Due to Dr. Snyder's unforeseen illness, our morning Tolkien lecture has been rescheduled for tomorrow morning: Tuesday. We therefore opted to sleep in...er, used the valuable morning hours to further our studies. Right.
11:15am - After breakfast I walked along the canal path to pay a visit to Venneit Close. Along the way I passed many Germans out for a walk or cycling. German-speaking students and tourists seem to comprise a large segment of the Jericho neighborhood. The flies along the canal seem to be getting worse.
11:30 - Arrived at Venneit Close and conferred with Bailey about possible afternoon plans. A few minutes later, we received a distress call from Hannah who had lost her way along the canal. This would prove to be the first of many such instances, as we will soon see.
11:45am - Hannah was quickly located in the most fly-ridden stretch of the canal. To her credit, she had gone exploring and simply taken a wrong turn a fork in the towpath. I walked her back to Venneit Close and then set out for Christ Church to continue my studies. Yes continue, I like that.
12:15pm - Arrived at Tom Quad, Christ Church where I introduced myself to Ron the Porter. Charming man with a bowler hat, very helpful. The porters Dropped by Junior Commons Room (JCR) to eat my bagged lunch, a prepackaged Tandoori Chicken sandwich and salt and vinegar crisps, and to read for Dr. Snyder's seminar.
The material consisted of short early biographies of C.S. Lewis and his friend and fellow Inkling names Charles Williams, a novelist and fascinating Christian mystic figure, as well as selections of Williams' beautiful but at-times-impenetrable Arthurian poetry. With his mystical references, regular shifting of time and location, and wondrous imagery, Williams in some ways prefigures the literary genre of magical realism, but always with a Christian undertone, sometimes overt though oftentimes quite murky. It's very interesting stuff which I find far more appealing than anything I have yet read by C.S. Lewis.
The JCR remained mostly empty, but over the next two hours, I watched a variety of students, mostly finalists in dress clothing for their examinations, pass through, either to pick up a newspaper or to grab a snack.
Over lunch I read the student newspaper Cherwell ("Independent since 1920"). Top stories for the week included one college's dispute over the amount of funding for JCR garden party to commemorate the Queen's Jubilee. Once side argued that it was an important national occasion, while the other claimed that funding such a exclusive party promoted class privilege and was nothing more than a commemoration of "Elizabeth Windsor's knack for staying alive."
Meanwhile, the president of the university's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, and Queer Society (LGBTQsoc) apparently felt there were one too many letters in that acronym and was forced to suspend his reelection campaign after making some ridiculously disparaging remarks about transsexuals (as Facebook status updates, naturally. The classiest way to do that sort of thing).
In other news, the world-renown political figure and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar/Burma is scheduled to receive her long-delayed honorary public law degree from the University (as well as deliver her Nobel prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway) during her international tour in June. She was famously under house arrest by the Burmese military junta for most of the years between 1989 and 2010.
Last but not least, the Oxford women's track team is doing very well.
3:30 - Returned to WISC offices on George Street to meet WISC's group of Christ Church students and returned with them to the college.
4:45pm - As a further part of our orientation, we met with Christ Church senior tutor David Maw (Music Faculty) who served us tea and biscuits (i.e. cookies) and questioned us about our priorities and goals for our time in Oxford. We had a very pleasant visit. He offered suggestions for things to do around Christ Church and the city as well as discussed recent developments in the music faculty.
A few students were arriving from tutorials, and the don's already crowded rooms were stretched even further over the course of the session. Through it all, Mr. Maw was a very accommodating host. Piles of books were moved and extra mugs brought down from some hidden cabinet. "Oh, another? Right, I'll just put some more tea on then."
6:00 - Those of us who had booked in for dinner made our way dining hall and visited one of two bars within the college grounds, The Buttery, to purchase a bottle of wine to go with dinner. Most colleges have at least one bar and heavily subsidize them, allowing students to purchase cheap drinks. To borrow the words of a certain Tupelo, MS liquor store with terrible radio ads, "It's not cheap wine, it's GOOD wine that's cheap!" Bailey and I were inclined to agreed.
6:20pm - Informal Dinner in dining hall (I.e. the Great Hall from Harry Potter). Despite this being the informal dinner seating, the surroundings and the table service grant a certain lofty air to the proceedings. Portraits of the founder King Henry VIII, well-known alumni like the philosopher John Locke, and several notable nobles lined the walls behind us. Dinner was a three course meal: rich potato soup, a baked salmon pasty with green salad and sweet carrots, and tiramisu. We dined with several British students caught up in a discussion of whom they were currently Facebook-stalking (go figure) as well as an American PhD candidate who was quite willing to join in with some fellow countrymen. The ladies tried to flirt with him, while certain guys in our party tried to ascertain his positions on gun control and philosophical questions. I'll only say that, in all cases, Bailey and I were glad for our forethought concerning our previous purchase. Formal dinner with gowns and a reading of Latin and Greek graces begins at 7:20, meaning we were kicked out of the hall around 6:45. We definitely need to attend formal dinner sometime in the future, if only to be allowed to linger in such a place!
After dinner we retired to the Venneit Close apartments to read and prepare for the morning's Tolkien lecture with Dr. Snyder.
No comments:
Post a Comment