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.