Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

The other day, in a lecture on modernist poetry, the lecturer was talking about the sentiments prior to the first world war. Back then it was generally thought that europe was advanced enough to be free of war. Europeans actually thought that they were enlightened enough so that they would never engage each other in war again. Then, of course, the first world war happened and shattered everyone's idealism, world war two finished it off in an even different way.. but anyway, we were discussing the effects of these changes on poetic style and stuff... but then my mind started to wander away from what the lecturer was saying and I realized "we are in the same mentality today!" Granted it is a bit different, but we are stuck in this sense of human triumph and idealism. 9-11 did a bit to slap the world awake, but we are still blind to our own lack of control and chaos. Sure, we have realized that no one is immune to the attacks of terror, but we have made a critical world view...

I am sitting in my room. Its late. Its dark outside, and odds are it is wet there too. I cant be sure about the moisture since I cant be bothered to open my curtains. I must admit that today was a pretty well wasted day. I spent quite a few hours watching many episodes from the first season of Lost that I rented on a whim. I am addicted and cannot wait to get the rest of the season, but I will wait until after my tutorials on Thursday. If I get them sooner then the rest of my week will be wasted. In truth, it wasn't my plan to spend the day like that. This morning I got up to do some errands. The light outside was doing that weird thing that it does here when a low fog fills the air but the sun still shines brightly above it. The sun is diffused through the fog and shines into places usually filled with shadows and makes the streets look like a movie set, unnaturally lit with an omnidirectional light source. I left the house to go to Tesco's (the main supermarket around here) ...

I just want to say that Shakespeare kicks so much butt.

*OK, ok... after a post that was gripped by senioritis despair coupled with a healthy dash of mk angst I have regained my senses a bit and have calmed back down to a more rational state of befuddlement as I examine my many options. But options are a good thing. I just have to remember that and realize that I may have gotten a bit carried away in my assesment of my current state of affairs.* Things I Love About England >A list -The way two veiled muslim women will walk by chatting in an aristocratic, RP accented, perfect, standard, queens english. -The way the porter at the Bodleian will call me "sir" (Me: awful weather outside today isnt it? Porter: Indeed it is, Sir) -Cornish Pasties (portable meat pies... much like empanadas only hot and filled with many more goodies. -Cask Ales. They dont have cheap spigots or pressurized kegs. They have to be hand pumped out of a cask. -The fact that people like Queen and Bowie here. -The way religion is not a hot topic or political b...

This past week I have realized an important fact: I am graduating in June. It is one of those things that I have known but never fully processed until recently. I will be done with college (finally) and will be the proud owner of a fairly useless English degree. So what to do next... that is the real question. One side of me wants nothing more than to return to Spain, for I think that I could easily settle down back into the mode of living there quite easily. Unfortunately, there is nothing for me to do there at this point. I could get my TESL or CELTA certification and teach English to Spaniards, but I do not really want to do that for the rest of my life (neither could I live off that). There are a couple international high schools in Madrid, but they are quite elite and hard to get a job in. Most require at least a masters and a couple of years of prior experience. Fortunately I would like to get a masters anyway, so I will do that. I am taking a year off though because I am not rea...

I have neglected my blogs over Christmas I admit it. I will appease the blog gods by sacrificing these newly developed Ireland pictures: This was off the coast of Kerry. A beautiful sight, where the sunlight would break through the fast moving, low clouds and create brilliant pools of light on the water. Those very clouds were ravenous as they came off the sea and they ate every mountaintop that happened to be in their way. This was Killarney at Christmas time, like the song. Guinness factory. Pretty. I thought so at least. Yours truly with Killarney National Park behind me. Stained glass. Not much more to say about it. A gnarly gnarled tree.

I had arrived in Ireland an had spent and hour finding my way into Dublin. It was dark out and the streets were wet. Eire is generally always wet. But it made the streets pretty when the orange lamplight reflected off the brick and concrete. I followed my friend's instructions to get to her house. "Take the bus from the airport to O'Connell street and switch to the 121 and go to Ardee street." I had followed the instructions successfully and was then waiting alone on some empty back street. I waited 15 minutes. She didn't show up. Was I supposed to call her? I think so. Loaded down with my backpack, I walked up and down the street, looking down alleyways trying to find a public phone. It was beginning to look impossible, but I kept walking. I saw some small children playing outside with some toy guns and an abandoned mattress. Kids only play in the dark if the neighborhood is either a very safe one or or if they havent seen their parents in a couple of weeks. The ...

I was standing in line at the supermarket today, buying a prepackaged sandwich and a bottle of tonic water. The Indian cashier deftly swiped people's items under the bar scanner and counted out the change for the customers. "Do you have a Tesco's membership card" he would ask, in a voice that was dutiful but that had tinges of tiredness. I didn't have a card. I had one for the local supermarkets in Boston, but they actually worked to make things cheaper. The ones here just give you coupons. But somewhere between his question and me reaching for my wallet it hit me. I couldn't remember then name of the supermaket in Beverly that I always used to go to. I stood there, staring in space at the horror of the realization that I could not remember a place that I had interacted with for 3 years. The same place that was filled with memories of times that I had gone there with friends, preparing for parties or meals or just having conversations with apartment mates as w...

This past week has been one of the most academically intense ones I have had in a long time. In actuality it has been the most intense since the first week at Oxford. The first week was actually fairly easy going compared to the rest of the semester, for every week after the first had more work. My usual workload consisted of 3 research papers every 2 weeks. I do not use the term 'research paper' lightly here. These are not the typical 4 page projects that are meant to synthesize a book or a couple of articles. These are the kind of papers that you spend all all week in the library, from opening time to closing time, trying your best to read through the 800 pages of obscure scholarly journals, historical backgrounds, commentaries and of course the primary texts per paper. A lot of it is extremely slow and thick reading, the kind that I will read a couple of pages of and suddenly realize that I have no idea what the author is talking about (curse you Terry Eagleton!!). Of course...

I just got an email about how animal rights activists are protesting in Oxford and how we should avoid the area where they will be protesting because it is common for the protests to end up in violent clashes with the police. What caught my attention was that our tutor mentioned the fact that the riot police use a lot of mounted cops and K9 units. I didn't think much of it because both security measures are common at riots or protests, but then I read that they use a greater amount of them than normal because the animal rights protesters will not fight against or harm the horses or dogs or any other animals that are used against them. I my mind I could picture a protester throwing Molotov cocktails and punching a cop and then getting jumped by a German Shepard. Trying to both run away and confront the dog with words, the protester calls out desperately to the animal as he is pulled down by another k9 eager to get a piece. Curled up in a ball he calls out to the dogs that he is thei...

Well, this year thanksgiving was not spent with a family of any sort. While friday some of us american students made some food, this year, the last thursday of november was spent turkeyless. I was resigned to spend the evening alone, thankless, and in the library researching classical rhetoric or some other nonsense when my friend Kate called and said that it wasnt right to be cooped up, without food or drink or merryment of any sort on thanksgiving night. Looking around me at the pasty faced nerds that were with me in the library at 9 PM, I realized that indeed I needed to get out of that scurvy place. So I packed up my books and headed outdoors, where the blistering british wind buffetted my body like the abusive parent I never had. After introducing the wind to the social services that was my scarf I headed over to the Kings Arms pub to meet up with Kate. There are quite a few Kings Arms pubs in England. No, they are not franchised, they all just have the same name. The name comes f...

The new Sigur Ros draws mixed feelings from me. In many ways it is like Woody Allen's later movies, they are still better than 99% of what Hollywood spits out, but compared to some of his older ones they just don't cut it. Yet perhaps that is a bit harsh. This is a very good CD. Very good. Sigur Ros does what it does best by capturing pieces of rising and falling emotion, minimalistic sounds and epic, orchestral swells. Otherworldly vocals move over fantastic musical arrangements.... But something is missing. Each track in itself is complete and whole, perfect. Yet the album as a whole does not have that same flow as () or Agaetis Byjurn . The latter of the two previous albums creates an intangible and indescribable mood, a flow, a musical emotion that starts of whimsically and progresses with bombastic enthusiasm only to finally settle down into a drowsy sleep, protesting out of principle yet not putting up a fight as it smiles into its finish. () is another kind of mood alt...

So I'm sitting in the library, when suddenly I think my time has come. The smell of burning sulfur fills the air, smoke obscures my senses and I am sure that ye ole devil is going to appear at any moment to eat my soul. But he didn't. I just sat there, confused and sniffing smoke. "From whence cometh this foul stench?" I wondered to myself (most of my reflexive questions are in archaic English). That is when I stopped looking around me and simply looked down at the desk where I was sitting. Smoke sizzled up from the back part of my computer. "This looketh like trouble, methinks." Turning the computer around I was relieved to find that it was not the computer itself, but the power cord. The cord in question has seen some abuse in its lifetime, and this older design has been known to break easily. So I unplugged the infernal cable and the hellfire stopped. But now I am left with a powerless computer. Alas, though it is off for now (I write from the library one...

A couple of nights ago I was dressed up in my tuxedo, waiting outside of Magdalene College's Theatre, in the dark, in the cold. I was in a line, yet I was not waiting for tickets or to get to my seat, I was waiting for my queue to walk in behind the rest of my jazz group. Yes, we had what I consider our first real concert (after a small gig for charity and a set we sang for a college banquet). We sang a total of 9 songs, mostly jazz standards and a couple jazzed up popular songs, which considering that we had only first met each other 4-5 weeks ago... is not half bad. Our show was only half good however, for we messed up bits and pieces and we were not tight. That was a shame really, because, as tends to happen in these things, we had sounded pretty good in various different rehearsals. But I know that time heals all wounds, and when that time goes towards extra practicing it heals the musical gashes that we have at this particular moment. It was still fun though. I am getting to ...

In her book, Women, Men and Language, Jennifer Coates points out that men and women have two different kinds of conversational styles. Women speak in a collaborative style while men speak in an adversarial one. This means that the speaker in a collaborative conversation is much more likely to switch back and forth in turns, with many more interruptions and intercalated comments delivered by various different members of the group. The “rule of one person-at-a-time does not apply,” it is a “jam session” of words where “the speakers co-construct utterances” and “that the speakers talk at the same time.” Men, on the other hand adhere to a adversarial method of speaking. This takes different shapes, such as the monologue and the verbal sparring. In the first method, one person holds the floor about a subject as if he had some expertise on the subject while others listen. These monologues are often brought on by direct questions seeking information, a kind of questioning that women tend to s...

I have recently had a strange idea. Do you know the movie Groundhog Day? In it, Bill Murray finds himself trapped in one recurring day, doomed to repeat the same day every morning when he wakes up until he gets it right. The other day I imagined that the same sort of thing happened to me, only in a different way. I wondered what it would be like if instead of a day I had to repeat my gordon years over again. 3 consecutive years played over and over again. What would I do differently, what risks would I take knowing that I could start over again once they were up or I were dead? I must say that I didnt really play it out as if it were a permanent thing or even such a lasting event as the one Bill Murray had to endure. Just give me a couple chances, 2 or 3 times, to go through Gordon again and try different things. Knowing what I know now, who would I not bother investing my time into and who would I try to get to know much earlier than I actually did? I mean, everyone has had people in ...

Since I've been here I've tried to take advantage of my environment as much as possible. And I mean this in the non academic way. During my free time I really do all the stereotypical things that people do here. I dont know if I am doing them consciously or not either. I dont know if it is because they are things I would normally do or because I am merely here. There are some that I would do normally anyway, such as going to Pubs. I am amazed that more of the Gordonites here do not do it. Its not that they dont drink, there is one group that has wine with their meals, other people have a beer or something on poker nights, and of course you have your binge drinkers. But few go to the pubs. I understand that if you are a binge drinker looking to get smashed then the pub method isn't a financially feasible way of doing so. At first I thought that if you didnt like beer then you probably wouldnt go to pubs, but all the girls that do go with me usually get a glass of wine. So ...

This morning I woke up pretty impressed with myself. You see, last night I invented great things, in my dreams that is. It is one of those things that people rarely think of but that nonetheless is true: You are the one that comes up with everything you dream. So just think back upon your craziest, most original and outlandish dream and realize that it was your imagination that came up with the idea. Don't you feel sort of proud of yourself? The reason I was impressed with myself is that I invented a kind of food in my dream and then when I woke up I really wanted it. In my dream I went to the supermarket to get things for my flight and I was looking at the teddy grahams and I saw that they had a new kind. It was called "caramel snicker-doodle." In my dream I was surprised because I had never seen that kind before but was instantly interested (obviously, I mean, I came up with it!). But when I woke up I realized that it would be a very tasty flavor for teddy grahams that ...

I spent quite a while reading in the library today. Or so I would like to tell myself. I have had a love/hate relationship with the libraries here. The famous Bodleian library is off limits to the Gordon students during most of the day because of our affiliate student status. Our hours begin around dinnertime. During the past couple of weeks, many of us occupied our days in the Faculty Libraries (faculty being the British term for Department). I technically did not have access to it either, but they did not have anyone checking the doors, and I did not see anything saying I could not just go in and read without trying to check books out. Then the directors of the program found out and decided to damn our souls to the everlasting fires of hell for our unforgivable sin of not respecting bureaucracy. Today they told us that they had not realized that the rules had changed, and that "oh wait," we could indeed use those libraries as reference libraries. Go figure. So anyway, toda...

Life has the sweetest ironies ever.