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.

Sports and philosophy go hand in hand

I've always found sound bites from athletes rather trite, but I found last week that you seriously do get a lot of life lessons out of doing sports.  I have to admit, part of me feels like philosophy is just the refuge of the disappointed, at least in athletic endeavors.  But there's also a lot to be proud of from last week's efforts.

In terms of the bumps results, we did almost as badly as you can do: we got bumped every day, earning the ignominious award of "spoons" (the opposite of blades).  However, I was rowing in the first boat, of which I'm very proud.  On at least one day, I felt I found depths of shoving power that I had never exerted before, and I'm very proud of that.

Our coach, Martin (see photo), is quite a character, and people tend to love him or hate him.  This year marks 40 years of his being the Trinity Hall boatman, making him the longest-serving one on the Cam and a legend.  Though he has his faults (a snap temper and unpredictability, for example), I so admire that he does exactly what he loves to do and has mentored so many students.  Anyway, he has a knack for putting things hilariously and yet making a real point with them.  Here's how he compared the pain of racing to life:

Think about how you come into this world.  Your mother shoves you out, and the first thing that happens to you, someone slaps you.  And you start thinking, "I'm not sure I want to be here."  But you [just have to] think, "Hey ho, that's life," and you get on with it.

The day after bumps was (were?) over, we caught an early-morning train to London and the Tube across town, where we found the trailer that had hauled our boat to the bank of the Thames.  We reassembled it and waded in...because we were participating in WeHoRR (Women's Head of the River Race).

I found it a great pick-me-up after the frustration of bumps.  For one thing, the Thames is WIDE!  The Cam is incredibly narrow -- which is why we have bumps instead of proper races in the first place.  For another thing, when we passed under Hammersmith bridge, it was choked with people watching, and the city was just generally a very different surrounding.

And finally, it was a huge ego boost to me to know that I could row 7.5 kilometers, which I'm not sure I would have believed without doing it.  I've gotten so much better this year both in terms of skill and fitness.  When I was having lunch with a friend from uni a couple weeks ago, she said, "You're such a jock [type]" -- but I never actually was in terms of physical effort.  It feels great to be in the best shape of my life.  So once again, we return to philosophy: it's really never too late to kick yourself into gear.

Lent bumps approaches

Maybe it's wrong for me to admit this, but I'm terrified of racing.  I've always found this about the few sports I've played: I enjoy training, but the actual competitions make me all kinds of nervous.  Well, for better or for worse, lent bumps has come 'round again: they start tomorrow.  It has been a hot-and-cold term in the women's first boat; the crew has been in flux for much of it, and while some outings were great, others seemed to forecast an embarrassing performance.

Fortunately, we had a good little practice today drilling the start.  But as our coach has said repeatedly, bumps is designed to freak you out: a cannon goes off with four minutes to go, then one minute, then to start the race.  By then, your adrenaline is flowing so much that you react strongly when you hit the rough water caused by all the boats ahead of you...  If we can keep from panicking, though, I believe our boat has the strength in our training to perform well.  Now about that not panicking thing...

In other news, I've been writing a massive chapter-chunk for my supervisor for the past month, and I'm hoping to send it to her tomorrow so that it's considerably less awkward when she comes over to formal dinner at college on Wednesday night.  Trinity Hall generously offers to pay for your supervisor to come over once a year, and I thought it would be nice to host Heather for a purely social occasion.  Of course, what we're going to talk about for all that time is somewhat unclear, especially since I don't really want to emphasize how much time rowing and choir take out of my schedule.  Heh.  But we get along well, so I'm sure it will be a pleasant evening.

And just because I feel this blog should have more pictures, here's the fireplace in the Robin Hayes Room, which is usually only for fancy faculty/staff meetings.  However, a couple weeks ago, the MCR writing group (run by moi) got put in there instead of our regular room.  Soooo cozy and Oxbridge-y!  Even if the fire was gas-fueled.

Major, major geekout

Earlier this week, I had two great conversations and had the most serious geekout near-plotz ever.  The first conversation was with a guy giving some lectures on German philosophy in 19th-century England, which is an important aspect of my research.  I asked a question after the previous lecture, and this time we followed lecture with lunch -- for an hour and a half.  It turns out he's not long out of his PhD, and we have some similar research interests.  He's now on my list of people who have volunteered to read my writing.

The next day, I met with a professor who is a one-man fan club and conservator of my buddy J.M. Kemble.  I had seen this prof. thanked in a footnote, and when I googled him, I discovered that he's at Trinity College, a five-minute walk up the road from Trinity Hall!

Before I proceed, a quick dramatis personae:

• Alfred Tennyson
• Most popular poet of his day (which was most of the 19th century)
• Attended but never got a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge
• Most famous poem: In Memoriam, about the tragic early death of...
• Arthur Henry Hallam
• Tennyson's best friend, also at Trinity
• Died suddenly at the age of 22
• John Mitchell Kemble
• A mutual friend of both the above at Trinity
• Pioneering, arrogant, and spirited Anglo-Saxon scholar

So on Tuesday, I rang the bell of Prof. Keynes's office (which, by the way, was in the building just behind Trinity's famous clock).  Upon entry, I followed him through a narrow bookcase-lined hallway to the main sitting room, which was in a proper state of academic dishevelment.  First, he "introduced me" to a marble bust of Kemble, which he had pulled out of a basement storeroom at Trinity in the '60s and claimed for his office.  Then, to amuse me while he made the tea, he gave me a binder with various original Kemble items in them -- holy cow, did the guy have tiny, precise writing!  When he came back, my host said, 'Here, I think you'll like this.'  He pulled out of its sleeve a copy of one of Kemble's pamphlets, On English Præterites, which I've read before.  'Look at the inscription.'  And here's what was inked on the cover:

Arthur H. Hallam

from his affectionate friend

JMKem

I could not believe my eyes.  This was Arthur Hallam's personal copy from Kemble.  I was completely gobsmacked.  What's even more nuts is that Simon (the professor) said that he'd gotten it from his old supervisor, and he's pretty sure she didn't know who Arthur Hallam was; she probably just picked this up somewhere.  WOW.  That's some incredible dumb luck.

After I was done having a fit, we talked for about an hour and a half about all the Kemble stuff that's out there (way more than I was aware of) and how he's really a project waiting to happen (PhD, book). I told him that it's my dream project post-PhD.  Who knows, maybe I can stick around Cambridge for a while working on that.  In any case, it was such a fun meeting.  This is the kind of thing you go to a place like Cambridge for.

Brrrrr...

So you know how I mentioned wearing my college scarf when it's chilly?  Well, it's downright freezing this week.  Correction -- it has been below freezing every day.  The river actually freezes over at night, and fairly convincingly: this morning the broken chunks were a good centimeter thick, and I saw a seagull standing in the middle of the river.

Then tonight, during the course of a concert I attended, the city was transformed into a winter wonderland by a good three inches of snow (by my estimation) -- and it was still coming down as I shoved my bike home through it.  All the familiar paths and roads (flagstones here, cobblstones there, bump in pavement at this curve) were suddenly hidden under the kind of perfect fluffy powder that I'd love to ski on.

Things are old in Cambridge

Wow, what an insightful statement, I know.  But just when you start to get used to so much of Cambridge having medieval roots, something will make you realize yet again how staggeringly long a tradition this place has.  For me, Trinity Hall's age was brought home again at a recent dinner that the MCR (grad student) committee had in the Master's Lodge.

At this dinner, the water cups were silver tumblers that looked vaguely like buckets.  I made a comment to the Master's wife, who was sitting next to me, and she explained that they were replicas of one of the college's most prized possessions.  The Founder's Cup (see picture) was given to Bishop Bateman by the Pope in the 1340s, before the bishop founded Trinity Hall in 1350.  And we still have this cup!  It comes out once a year for the Bateman Feast, which is when the Fellows invite eminent people in their field to come to the college.

That such a thing physically exists from that long ago and is in any way connected to me blows my mind.  I admit, I've been to the Cluny museum in Paris and looked at lots of medieval art, but it helps to have a personal tie.  Here's a picture of the inside bottom of the cup.  See the coat of arms?  It's still the college symbol.  It's on the scarf I wear when it's chilly out, and the crescent is on the uniform for the rowers of the first boats.  And some medieval silversmith worked it into this cup while living in a world that (as far as he knew) was populated by invisible beings, a world that sat in the center of singing spheres of heavenly bodies.  Amazing.