Summer Research

Cambridge friends might be under the impression that I'm whiling away the lazy summer days in Californian sunshine, feasting on succulent strawberries as I lounge in the garden.  Well, there is sunshine, but cold breezes have temporarily banished my shorts.  And I am feasting on the finest berries that Whole Foods can provide (mostly blackberries) -- but my summer is hardly lazy.

This is because I (perhaps foolishly) submitted a proposal for a conference paper on a person I didn't know much about.  It was accepted -- hurray!  But now I have to learn all about this guy, mostly reading everything he ever wrote.  I'm actually enjoying it a great deal, but time is of the essence in digesting a lot of material so that I can form some kind of argument or summary.

Meet John Mitchell Kemble.

  

He was part of the same secret society as Tennyson at Trinity College, Cambridge.  He's considered the first modern scholar of Old English, and he did a lot to bring good practices to translation and interpretation.  (First scholarly translation of Beowulf, and only the second one ever in England!)  He also didn't mince words when he thought other scholars had blundered.  This makes for some moments of pretty amusing reading.  For example:

"I beg once and for all to say that Norse forms have nothing whatever to do with Anglo-Saxon inscriptions.  It was by trusting to Norse forms that Thorkelin misread every line and mistranslated nearly every word of Beowulf.  It is by trusting to Norse forms that Dr. Repp has plunged himself into his ludicrous Christ-basin, and that Finn Magnusen has recorded his own rashness throughout 105 of the most adventurous pages I ever remember to have read."

Other times, he's pretty dry.  The other day I scrolled through a chapter that meticulously compared sources to figure out how big an Anglo-Saxon acre was compared to a modern one.  Zzzzzz...

Anyway, I'm going to talk about him at a conference on how people have looked back at the Middle Ages for their own purposes.  I expected Kemble to be much more nationalistic, but he's kind of all over the map.  He wants to get his fellow Englishmen interested in their own national treasures and emulate the good parts of the past, but here's what he thinks of the Anglo-Saxons' sense of humor:

They were an extremely dull, calm, sober, common-sense people, and as for satire, God help them! they had not an atom.

So I continue reading, and eventually I'll put something together to talk about.  It might just be a list of how he was a nexus of conflicting interpretations of medieval England.  But I'll bet that very few in the audience will know as much as I do already about Kemble, so I'm not too nervous.  But maybe that's just his arrogance rubbing off on me... :)

All good things must come to a (temporary) end

Well, I'm back home again after two last weeks of insanity and fun and sad goodbyes.  Since I left you hanging with May Bumps, I'll finish that story.  First, a picture of us with our first-day victory greenery:

The last two days of bumps, we had to row over twice a day, first to stay at the head of our division, then to try to claw our way into the next-higher division (unsuccessfully).  It was exhausting and fairly frustrating to keep falling short, especially since we thought that if we had been fresh, we could have caught that upper division...  In any case, the end result was a total of moving up four spaces (3 the first day, 1 the second) and never getting bumped by anyone else.  This makes you eligible for "discretionary blades."  But wait, what are blades, you ask?

Blades are the coveted award for bumps -- but they're often a matter of luck as well as skill, so they're hard to win.  Physically, it means you get an oar painted with the names of the crew members, like this.  To win them unequivocally, you have to have gone up at least four spots and have bumped at every opportunity (i.e., at least once a day).  However, if you go up four and never get bumped, your boat club captain can choose to award you blades.  And ours did!  What a very Cantabrigian thing I will have on my wall forever and ever!  :D  Here's a celebratory picture with the flag, which represents winning blades.

After bumps, all the rowers celebrated with Boat Club Dinner, a convivial (read: drunken) event, as always.  Then after a short night's sleep, I headed into my first Suicide Sunday.  It's a day that consists of a series of garden parties -- men in blazers whose colors indicate the sports they play, women in summer dresses, everyone drinking bellinis and other cocktails.  Why is it called "Suicide Sunday"?  I've heard two theories: 1) It's so booze-soaked that you wreck yourself; 2) It's your last chance to kill yourself before exam results come out.  Cheery, huh?  In point of fact, it's fairly civilized: a chance to relax on the grass in the sun.

The week following was May Week, during which people attend various college balls.  The only actual balls I attended were Queens' May Ball and Trinity Hall June Event (same idea but more casual and doesn't last all night).  However, the week filled up with many other activities, as well.  And then it was time for people to start dribbling away, some for good.  It seemed like nearly every day there were sorrowful leave-takings.  Eventually, I managed to scrape together some boxes in which to store my things and bid farewell (temporarily) to Cambridge myself.  I'm so grateful for the amazing year I had, and I look forward to another great one.  Meanwhile, time to do some research for my first "real" conference talk, first thing in September...