Ramblings

• I just watched the movie Once, and it was as lovely as everyone said. Its earnestness was captivating. As I watched the Dublin scenery, it made me really excited for the trip to Ireland I'm planning. But then I thought the Dublin in the movie does not exist in the touristy city-centre where I'll likely be. I'd have to live there to find it. I remember seeing that landscape in Belfast--gritty, working-class, hardened. I was drawn to it, but as a foreigner, there was nothing to draw me in. And I just wished something that seemed so real wasn't so off-limits to me.
  
  
• I went to a gargantuan book sale today in Gainesville, and I had to quit buying books when, with a box and a bag, I had more than I could physically carry. And, while I'm excited about my finds, the finding and buying them was a surreal experience. Suffice to say I don't suffer crowds well to begin with, and this place was third-world crowded. The prices were so low and the searching was so aggressive, it felt more like looting than buying. And all at once we were the Yahoos from Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I wondered what the Houyhnhnms would think if they saw us. They'd think the hundreds of book grubbers looked like they were digging useless things from the earth for the sake of greed and competition.
  
  But these things were books--and classics and textbooks at that! The very things that are supposed to redeem us from the ignorance that begets greed and mindless competition. It was jarring to see this frenetic tableau paired with and created for its opposite, reading and contemplation. While I wanted to flee the debasing of the Books, I thought they're probably just books, and I bought a box full.
  
  
• I've been wondering what to live for. And the weight of "purpose" resembles the weather--English weather. There are days of brilliant sunshine that soak the wild daffodils, where everything is clear and in sharp focus. Then there are some days of continual, relentless rain with the kind of piercing cold that makes you feel bruised from the inside out. But most days are in the middle, dry but overcast--not darkness but greyness.
  
  
• Today I considered whether I could have / would have been friends with Holden Caulfield. And I don't think so. I think people who cite Catcher in the Rye as their favorite book might have missed the point. That child--and I do mean child--lives in a peculiar hell he made for himself.
  

Favorite Places

Yesterday, I took a friend to one of my favorite places in my area, the Windsor Rose Tea Room in Mount Dora, Florida. The tea room is more English than almost any I found in England. Their scones are dense and sweet, they have a dozen teas to choose from (Yorkshire Gold was my choice), and the atmosphere is all at once everything quaint about the English. It is where I go for my British fix, even though I am always the youngest person there by 40 years. But as my friend pointed out, sometimes we have to "unleash our inner granny".





This beautiful red spread I found at the shop next door.

My Senior Speech

When I went to England, I went as part of a program that included 20 people from my university. Many of the people in the group were very close, but my day-to-day life didn't really include most of them. I only had a couple of friends with whom I shared my kitchen, and eventually an apartment.

When the program ended, we had a final weekend in Wales and a goodbye-type session. My friends Cassie and Matt played and sang a Bob Dylan song many of us better know to be covered by Lifehouse, "You Belong to Me." ( I wish I had a way to put it on here)

At the closing session, they played the song and I gave the following address. It may seem overly saccharine, but is my closest thing to the thing that is the MVA senior speech:

The next song is called “You belong to me.” Listen to it, and before you let it remind you of Shrek, or Bob Dylan, or a cheesy unfitting love song, let it remind you of what it means to “belong.” When we left, even the bravest, most independent of us was scared. We were scared to leave what we knew, scared to leave those who loved us: we knew we belonged at home. Moving here drowned our sense of belonging in the confusion of our “Foreign Country Syndrome” and… sometimes drowned it in the pub. But look at where we are! Look around you! Look how familiar the faces have become. It goes beyond knowing everyone’s name and major, or what class they teach or to whom they are married. It goes beyond knowing what sport people played in high school or where you are involved at UMD. Those groups to whom we belonged gave us labels and those no longer apply. We are the ones who know best what each of us has become. We have become the travelers like the one mentioned in the song. Look how what was once exotic has become familiar. We know the smell of the Rendezvous chips. We know that a pint in the Manor bar, or Manhole, costs a pound sixty. We know our way up and down Broad Street. Do we remember when calling them chips instead of fries, buying beer by the pint, and going to a black-shoes only clubs sounded so foreign?

We belong in England, and this sense of belonging freed us from fear. We are not afraid to sleep on a train-station floors. We are not afraid to attempt another language. We were not afraid to wander Barcelona, though we probably should have been. And German Beer by the Liter definitely does not intimidate us. We now belong to the exclusive group known as Travelers—not tourists—travelers. These are people who understand HOW to understand other cultures, how to cope with inconvenience, people who see how quickly companions become friends, and who see how to live life as the journey it was meant to be. Everyday here, whether we realized it then, or not, was extraordinary. Every person here, whether we hung out together or not is extraordinary for coming, extraordinary for what they did when they came, and extraordinary for what they have become. The time is coming soon when we will not longer belong in England. We don’t belong to Cassie and matt when they are singing the song, and we won’t belong in our old lives as our old selves. Coming here could have been the hardest thing we ever did, but leaving is about to be harder. Remember that each one of you belongs to us, and with us: you have flown the ocean in a silver plane, and gotten your photographs and souvenirs, but you have also found family in your fellow Travelers.

Students and Teachers and Spring

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985 / England)

Losing Things in Bulk

The holiday's leave plenty of time for losing things, running expensive errands, snacking, long showers, and reflecting on current employment (because NOT working leaves time to think about it). So naturally, a few more top-five lists emerge:

My Top-five Most Annoying Things to Lose:
(Based on degree of annoyance and frequency of misplacement, these are the things that wreck all concentration until I find them)

1. Fingernail clippers
2. Fountain pen
3. Driver's license
4. Phone charger
5. my lists!

Top-five Coolest Things to Buy at Costco:
1. Post-it notes--a pile of 24 for 10 bucks!
2. Wine--Banfi Chianti Classico Riserva for 12 bucks!
3. Peanut M&Ms--who wouldn't want five pounds of these??
4. Cheese--Gruyère, Gouda, and a Dublin cheddar!
5. Dog bones--even George Herbert understands the significance of buying in bulk.


Top-five Favorite Cheeses:
1. Sharp English Cheddar (aged)
2. Muenster
3. Fresh Buffalo Mozzarella
4. Feta
5. Brie (with no rind)

Top-five Favorite Shampoos
1. Paul Mitchell's Tea Tree Shampoo
2. Bumble and Bumble's Gentle Shampoo
3. Redkin's BlondGlam
4. Aveda's Rosemary Mint Shampoo
5. Bumble and Bumble's Creme de Coco Shampoo

Top-five Dream Jobs
1. Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (with a season ending at The Proms)
2. Accessories/Cosmetics product selection for Nordstrom's
3. Editor of my own magazine (The New Yorker meets InStyle meets The National Review meets Paste meets CondéNast)
4. Ambassador to Britain under Tony Blair
5. U.S. Senator (Foreign Affairs Committee, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee)

extraordinary days

Over a month ago, I posted a lament that I couldn't find something important to me online.

Yesterday, I was wandering around online, and I came across this. It is only part of what I was looking for, but it is sufficiently representitive of the thing I thought I had lost.


I forgot how much I had contributed to this site, acknowledging that it is amateur and archaic. My photos (or I!) appear in the following sections:


Birmingham>Manor House, Out and About in Birmingham, Working in Birmingham, University of Birmingham.


Chances are, if there are blue skies, I took the photo. Also, a handful of photos at the bottom of here are mine, too. I am quite proud of that nighttime Tower Bridge photo, and the shoe one.


***
I got a gift for Christmas that has me pouring over photos. Doing this, combined with having found the website, has me wondering what to do with a set of experiences untouchable by any other set from before or since. This life seems so irreconcileable to the one I have now; in fact, these extraordinary days are actually aggravating because they give me something against which everyday life is compared--if not everyday life, at least my current geography. I am so annoyed by the contrast.


For which days are we supposed to live? Those days, the extraordinary ones? Or the doldrum days like these ones between Christmas and New Year's?

It is easy to love the extraordinary days--the kind one spends galavanting around Europe (and then spending years paying off). And to be honest, it is unlikely I need any more of those, exactly.

All this just makes me wonder what it will take before I feel satisfied, before I am no longer aggravated by what I don't have any more or what I am not. I know I have a job I love, a cool apartment, and a great dog--why isn't this enough?

So what we have here is a set of life lessons:

1. Holiday breaks highlight twentysomething ennui. Combing through favorite pretty photos is no remedy for this.
2. Drinking more (liquor or coffee--its a tossup) is.
3. And my longtime favorite: Today is not forever.

Christmas List

I checked the refrigerator today when I got home for "tree-festooning," and all of my siblings had their Christmas lists posted. The problem with posting things on the fridge is that you can't add hyperlinks; one may look at a written list, but there is no compulsion to click on it. So I posted mine in the family pile, but here is where you can add specifics and pictures.

So, without further adieu, the interactive Christmas List:

• long sleeve JCrew tshirts. (XL, holiday red, black, and sapphire)


• a weekly London Engagement Calendar


• bookends


• a pretty inkwell


• The Blair Decade, PBS video


• Moleskine City Books, Boston and Dublin


• Moleskin large plain notebook


• Magnetic Poetry (I have never owned a set and always wanted one.)


• Levenger Ink in cobalt blue and emerald


• Style 101, from InStyle


• Elements of Style by Strunk & White (mine has dissappeared)


• This is Not a Book, by Michael Picard


• England, England, by Julian Barnes


• Joshua Tree, U2


• Under the Table and Dreaming, Dave Matthews


• Crash, Dave Matthews


• Stars: The Best of the Cranberries, 1992-2002


• Stella by Stella McCartney


• Weekly Subscription to The Washington Times


• A Subscription to Paste magazine.


• Anything from my Amazon Wishlist


• Anything from my Sephora Wishlist

I seem to have posted a series of shallow, materialistic lists. I will make a real post later.

If only No. 10 were my address...

I am sorry to say it seems my strange affection for British Prime Ministers goes beyond Tony Blair (and my appreciation for Tony Blair is more than unreasonable--some say disturbing) . I have seen the movie Amazing Grace four times this week (because I am showing it in my classes), and my favorite character in it is Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger.

In addition to finding his movie portrayal charming, , he was single--I mean--I would have liked his politics. I am reading a biography of William Wilberforce, and I am pleased to find much of the dialogue in the movie is taken directly from historical documents of the time. This means that I get to like the historical figure instead of just his portrayal in the movie. And he was quite the historical figure: He was prime minister during the Act of Union with Ireland, but he also stood up for the rights of the Catholics. Though he died before slavery was abolished, he was instrumental in Wilberforce's success. He was loyal to the king, even in George III's madness.

Admittedly historical accounts (here, here, and here) are mixed on his overall sucess as a PM, but historical commentary suggests it was because he was a statesman, and not a politician. The difference between the two terms is more than semantic: a statesman demonstrates great wisdom, ability and experience in the art of government, and a politician is someone who is more concerned with winning favor than with governing. What Britain needed during the tumultuous time of the early 19th century was a statesman, and this is what America needs at turn of the 21st. From a political and a quirky personal standpoint, wisdom, ability, and experience are attractive qualities in a man--a confession which betrays my preference for older men.

Perhaps developing an appreciation-turned-crush on historical figures is a hazard of being a twenty-something single history teacher. There is a small chance that I like Pitt because I find the actor (who was recently featured in a Times article) for him attractive. It's unlikely, but I hope that is it. It would make my ministerial fixation a lot easier to explain.

In Medias Res

I watched a docudrama this weekend on HBO about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor for British Prime Minister. (It is a British movie, but HBO picked it up, and I found out about it because “Tony Blair” is a search category in my news reader.) The Deal was made by Stephen Frears who made The Queen, using Michael Sheen for Tony Blair in both.

One of my hobbies/interests (what is the difference between an interest and a hobby?) is British Politics, so I loved The Queen. It was a fascinating look at the modern tension between the roles of monarchy and of representative government with a parliamentary executive. I am one of the only people I know who liked it, which means I had to watch the lesser-known American follow-up The Deal alone. This means there was no one I could ask about the parts I didn’t understand. Having seen The Queen and having remembered the death of Diana and the surrounding coverage, I knew Frears’ method for integrating film footage with actual news clips from that time. I know the news clips in The Deal were monumental moments in British politics, but I had no context or frame of reference, since these events occurred when I was in 5th grade. I have no way of gauging how great the impact of the Blair-Brown rivalry, a key principle in the movie. With the transfer of power in June, the rivalry is now a moot point. I tuned in in medias res, only the beginning seems to have really mattered.

Blair ushered in a new era for Britain, and Brown marks the waning of it. I am looking forward to the next election so that I can start things from the beginning. My natural tendency as a history student is to weigh the present against the past. I want a fresh start so I can do that accurately. What is present now is a past I will know—however small it is.

Brown is to Blair what John Major was to Margaret Thatcher. He illustrates the idea that a change in leadership is hardly the start of something new; in fact, it may bring out the worst in what is left of the old. We saw this with the 2006 election, where there was hope for significant change. The democrats’ seizure of control over congress and the resulting failures, I fear, sets the tone for the next presidency. (People point to the president’s approval ratings when congressional approval ratings are a little to the left of ZERO) It won’t matter who is elected, we will have more of the same.

With Nancy Pelosi, we have the novelty of a woman in the country’s third-highest office. One of Hillary’s most prominent attributes is that she’s a woman who may, by that fact, have something different to offer. One of the faults attributed to Bush is ill-conceived foreign policy, but in Pelosi, we have already seen what a “woman” as to offer. Washington Post commentator Charles Krauthammer points out that what we have is a leader who is “deeply un-serious about foreign policy,” citing, “This little stunt [the Armenian genocide declaration] gets added to the ledger: first, her visit to Syria, which did nothing but give legitimacy to Bashar al-Assad, who continues to engage in the systematic murder of pro-Western Lebanese members of parliament; then, her letter to Costa Rica's ambassador, just nine days before a national referendum, aiding and abetting opponents of a very important free-trade agreement with the United States.”

New leader, new gender, same heedless foreign policy.

In America, as in Britain, vision-driven, principled politics is mired in partisan squabbling. In theory, it is this decline into pointless bickering that marks the end of an era. Unfortunately, I see no presidential candidate who is standing as a light at the end of this tunnel. We need politicians farsighted enough to weigh their present actions against a past that extends farther back than the foibles of George W. Bush. We need a congress that recalls they themselves voted for the War on Terror instead of superficially shifting blame to the machinations of a single man—because our presidential candidates are coming from this congress. We need a leader who will not only start at the beginning, but make a new one, because the politics of in medias res have deprived both voters and leaders of desperately needed context, and therefore foresight.

icon

I have this thing that has for years been my icon for the single most formative experience in my life. It is so significant that I left no room for it to be less significant to anyone else (not that I was aware of this). I was then so distressed to find the other day, that it had vanished from the internet--and I'm good at searching, too. It has been awhile since I sought it, but I remember it used to have a substantial presence online. Even after a couple of hours looking (the obsessive point it reaches when there seems a pending identity crisis), I found no helpful results.

I wanted to post something about my thing on here and provide a handy link, but everyone knows if Google can't find it, it must not exist.

How can this be? Where is the corporate urge to preserve something so precious? Why can't I find it and why doesn't anyone else care enough to keep it around?

Defeating the most exhaustive search mechanism we've ever really known feels like anything BUT victory.

Moving on in life means things aren't "there anymore." I get that. The loss of it, though, even in the cyberform is big. What a wave of isolation comes from realizing that my precious icon can no longer serve as a common referent--and that maybe it didn't even in the first place.

The Weight of Things

“That the sky would lift
That I’d find my place
That I’d see your face in the door
And the sun would glint
On a time well spent
On a time that ain’t no more

Takes the broken hearts
In the vacant lots
To see the fruit that rots on the trees
Had to turn my head
Leave it all for dead
But it’s in my mind always"
…
LATELY—David Gray


I have been lately feeling the weight of things amiss. Maybe it is because I am tired, and everything feels heavier when you are tired.

My heart aches for the loss of a student who might always be lost. I have another student whose family has been ravaged by an irreparable pain, and I feel the weight of the permanent damage that is still occurring.

The losses that contributed to me being where I am are back to grind at me, and I had forgotten them a little bit--or at least I wasn’t having to bear them every day anymore.
I feel the weight of having lost where I always went for guidance, because it is broken, or at least separating.

I feel the weight of the impossibility of return—what I loved simply isn’t there anymore.

I saw a movie this weekend that reminded me what a human mess we are in, and I feel the weight of having no clear way out.

A friend of mine is getting married, and the last time this happened, we never really spoke again. What should have been beautiful and loving amounted to some of my most significant losses and regrets. A repetition is, of course, not inevitable, but the potential weighs heavy enough.

I feel the weight of aimlessness and of being very far from my favorite people.

…
This weight drives me into one of my most familiar rituals: a pot of English tea—my special kind that really comes from Britain—and a whole lot of David Gray. I have been having tea with him, especially on days like these, for the better part of five years.

I first started doing this at Manor House (see Picture), when I lived in Birmingham. The English rain had its own effect: it would run down the window, washing in a kind of clarity. I didn’t mind the rain so much because it was such a part of where I was, and I knew it would stop sooner or later.

I still do this because I have found David Gray can make the hurt and heaviness beautiful without trivializing them. Also, it has to do with ritual. A ritual stands as a reminder that both the its routine and its inspiration are repetitive—cyclical. I don’t always have to carry it all, I just do sometimes. Sooner or later it will lift, and when the rain starts again, I know what to do.

The Strand

Photo: The Strand, ca. 1929. The Museum of London

I think it’s sad when landmarks are reduced to a postcard existence. Sometimes I visit my favorite places, and I see they are bits of geography extracted from their meaningful historical context by tourist point, shoot, and run tactics. The Strand runs no risk of this. It is largely un-photogenic, though it has flashy endpoints (Temple Bar at one end and Trafalgar Square at the other.) No one really takes pictures while along the Strand, and its not a tourist target because there is little access to its unadorned stone buildings. Yet, it is always a small triumph when the appearance of something is no measurement of its importance.

The Strand is one of the most significant literary and historical thoroughfares in London history. Today, at either end, there are the 2 forces that drive society: the money of the The City and the politics and government at Westminster. The middle passes through the Covent Garden theatre district, past the Adelpi and the art galleries of Somerset House. Geographically it places art at the center between power and money—a familiar idea in the study of art’s history.

While literary London landmarks include Bloomsbury, Westminster, and Shakespeare’s South Bank, it is unlikely any single neighborhood housed more writers for a longer period of time. Since the Strand was the merely home to some of our greatest writers, it’s missing the celebrity culture of Bloomsbury and the journalistic excitement of Fleet Street. The Strand is extraordinary because grounds the works of Boswell, Dickens, and Kipling in the context of daily life.

Boswell drank coffee and picked up prostitutes along the Strand, only to be scolded by Dr. Johnson, who piously prayed at its St. Clement Danes on the same road. Twenty-five years later, Dickens’ parents were married in the church of St. Mary le-Strand, and his father was eventually thrown into debtor’s prison. Young Dickens was forced into a shoe-polish factory, where, upon leaving each night, would scrounge around the Strand for cheap food like Oliver. Many years later, adult Dickens would return to the Strand and its side streets as a parliamentary reporter, as does David Copperfield, and Dickens lives in a flat near the one described as Pip’s residence in Great Expectations. Here, the Strand is proof that, for Dickens, biography, geography, and fiction are inextricable. These are other writers who lived and worked on or near the Strand: Samuel Pepys, Ben Johnson, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskill, Wilkie Collins, William Rosetti, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Graham Greene, P.G. Wodehouse, Thomas Hardy, J.M. Barrie—and consistently, where they lived appears in what they wrote.

In college, much of my literary critical training emphasized a very formalist method. The literature I studied was deliberately extracted from its context; the author and his life were irrelevant—even intrusive—and the society surrounding it, even more so. But it seems the height of hubris to elevate art above its society. To do this renders the reader and his experience more important that the collective experience that conceived the work. It diminishes literature’s value to restrict its meaning to immediate contemporary experience. Just as common, the historical discipline renders society more important than its art. But it’s in art, particularly literature, that the demographic statistics, power changes, and economic trends come to MEAN something. What good is an understanding of the past if we don’t understand fully its impact on the human experience by concentrating on its expression? Someone told me that history was the story of “humans being,” but literature is the story of humans living.

The Strand is the Highstreet that connects society and art and history and literature. It deserves a stroll; it deserves some coffee and writing to commune with its saints and tenents--even if there won't be postcard shots to show for it.

Introduction

I turn 26 tomorrow--hardly the most commemorated birthday--but the start of a new year nonetheless. In the name of newness, I have made a new place to put things.


I used to consider moments and things and observations worth archiving because they were all part of some brief and transient phase, e.g I am not in high school forever; I am not in Duluth forever; I am not in England forever; God, please don't keep me in Central Florida forever, etc. And to reconcile the constant change, I work to keep the best parts of each--maybe I can keep some of them here.


New phases are worth noting. At 26, I am beginning the first year in five where I will NOT be trying to move to England.


But which is the phase? Chasing London or staying put? And does 26 make me too old for phases?


At any rate, this begins the blogging phase.