Things I love about Palo Alto

Inspired by the blog of an impossibly-hip former tour client, and to ease my pain as I approach my (temporary) departure from Cambridge, I thought I'd make a list of things/places I love about my home town.

• The Stanford Theater.  I always think this should be on the tourist route in addition to the university campus -- except I don't want it cheapened.  I love that a theater that rarely shows any films made after the 1960s is a vital part of the community in the heart of Silicon Valley.

• The Peninsula Creamery.  Probably the same as any number of 1950s diners around the country (though it was founded in 1923!).  Still, it's an institution -- my dad even used to take his engineering textbooks and study here during college.  Mmm, extra-thick milkshakes. 

[Note for locals: apparently, the actual name is the Palo Alto Creamery, and it's no longer run by the Peninsula Creamery dairy company.  But no one knows that or cares.]

• You  never know who might secretly be a m(/b)illionaire or other impressive person.  When Steve Jobs gave my class's Stanford graduation speech, he wore an honorary gown...with shorts and sandals underneath.  This epitomizes what I'm saying.  If your everyday fashion tends toward the casual, it does not imply anything about your abilities or talents.  Actually, I'd say it's the same at Cambridge -- it's just that here we have a fair number of events for which you specifically go black tie.  [It's a great speech, by the way.  Read it here or watch it here.]

• The view from the Dish.  In the words of my alma mater's school hymn, Palo Alto lies "where the rolling foothills rise up toward mountains higher, where at eve the Coast Range lies in the sunset fire."  Take a little hike and the reward is incredible.

• San Francisco Symphony Chorus.  Okay, it's not in Palo Alto, but you're never going to be disappointed with these guys, especially (in my case) if they've gotten hold of some Russian music.  If flights of angels sing me to my rest, I'd like to request Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, please.  Failing that, I'd accept the SFSC performing the same duty.  And did you know that something like 70% of them are volunteers?  They are Grammy-winning pros and yet most don't get paid at all for giving up their time to be so good.  [Pop quiz: what's the literary reference in this bullet point?]

• University Church.  Tight-knit yet welcoming, supportive in everything, and incredibly active in making the world a better place in a hands-on way.

May Bumps 2011, Days 1 & 2

For those who need a little reminder of how bumps works, see my old post here, or the explanation by one of the boat clubs here.

Day 1
Our first day was absolutely epic and possibly the most pain I've ever experienced from exercising.  Thanks to the brother of one of our rowers, you can watch a video of one of the crucial moments here.  We come into view rounding the corner about 35 seconds in, wearing white t-shirts.  You can see the two boats in front of us bump and move aside, and we take a very wide course around the corner in order to avoid them.

We were something like 6 boat lengths behind the boat we now had to chase; we and everyone on the bank thought we were destined for a rowover (just finishing out the course).  But the coaches kept yelling at us to try for the overbump, telling us that we were now only 4 lengths behind, then two (for a long time), then 1.5...And right at the very end of a 2K course, we actually bumped them! I was in so much pain trying to breathe, it was not remotely funny.  We've all developed "rower's cough" -- which sounds like we've got tuberculosis or something.

Day 2

We came into today feeling fairly confident.  Thanks to moving up three places with our overbump, we were starting at #2 in our division.  It was a close one, though.  The boat behind us was inching closer to us as we inched up on our prey...We were actually overlapping them for quite a while, but at that point in the course, you have to physically touch to earn a bump, and they were taking evasive action.  Eventually, though, they hit a corner and had to turn, bringing themselves nicely into contact with our bow.

Then the hard part came.  Having reached the head of our division (yay!), we became the "sandwich boat" -- i.e., we were now also the bottom rung of the next division up.  We had a 45-minute break, and then we had to try again.  We came out swinging, but our coaches soon told us to back off and save our energy.  So we slowly finished out the course (no one chasing, since we were the bottom).  It was somewhat disappointing, because it means we have to do the same thing tomorrow -- and potentially the next day, too.  But on we go!

In the Stanford Band, we have a saying: "If every week were Big Game Week, we'd all be dead."  I think the same applies to Bumps.  But by golly, I want to win blades!

A whimsical journey

[Useless rambling about the title.  Skip ahead for info about my weekend trip.]
In my graduating class, in the Stanford band, there was a guy named Tom Hennessey.  For years, he proposed a field show that would tell the story of the black plague from the point of view of the rat, ending with him arriving in England and having tea with the Queen.  This show never got voted in because, well, no one thought it was that funny.  What was funny was Tom's persistence in presenting this show, inevitably with the loud proclamation, "IT'S A WHIMSICAL JOURNEY!"  It seems appropriate for the random-ass trip I took with my sister-ish-in-law...

I won't bore you with the details of all the transportation connections we messed up, but we always got where we were going, even if it meant sampling the local cider in a pub while waiting for a taxi (how rough).  Here's the short version.

STOP #1: Tintern Abbey (just inside Wales)
William Wordsworth wrote a famous poem "written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" after a visit in 1789.  It's one of my favorites -- go Google it and read.  The actual Abbey is remarkably well preserved considering it was founded in the 12th century.  And for an extra bonus, they were having morris dancers perform that day -- as far as I could tell, this means hopping around with bells on your legs and waving handkerchiefs.  We had a lovely couple hours in the sun between rain showers.

STOP #2: Clevedon (Somerset)

This little coastal town used to be a modest Victorian resort.  There's a restored pier from that period, and we even saw a day-cruise ship dock as we ate dinner on a pub balcony:

It was a gorgeous evening, as you can see.  That night, and all the next day, it rained without ceasing.  Nonetheless, we walked down to a little church for the real reason we'd come: the grave of Arthur Hallam.  Hallam was Tennyson's bosom friend from the time they met at Cambridge and was engaged to Tennyson's sister.  He died very suddenly of a stroke at age 22, which devastated the poet.  During the ensuing years, Tennyson wrote a bunch of poems and pieced them together into his masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H.  The plaque to Hallam is inside the big window on the right of this picture.  His actual grave is somewhere nearby, possibly under the floor.

The Danube to the Severn gave
   The darken'd heart that beat no more;
   They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;
   The salt sea-water passes by,
   And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hush'd nor moved along,
   And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
   When fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again
   Is vocal in its wooded walls;
   My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.

STOP #3: Chew Magna 

Never heard of Chew Magna?  You're not alone.  It's a one-horse town, but it holds something special for my sister-in-law's family, the Miners.  Their ancestor Thomas left Chew Magna in the 1600s to make his way to America.  When some Miners from America wanted to put up a plaque in the church in the 1970s, they discovered that the herald they'd been told they had by a shady genealogist in the 1700s was complete BS.  We wanted to see whether the plaque ever went up.  It did!  But without the heraldry.  I'll spare you that picture and leave you with me on the main street:

In short, it was a very quirky tour -- a whimsical journey, if you will.  It appeared that we were the only tourists in Clevedon and Chew Magna, and on one memorable occasion, we entered a pub and everyone turned and looked at us, perplexed.  That's how you know you've gotten off the beaten track!  But as long as there's cider in the pub, it's a good place to be.

As Easter term rushes toward its end...

A few things to update you on as the term starts winding down.

First, I submitted all the paperwork for my first-year registration!  The big thing was a writing sample, which I felt was ultimately less complete than I would have liked.  Still, it showcases what I'd like to write about for the next couple years.  Here's the funny thing, though: after I had printed out everything, including statements of what I've been doing and attending all year, I signed the cover form and suddenly found myself stumped by the following: "The title of my proposed dissertation is ___________."  My topic has changed a fair amount from my admissions proposal, and I genuinely haven't thought about what to call it.  So 15 minutes before this thing was due, I sat in the library staring at this little bit of white space, trying to come up with something clever.   I didn't.  Placeholder it is: Tennyson and the New Philology.

Now I wait for the department to contact me about an in-person chat with two faculty members who are not my supervisor.  But do you think I'm relaxing?  Not a bit of it!  For one thing, I've been working on a proofreading project for quite some time now, sorely neglecting it the past couple weeks.  For the sake of professionalism, I really have to finish it up pronto -- hence my return to the library.

Meanwhile, rowing has ramped up in preparation for the May Bumps next week.  It took nearly all term to settle on a crew for W2 (women's second boat), so now we're trying to come together as a unit quickly.  To be honest, I've found it a frustrating term for rowing, because it feels like I'm getting worse rather than better.  I don't think that's actually true, but my half of the boat (and me particularly) are certainly getting a lot more commentary from the coach and the cox.  And the more they call out in piercing tones that convey annoyance that we're doing something wrong, just as I was focusing on fixing the last thing, the angrier I get.  It's not pretty inside my head at those times.  Then today, for extra fun, I had so much trouble breathing during a sprint that I was actually worried about my health, and so was the coach, based on my facial expressions.  I've never in my entire life had asthma, so this was both frightening and embarrassing.  Here's hoping it was a fluke panic attack or something.

Looking ahead: my friend/sister-in-law's sister and I are taking a weekend trip to some off-the-beaten-track villages on the border of Wales.  Bumps follows, after which will be the gloriously booze-soaked, sleep-deprived experience that is May Week in Cambridge.  So I should have lots to report in the coming weeks!

What I've been doing

I always find it interesting when I sit down at a study desk to guess what the previous occupant is cramming for / researching, based on titles of the books stacked there.  As I put together my bibliography for the year's reading, it seems like a good way to show you what I've been doing all this time.  Keep in mind that many of these are articles or book chapters, not whole books, and a large chunk of them relate to a project I'm no longer doing.  Still, I'm pretty impressed with myself.

Anglo-Saxonism (aka what I'm not doing anymore)

‘J.M. Kemble and Sir Frederic Madden: “Conceit and Too Much Germanism”?’,

Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800

‘The Elstobs and the End of the Saxon Revival’

Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity

Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries

‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’

‘The Anglo-Saxon Grammars of George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob’

‘Antiquary to Academic: The Progress of Anglo-Saxon Scholarship’

‘The Elstobs, Scholars of Old English and Anglican Apologists’

‘The Rediscovery of Old English Poetry in the English Literary Tradition’

‘Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille: The Anglo-Saxons, Revolution and Gender in Women’s Plays of the 1790s’

Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century

‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes?: Alfred the Great and the Romantic National Epic’

‘Historical Novels to Teach Anglo-Saxonism’

‘The Anglo-Saxons: Fact and Fiction’

Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Medievalism

Reinventing King Arthur : The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture

A Dream of Order; the Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Culture and language politics

Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture : Discourse and Ideology

Philology

The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860

‘The Uses of Philology in Victorian England’

The Rise of English Studies; an Account of the Study of the English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School

The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology

‘Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik by English-Speaking Audiences’

Tennyson and His Circle

The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years

The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Élite Intellectual Secret Society

Guessing at Truth: The Life of Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855)

John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm; a Correspondence 1832-1852

‘Middlemarch and Julius Charles Hare’

The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life

Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart

Theological Essays (by F.D. Maurice)

Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (by R.C. Trench)

Tennyson’s Poetry

‘Tennyson’s “The Princess”: A Definition of Love’

‘The Argument of “The Ancient Sage”: Tennyson and the Christian Intellectual Tradition’

Tennyson’s Language

‘Soul and Spirit in “In Memoriam”’

‘The Anti-Feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s “The Princess”’

The Spirit of God in the Old Testament.

Language and Structure in Tennyson’s Poetry

‘“Flowering in a Lonely Word”: Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language’

Tennyson and the Reviewers; a Study of His Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics Upon His Poetry, 1827-1851

The Language of Tennyson’s In Memoriam

‘“Knowledge of Their Own Supremacy”: “Œnone” and the Standardization of Tennyson’s Diction’

‘Tennyson and the Nineteenth-Century Language Debate’

‘Tennyson and Persian Poetry’

On the straightaway

Well, the race is nearly over, and the finish line lies straight before me.  I have three more days in which to polish up my end-of-year essay and write some blurbs about what I've done so far and what I'll do next.  Meanwhile, the weather is warm and sunny, and I gave a tour to a delightful family this afternoon, during which I got to deviate from the standard route and take them to lunch at Trinity Hall.  I'm delighted to report that they seemed convinced that it's the best college -- yay!  :D

And we're not entirely without fun, even in exam term.  A couple weeks ago, the MCR had its Annual Dinner, which was 1920s themed, so everyone looked fantastic.  Thanks to a helpful video from YouTube and a lot of bobby pins, I managed to transform my long hair into the appearance of a wavy period bob (see photo).  We also got to have pre-dinner champagne in the fellows' garden behind the master's lodge -- quite swanky.  Incidentally, I've now worn three of my four bridesmaid dresses in Cambridge, and I'm sure the last one will make an appearance before the year is out.  I think this speaks to a) brides I have known having fairly good taste, and b) Cambridge providing lots of black-tie events.