Behind the clouds is the sun still shining

The title is a line from one of my favorite Longfellow poems, "The Rainy Day."  The poem is actually fairly dour, but with a touch of comfort in the end:

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
  Some days must be dark and dreary.

I've been thinking about this poem not because I'm having a terrible week but because it has actually rained a bit the past couple days, including during our rowing outing this morning.  I've never been on the water while there was so little light that it was hard to see exactly what everyone was doing in the weird blue dusky luminescence of a cloudy pre-dawn.

"But Sarah," you ask, "why on earth would you be out that early?"  Because, dear readers, I'm now rowing in the first boat.  Think of this as making the varsity team within the college.  Of course, it would be more of an accomplishment if it weren't for the fact that it's largely due to most of last year's first boat graduating.  Still, you have to take the opportunities that come along.  The schedule currently involves four early mornings in a row for training.  I enjoy getting my day going, and I'm more invigorated during most of it than I used to be, but by 9:30pm I'm ready for bed, which makes it hard to socialize...  I'm hoping my body will adjust so that I can do both.

Meanwhile, I haven't yet met with my supervisor, but every time we exchange emails she enquires whether I have more for her to read.  So I guess I'll try to put something else together, in addition to the items already sent.  I'm becoming a bit paranoid about what this means.  But worries will always be nipping at your heels, so I'm just plunging ahead.  Besides, the sun has now come out.  I shall celebrate by going to the library and writing about Julius Charles Hare's discussion of pronouns in Guesses at Truth.  That's a story for another time.  :)

Cambridge, 2012

Cambridge in the newly-arrived 2012 looks much as it did in 2011, and largely as it has for hundreds of years.  It's a wonderful thing about this place.

Christmas lights at the Boise botanical garden

I got back a few days ago.  I spent December mostly at home, with short trips to Boise for Christmas with my brother's family + our parents, and to Phoenix to see Stanford football break my heart yet again, this time at the Fiesta Bowl.  The time went far too quickly, but I managed to see some people, go to the SF Symphony's 100th anniversary gala, do some sewing, and bake the traditional Weaver (via Arnold) Christmas cookies with mom.

Since I got back, the weather has been unseasonably warm -- which helped ease the pain of rowing TWICE a day, EVERY day.  I could do without the second one to interrupt my afternoon, but the first part of the day has a nice rhythm to it: get up, go rowing, meet a couple friends for lunch, work together in the college library's toasty-warm reading room.  Then go row again.  Get dinner somewhere and try to stay awake long enough to do more work.  Give up and go to bed.

It's the kind of reasonable pace I wish could sustain itself during the term.  As it is, I'm trying to get all my ducks in a row so that I can start Lent term efficiently -- before it deteriorates, as it must and will.  Projects for this week have been:

1) Write up thoughts on the book I read over Christmas, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.
2) Prepare syllabus for my Old English student (I get her again this term and next -- fun times!)

View from the boathouse

Next week, I will have to meet with the supervisor and make plans for the rest of the year.  My current plan is to spend this term reading all of a guy named Richard Chenevix Trench.  He was a friend of Kemble's and Tennyson's, and he wrote stuff that's exactly what I need in order to draw the connection between Tennyson and philology.  But I suspect he will be less colorful than Kemble.  :)  Meanwhile, here is yesterday's glorious sunset, which followed a rather bleak morning.

Chapel Choir Carol

Here's an experiment to see if I can put up a song from one of the the Trinity Hall carol services.  Sadly, I goofed and didn't record the service where the choir sang lots of pretty anthems, but rather the one where the whole congregation sang along.  Still, you can hear some harmony in there.

"Letters and Memorials"

To the extent that I've done any work in the past few weeks, I've been collecting evidence of Tennyson's contact with two men he knew at Cambridge, and the general circulation of ideas among his Cambridge friends.  All that history, combined with being at such a longstanding institution like Cambridge, made me start thinking about certain continuities across the ages.  This is what C.S. Lewis called the Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart -- and he was (I think rightly) wary of reading literature with an eye only for what never changes about humanity.  Obviously, we're also products of the times in which we live -- but some things never change.  Everyone in the history of humanity has said something stupid or cruel, resented their parents, felt inadequate, fallen in love unrequitedly, etc., etc., etc.  I list the bad things because it really is comforting to realize that any issues I could ever possibly have are part of the wonderful mess of being alive, and they've all been had before.

Caveats: 1) Many people face serious problems like starvation and genocide, I don't want to class those as part of a 'wonderful' anything.
2) I realize that this means that nothing has changed in ages, in a way that some people find depressing.

The other thing that comes forward when reading Tennyson-related letters is the fact that people used to be able to control their legacies to a greater extent.  Tennyson's son collected lots of letters and recollections from the poet's friends, and he put them together into one of the authoritative sources of information about him.  He literally cut and pasted the material into a draft scrapbook.  Then he burned whatever didn't fit the narrative of a great Poet Laureate.  This is horrifying for us, but then again, Tennyson himself hated the celebrity worship that led people to strip his front-lawn tree bare because they wanted souvenirs.  Here's how one acquaintance explained it:

"He said...that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shakespeare but his writings; and that he thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's..."

I can see how, from his point of view, it's none of our business what he wrote to friends.  But it's sort of staggering how people could actually somewhat control what posterity would know about them.  These thoughts bubble to the surface almost every time I write in my own diary.  I'm not a famous anything, nor am I likely to be.  So who is the audience, the potential reader, of my emotional unloading?  Well, I primarily write for my own benefit -- to think through things and to remember details of day-to-day life years later. But by definition, writing is for transmitting ideas -- to whom?  I often imagine some future historian using my rather banal diaries as material for reconstructing life at Stanford/Cambridge in the early 21st century.  Then I wonder how amusing or annoying it will be for them to slog through the parts about boys or family or whatever bothers me from time to time.  Oh well, it's not my job to adapt to a person who may not exist.

My lecture on "Tennyson's Cambridge"

Last week, I gave one of the weekly McMenemy Seminars at Trinity Hall.  This is a chance for grad students to talk about their research to their peers.  I wanted to make sure it was engaging for the crowd, though -- and to make sure there was a crowd at all -- so I talked about the context of Tennyson and his friends at Cambridge.  Thanks to a borrowed digital recorder, I have the speech and have paired it with my slideshow.  Sorry it sounds so rushed -- I went a bit over time!  And maybe one day I'll get a better resolution video up, but the limitations of size are, well, limiting.

Conferencing and coming "home"

As you all know, I'm prone to signing myself up for "too many" activities.  It's usually possible to do them all, but the running around doing them often leaves little time or energy for studying.  This has never been truer than this term, during which I have done essentially no research, unless you count writing various conference papers.  Why?  Because of the following:

• Rowing
• Chapel choir
• Trinity Hall Boat Club co-women's lower boats' captain [scheduling novices]
• Supervising (teaching) a student on Old English
• Classes: Latin, Old English, Old English literature, Old English informal reading group
• Job(s): conference assistant, proofreading, soon to be library invigilating
• Writing conference papers

At least the last one might sort of produce material toward my PhD.  Meanwhile, I took a trip to the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) annual conference.  Although it was in Nashville, I first stopped to get my Disney World fix and then visited friends and my brother's family in Greensboro, NC.  My little nephew is turning into quite the little man; he grabs you by the finger and walks you all around the house, or up and down the street, on a mission to find anything that might remotely be called a "choo-choo" -- i.e. anything with an engine, a toy thereof, or any screen that will show him a video of such a thing.

The conference itself was fun (so many people to meet!), though I wish I'd had a chance to go out into Nashville proper.  As it was, my excursions were restricted to a reception in the Parthenon reconstruction, with this gaudy-awful Athena statue:

and a walk around autumnal Vanderbilt:

It was a good trip, but I was also glad to arrive back home in Cambridge.

Drowning in email & admin

Well, this is a less romantic post than many, for the same reason that it is rather delayed; I've simply been drowning in the amount of email and organization I have to handle every day.  Because the new year has started!  I'm officially a second-year PhD student, no longer probationary.

So far academically, I've been attending classes on Latin, Old English, and Old English literature.  The latter two are especially motivated by the fact that I've gotten my first opportunity to supervise (teach) an undergraduate!  Supervision can be hard to acquire here as teaching is arranged through each college separately, and you often have to know someone/leverage your supervisor's networking.  However, there aren't many people who are able to teach Old English within the English faculty.  Most serious scholars of that stuff are over in the ASNC department (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic).  Win for me. :D  I've met with my student a couple times, and she's delightful.  I worry that I don't know all the minutiae of the language or vocabulary, but the exam for which I'm prepping her is more focused on the literary angle, so I just keep telling myself that I know how to do that.  Plus, having asked a few undergrads about good supervision techniques, I gather that I'm doing better than some...

I'm also co-captain of the novice rowers, which involves a fair amount of scheduling and such.  Oh, and acting as 'external ents' [entertainments] officer for the MCR.  You can see why my inbox has been clogged for a couple weeks.

Meanwhile, I have one week in which to get my paper in shape for the annual NAVSA conference (North American Victorian Studies Association).  It's a big-ass conference, and I really want to do well at it; so of course I proposed to talk about a confusing, slippery poem that will easily turn you around until you can't sort out what your argument is.  Fun times.  :-/  But it will come together somehow or other.

For wading through all that, how about a picture?  Here's the view from my bedroom window.  Tree!