Calling springtime...

I'm back in Cambridge, and while that fact alone is always pleasant -- especially during a week of rowing and playing cricket with few other commitments -- I am a bit sad.  Why?  Because I had this idea that spring had bloomed during my visit home and I would return to mown grass and sunny skies.  Instead, it's chilly and drizzly.  Blah.  I was supposed to learn to scull (row a one-person boat) this morning, but it was too windy.  Double blah.

At least the run-up to my return was good.  I got everything packed and drove down to Six Flags Magic Mountain, where a forecast of rain (and its being a Wednesday) had scared away all the roller coaster enthusiasts who usually clog the park.  Goliath is my personal favorite, and the line is usually an hour.  Here's how it looked last week.  I literally could have ridden it all day without getting in line.  I didn't, though.

The next day, with an early-morning start, I flew from Los Angeles to New York.  There were no problems except that I got to LAX too late to check my bag, thereby depriving friends of the California wine I wanted to bring them.  I spent my weekend in the Big Apple attending the NVSA conference, with a bonus of visiting with friends.  My paper went off well -- didn't get many questions, but people said they enjoyed it.  Someone told me that the public library had an exhibit of materials relating to the Shelleys (as in the poet Percy and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein).  So on my last afternoon, I made my way to this iconic building:

The exhibit was in a very modest room -- maybe 15 feet by 20 -- but I spent over an hour inside.  There wasn't too much that I wasn't familiar with, but it was exciting to have real handwritten things there.  In fact, most of why I took so long was that I took time to decipher the letters myself.  The really moving items were a lock of hair from the daughter of Mary's step-sister and Lord Byron (she died very young), and charred bits of Percy's skull that his friend took after the impromptu beach cremation (he had drowned).  Also the fact that Percy died at age 29, which is my age.  All the lifetime he ever had, I have covered.  If I were he, I'd be done now, which is spooky to consider.

Anyway, I'm now back and spending the week in sporting endeavors, which combine with the jet lag to make one tired Sarah.  Onward!

Spring break

I have a new appreciation for people who came from far away to study at Stanford and only had a week-long spring break to go home or take some kind of vacation.  I will have had three weeks by the time I leave California, and it has gone by so quickly that I do not feel prepared to start up another term yet.  Part of that is due to the fact that I had to spend a lot of time and mental energy on the process of finding a new roommate for my apartment (which worked out very well, I'm happy to report).  The upside of that whole process is that I've been motivated to do a lot of cleaning, organizing, and (moderate) purging.  This makes me feel very efficient and has the benefit of showing tangible progress: that surface was cluttered; now it's clear.

My other ongoing project has been writing a paper for a conference at Columbia, which will be a several-day stop on my way back to England.  The title is Victorian Philology and the Problem of “long familiar use” in the English Language.  My friend and fellow Victorianist's reaction to that title was, "Oooh.  I don't know what that means, but it sounds great!"  I'll take that.  :)  It's about Richard Chenevix Trench, the focus of one of my chapters.  Basically, he said that we should pay attention to the ordinary, everyday words we use.  If we do, we will discover vibrant metaphors and enlightening histories in single words.  In short:

As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dewdrop or in the mighty ocean,...so the spirit of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad...On every side we are beset with poetry.

Nicely said, I think.  During my first-year review, one of the reviewers rather unexpectedly asked me why I found philology interesting, personally.  I had focused on selling them on its importance in Victorian culture...  What I said was that I like the idea that we are all speaking compact metaphors all the time.  And trust me, teachers of Old English still love to explain what you're "really" saying when you use certain parts of the vocabulary.

That's my spring break in a nutshell.  For the moment, I'm playing tour guide to a Cambridge acquaintance who is visiting Stanford as a potential PhD student.  A bit strange mixing my contexts, but I'm proud that my hometown and university have done their usual job of impressing with their beauty.