When I was in my junior year in high school, I was in a play called The Importance of Being Earnest. I was Algernon and my good friend Kale was Jack. In the first act of the play, my manservant, Lane, brings me a plate of cucumber sandwiches for a tea I am giving with my ‘smart’ Cousin Gwendolen and my Aunt Augusta. However, I eat all of the sandwiches before they arrive. I’ll never forget this because on the first night, I had such horrible nerves that I had to practically force myself to eat them. Anyway, it goes:

Algernon. [Picking up empty plate in horror.] Good heavens! Lane! Why are there no cucumber sandwiches? I ordered them specially.

Lane. [Gravely.] There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.

Algernon. No cucumbers!

Lane. No, sir. Not even for ready money.

Algernon. That will do, Lane, thank you.

Lane. Thank you, sir. [Goes out.]

Algernon. I am greatly distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money.

* * *

I always liked that part.

Anyway, I’ve since never seen cucumber sandwiches. That was (predictably) until I arrived at England and was ushered into the tradition of high tea.

High tea is given between the hours of three and five in the afternoon. It consists of tea, usually a black tea with milk and/or sugar, scones, clotted cream and jam (or jam and clotted cream if you’re from Cornwall), perhaps some biscuits (cookies) and cucumber sandwiches.

It’s a lovely spread of food, and is at a nice time in the day–especially since I enjoy later dinners. Like most English Aristocratic behavior, it is now marketed pretty heavily towards tourists. But, enough English people do it that I don’t feel like a fool for really enjoying it. I tend to get really into a kind of ritual to eating and drinking. High tea is a good outlet for this. Usually, I’ll only do it a couple times a term. It’s a little expensive to do it out. However, Penelope Warner gives a tea once a term. For the most recent one, she made: coconut cake, lemon curd cake, scones, jam, clotted cream, two kinds of tea, maple muffins, blueberry muffins, rice krispie stuff (here called ‘flapjacks’ for some reason), little sausages, brownies aaaaand cucumber sandwiches. As she walked us through the spread she mentioned the sandwiches being ‘in honor of The Importance of Being Earnest. I couldn’t help but grin at that.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

Penelope's spread

My essay prompt for the week is, ‘Is this novel still shocking?’

It’s referring to D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love–a book banned in England for a while, I think. It contains what people in the day referred to as sexually explicit content.

The simple answer to the prompt is ‘no’. But, there’s something in the simple answer, and I think it has to do with the person answering it.

I say ‘no’, because it doesn’t shock me. The sexual revolution occurred THIRTY years before I was born. All those people grew up and got jobs and then had kids. I was born after the AIDs stuff of the 80s, after a movie rated ‘X’ won an academy award (Midnight Cowboy), after characters were allowed to intimate that they were having sex on television, after pornography became a viable industry, well after Updike wrote Rabbit, Run. D.H. Lawrence simply doesn’t shock me.

That’s what is so funny about this prompt. I can’t answer it without being personal. And I can’t be personal when writing an essay for Oxford.

I was told early last term that my prose style is much less palateable here at Oxford than it is at home. I was told that I’m a little too self-reflexive. But, then–in a rather ironic moment of self-reflexivity–my tutor said that it’s actually more acceptable in the light of a certain school of literary theory (Reader-Response and Reception Theory). She then remarked that maybe my problem is actually my overtly American vocabulary.

Anyway, the long-standing tradition of essay writing at Oxford is, of course, highly academic: with a loquacious penchant for literary jargon. However, the popular literary theory at the University now (as I can best get my finger on the pulse) is Reception Theory, which also is very interested in the audience’s role in the act of reading.

So, here we are back to Lawrence, a monolith of critical inquiry since he published Sons and Lovers. Lawrence, I think, has had so much appeal for critics because his work is so contradictory. His work is constantly canceling itself out, leaving lots of room for critical interpretation–it begs theory. It give the critic room to talk.

I study English literature because I want to learn to read well. I want to learn to read well because in reading I feel in touch with things that I think are universally important–humanity, God, tradition, thought, all of it. But I learned in the first week of literature classes that I shouldn’t read for ‘universal truths’, so I stopped.

However, in picking up the endless train of -isms, I have caught flashes of history through critics of writers like Lawrence. In the last twelve hours, I have been convinced that Lawrence is bad writer, that Lawrence is a great writer, that Lawrence is a great writer of England, that Lawrence is a traitor to his country, that Lawrence’s writing embodies Terry Eagleton’s evisceration of capitalism, that Lawrence’s writing illustrates Foucault’s notion of power and sexuality, that Lawrence’s work actually reduces itself into nothing.

I am wholly convinced that readers read books differently. However, I can’t suppress for long that in seeing the development of reading as a practice, that maybe–just maybe–that elusive, regressive, anachronistic practice of ferreting out the occasional ‘universal truth’ may not be entirely out of the question.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

My coordinator/advisor for my time at Oxford, Francis Warner, is notable for many reasons. The obvious being his own brilliance; the less obvious being people he has known. He was one of C.S. Lewis’ last graduate students and has known scores of notable people in his lifetime. He is, I think, in his 70s. Every day he wears a navy suit, white shirt and a St. Peters college tie and cufflinks. His tie is arched, in a Pratt knot, which is in the style of the Neapolitans. This strikes me as odd because everything else he wears is classic English tailoring and style.

Anyway, in the time I’ve spent with him, he’s told me some pretty impressive tales. I’m going to begin a series where I relate these stories to you in a form that makes sense. Todays will be in the form of a dialogue.

Dramatis personae:

Travis Snyder

Francis Warner

Richard Burton: actor, twice married to Elizabeth Taylor. They were in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf together.

Scene 1: Oxford, 1975. Francis Warner and Richard Burton. The two talk after rehearsing a play that Burton is acting in and Francis is helping to direct.  

 WARNER     You are a lucky man, you know?

BURTON     Why’s that?

WARNER     She’s already married you once, and now she is going to again.

BURTON     I suppose you’re right.

WARNER     You must treat her well.

BURTON     I suppose I must.

WARNER     Have you held a reception for her? Did you have a nice one after the ceremony?

BURTON     I did all that the first time

WARNER     But, it is after all a wedding. Shouldn’t you have a celebration?

BURTON     If you’re so keen on it, why don’t you throw one? I’ll pretend I did it if you put it together.

Scene 2: Oxford, Francis’ house. 2012. Travis and Francis stand looking at a picture hanging in the hall near the stairs. It is of a wedding party. Richard Burton stands on one side, looking faintly bemused. Elizabeth Taylor smiles, perhaps a little uncomfortably. Francis Warner, in the picture, beams. 

TRAVIS     Looking at the photograph. Were they really like that? Like in the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

FRANCIS     I think your word for it is ‘joshing’. They were always joshing with each other. I do think they loved each other very much… It was hard on both of them. Richard still talked to Sybil most days. I think that was hard on her. I did throw them that reception, though. This is the picture.

TRAVIS     Was it quite as terrifying to be around them as the film?

FRANCIS     laughing. Oh no, it was usually more light hearted. That was an excellent film, though. Impeccably casted.

TRAVIS     Did you ever work with them together?

FRANCIS     She was Helen of Troy in a Faustus once. She didn’t speak any lines. Of course, he did–as Dr. Faustus. Anyway, it’s a funny picture, the one you see there. I’m quite fond of it. You must look at it often; they were a very interesting pair.

Blackout

I didn’t exaggerate any of that, I don’t think.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

My situation as Oxford, in many ways, is somewhat isolated. The first thing that renders my life as such is the general academic mode of existence here. What I’m doing requires me to spend disproportional amounts of time reading and writing. Disproportional to anything else under the sun.

The other reason I’m alone as much as I am is that my program is, in some ways, disengaged from the community. My program is run via St. Peters college, but it’s not especially connected with that community. I am a member of the extremely bourgeois Oxford Union, but that’s mostly a place I go to work (I posted about the library there last term).

All that being said, my encounters with people have to be entirely initiated by myself, and this is not my forte. However, being around things that aren’t my forte probably builds character. A broadened comfort zone never hurt anyone.

Oxford has interesting ideas of community. From what I can tell, there are many ‘best friends forever’ types here, but it is an intimacy of a type I haven’t before seen. It’s almost like some sort of Platonic (in the classical sense of the word) unity of minds. There’s a closeness amongst those who are learning together. Not that Oxford is all about academia all the time. But you can definitely tell that people are maturing together as much as they are coming into themselves. There’s so much youth here, that you can just feel the influx of people pouring into each other.

I’ve also noticed that there are a lot more close male relationships here. Frequently, I’ve come across groups of half a dozen guys all out together. It’s a classic boys club that seems reminiscent of the days when Oxford was a literal boys club. It’s an intense camaraderie, a robust masculinity that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s also much more affectionate than I’ve seen at any of the schools I’ve been around at home. Perhaps this can be chalked up to American campuses being too emphatic on sex or being a touch homophobic. I think there’s elements of this, but it’s also just a long standing tradition here. There were like 800 years of all male education at Oxford. You can still get those vibes if you’re looking for them. Not to say that women don’t have the same thing; the male side is just especially noticeable to me.

All that being said, I still tend to stick to myself. The flip side of community here is the unifying notion of the university town. ‘Oxford’ means as much the university as the city, so–when you’re out–you pretty much know what most everyone around you ‘does’. It’s easy to pick up a conversation with a part time bartender or a librarian or museum attendant. We’re all a part of this… thing together. I like that. I can’t say that I’ve made any lifelong friends, but I can say that I’ve been a part of something and that I’ve been able to join other people in it. It’s a bit of a Midwestern thing. Where you can just pick up a conversation with someone like you know them a little.

It’s the sort of place where everyone inherently knows everyone a little.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

The Taming of the Shrew is a play that you don’t want Shakespeare to have written. Sure, Kiss Me Kate and Ten Things I Hate About You are adorable, but Shrew itself just is not palatable to a modern audience. It endorses a husband’s browbeating of his wife, via witholding food and sleep, until she becomes submissive. In the end, the ‘shrewish’ woman is, in fact, tamed, and she gives all the other wives a vomit-inducing speech about how husbands are masters.

I don’t care if you think feminism is stupid; no one endorses that sort of thinking anymore.

So, why is it put on?

First and most obviously, the Royal Shakespeare Company has a contractual obligation (presumably with the Shakespeare’s ghost? I really don’t understand this…) to work through all of the bard’s plays every ten years or so.

Second, it’s literature. We’re past the point in history when we can just ban things with which we disagree.

Third, it is after all, a comedy. Can’t we just not take it seriously?

Well, I guess. But we’re really laughing at the wrong stuff. The play’s humor is mostly slapstick or at the expense of the women. At the end, the men are still making bets about which wife will come first when she is called (the father of the ‘tamed shrew’ actually pays her husband a reward for his handiwork). The play I saw at Stratford navigated this as best as possible. Clearly, the audience has evolved out of the rigid, Elizabethan patriarchy, for whom this play was written to amuse.

The performance I saw was set in the 40s in Italy. Also, the whole stage was a giant bed. The company, of course, is brilliant and the director very creative. I found myself laughing through most of it. By the end, though, you are forced to face what the words mean. The actors can’t just say it ironically. I was caught between laughing and cringing. Usually, reactions to comedies aren’t that complicated.

Fourth, I mean, Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer of all time, wrote it? How bad can it be?

It’s not bad! It’s a good play. And ol’ Billy is still one of the greatest writers of those elusive eternal truths of the human spirit. BUT, I mean, he was also a professional writer. When he wrote Shrew, he was a young professional writer very early in his career. He knew what he needed to write to make money. Shakespeare is not immune from the influences of his day.

That being said, we probably shouldn’t throw the bard under the bus as a raging chauvinist. I think the body of his work can make a case that might not have been as bad as the mores of his time. Maybe the man needed to make a buck and knew how to do it. We know he’s especially clever because the play is still a money-maker today, in spite of being hard to swallow.

I wrote before that it’s easier to think about Shakespeare the man here, with a real house, a commute, a wife who may have been unhappy with him, an illegitimate son and friends with whom he would correspond. His plays may exist forever in our collective consciousness, but the man is perfectly finite: our friend, who is not immune from saying questionable things from time to time.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

Oxford is not a small town. It’s certainly no booming metropolis, but it is not like my dream of living in a coastal Italian town, where I can walk to the fish market every day, then pick up fresh fruit and vegetables, a bottle of wine and perhaps a cigar. Then I’d spend the rest of the afternoon cooking. I would literally be happy doing that every day the rest of my life. I can’t say that about most things.

Grocery shopping at local markets is part of the unrealistically romantic vision. Sure, I’m all in favor of the ‘eat local’ ‘organic’ ‘ethical’ ‘green’ whatever trendy things, but mostly I enjoy small town grocery shopping because it’s more fun and because it’s a better product. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a covered market in Oxford. Here, there is a fruit and vegetable stand and a butcher where I consistently shop. There’s also a bakery when it is my turn to buy bread.

The other day, I was shopping for dried cherries to put in a salad. The woman running the fruit stand said she had two kinds. Not being a cherry connoisseur, I asked the difference. In response, she just let me try both.

I love the overwhelming super grocery stores at home; I really do. But, there’s still nothing like standing at a fruit stand, sampling dried cherries, then having someone get the right amount, weigh them and bag them up for you. Same goes for the butcher, except I don’t sample the raw meat (unless I’m buying entire wild boars).

The covered market is not a true farmer’s market. In some ways, it’s a tourist attraction, manufactured to make me feel quaint. There are as many tee shirt shops and sandwich chains as local food providers, so I’m not kidding myself about being in touch with anything special. But, there are still moments, manufactured or no, that let me participate in my fantasy life for a little bit.

Of course, this contrasts with the other places I grocery shop, with their florescent lights and generic frozen peas. But, I mean, I need these places too. They have soy sauce, peanut butter, dried spices and basic things that are impractical or unavailable to purchase locally. It’s a compromise, but a necessary evil in a middling town like Oxford, which isn’t small enough to be self-sufficient without a mega store or two.

When I am occasionally able to escape for an afternoon to leisurely stroll through the market, a grocery store and a wine shop, Oxford seems to slow a bit for me. As though it can take a second to breathe if I agree to meet it there. In many ways, it’s an unmerciful and competitive and arguably very elitist community, but–in its best moments–it’s also welcoming, genuinely beautiful, and a sunny outlook of a place.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

A photo presentation and illustration of the aftermath of the previous post:

11:32 AM. Word Count: 0. Auspicious beginnings, the place is set.

1:17 PM. Word count: 0. Optimistically reviewing material.

2:36 PM. Word count: 0. Still reviewing material. Jotting down preliminary notes. Optimism less pronounced.

3:42 PM. Word count: 35. Lazer-like focus. One hundred percent of word count is name, date and title.

4:41 PM. Word count: 107. 'First paragraphs are tricky.'

6:10 PM. Word count: 643. 'There is thus no final interpretant whose identity is not self-divided, like a sign , or that stands outside of his semiotic's logic of alterity. The generalized alterity of the sign process fans out in all directions as an excess of otherness within the self-identity of philosophical thought.' I AM PHILOSOPHY

7:56 PM. Word count: 1476. 'I don't understand anything I've said so far.'

9:30 PM. Word count: 2327. 'I think I just argued that the speaker of a poem has unwittingly time travelled... literature...?'

And scene.

It’s like you were right there with me, no?

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

Today is that dubious day, an essay day.

I wait until the day before a tutorial to write an essay. I do this, first, because I want to get as much time as possible with material before I write about it (at most, I can still usually only get 4-5 days) and, second, because a slight sense of urgency helps me. Of course, perhaps I am merely lending credibility to procrastination.

It’s a particular feeling, before I start writing. It’s all I do: read and write. I don’t have an otherwise structure. My entire schedule is created around reading days, writing days, and tutorial days. Others at Oxford seem to treat their time in a similar fashion. Many people go out to ‘let loose’ on a normal day like a Thursday. I would hazard a guess that this is due to the completion of a paper or a tutorial. You sort of create your own weekend. The essay day is a mini-culmination of the week. It signifies the end, even if it’s on a Tuesday.

I write in my room usually. My resources create a sort of academic wasteland. Some weeks I’ll only have about 4 or 5 books; some–like today–will involve a stack of twenty that I’ve had to wrangle into something more manageable. I sit on my bed and encircle myself with my sources. The primary source will be the most accessible, and the secondary source will be piled around me, sorted by anticipated relevance. I’ll have it all close, though, in case I want to call an audible and recast some ideas.

The sensation before the first words is most palpable. ‘The deep breaths before the plunge’ is a relatively trite and overused image, but it is apt here. You do feel like you’re on a precipice overlooking an abyss. The sheer quantity of material can fog up the mind. The first words are your attempt to needle through the muddle to make something out of it. They’re usually rough, for me, and rarely survive the first or second edit. But the sensation is one of almost veneration. It’s also one of intimidation before the task at hand. To make something of piles of famous books may seem unreal or unimportant. But, in the moments before writing, it feels like the grandest task in the world.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis

I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls … Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead

–T.S. Eliot

In Oxford, you give each week a number. You start with 0th week and go all the way to 8th week. It’s nice because it seems less like school and more like American Idol.

0th week only really exists for people to get settled in, perhaps meet with their tutors for the term, and then go on a variety of themed pub crawls. You realize this when walking by a wood-fired-pizza-mobile at two in the morning and you see fifteen guys in drag standing in line debating between the quattro fromaggio and the napoli. This is sort of like the auditions weeks of American Idol. You see people awkwardly show off any academic talent in front of their judges (the tutors). You could even categorize tutors into the Randy Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Tyler major groups. Though, I’d also allow for Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell tutors.

Myself, I have one Randy Jackson tutor and one Simon Cowell/Jennifer Lopez tutor.

Anyway, first week is Hollywood Week. You’re thrown into an environment with a bunch of other people, and you are sorting out what life looks like to be living with/competing with these people. However, in Oxford, they aren’t people–they are books. I have to live with piles of them. Many of them are annoying in tone, some seem pitchy, some sound like they have invented accents, and some are attention deprived (usually the theorists).

There are many contestants who don’t ever overcome Hollywood Week. You aren’t exactly voted off in Oxford, that’s where the metaphor breaks down a bit. But usually these are the people who get really sick by third week or have nervous breakdowns by the fourth. It’s often the most memorable who go through this. The ones with the bright red mohawks that store harmonicas up their sleeves and sing in an impossibly deep bass.

By the end of the time, you’ve figured out which fellow contestants (remember, books) you can work with, which you cannot stand, which seem like they’ll form a good alliance with you (but then their plots contain some sort of weird, modernist twist that makes it impossible to write about). Anyway, you eventually whittle them down to where it’s just you and one last contestant to overcome. Usually, it’s a fairly unobtrusive contestant whose been hard to read and almost deceptively simple. Someone unassailable, whose favorite recording artist would be, like, Elton John.

(I guess beating out contestants is like writing a paper where you successfully analyze books.)

Anyway, at the end, you work with what you have, awkwardly dance around a weirdly formatted stage, go back to back with the guitar player, make eye contact with the camera, then hopefully stop before going on too long. Then, all that’s left is to stare into the bright purple satin outfit of Steven Tyler, and wait to see how you’ve done.

Thanks for reading.

Your friend,

Travis