London calling, part two: Mighty heart

After coffee was over and Rory had popped off to attend to paperwork, Malika and Sarah took us back down through Westminster Hall and to a little parliamentary cafe, where we planned to have lunch. A quick trip to the ladies’ room resulted in our being forced to queue behind two hundred primary schoolers, all twittering in those high bird-like voices that children have. They moved surprisingly quickly, however, and soon we were all seated around a distressingly small table, munching sandwiches and muffins and comparing notes. For some reason, Malika had handed one of us the official Westminster tour script, which she’d been referring to when showing us round, and we all had a look at it. The introduction is full of dire warnings to tour guides. Apparently, tours “must run in a smooth sequence to avoid blocking pinch points; like a Ferris wheel, parts of it cannot stop if the rest of it is to keep moving”. Guides are also enjoined to “beware the eager visitor, who will always stand near the front of the group and ask questions”, and, my absolute favorite, “Beware jokes…There is a wealth of historical humour available for use (e.g. the sayings of Churchill or Disraeli); do not be tempted to use the latest reports in the media to raise a laugh.” It’s difficult to pin down precisely why the pedantry of that is so funny, but somehow it very much is. The idea of “a wealth of historical humour” from which one can select approved witticisms, like Swedish parents picking a name for their child off the prescreened list, is simply too good.

After this, we discovered that we were about to be late, and so hurried back through Westminster Hall to the lobby of the Houses, where we waited with perhaps thirty-five other people for the session to be opened. At the beginning of each session the Speaker of the House (at the moment, John Bercow) takes his place, and this is done with all of the pageantry which makes Parliament simultaneously ridiculous and awe-inspiring. As we stood and waited, several policemen moved, quietly and subtly but unmistakably, in front of the crowd, forming a cordon. There was a moment or two of awkward silence as everyone gazed expectantly down the corridor, and then a man in white tie and tails appeared, threw back his head, and shouted in a remarkably sing-song tone, “SPEEEEEAAAAA-KERRRRRR!” After a pregnant pause during which I could hear the Duchess next to me trying to suppress helpless giggling (she has since confessed that she expected John Bercow to respond, from around the corner, “CO-MIIIINNGG!”), a procession appeared. It was headed by a solemn man holding a very large and heavy-looking golden sceptre, followed by someone else in white tie and tailcoat, followed by the Speaker himself, clad in a lounge suit and what looked like an academic gown. Apparently, Bercow is the first Speaker to get rid of traditional dress entirely: they used to wear wigs, knee breeches and silk stockings, an outfit known as “court dress.” He was flanked by a couple of lackeys, who were wearing court dress, and a man in what I think was a QC’s gown. It was all most impressive (and I’m sure I’ve got some of the details wrong. I do apologize, but I’ve been looking on both Wikipedia, which should not be discounted as a source of extremely useful information, and Parliament’s own website, and neither of them can provide clarification.) They proceeded into the debating chamber, the doors slammed shut, the policemen moved away from us, and we were free to head up into the public gallery.

The tickets we held were for a Special Gallery, which as far as I could ascertain simply meant that we got seats slightly closer to the front. In the House of Commons, the public gallery is above the main chamber, to the left-hand side of the opposition. They used to have a separate gallery for women during the Golden Age of Parliament, the mid-to-late nineteenth century, on which Trollope is so illuminating. The women’s gallery was fitted with metal grills so that neither the ladies nor the MPs would be unduly distracted by each other’s presence, a practice and rationale startlingly reminiscent of purdah. Suffragettes chained themselves to the grills in the early twentieth century, and they were removed shortly afterwards; now they’re displayed in the lobby.  The public is still kept at some distance from its elected representatives, however; the gallery is glass-fronted. This is probably a good thing, as it seems not unlikely that some enterprising young politicos (or lunatics) might choose to draw attention to their cause by hurling themselves down into the debating chamber. Still, you can see everything. The House of Commons is decorated entirely in green, green being, apparently, a “common” color. (Don’t ask me why.) The Speaker sits on a raised chair at the far end of the room; in front of him is a desk where the clerk of the house (currently Robert Rogers, who sports a lush white beard and curly moustache) sits and records, and a long table which stretches down half the length of the chamber, containing papers, books and dispatch boxes. This is the table to which frontbenchers (government ministers and members of the Shadow Cabinet) stand when they give speeches and answer questions. The opposition benches (Labour, in this case) are on the Speaker’s left; the government benches (Tory and, though there were fewer of them, Lib Dem) are on his right.

Now that I’ve got you oriented (and believe me, it took me long enough to work it out, even with Darcy’s extremely helpful running commentary in my ear): we got there in time to watch Michael Gove answer questions on education. Now, I know very little about Michael Gove’s education policies and it is entirely possible that I would dislike them greatly if I did, but the man has at least one thing going for him, and that is the fact that he is a tremendous speaker. He’s witty, clever, amusing, fluent, and positively refuses to be drawn into the sort of futile, mimsy, bickering nonsense that many MPs seem to consider their duty. At one point, an opposition member stood up and asked if he would apologize for something or other; Gove leaped to his feet, leaned over the dispatch box, snapped, “Absolutely not,” and sank back onto the bench again. And that, remarkably, was an end to it. No one bothered to push the demand for an apology any further; he was too strong-willed. He is also a talented practitioner of the Parliamentary strategy of Not Answering the Question. He does it so well that you practically don’t notice: someone asks something, he picks up on one word or phrase, follows that off in another direction, and ends up making his party’s point for the half-dozenth time. It is most impressive. On only one topic did I feel the impulse to argue with him on the spot, and even then I suspect it would have been great fun: it was when an opposition member accused him of wanting to drag the national English curriculum back into the nineteenth century. This daunted Gove not at all. “Actually,” he said, “I think the nineteenth century is exactly where it should be. I believe,” he continued expansively, “in the value of Jane Austen, of Charles Dickens, of Thomas Hardy; I believe in the canon of great literature, and I believe that our children have the right to be exposed to the best work that the best minds have produced.” The peroration lasted for somewhat longer, but that, you understand, was the gist. I wanted to pick a fight with him on the subject because the idea of a canon is one that ought to fill everyone with at least a tinge of suspicion. Canons are only canons because of common consent, and they tend to include works that we privilege as possessing “superior literary merit” for extremely tenuous reasons. “Literary merit” is a highly nebulous term. Do we mean that the work is written grammatically? Do we mean that it reinforces values and ideas that we hold in high regard? Yes, generally, we mean both. Whose values do we esteem and respect, then? What lessons do we agree our children ought to be taught about the world? What you read determines how you think, and English curricula are no less valuable as tools of propaganda than television advertisements. Also, quantitatively, the nineteenth-century novel is simply over-represented at the moment. George Eliot and Dickens and Austen and Hardy are great and important writers, but Britain has produced other great and important writers too, not to mention genres other than the novel. I’m sorry and I shall dismount from my soapbox now, but I do feel that someone ought to set the Education Secretary straight on this.

After education questions, there was the beginning of a debate on the Leveson Inquiry. I wish I could be more illuminating about this too, but unfortunately it was that time of the afternoon where I always begin to feel a bit sleepy. The debating chamber was quite warm, we had all been up early that morning, and as Maria Miller stepped up to the dispatch box I could feel myself beginning to slide into somnolence. Enough of Miller’s speech came through, however, for me to consider her sympathetic but a touch out of her depth. She suffered constant interruptions from her own side and the opposition, and was perhaps too generous in giving way; consequently, I cannot tell you what she proposed as the government’s response to the findings of the Inquiry. The debate seemed to be over whether any legislative action should be taken, or whether the press should be left to regulate itself. Self-regulation, which has been the status quo since the 1940s, appears to have been an abominable failure; the recommendation of Leveson is that there be an independent body to oversee the press’s self-regulatory committee. It strikes me that such a body would most likely be both cumbersome and wasteful. In theory, I have no problem with legislation on the subject. It would certainly be more likely to create an effective barrier against invasion of privacy. The downside, of course, is that the English press would then be officially censored, whether anyone admitted the fact or not. Few people (except for Ian Hislop and one or two MPs) seem to be mentioning that, actually, phone hacking and other such tactics are not “bad” because they are immoral (although they are that, too); they are “bad” because they’re illegal. Shall we prosecute journalists who break the law, and leave the rest of them to get on with their jobs? Seems reasonable.

Anyway, it was all getting very involved, and halfway through Jack Straw’s speech, I fell asleep. I woke up to find Darcy and the Duchess poking me. “We’re going now”, someone whispered, and a glance at the clock revealed that it was nearly five. We would have to hurry if we wanted to get to mass at Westminster. The others put their visitor tags on a hook by the exit, but I pocketed mine, and we walked out into the bright cold lights of central London again.

How to change the world

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I can tell because my housemates are bothering me about it again. Sorry. College has been having to deal with a lot in the past few weeks, which I’m not going to write about, and some of that stress is inevitably transferred to everyone. Not to mention the more general stress of the extended essay I’ve been writing for the past two weeks which is marked as part of Finals, and the pervasive sense of fear and anxiety which seems to surround me like a cloud every time I think beyond the next six or seven months. This is part of what it’s like to finish; the exams, I suspect, are only the most tangible and easy-to-complain-about element of the fine blend of terror, sentimentalism, and deep sadness that always occurs whenever you think you might be doing something for the last time.

That said, it’s not all clouds–or rather, they sometimes produce hot ice and wondrous strange snow. Rory Stewart came to talk in Oxford this week. He’s written two New York Times-bestselling books, which is how I’m aware of him: The Places In Between, about the time he spent walking through Afghanistan, and The Prince of the Marshes, about his time as a deputy provincial governor in Iraq. He’s still very young, thirty-nine (thanks, Wikipedia), just got married this past month (awwww), and an exceedingly clever boy. Before Stewart’s talk in All Souls under the auspices of the university’s Strategic Studies Group (which Darcy runs, by the way), there was a dinner for him in New College’s Red Room. This happens every week with the speaker, but usually it’s on a Tuesday, right over choir time, so I can never come, and Darcy always brings the menus back, which only serves to exacerbate my socialist tendencies.

This week, there was an extra talk on Thursday, so Darcy, the Duchess and I decided to go to evensong at New before the dinner started. Oxford, which has its own temperamental weather system, has been extra windy these past few days, so we arrived just as the service was about to begin, looking as though we’d walked backwards through a hedge (except for Darcy, whose hair is impermeable to wind, water, and all manner of other things, including, possibly, napalm.) A skeletal and Dickensian usher arrested us in the ante-chapel with a firmly held up hand; we waited with the other tardy delinquents until the choir had entered, then were handed service booklets and permitted into the sanctuary. I’ve been in New College chapel before, but it’s always an experience. The back wall above the altar is entirely carved, the hierarchy of heaven made obvious: apostles, saints and martyrs, bishops and (presumably) big donors to the college, Mary and the Christ Child, then God the Father right at the top, almost too high (and too poorly lit) to see clearly. The trebles and the clerks–“lay clerks” is the term for the adult singers in an all-male choir, the altos, tenors and basses–stand in stalls as we do at Exeter, with lit candles providing atmosphere and tiny lightbulbs under the candlesticks, almost imperceptible to anyone in the congregation, providing actual light for their music. It was the feast day of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, and they were singing Haydn’s St. Cecilia’s Day Mass in celebration. Unfortunately, a mass is at least twice as long as an evensong, and we hadn’t budgeted enough time before dinner. Darcy slipped out about halfway through to meet Rory Stewart at the gate (though as it turned out, this was unnecessary, because poor old Stewart had been delayed by about half an hour on the coach service from London to Oxford). The Duchess and I stayed until the beginning of communion, then made our exit.

We were joined at dinner by Princi, who couldn’t come to the talk, but who introduced me to her conversation partner, a Marine named Ian with whom I exchanged pleasantries and Americanisms before turning my attention to the starter: slices of smoked chicken and avocado. Dinner was a fish steak with tiny golden potatoes in a sauce, and finally pumpkin pie, which made me very happy as it happened to be Thanksgiving that night. I was seated next to another Exonian, a second-year PPEist who is so ubiquitous around college that he will be referred to simply as the Man. Everyone knows the Man, and everyone is extremely fond of him. He’s friendly, amusing, up for anything, curious about everything. There are worse ways to live. We chatted and gossiped for most of dinner, with a brief interlude when he turned to say something to Darcy and I was left without a conversation partner. I pushed smoked chicken around in a desultory manner and paid attention to the conversation the Duchess was having, on my left, with a philosopher from Worcester. We talked about Martin Amis for a while, but it didn’t click–I sensed fundamental disparity of character–so I went back to my food, and eventually the Man returned his attention to our discussion of college life, which continued up until pudding.

When that was served, Rory Stewart said he would answer a few questions, presumably to cut down a bit on the time he’d spend answering questions after the talk. (I felt rather sorry for him; it meant he wasn’t able to eat the pumpkin pie, which was extremely creamy and delicious.) I always expect for these sorts of sessions to be different: for terrifyingly well-informed people to pose complex and intriguing conundrums of the sort that cause the speaker to launch off on a deconstruction of contemporary global policies, culminating in an offer of a job in the Foreign Office to whoever asked the question, leaving me panting in the intellectual dust. This never actually happens. There are always the same sorts of questions: there’s always one who spurts a paragraph or two of assertion, then tacks a superfluous interrogatory on the end. There’s always one who wants to prove s/he’s read what the speaker has just written. There’s often one who wants to argue. There’s usually one who has no idea what s/he’s talking about. There’s always a professional arse-kisser.

I’m not sure which category I fall under–the penultimate one, I suspect–but I asked something. I never do this. The only interaction I’ve ever had with a speaker of any kind was one occasion in high school when the actor Richard Dreyfuss came to talk about political engagement, and I got so annoyed with him that I went up to him at the end and demanded a proper explanation for his evident opinion that a national government is innately entitled to the support of its citizens. We argued a little bit in the auditorium as everyone else was leaving, and then I got bored of his windbaggery, made some pretense of having been convinced, and escaped. Rory Stewart, on the other hand, you will hopefully be unsurprised to hear, is no windbag. He is a thoughtful, well-educated, articulate, experienced and frighteningly clever man. I asked a pretty simple question, about the rebel presence in the Congo (where I have family) and what some possible international responses could be. “I have to say I don’t know,” he said, and then proceeded to outline eminently plausible possibilities for five or six minutes.

The actual talk, at All Souls, was equally great. It was entitled “Can Intervention Work?”, but would more appropriately have been called “How to Save the World.” Rory Stewart has no time for bullshit. Setting up a bank and stabilizing the currency in a Middle Eastern country? Piece of piss, you can do it from an office. Getting a provincial government to produce vital paperwork efficiently, or stopping the officials from taking bribes off every local sheik who claims he has a couple thousand men with guns? Good luck. It’s way harder. You have to talk to people like you’re aware of what’s going on; you have to pretend you’ve got some, most or all of the cards when you really have no idea where the deck even is; most importantly, you have to effect cultural change from within the very culture itself, and that’s difficult. It works better than the alternative, which is to impose Western standards and values without any consideration for the history, geography and identity of the people you’re working with, but it’s still challenging. It takes a lot of time, and you have to be serious about it. You have to take that other culture very seriously; you almost have to do what the Victorian imperialists did, and really settle there. Imperialism, Stewart pointed out, was responsible for horrible things, but at the same time, at least India Office employees lived in India, held posts there, knew locals, spoke the language, learned regional history. These days we don’t seem serious about anything. In the hundred-and-ninety-odd page document produced by the British government detailing how to get Afghanistan back on its feet, the words “Soviet Union”, “Taliban” and “sharia” do not appear once. No wonder it’s taking so long: official guidelines pretend that the country has no history. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Duchess, the Man and I left the talk with our heads spinning. Almost no one talks like that, in my experience: so clear, so intelligent, so sensible. It was like going to hear a really gifted lecturer on Shakespeare or Joyce (and permit me to assure you, the English faculty here has plenty of both.) Suddenly, things that have always seemed beyond your reach become interesting and relevant, and you want to know more. That’s a great power. Something to aspire to, anyway.

Let the sky fall

Yes, we went to see it. Well, Darcy and Princi and I did, anyway. We thought we were doing fairly well by going four days after its release, but obviously none of us go to the cinema enough, because we hadn’t realized that there would STILL be queues of people stretching nearly out the doors. By the time we got to the front desk, the crustacean-like cinema attendant had already barked, “No more tickets for the 20:30 showing of Skyfall! You can get some for the 22:00, or there’s a 21:15 showing at the Odeon on Magdalen Street, or you can bog off!” (Not the last bit. But quite close, I think.) We conferred, decided on the 21:15 showing, and stepped up to the counter only to be told that we had to buy those tickets at the Magdalen Street site. “Of course,” I muttered, trying not to direct too much sarcastic irritation at the ticket boy, who was surely just as tired of the general public as the general public was of him; and we sloped off to Magdalen Street, where we purchased tickets from a machine which informed us that Screen 1’s heating was broken and we should not think about taking our coats off under any circumstances. Fortunately, we still had time to kill, so we headed to Hassan’s to buy Darcy (who has a peculiar habit of not eating) a kebab. He and Princi happily discussed the political crises of Rome circa 60 B.C. whilst I sat quietly and waited for them to finish, and then we headed off to the cinema, our pockets (well, my handbag) full of smuggled chocolate and our hearts full of anticipation for the latest installment of Daniel Craig in black tie, sex and explosions.

Skyfall gives you a fair bit of Daniel Craig in black tie, primarily in China. But there’s not much sex, and what there is feels rather peremptory. There is, however, a Komodo dragon, and also a very great deal of explosions. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a scene with a helicopter that made me sit straight up in my seat with a grin on my face like a kid who’s just been told that Christmas has come early this year. Not to mention shots of the Scottish countryside which confirmed me both in my profound, unswerving and eternal love for it, and in my desire to be buried there. The film’s long–two hours and twenty minutes–and worth every second of it. I loved it. It’s darker than Casino Royale, and much more interesting, and better than any of the previous Bond films. I know there are purists who say that the franchise is based on ludicrousness and implausibility, and of course such was the case (such had to be the case) with people like Roger Moore and Sean Connery at the helm. And, you know, it was the ‘60s. But the revamped Bond is perfect. It quotes some of the old Bond tropes (there’s a bit with an Aston Martin which will make freaks like me rejoice. There’s also a bit at the end which recalls, in the most devastating way possible, the old-school tradition of finishing every film with Bond in the arms of some crumpet.) It’s relevant. We’re not fighting the Cold War anymore; we’re fighting something much less tangible. M says something about the changed nature of our enemies; they come from the shadows now. The new film gets that across very well. Also, it has M quoting Tennyson. When a film has explosions and Tennyson, it assumes a rather special place in my heart.

Excitement comes in bursts at Exeter; on Sunday, Philip Pullman (a “justly famous” alumnus, as my English tutor put it, making me wonder which of our alumni might be considered unjustly famous) gave a talk at the Sheldonian, as one of the special events that Exeter’s been putting on in the years leading up to its seven hundredth anniversary. The Sheldonian is an outrageously uncomfortable venue; the seats are too closely spaced, so that if you’re there for more than half an hour, you end up shifting vigorously in order to stop your legs from falling asleep. The talk, fortunately, was phenomenal. Pullman has just rewritten fifty or so of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, in an anthology titled, appropriately, Grimm Tales. Fairy tales really are exceedingly grim; I know it’s a commonplace, but it ought to be reiterated. Disney completely bastardized them. The Cinderella that people of my generation think they know is the one with the dancing mice; the Cinderella that the Brothers Grimm recorded involves physical mutilation, as step-sister one cuts off her heel and step-sister two cuts off her toes in vain attempts to fit the glass slipper. They all get short shrift in the end anyway because blackbirds peck out their eyes. It’s not so nice. Luckily, Pullman’s a fantastic storyteller. He read three or four of the stories from his new collection and the entire theatre sat spellbound. He does voices, but he does them really well; they’re believable. He picked some tales that no one knows, that are obscure and deserve not to be. And he talked about the essential qualities of fairy tales: their stylistic cleanness, the anonymity of their characters (no one has a name; they’re just “the miller”, “the princess”, “the witch.” The rare few who are named are called things like Hans or Jack; they could be anyone and they are no one.) I left with a great desire to buy the book and get it signed, but the line was enormous and anyway he’s doing a signing at Blackwell’s next Saturday, which I fully intend to go to.

Bonfire Night, on the other hand, was a bit of a letdown. There are never enough fireworks. In fact, there weren’t any fireworks at all, due to health and safety. There were some at South Parks on Saturday evening, but we missed most of them, except for a few which Darcy and I caught because we put coats on and ran out to St. Clements’. I thought it might make up for missing the 4th of July. It didn’t quite. Hall put on a steak dinner, which was (for once) edible, and afterwards we were each given a little sparkler, which we waved somewhat disconsolately and self-consciously on the steps, like they were birthday candles. When they went out, we stuck them in a bucket of sand. They looked rather poignant there, like the twig flags atop a child’s sandcastle. Princi and I contemplated them with some melancholy and then went home, where we watched Tangled and ate the Penguins I had bought on a 3 for 1 sale at Tesco’s. Life has its consolations.

I’m cockblocking your marshmallow

I write from the demilitarized zone, gentle snowflakes. And by that I mean “house with no power.” This confuses me because there has been no major storm, and in my experience that is the only situation that justifies a power outage. However, it’s been off for nearly two hours–I came home to find Darcy, Princi and the Duchess sitting in the darkened kitchen with candles shoved into wine bottles (again; it’s our default emergency procedure). Naturally, we are all toasting marshmallows over candle flames.

You’d think this would be difficult, but actually there’s something of an art to it. Darcy and I went to Sainsbury’s and bought two packets, so there’s a lot of room for trial and error. (I’m so sorry, but I just heard the Duchess behind me: “Let’s do mead shots!”) Anyway, the marshmallow-toasting is bringing me back to my childhood. We used to roast them over the outdoor chimney on the back patio, which was extremely quick and easy, but I’m really warming to this whole candle-flame, au naturel thing. (More dispatches, this time from Princi: “Mmm. Mead tastes like honey.” Me: “It’s made of honey.” Princi: “….Well, what do you know.”) The key is to hold the marshmallow close to the flame and watch the surface of it until it bubbles and blisters, just slightly. Once it’s browned, it’ll start burning from within, at which point you blow it out and move on the next patch. Except this is all a lot harder when two of you are sharing a single candle. (The Duchess to Darcy, with questionable anatomical accuracy: “I’m cockblocking your marshmallow. HAHAHA.” Presumably disheartened, Darcy moved on to burning different foodstuffs, an experiment which culminated in his decision to skewer a pear with a chopstick and roast that. The Duchess, immediately: “Now I’m cockblocking your pear. Argh! You’ve wounded my marshmallow! I shall lick the wound!”)

They have work to do, though I’ve taken the day off, but we are all regressing rapidly. It’s nice, this darkness (apart from the fact that we can’t make tea.) It feels like Christmas. Or like Christmas would, if Christmas were a holiday celebrated by a bunch of anarchic primary schoolers with an unhealthy interest in sex and violence and food.

Postscript: We have just had a visitation from Scottish Power. The nice man came round and went into the sitting room and looked at the meter and reached out and flicked a switch, and immediately the lights came back on. From which we can draw three conclusions: 1) just because four people go to Oxford does not mean that they are not idiots; 2) Scottish Power is lovely; and 3) everything is better by candlelight. Even (especially?) cockblocking.

Vissi d’arte, or something

I’m writing this in my kitchen in Oxford, listening to an archived Met Opera broadcast of Die Zauberflote from 1967 and avoiding reading about Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies. Princi is across from me, doing something studious with Catullus. It’s nice to be home, though “home” has become a pretty fluid concept, but let’s be honest, I live here. It’s as much home as anywhere else. America, which used to be home, was nice to visit for two weeks, but two weeks is, I think, approaching the upper limit. It’s not that I don’t love to see my family, because I do; or that I don’t miss the peculiarly Virginian landscape that I grew up with, of black rail fences and blackberry bushes crowding the highway medians, and kudzu vines that strangle trees, and the red clay that underlies the grass. It’s just that, as Barabas puts it in The Jew of Malta, “that was in another country”, and I don’t live there anymore.

I went to the Ashmolean with Bunter the day I got back. (Bunter is the man formerly known as James May, but he’s gone up in the world, and I’ve traded in his moniker accordingly. He’s now named for the butler in Dorothy L. Sayers’s marvelous Lord Peter Wimsey novels.) The Ashmo is great and I don’t visit it very often, partly because when I went there in first year, I didn’t realize that there were proper paintings to visit, and all I saw were the artifacts. Artifacts tend not to interest me very much; I think it’s because they’re not particularly individualized. There are lots of combs and jugs and buttons in the world, and my brain can’t be bothered to make up particularizing details for all of them. Paintings, on the other hand, always have something to focus on. Bunter prefers the medievalists, which I don’t understand. They seem to have produced little, other than interminable and interchangeable whey-faced Madonnas, always holding a breathtakingly unappealing Child in arms. (The Baby Jesus has not gotten a good artistic representation deal over the centuries, I’m afraid. Many of them are cross-eyed or holding their heads at a decidedly unnatural angle. One, rather memorably, is so enormously fat, even for a baby, that he looks as though he’s wearing spare tyres on his legs.) I am, however, a complete sucker for Dutch paintings. Even the most plodding jobber among the Dutch artists manages to produce, time and time again, a shard of a worldview, a place where there are people who live and drink and buy and sell and farm and fight and marry and ice-skate. The European Renaissance is another good time period for paintings of that sort. There are a lot of Renaissance paintings that are really quite surprising, like one the Ashmo has of a dog lolling, nearly upside-down, on a paving stone. Unusually, it’s neither a lapdog nor a hunting dog; it’s a young brown-and-white mutt, with some splashes of white on its paws which mean it was almost certainly painted with one specific creature in mind. Its tongue is halfway out of its mouth, its front legs are drawn up to its chest, and it looks very lazy and infectiously happy.

Unfortunately, I then fell asleep on a bench among the still lifes, so we concluded that the jet lag had not yet worn off and returned home. That was four days ago and I’m pretty well recovered now. At the moment, Princi and Darcy are both here, though Bunter left for home, and then for Germany, this past week. It’ll be a very different house next year, which is rather a sad thought, if also an exciting one.

Also, I’m about to start my Finals year. I don’t understand how this has happened, but I’d prefer to gnaw off a toe than to dwell seriously upon the fact that my undergraduate years are drawing ever more swiftly towards their close. So I shall merely state the fact and leave it to be returned to, in a sufficiently angst-ridden fashion, later.

You know what they say about going home again

What they say about going home again, of course, is that you can’t, but I have found this to be a slightly pessimistic assessment. For one thing, I just did: I flew from Heathrow to Washington, and then on to Charlottesville, on Tuesday, and I’m going to be in the US until September 20^th, when my flight gets back into Heathrow at a delightful 6:00 in the morning or thereabouts. The only thing about going home again is that you have to expect things to be different from the way you remember them, or at least, if you don’t expect them to be different, you have to be okay with it when you notice that they are. Because they invariably will be. I have been away since Christmas, and there are things that I’ve noticed—after two days—which I never paid the slightest bit of attention to, previously. This is either because America has gotten a lot weirder in the past nine months (not an implausible conclusion) or because being away for nine months, and doing your own cooking, is different from being away for six and a half months, which was my previous record. Or both.

Anyway, we went to the grocery store on Wednesday (our equivalent of a shop like Tesco or Sainsbury’s is a grocery store called Kroger), and it occurred to me, as it never had before, that all the food was huge. Some of it is just the packaging, as with the twelve-inch-tall peanut butter jars, but some of it is inherent in the actual food. The salmon fillets I bought to make dinner with, e.g., were enormous. They were literally two times the size of the salmon I could get in Cowley. The aubergines (which in America are called “eggplants”, for reasons no one has ever explained to my satisfaction) were all the size of a week-old baby. The chicken was similarly proportioned to the salmon. It was utterly unreal. I went wandering around the store with my mouth hanging open like a Soviet refugee, clutching my mother’s arm and whispering, “Oh my God, look at that! Look at it!” Searching for Greek yogurt to make a sauce for four people, I found one container that was just about the size I wanted, then discovered that it was being packaged as a single serving. For some reason (possibly some kind of hypnotic fascination induced by the contemplation of such plenty), I bought a different one, the only other size they had, which came in what could be described as a bucket. Incomprehensible!

This is without taking into consideration the bakery, where I found a) some witch’s concoction which consisted of two chocolate chip cookies sandwiched together by pure icing, in lurid University of Virginia colours of orange and blue, and b) a foodstuff called a Marshmallow  Munchie, which resembled a Rice Krispie on crack and which was being sold as a snack suitable for consumption in school lunches and by sports teams. What an extraordinary country.

I wish I had brought a camera along. If I remember, I may take some pictures the next time I’m there, to add to this post. Otherwise, none of you will believe me for a second when I tell you—entirely truthfully—that there is also a sign on the wall in the bakery which reads, helpfully but ungrammatically, “Froze Cakes”—and which has read thus, apparently unnoticed by staff and patrons alike, for at least the past two years.

Zeitgeist litéraire 1: Universally acknowledged

High on every bookseller’s list of ubiquitous current publishing trends, I should imagine, would be the agonizing proliferation of pop crit books on Jane Austen. This category doesn’t even encompass the fan fiction. Do not get me going on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the brood it spawned. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? Oh dear. Not that there’s anything wrong with their existence; I just have an upsetting premonition that more people will end up being familiar with the Sea Monsters than with the Sense or the Sensibility. The thinly veiled Mr. Darcy soft porn, on the other hand, is wildly amusing, but begins to pall after a while, mainly because it is so clearly and depressingly the result of a particular demographic’s fantasies and happy-ending fetish. Which reminds me of this felicitous piece of comedy (I tried to put it in this post as a picture but it wouldn’t do it), by the brilliant Kate Beaton (GO TO HER WEBSITE RIGHT NOW SHE IS COOL AND FUNNY AND CLEVER AND I SPEND VAST PORTIONS OF MY TIME ON THE INTERNET LAUGHING BECAUSE OF HER GENIUS).

Fitzwilliam himself, romantically a-smolder. 

But no—what I actually started off talking about was the nonfiction. Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. A Truth Universally Acknowledged. A Jane Austen Education. A Walk with Jane Austen. I can cope with reasonably informative things—Deirdre le Faye has a genuinely interesting book on the social and cultural background of Austen’s novels. It’s the personal-quest-narratives of the Janeites that drive me bonkers. They preach to the converted; as for the unconverted, they flee screaming. Which isn’t ideal.

One of the problems about approaching Austen in this rabid, frothy sort of way is that it makes people take her less seriously as an artist. She gets mentally (but not literally, not in my bookshop) shelved under chick lit. In practice, what this means is that men decide they can forget about her because she’s for girls. I hate this. I read both Tom Sawyer and Pride and Prejudice when I was ten. I loved them both. I’ve reread P&P more often, but that may just be because it’s been on more syllabi. Anyway, it makes me think about author celebrity cults and the way they influence reputation. Are there any fans of male writers who are as insanely devoted, and as (in the main) unscholarly in their appreciation? (Your average Janeite—average, mind you—does not care that the novels are about legalized prostitution of young women and the terrifying economic imperatives against which said women are pitted; all she knows is that everyone at the end is rich and married and happy, which is, as far as she is concerned, great.) I think maybe only Goethe had such a crazed following. For commentary on which, please see the extraordinary Kate Beaton again (REALLY REALLY GO LOOK. Second strip.)