Some things that have happened recently...

... in the last 24 hours or so.

Last night I went to this thing: http://www.secretcinema.org/
And they showed this movie: http://www.cinematical.com/2008/01/19/sundance-review-anvil-the-story-of-anvil/
And afterwards, the band played, and for the encore, they were joined by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_ian

Today, thanks to a complicated mental calculus involving the fact that it is Presidents' Day, and it is reading week (the UK equivalent of spring break, save that it happens every term), and I didn't sleep well last night, and it was sunny and in the mid-forties and I really didn't want to go to the library, I played hooky and walked around London instead. I wound up visiting Pollock's Toy Museum, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and the Tate Britain, none of which I'd ever been to before. I also intended to visit the Royal Academy of Art and the Banqueting House as well, but the Banqueting House was closed for an event, and I can never work up the enthusiasm for the Royal Academy's exhibitions to make myself pay the comparably high admissions prices. So I bought some macaroons from Laduree in Burlington Arcade, and ate them as I sat in front of the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds and watched for people coming in and out of the nearby Society of Antiquaries. Then I went to Fortnum and Mason, which was eerily subdued. It is possible that £70.00 for 125g of tea looks a bit... conspicuous in these times.

Anyway, as stated, I made it to the three museums above-named, as well as the Samuel French theatrical bookstore, where I bought a copy of one of my advisor's books (There are plural advisors each with plural books; I merely bought one book authored by one advisor) with only a slight twinge of guilt (as I was not doing anything at all dissertation-related). By the same calculus whereby I justified taking the day off in the first place, I figure that buying it from an independent specialist bookstore must count as some sort of good deed, and also, as the title does not mean what I suspect whomever stocked the book thinks it means, no one else in that store was likely to buy it.

I don't know if I could have picked three more different London institutions all laying claim to the title "museum". The first I visited, Pollock's Toy Museum, is clearly a labor of love, perhaps a half dozen small rooms crammed full of toys and other childhood epherma from the last century and a half. Some of the rooms were loosely organized around a theme-- there was a girl's room, with dolls and doll houses, and a boy's room as well-- while others were more of a curious mix: optical illusions with tin models, for example. The exhibits, I have to imagine, have remained largely altered since their installation, and there's a minimum of interpretive material apart from the pamphlet you're handed upon paying your four pounds at the door. If there is a curatorial principle, it's got to be additive: twelve dollhouses are better than ten, and fifteen is better still. The Pollock whose name graces the establishment was a specialist in toy theaters, to be purchased as kits and constructed from heavy stock, and the museum has what I was told is the finest collection of such theaters anywhere, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It reminded me a bit of the Sloane House museum in its elevation of theme over taxonomy. Yes, everything on display here is a toy of some sort, or could at least be classed as such under a fairly generous definition of the term, but the point that the museum makes is "look at all these toys!" rather than encouraging you to consider individual objects in the collections, and connect them either to other objects at hand, or some larger historical or cultural context.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, by contrast, is an almost totally commercial affair. But it is also a deeply fascinating thing, because how can you have a museum of a fictional man? It's either deeply cynical or totally deep, and I'm not entirely sure which.

(Because I am lazy, I am copying an earlier attempt to describe the Borgesian infinite-regression effect going on here. The transcript has been edited to remove references to certain faculty members and also the Spice Girls.)

megan: So, I went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum today.
Brooke: !!!!
robert downey jr. is playing watson in an upandcoming remake OMG
but anyway TELL ME ABOUT IT
megan: !! re RDJ.
Um, it's very strange, right?
Brooke: the museum?
megan: Because Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character.

megan: Anyway, so you go in, and you're in the gift shop.
Brooke: yeah
megan: You have to walk up to the til in order to get tickets for the museum.
So, it's basically a gift shop first and foremost.
Brooke: for things made out of tweed and pipes I hope
megan: Yes. Lots of tweed, lots of pipes.
megan: And anyway, you go upstairs, and the first rooms you're in are Holmes bedroom and study, meticulously recreated from the descriptions in the books.
Brooke: oooooooh
Brooke: handsome
megan: And there is a man there, who is dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, and he invites you to look around the room and take pictures and sit in his chair and try on the deerstalker and bowler hats provided for the purpose.
There's real fires in the fireplace, tea in the cups, etc etc.
Brooke: oooh
is he handsome
megan: The whole thing is VERSIMILITUDE, it's like a disney attraction.
No, he is old.
And doesn't look like I think Holmes should look.
Brooke: damn
megan: But anyway.
Brooke: he needs to be dignified and middle ages and handsome
megan: So you go in the other room, which is I think supposed to be a parlor or study, but it is likewise furnished in high victoriana.
megan: Except that there are copies of the novels in the bookcase.
Brooke: that's confusing
Brooke: it's like that with
the charles dickens thing at macy's
where all bookshelves in the recreated world of a xmas carol are copies of an xmas carol
IT IS A PET PEEVE OF MINE BECAUSE IT IS NOT TEXTUALLY FAITHFUL.
Brooke: The only book you can do that with is Don Quixote.
HEH
megan: also maybe Borges?
Brooke: yeah that's true
and certain goosebumps books.
megan: But it gets even WEIRDER.
megan: Because then you go into the other rooms, which are full of wax life-size wax figures representing the villains from the stories.
megan: And then also in the same room is a big book of letters written by (mostly American) schoolchildren asking for Holmes help in solving mysteries.
Brooke: aw(l)
megan: And then in the final room there's a wax figure of Watson WRITING HIS NOTES on Holmes' cases, and a big display case with artefacts from said cases.
I can't decide whether it's brilliant or incoherent.
Brooke: it's a museum about the making of itself
it's infinite
you can find god in it
just like spice world
megan: Except it doesn't document any factual things.
It's a real museum of fictional events!
Brooke: the museum ends with a room that is about how it is going to be made
EVEN MORE COMPLEX
it sounds awesome
did you buy anything
megan: no.

So, as you can see, strange. But useful insofar as it does make me think about the conditions of fictional historicity (the attention to accuracy, accuracy as a kind of textual exegesis). I wonder if Jean Baudrillard ever got around to visiting, because this is the simulacrum pretty much spot-on.

The last of the three I visited was the Tate Britain. I've been to the Tate Modern a few times, mostly because it is conveniently located and a reliably warm and free refuge from the oft-chilly south bank. And, well, turns out the Tate Britain is really lovely. I've run out of steam now, so I won't go on at length, but I really appreciated the fact that it's such a varied collection, both in terms of historical scope and style. As per usual, they did not have a postcard for my favorite painting, which was definitely the following:


Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI
The image isn't so great, but in person the colors-- the reds and the golds-- are absolutely striking, and I love the juxtaposition of all the cardinals with the incongruous woman at the center. You appreciate the regal nature of the scene at almost the same moment you realize what's so scandalous about it. But aesthetically speaking, I think it's the symmetry that I really love.

After finishing up at the Tate, and realizing that my capacity to absorb visual stimuli had been taxed to it's limit, I came back here and managed to continue assiduously avoiding any real work. Dinner was particularly awful this evening, but the fact that valentines day truffles are half off at the grocery store and-- surprise-- loaded with whiskey makes up for some of it.

Candy!

Hello friends. I would like to take a moment to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart, and that subject is candy. But Megan, you say, what about your trip to Paris, where you visited the catacombs and ate the most delicious clementines known to man? What about your subsequent trip to Michigan, where you neglected to mention your trip to the catacombs to your friends who would have harmed small children for a similar opportunity? What about your whirlwind tour of the finest that West Philadelphia has to offer, and your subsequent journey back to Grand Rapids in luxurious first class, proving once again that standard rates and rules do not, in fact, apply to you? What of your joyous noel, knee-deep in lake effect snow? What of your turbulent journey across the Atlantic, and your jet-lagged adventures in post-Christmas sales and mass market retailing, including your trip to Westfield Shopping Mall, Europe’s largest, and also to the UK equivalent of Hobby Lobby? What of the questionable events of New Year’s Eve, and the even more questionable decision to teach yourself to knit? What about the paradigm-shifting fritjes you had in Antwerp, and the world’s oldest surviving printing press?

Well, tough. This is what you get for now.



Before Christmas, my friend Chris and I made a deal: I'd bring him back candy from the states when I went back over Christmas, and he'd return with some candy from Manchester. This is what he brought me. If you click through to the photo on Flickr, you can see what I thought of each.

I finally got around to spending a few hours in the National Gallery yesterday afternoon, after a visit with a few students to the Saatchi Gallery. It's difficult to convey how striking the space is, even apart from the paintings on the walls: the main galleries have high, even soaring ceilings, and the walls of all the rooms are painted or upholstered in rich, highly saturated colors.

I skipped the medieval galleries, I'd like to say because I was short on time and want to return for an extended consideration of just those rooms, but really because my taste in visual art is pretty firmly bourgeois. Holbein to Turner is where it's at. Mancestral, I know.

Anyway, as I said, this was a quick trip, where I allowed myself to look at the paintings that interested me most and enjoy them, rather than worry about contextualizing or analysis the artworks or my own response to them (thanks, Bourdieu! And I'll have you know I spelled "Bourdieu" right on the first try). The setting encourages this, I think: compared with, say, the white walls and plain lines of the Tate Modern or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery seems designed to promote appreciation rather than analysis.

Here are a few of the paintings that struck me the most.


Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards (1875), by Ignace-Henri-Theodore Fantin-Latour.
She looks like such a badass.


Self Portrait, about 1645, by Salvator Rosa
Bought the postcard of this one. Check out the inscription, which means "be quiet, unless you have something to say that's better than silence." He looks like a philosophy grad student.


Saint Margaret of Antioch, 1630-4, by Francisco de Zurbaran
I am beginning to believe I have a thing for portraits where the subject looks directly at the viewer.


Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, about 1620. This is a genre of painting that's always appealed to me. I like the combination of intertextuality-- many of the paintings are identifiable as works by prominent Flemish artists of the period-- combined with the fantasy setting and the miniaturization of what would have been massive canvases.


Allegory of Grammar, 1650 by Laurent de La Hyre
Surely there must be other depictions of grammar from this period, but I've not seen them, and as such I'm not quite sure how to interpret this one. Why is she watering plants?


A Scene on the Ice near a Town, about 1615, by Hendrick Avercamp
It's all about the red sash of the woman in the lower left corner.

Looking over this, it appears I could be said to have a thing for early seventeenth century painting.

Dates for my diary, as they say

Things I mean to do in the near future, in no particular order:

- Indian Highway, contemporary Indian art at the Serpentine Gallery
- The Photographers' Gallery, finally open in their new location
- GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy of Art. I also mean to see their collections more generally, and the Byzantine art exhibit they've got on right now.
- Adrian Tomine at the Institute for Contemporary Art
- Too Much is Not Enough, a group show about fandom, at the Transition gallery
- The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. They've got an exhibit on right now about 60s candy packaging, what could be better?
- Films of Fact, vintage science documentaries at the Science Museum.

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!