-- very very full-- of pretty young Londoners in elaborate rock-and-roll getup. (London requires a certain recalibration of my personal aesthetic and also reminds me every twenty minutes or so that I am no longer twenty one. More's the pity.) The Canadians tried to convince a giggling trio of Greek girls to come with them to a concert. They were having none of it. I chatted with another guy who really, really wanted to talk to me about Chaucer, thumping bass and bored-looking date be damned. London nightlife, at least my extremely limited experience of it so far, seems highly social but also effervescent, even with the curiously standard exchange of email addresses for Facebook purposes. Not knowing anyone frees you up to talk to everyone.

Today, I am supposed to go to see the bike polo (hipsters on fixed gear bikes hit a ball with mallets made out of ski poles and gas piping), but it's raining for real, not just drizzling and I have only a so-so idea of where the court is located. Also, something about a dissertation? Work to do? I dunno. We'll see what the weather does.

Day 11

Not so much to report (alas, I fear this is all going to get more and more mundane as I settle into a routine). My advisor will be in town briefly next week, which has produced in me not just the vague awareness of the fact that I should be doing work, but an actual desire to get something accomplished. I'm reading Jennifer Summit's new book, which is awful good, and thinking about the difference between collections of books and collections of texts within a single volume. Summit talks about Sir Thomas Elyot's confusion when, upon gaining access to Henry VIII's library to work on his Dictionary (printed, of course, by my bff Thomas Berthelet, who is also the only early printer to print editions of texts by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, i.e., I think he had a specialty, i.e., I should probably write an article), he finds to his dismay that the books are arranged alphabetically, making it impossible for him to determine which sources are orthodox and which could be dangerous to cite in the rather chilly political climate of the late 1530s. Which I think is quite telling. It's difficult for me to wrap my mind around, but alphabetical organization of libraries and collected works of recent writers (vernacular writers, even) are just not givens in the sixteenth century the way they are today. There are certain advantages, of course (Elyot's Dictionary is in fact arranged alphabetically, just like the library he worked from), but to early modersn these were not naturalized organizational schemes but specific choices to be made, with certain tradeoffs.

But enough about that. The most exciting thing I have to report is that the battery charger I ordered last week has arrived, in good working order, and I can take pictures now (it's also proof-of-concept that I can, in fact, get mail here. See?





The first is the view from my windows, the second two cover pretty much my entire living space. It's tiny but not too bad, unless I start to think about how much it costs. I figured it out and the useable space is only about forty square feet less than my freshman year dorm room, which was of course shared.

Yesterday, in proof that in times of social isolation we all revert to type and mine is geek, I also visited several nearby comic book stores, including Forbidden Planet, looking for the trade paperback of Rex Libris. Everyone knows the title, remembers having it in a month or so ago, but hasn't got it now. They can order it, though! I don't know where the stereotype of comics store employees being aloof and unhelpful comes from, they've never been anything but solicitous and helpful to me. I bought the Great Outdoor Fight book instead. Based on this admittedly cursory expedition, Anglo comic book culture seems quite similar to its American equivalent, just with the books of creepy pictures of Japanese girls more prominently displayed. Same dress code: jeans, black sweatshirt. Facial hair encouraged.

I took a more structured detour through Covent Garden on my way back, and looked at a lot of very nice things that I certainly can't afford to buy, including a beautiful dark grey down-filled silk coat in the low four figures (and that's pounds) that I feel certain would have magically transformed me into the sort of sleek, stylish, slightly patrician and deeply cool woman who seems to fill the streets here. I really do need to go buy a winter coat, though. It's chilly here, and very frequently wet, and for packing reasons I left my own coat, a 3/4 length downfilled thing that doesn't fit anymore anyway, back at home. My original plan was to find something cheap in a charity shop, and then just donate it back at the end of the season, to rent it, as it were, but all the stores I've been to contain just two sorts of coats: those that don't fit me, and those that are shapeless, in bad condition, and generally make me look like a homeless person. Plan B is Topshop. A peek online at their current offerings is promising, style-wise, but I thought Topshop was supposed to be cheap! (I like this one best. I'm a UK size 10. Just FYI.) Maybe Primark will have something.

Later in the evening I made a second venture to the bar in the basement, which was remarkably less crowded and noisy than on my earlier visit. There, I enjoyed a pint of Grolsch for two pounds (hard to argue with that) and lively conversation with several first year undergraduates who fancied themselves intellectual gentlement of the world (no doubt just the sort that would to a woman such as myself!) and told me about the tiny towns that they'd managed to escape from by dint of their wits just a few weeks before. They were awesome. If it's my fate in life to spend a lot of time in bars talking to nerdy boys in bars-- and the last decade or so of my life suggests that it is-- well, I could do a lot worse.

I've taken some non-drowsy decongestant and now I feel all wonky. Kind of great, and no more stuffy nose, but definitely wonky.

Day 10

Today, to my shock and surprise, I actually did some work. I also sat in on another class I'll be dipping in and out of; a lot of the lectures will be repeating information I've already covered twice or thrice in my own coursework. Today was mainly an introductory session which I attended to meet the professors and suss things out; I incidentally got to witness a lot of MA students here in London to study the Great Genius Shakespeare get their first taste of historicist kool-aid. It does burn a little going down the first time, but they'll get used to it.

This evening, I attended a lecture and reception at the British Library to celebrate their acquisition of the only known complete copy of the 1595 English translation of the book De Arte Natandi. The book, as those of you who know Latin may have already surmised, is a how-to-swim manual, according to the lecture only the second known printed work on swimming and its English translation the first known book on the subject in English. It's appearance at the end of the sixteenth century has a great deal to do with humanism and a renewed interest in and appreciation for classical texts. Julius Caesar was a great swimmer in his day, apparently, something about swimming in the Nile during a naval battle while holding important documents above his head. And if it was good enough for Caesar then, by God, it was good enough for the gentry of sixteenth century England. (People who worked around water had always had to know how to swim, of course, but it was not until swimming Became a Roman Thing to Do that it was promoted as sport rather than practical skill.)

So there's this book, which is weird and wonderful on at least two fronts. The first concerns its author, one Everard Digby, whose career as a senior fellow at Cambridge came to a rather awkward end: as the blurb for the lecture puts it, "Everard Digby was a rumbustious Tudor scholar, thrown out of Cambridge for offences ranging from crypto-Catholicism to fishing when he should have been in chapel and blowing a horn and shouting round his college."

The second is the books woodcut illustrations, of which there are forty-three. Each consists of one of five frames showing a waterside scene (riverbanks, the edge of a lake, and so on) into which a central block has been inserted bearing a figure demonstrating the particular stroke or trick under discussion in the accompanying passage. These range from something like our modern breast stroke and backstroke (the crawl is a nineteenth century invention. Unless it's not. There was quite the debate over this during the Q&A.) to tricks, like swimming while holding something above water in each hand or swimming while trimming one's toenails, that suggest Digby viewed swimming as rather more akin to acrobatics than a form of transportation.

A few examples taken from the Latin original can be found here. The Latin version is STC 6839 and the English translation is STC 6840, if any of you with EEBO access would like to take a look at the full series.

Anyway, it's a funny little book, and it was nice to learn a little more about it. The reception afterwards gave me the chance to add the British Library to the big list of Cultural Institutions in which I Have Had a Drink, and I should think a bit about what other London places needed to be added to those rolls before I leave here.

Days 8 & 9

Back-to-back theater: Timon of Athens at Shakespeare's Globe yesterday and Stoppard's new translation of Chekov's Ivanov starring Kenneth Branaghghghgh (acting very much like Hamlet, but acting very well). The latter was truly outstanding; I don't know when I've ever felt so engrossed in live theater. Go look up the reviews online: all I can add to them is that they do the production justice.

Got way, way lost around Covent Garden walking home; I'd passed the London branch of Forbidden Planet on my way to the theater and had stupidly assumed I'd be able to find it again on my way home without noting, say, the street name. This was to prove not to be the case, and I learned that the Centre Point tower, which I'd been using as a navigational guide, looks exactly the same from the east as from the south. I did, however, come across Detroit Bar (careful, makes noise) which promises "no attitude, no pretension, just Detroit." I will obvs be back.

Explorations in British confectionary continue with the purchase of a Cadbury Crunchie bar. The packaging advertises "milk chocolate with golden honeycombed centre." I'm still not sure way that last bit means, but it was very tasty indeed, much more so than the stupid Aero bar.

Day 7

A relatively uneventful day, since I am supposed to be getting down to the business of, you know, starting a dissertation. Whatever that's supposed to mean. The biggest pragmatic difference, so far as I can tell, is that you're usually expected to have read the whole book of secondary scholarship or criticism rather than just the relevant bits. Additionally, I've been spending whole hours in mute confusion looking through the British Library's catalogues only to realize: I don't have to be looking a a manuscript every day. I will look at manuscripts or rare books on many days, of course, but I don't need to justify my presence here by looking at archival material when it would be more productive for me to work elsewhere, on other things. Marx may have written Gundrisse in the British Library, but he didn't have a laptop, the internet, or access to other nice libraries with open shelves.

Anyway, my sole excursion for the day yesterday was a trip up and down Charing Cross Road, looking for a used copy of Augustine's Confessions. Used bookstores, in particular, can be really good for the Loeb classics (I know, I know, I'm never going to become a decent Latinist using facing page translations) but they (the used Loebs) tend to travel in packs and so things tend to be rather hit or miss. Yesterday was full of misses: not one of the maybe half dozen secondhand bookstores I stopped in had a copy of the Loeb or any other edition. I did find a fantastic selection of new copies at Foyle's, but the prices (11.99 for the Penguin classics edition!) gave me sticker shock and I demurred. The better translations of the Confessions, as well as the Oxford edition of the Latin text, are all available online for free.

Yesterday evening I attended "pub quiz" in the bar in the basement of the hall. The procedings will be familiar to fans of any of the innumerable American variations on the basic theme; the notable difference here being that the prizes included a bottle of champagne and a package of milk (true story). Teams were assigned at random, and mine included students, mostly other postgrads, from the US, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and Luxembourg, a definite asset as the questions were deliberately global in scope. The desire to be a smart-ass (e.g., "What is the tallest mountain in New Zeeland?" "Mt. Doom.") and also, oddly, to provide an answer to every question in a picture round, seems to be universal, even if it means guessing that a photo of what turned out to be the new president of South Africa was "Martha Stewart". Our team performed tolerably well, but not so well as to win either bubbly or milk. Disappointingly, there was no bonus round at the end.

My explorations of British confectionary continue, now with the purchase of a mint Aero bar. It tasted like sugary confusion. The packaging promised "bubbles" within; I have to say I was disappointed, as I suppose I was hoping for a "pop" rather than the "melt" that the packaging suggests. Apparently the filling is also mint chocolate flavored rather than simply mint flavored. Curious stuff.

Day 5

(I am writing these all out of order.)

Up in a timely manner to meet with someone in the cafe at the British Library. Scrambled eggs do not seem to be in the repetoire of the breakfast chef in the kitchen, which both disappoints and surprises me, since they were a hallmark of the breakfast experience in my college dinning hall. My hardboiled egg was burnt, which I did not know was possible, and yet. (I shouldn't complain too much, though. The food, and the accommodations as a whole are quite decent. And I could rather get used to having someone else cook for me mornings and evenings.)

I've been trying to meet other postgrads in the hall, mostly by looking around at mealtimes and seeing who's eating alone and looks older than about nineteen. Yesterday, I met a nice political theory grad student, who invited me out later that evening. But more of this anon.

My meeting went well, quite well, in fact, as it was with the only other person I've yet met who's read one of the texts that I think will be quite important to the chapter of the dissertation I plan to write during the second half of my time here (the preface to Thomas Berthelet's 1532 edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis, if you really want to know). I've been preaching its virtues in several quarters for awhile now, but it was fantastic to talk about it a little with someone who's also given it some time and attention. We met in the cafe in the main lobby of the library, which has the same terrifying scholarly hum as the hallways at a conference, the slightly hectic awareness that there is knowledge, both scholarly and social, all around you, and it is just out of your grasp, and if you only knew where to look, you could find just what you needed. At least that was my impression. The coffee was better than that in the hall, certainly.

Anyway, the meeting went so well that I decided to take the afternoon off from weightier affairs and walk up to Camden Town. This I did, and after briefly loosing my way (whenever I get lost, I seem to wind up on Tottenham Court Road, which is never exactly where I want to be, except Muji is there and I still want to buy everything they've got and live a calm, well-organized, and beautifully turned-out life), I was delighted to discover a whole slew of charity shops, discount stores, and cheap Thai restaurants up near Mornington Crescent. It was good to get out of Bloomsbury and central London a bit; nice as they are (and they are very nice, on the whole) they're neither places I could afford to live if I were hear on a permanent basis, nor places I would choose to live. I mean, cheap ethnic food and dive bars are important, no?

Further north is Camden Market, which is sort of like St. Mark's Place writ large. Like St. Mark's Place, my initial reaction is a bit of love-hate. It was crowded, there were rather a lot of tourists and/or kids skipping school (I mean, the streets were packed), and the cute, unique-looking dress I saw for sale in one shop or stall would inevitably also be for sale at two other stores down the same block. It's basically a commercial stretch, full of cheaply made goods aimed largely at the tourist or teenager with a little money in his pocket looking to bring home something at least mildly titillating. At the same time, though, there's something pretty adorable and awesome about the stick-it-to-the-man defiance of a square mile full of girls with pink hair, boys with mohawks and studded jackets, and more EGL knock-offs and second hand Doc Martens than Hot Topic could ever dream of. And to be fair, unsure of my bearings, I stuck only to the main thoroughfare, and even there I saw some neat handmade things-- a store selling felted bead necklaces and handwraps sticks in my mind-- and had a truly delicious slice of pizza (made by real Italians! the sign proclaims) for only a pound. You know, the sixteen year old me was just jumping for joy and it was hard to walk away from the stall selling a fantastic array of printed stockings. I will be back. I turned round at a restaurant called Gilgamesh, which promises to reward a return visit with a fantastically gaudy interior, though I don't know anything about the food, and headed back south. On my way back, I stopped at a 99p store (where they had things like Colgate toothpaste and Nivea face wash!) and also finally bought something at Argos (an alarm clock, sigh). American mind still broken.

Back at the hall, I had dinner with a Sketchy McSketcherton who told me he could tell I was a hipster by the way I walked (!?) and who wanted to get a drink later; I demurred and went out to meet the political theorist and some friends at a pub near the hall. Woud up, against expectations really, having a great time, meeting a bunch of Canadians, and proving I can still hold my own in a conversation about Hannah Arendt. I also spent a lot of time talking with a terrifically nice fixed-gear enthusiast from Montreal, who has offered to get me set up with a cheap ride via the London equivalent of the Bike Church, and invited me to Brick Lane on Sunday (e.g., tomorrow) to watch Bike Polo, which is apparently just what it sounds like. Given this option, or the alternative, which is staying in and re-reading Augustine's Confessiones, I think the choice is clear.

Day 6

I am going to have to keep updating this regularly if I hope to include half the interesting bits. It seems positively remarkable that I haven't even been here a week yet-- eventually the work will have to start, of course (eventually, like, um, Monday?) but for now I just go out, try and get my bearings, look at what I find interesting and talk to whom I find interesting.

My plan was to spend today in the British Museum, which is deliriously close to where I'm staying, maybe a five minute walk. And around 10 AM, what a walk it was: sunny, a little hazy, the streets busy in a quiet way and Russell Square full of kids so cute it made my teeth hurt a little to look at them. Nevertheless, I went to the museum. I made it through about half of the Egyption and most of the Greek galleries before things became entirely choked with large grounds of Japanese and Brazilian tourists. I also appeared to be moving at the same pace, and through the same circuit, as every middle-aged American couple who had arrived at the opening at 9:30, Rick Steve's guide in hand, and who was following the route laid out in the book.

I made it as far as the Elgin marbles before I threw in the towel. They are, as advertised, truly spectacular. I mean, truly stunning in a way I won't even try and do justice to here. (Though, suffice it to say, the story of their arrival in the British Museum is enough to make me reconsider my earlier comments about the majesty and laudability of the collector's business. It's a complicated and ideologically-fraught business, on a good day and there would be no, say, Cotton collection at the BL if bishops hadn't been burnt in Smithfield.) My favorite objects in the small portion of the galleries that I saw today were, as always, the idiosyncratic pieces were standard generic forms and now-inscrutable personal taste seem to combine: a tiny bronze figure of two women fighting (one has a sword!), a vase depicting the birth of Athena were Zeus' stylized eyes wince with pain, a carving from an Assyrian temple where cuneiform has been incised over a bas-relief of a hero fighting some kind of fish-monster, making the text appear to ripple with the figures' contortions. And some sexy, sexy Roman-era recreations of Greek statue. I'll be back, obvs-- I never made it to the Sutton Hoo treasure or Lindow man, the two things I'd got specifically to see-- but there's a long grey winter ahead for that.

Given that the sun was still out, I decided to walk east, a direction I had not heretofore explored. I walked down Clerkenwell (hey, it's medieval!), past something called the Yo! Sushi Academy (who would like to fund my visit to the local Yo!Sushi branch? Pretty please? They conveyor belts! if Rube Goldberg were alive today I bet this would be his favorite place to eat.) on to St. John's gate (the rebels burnt the original church there in 1831), where I visited the very small museum of the Order of St. John Ambulance, e.g. the Knights Hospitaller (Wat Tyler and friends also saw fit to dispatch their bishop at the time and to burn up all the records of the Knights Templar, which order the Hospitallers had absorbed after it was dissolved. In this way they provided the grist for hours and hours of History Channel programing and not a few masters theses). Eventually, I wound up in Hoxton Square, a nice, Northern-Liberties like neighborhood, chatting with an excitable Irishman named Jason, who announced that, well, I "[didn't] look like an American" (still unsure if that was compliment, insult, or observation. I seem to blend in well enough; people ask me for directions) and talked to me about American politics and told me I would make a beautiful mother someday. Remarkably, he'd actually spent time in West Philadelphia, and it was a relief to be able to explain to someone where I'd come from without having to resort to Will Smith lyrics. Inevitably, as all straight men seem to want to do, regardless of race, creed, or country of origin, he told me about his ex-girlfriend and how he is still in love with her, even more so now that she's taken up with another man. What do you want me to say, guys? No, seriously, what do you want me to say?

[There is room here for a larger disquisition on the rather dramatic differences in cross-gender socializing I've already observed here as opposed to the states, and how a display of the tinest bit of knowledge about, say, house DJ's or Britpop, surprises and delights, but it's late now and I am quite certain there will be other occassions for such a discourse.]

I walked back through Islington, which was, like Camden, packed full of real people going about their business and had a prosperous but comfortably worn feel to it. Came back to the dorm by cutting through a tiny, bucolic graveyard that I happened on completely by accident, unfortunately disturbing its two living occupants, who were making out with one another. Dinner featured a suspicious fish, but no ill effects yet, and a repeat performance by Sketchy McSketcherton, who was drunk and wearing a t-shrit that said "Hello, my name is Michelle." Did I mention he's got to be closer to 35 than 25?

Later, all I wanted was ice cream, frozen yogurt, gelato, anything soft and creamy. Since it was after eight-o-friggin-clock in the evening, though, everything, including Sainsbury's was closed. Salvation came, eventually, in the form of a Cadbury's chocolate pudding cup from Tesco, that minature emporium of-- well, not culinary, exactly, but gustatory-- delights. It was pretty good. Not Walker's Thai Chili Crisps good, of course, but let's not be greedy. Odd that the US should have a firm commerical upper hand when it comes to fast food, but not at all in the candy market. Clearly, this merits further study in the form of things like Aero bars.

... and now I'm telling the story. Whew. Brick Lane, Bike Polo and there really ought to be some reading done tomorrow. There is no longer any doubt in my mind how it is possible to live within sprinting distance of the British Library and not get any work at all done on one's dissertation.

PS, those of you with Skype should look me up; the username is the same as the gmail address in my facebook profile. How's that for Web 2.0?

Day 4

I have acquired one new piece of photo identification every day I've been here so far, and need to get at least one more. I left with three pieces of photo ID (passport, driver's license, student ID card) and I now have four more, a 133% increase: a card to get into my hall, an additional student ID card, a library card and a reader's pass for the British Library. The student oystercard (for discounted bus and underground rides) should be coming in the post next week.

After I got my card I walked around in the exhibition hall that houses the "treasures of the British Library." (Sadly, an exhibt on the Ramanyana has just recently closed, and the special exhibits gallery is currently in transition.) It was an interesting and in many ways disquieting experience to encounter, say, the Beowulf manuscript in (quite literally) the flesh and have it seem, as a static object open to a particular page, both less real and yet more reified than the various facsimilies and printed editions of that book that I've handled. Conversely, it was strange to encounter facsimilies of the Linsfrane Gospels in both electronic and codex form, while the manuscript itself was conspicuously absent, temporarily removed from view for conservation. The presence of two facisimilies surprised me, since isn't the whole point of such a treasury to house the irreplaceable, the rare, the unique? It's as though the import of the Gospels, and by extension, much of the exhibit as a whole (certainly the illuminated manuscript portion, which occupies maybe half the space), lies not in its textuality or even its materiality, but rather in aesthetics that are both tied to and very much mobile vis-a-vis the physical object. This last point is amply demonstrated by a visit to the gift shop one enters immediately upon leaving the exhibit. One of the things I've been struggling with as I start my disseration is the sixteenth century antiquarian's desire to monumentalize after the dissolution of the monasteries, to say that we have (or had) this, to articulate the past in order that it can be superceded. I'm not sure whether pulling out Frued or Kapital would give me the best theoretical framework with which to work through these issues, but from a practical perspective, I think that working in the BL will give me plenty of material (in every sense of the term) with which to work through that particular crux.

On another note, in some ways I find the existence of things like the British Museum and the British Library more remarkable than that of the objects they hold. However inappropriately, I cling to some notion of a kind of genius or inspiration that lies behind great works of art and literature, whereas the creation and maintainance of collections seems to require planning and foresight that is all the more moving to me because its an impulse that is familiar. "Genius" (however you want to define it) is so different from my own experience of being-in-the-world so as to create a sort of distance between me as viewer/reader and the work, while the innate familiarity of the actions of getting and organizing that go into any good collection make things like libraries and museums that much more impressive to me.

Day 2

Arrived early on campus for my "enrolement" and, aside from a terrible sandwich and some minor confusion over British vs. American forms of writing dates (a hint: if the second pair of numbers is "17," that does not indicate the month of my birth), got it all sorted out with a minimum of hassle. I'd spontaneously emailed two professors teaching relevant grad courses asking if I could audit, and received one enthusiastic reply, so I rather unexpectedly wound up sitting in on a discussion of The Body in Pain and one of Aelfric's sermons. It seems worth sticking with the course: although the reading list is heavy, it should help lend some structure to my week and fill in some gaps in my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon this-and-that. The professor also offered to let me sit in on her undergraduate course in Old English, which I declined. Though it's something I really ought to learn, I don't expect to be teaching it and don't need it for my dissertation (unlike, say, French, Latin, or German) and so it will have to wait.

In the evening, I went to Chelsea (cue Elvis Costello) to see Now or Later. Written by Christopher Shinn, an American whose professional webpage naturally enough includes a link to his myspace site, it's set on election night in the hotel room of the Democratic nominee's son. The set-up, in brief, is that potentially controversial photos of the son have been leaked to the internet; the campaign wants him to issue a statement, preemptively apologizing for the pictures, while he refuses to do so, whether on prinicipal or out of a more basic familial resentment. It's either a family drama mapped onto a political piece, or vice-versa, hard to say. It was quite short, about eighty minutes, which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that nothing really got resolved; there was sort of a medicus ex machina in the form of a phone call from the main character's analyst, and that was that. Not the action was really the point, I know, but it was strangely pat ending for a piece that spent the first seventy minutes dealing almost exclusively in complexity and moral ambiguity. What I thought was exceptionally strong was the dialogue, which consisted largely of debate between the main character and a college friend; it got a certain kind of very young, well-educated, somewhat self-indulgent archness down pat. And captured the theoretically-inflected rhetoric of a certain kind of ivy league undergraduate-- the main character's boyfriend had broken up with him because "monogamy is a heteronormative construct designed to minimize discursive space for queen transgressiveness." Oh, the pathos! The dialogue was so compelling, in fact, that it almost made me forget about the mostly British cast's wildly divergent takes on an American accent.

This trip marked my first experience with the London Underground. The Russell Square stop is on the Piccadilly Line which, as some of you may know, is very very deep underground. British sineage really throws me, and as a result I made not one but two trips up and down from the platform before finally locating a west-bound train, the first trip down having been made, in heels, on the stairs. Of which there are 175, something I did not know until I noticed the sign at the bottom of the stairs indicating as such, and also that they are only to be used in cases of emergency. Ah well.

Day 3

So, we'll start off with very little of the titular scissors or cake, but, as promised, none of the scholarly life. I've been in London for three days now and most of my time has been spent sleeping at odd times (jet lag!), walking around, and standing in line while trying to acquire certain needful things. In fact, so much of my time has been spent standing in various lines and/or in various waiting and reception areas, that the first two activities merely feel like temporary respites from the third.

Today was spent comparatively locally, around Russell Square and the various University of London related buildings there. In keeping with my lietmotif of standing in line, I got a library card for Senate House (seen here in all its Owellian glory), the proccessing of which was delayed by the arrival young man from Royal Holloway who'd forgotten his student ID and so was denied a card, and who pitched a fit that included raising his voice, emptying his wallet of all its contents and attempting to jump the entry barrier in order to access a computer and verify his identity using Teh Internets (the librarian said while she was sure there were very nice pictures of him on said internet, he needed the card. And also that she was, in fact, the supervisor on duty. Hee!). Senate House is nice but I don't understand why they don't have the OUP edition of Augustine's Confessiones, or what organizational scheme places the church fathers immediately next to the sports psychology section.

Later, I visited my first "real" UK grocery store (the Tesco express opposite the Tube station does not count, although it does have Walker's Sweet Thai Chili potato chips, with which I am obsessed. More of that below). As the song says, "I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere, so I started there." This was a Waitrose, which I gather to be a rather upscale chain, more along the lines of a Whole Foods in the US, and it had wide, gleaming suburban aisles full of packages of things which looked familiar but on closer inspection proved to be manifestly unfamiliar (much like the process of converting pounds into dollars). It pains me still that I don't have access to a kitchen here, but I did buy some cookies, some tea, some whole wheat bread and some peanut butter, which people for some reason insisted I wouldn't be able to find in the UK. They had both the crunchy and creamy kind, even (I got crunchy). My hall is a "catered" hall, which means that a full meal plan is automatically included with the room, at attendant cost. The food in the dining room is rather, um, uninspired, with the weird exception of the desserts, which so far have exceeded expectations. I'm trying to adjust to eating a larger breakfast, so's to economize on lunch, but it's weird and I find the sight and smell of stewed tomatoes at 8 in the morning distinctly unappetizing. Hence the wheat bread and peanut butter, which should make tasty, filling sandwiches and sit comfortably on my shelf until then.

(As you can see, I am not the only one who feels strongly about the sweet thai chili chips, er, crisps. They taste very similar to bbq-flavored chips but better, somehow. The bag assures me that this is because they use real chilies, but given the fact that Walker's is merely the UK subsidiary of Frito-Lay it's likely MSG or a known carinogen or something. The Walker's Sensations range-- carried in full at the aforementioned Tesco express-- also includes "Carmelized onion and balsamic vinegar," "sea salt and cracked black pepper," "Vintage cheddar and red onion chutney," "lime and thai spices," and, perhaps most intruigingly, "oven roast chicken with lemon and thyme." Obviously, I look forward to trying them all.)

But the grocery store was perhaps the least interesting stop on my shopping intenary today. Most interesting would be a tie between Muji and Argos. Muji is a Japanese store which sells, according to their website, "no brand quality goods". It's little like if IKEA and H&M got together (there's clothing and furniture sections upstairs) and gave birth to children, and these children were a stationary section and a travel goods section. And it was all very restrained and tasteful, and it all costs amounts that a sane person would be willing to pay, as opposed to most things in London. I could have happily spend a great deal of time and a not insignificant sum of money there, but I walked away with only a scented candle meant to address the fact that my room smells exactly like you'd expect a 112 square foot space in a fifty year old building.

Argos is something else entirely. Basically, it's a department store, but rather than the items being on a shelf, you select them from a catalogue, and the number into a kiosk, along with your payment info. The staff goes into the back (a warehouse, presumably), and brings your items out to you. You pay and you leave. And I don't know why but this breaks my American brain so hard: it's probably been going on forever and anyone who's reading this who's lived in Britian is probably going "Yeah. What about it?" But really, if you want to know something about a culture, I think there are worse places to look than when they get their food and their discount home goods.

The one thing I have not been able to find at a reasonable price is a new battery charger for the camera. I don't know whether it's broken or simply not wired to talk nice with any of my various voltage converters, but I'm unable to get it to work and was unwilling to purchase any of the universal chargers the nice electronics salesmen offered me for 39.99 (though I did manage to talk one guy down to 29.99). There will be pictures once I get that straightened out.

Till then-