Roots and fruits

The past two weeks in Oxford my life has been yo-yoing between an uneasy kind of idleness and a merry kind of chaos. Last Thursday, I finished my two seminars (well, with the exception of a paper for Dr. Eberle's class, which I assure you is percolating in the back of my mind at this very moment), and they ended so abruptly that I'm just starting to grasp that they're over. Strenuous as it was to write two papers every week and to keep my mind engaged for four hours of classes some days, I enjoyed walking down to the dining room for a good discussion on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The long room seems very empty and purposeless now; good forbid it actually be used for eating, but I think I'm going to need to host a curry night or something there to get some of the good minds together again.

As a not completely digressive side note, I love getting papers back. As many critiques as Dr. Southcombe would scratch in the margins of my historiography papers, I eventually got the A-'s and a note that I have shown much growth in my literary/historical analysis. Dr. Eberle said some even nicer things about my close reading in my last paper for her (which shouldn't make me too complacent, because I'm anxious that my longer comparative paper should look just as good). I can, and do, read nice comments about my work over and over and still feel like I want to keep getting better.

Tutorials have started this week, and I'm so thankful that both of my seminar professors pushed me to speak up more in class. On Monday afternoons, I have class in Hertford College (pronounced "Hartford", not "Hurtford" or "Hareton" ;) ), one of places of learning so important that they made the Bridge of Sighs between it and the History Faculty library so that even bad weather would not disconnect scholars from its knowledge. (P.S. I saw students walking across the bridge the other day! Without any long robes on to validate their crossing! I thought only dons were allowed to use it! I figure I need to break out some of my Cannes-style quick walking and important airs so that I can use the bridge, too.) It's Intro to Shakespeare, and it's just me and Lindsay and Dr. Emma Smith, a young don with boyish hair and a tendency to say "bloody" a lot. She told us straight off that her teaching style is meant to help us discuss our opinions and respond to each other with confidence (definitely not the "bad cop" style she pinned on Keble's beloved Dr. Ian Archer), and she meant it--she will wait until pauses are unbearably uncomfortable before she will step in to suggest another passage or theme we should consider, and we rarely hear what she thinks about the plays. But I really like it, because it's giving me room to think of and say everything I want to about the topics we discuss (instead of working up the nerve to suggest something only for the professor to lecture for 10 minutes and steer the conversation in the completely opposite direction), and Lindsay and I are having a lot of fun turning the play inside and out and asking each other questions while Emma looks amusedly on.

The next morning is history--Britain in the Age of Revolution--with Dr. Lawrence Goldman, a meeting which I am no longer dreading like I did this particularly calamitous Tuesday morning. I swear, the morning I am feeling my most inadequate, after stressing over and structuring and restructuring a history paper I wasn't sure how to write, and then learning that I was the only student of three to write a paper (so I was forced to read and test the waters, like it or not), the internet in the UGA house goes down with 30 minutes for me to print my paper and get off to class. In the rain. With help from Sara's flash drive I eventually stuffed the paper into my bag, wrapped it in a shopping bag, and made the huge mistake of biking in the rain. I dragged myself into Dr. Goldman's office carrying at least 10 pounds of water in my soaked jeans and feeling like I had inhaled the same amount into my sloshing, constricted lungs. But I read my paper with the confidence I could muster, and he seemed to like it! He's the type of teacher who will bring attention to all of the good things a student does in a paper and will use them to lead into the topics that might have been overlooked, instead of saying "You're such an idiot! Why didn't you mention the Protestant nonconformists?!" I felt good talking a lot in class (I even remembered a population statistic, totally out of the norm for an English major who has tried to forget her numbers!), and I'm glad I got the chance to make a good first impression, even if I didn't exactly want it at the time.

Finishing my tutorials early in the week is nice, since I can indulge my lazy streak like I did with my screening of Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth yesterday afternoon and still have the next four days to get back on track. I wanted to start today with a bit more structure, so I went to a lecture at the St. Cross buildings like any other Oxford student. Lectures are required for most Oxford kids, who take "papers" on a particular author or literary movement where they will have a tutorial in their college and then supplementary lectures by the best critics in the University. Any kids taking a paper (or kids who sweet talk the lecturers into letting them in "for fun," like me ;) ) can get into the lectures, and the Jane Austen lecture with Dr. Fiona Stafford this morning was packed. A variety of plain/sporty girls, artsy girls with wavy bobs and scarves and leggings, popular girls with fancy boots and lots of makeup, and even five guys filled up all the seats and most of the floor in room 10, and I did my best to look like one of the privileged few among them that deserved a seat at the table. Dr. Stafford talked really fast and fit a week's worth of food for thought about Austen's popularity among her audiences into the one hour she gets with the generally independent readers--she even employed a Jane Austen action figure, to great effect. I really liked the lecture and will be sure to be there even earlier next week.

Other than lectures I can organize my day around library trips (I always snag the best of the reading lists, reserving books at the lower reading room in the Camera or checking out a few gems from the Keble library before I can get shushed for some daft reason by the omnipresent shushing bitch), or coffee shop trips (Caffe Nero makes the best double-shot hazelnut cappucinos! They taste like magic!), or grocery store trips (crumpets disappear so quickly, but I finally got there in time to get *the last* package of Warburton's). I might go to London some days--last weekend we made the pilgrimage to St. Paul's Cathedral that is documented (with some hilarious captions, I might add) on my Picasa page (picasaweb.google.com/elmorelt), and I have five round-trips left on my bus pass to get me to some similarly picturesque park tours or museum exhibits or the London Film Festival screenings that are so expensive that I can only sit outside and drool over...

I laugh a lot here. My friends are a hilarious sort that are always joking about my labeled food in the kitchen, or their silly posts on the message boards, or our mutual favorite British TV show, Coupling. Sometimes I'll just be by myself, though, and something will amuse me on my morning bike rides, or on a walk through the UGA house, and I'll laugh out loud. With so many good people and good thoughts here, it's very easy to be happy--I'm becoming more conscious, and less self-conscious, of it.