Because Students Should Stay in Libraries Where They Belong

A Yankee in Oxford
   gets nothing but scoff
She sits on a wall
    they tell her, "Get off."
She calls to the birds
    they think her a fool
While she thinks the English
     are painfully dull.

***

I swear I just got scolded by Professor McGonagall.  Ten seconds on the wall, and she swooped down from nowhere like the Guardian Spirit of Conformity.  So I had to write a poem to vent.  I don't really think you're all dull, my English friends.

Also, I'm not sure I consider myself a "Yankee," per se.  That's really more of a New England thing.  The more you know.
*

A Faded Flower

A faded flower is placed upon my desk
and I for far too long have watched it die
with fragrances of beauty and unrest,
but if I could revive it, how would I
preserve its every petal, or would try,
and every fleeting moment of delight
and every half-forgotten lullaby.
I'd nightingale a thorn, if such a rite
would dawn them all restored, new-blossomed in the night.

Above on shelves of dusty-honored age
a multitude of knowledgeable works
deplore my guileless fancies and engage
my thoughts with noble tugs and stubborn jerks
towards venerable heights, and promised perks
of pleasures wrought by words that might fulfill
my every mental craving, yet there lurks
the flower far beneath them, fading still.
The textbooks are my way, the flower is my will.

And so enjoined in mutual decay
I turn the page with ever-younger mind
while stem and stalk and eyesight waste away
and loves and lullabies are left behind.
I buy them in the market when I find
a worthy batch - I buy them, just a few.
Though dusty books will be here all the time
the fragile things of life are passing through.
Replace the faded flower, it's me that I renew.
*

Oxford Graffiti #1

Bathroom scrawls are a bit...different...in Oxford.  They never fail to amuse me.  Here are some that I've come across lately:

1.  "Why are Oxford boys such twats?"

2.  "What did the Mexican duck say?  Guac, guac."

3.  "D.H. Lawrence: What a cock.  Discuss."

4. "Why is there graffiti here? It's against the law."

5.  "Prove that I'm a lawyer"
"You are a lawyer.  Disprove it."
"That isn't how the burden of proof works.  Hope your finals aren't coming up."
"Where's the case?  All it is is a statement.  And burden of proof is different according to where it's being applied and regularly shifts."
"...Do something social tonight."
*

From the Vaults - JPG Artifacts #2

Today I say "meh" and revert to unicorns.

UNICORNS FOREVER.

*click to enlarge*

*

It's Just That Kind of Place

Warning!  Mad blogging ahead!  I'll be catching up with my first year in Oxford over the summer, but at the moment I'm still trapped in the clutches of exam time.  "It's the most wonderful tiiiime...of the year..."

In the meanwhile, here's a picture of...a carriage on a truck.  They were filming a movie.  This happens quite a lot around here.  You're walking along, thinking about groceries, when suddenly Marie Antoinette or a man in a Pink Panther costume comes prancing around the corner.  (Fact.)

That'll be Oxford for you.  (Portland friends, you know what I'm talking about, am I right?)
*

From the Vaults - JPG Artifacts #1

In a moment of weakness, I nearly swear.

(click to enlarge)

Mr. Blogspot's Very Bad Day

Dear Blogger,

I hate your new format.

But "hate" is not a nice word.  Let me rephrase:  I deeply, violently dislike it, navigating through it in ways that explore new shades of frustration and hopelessness, my aesthetic soul shrivelling like burnt hair whenever I see its vast unused amounts of dead white space and its hospital-waiting-room color scheme and its infinitely useless button links that do things like "Insert Jump Break!"  I do not need a jump break.  I need a workable text window that fills more than 1/3 of the screen.  I need clarity.

Please get on that.  There's a great site you can use as an example of elegance and user-friendliness.  It's called Blogger circa 2010.

Thanks, signed-
Fifteen Feet.

Murals, Ireland, and the Post I Can't Write

After having it on my life list for many years, I finally got to visit Northern Ireland. I waited for a lull between bombings. Nothing's exploded for a while, hey? Time to go!

It was as amazing as I'd hoped it would be...and far more tense than I ever expected. I mean really, really tense. If I happened to say "Derry" instead of "Londonderry," the British Loyalists would say, "So...they've gotten to you, have they? They've taught you to call it that?" If said "Londonderry," the Irish Nationalists would take me aside and tell me to rip the "London" right out of it. And that was the least of the hostilities. I dare not write what else I heard. Wherever I went, it always felt like half of the population was looking away from the other half. A powder keg about to blow.

Indeed, a bomb did go off just a week or two after I left, but since I was still travelling I didn't hear about it until much later.

I originally planned to write a post about all the various murals I saw throughout the country, ones honoring fallen heroes on both sides, ones that inspired, ones that terrified. But then I realized I couldn't write a single letter without bias, because what information I learned on my short fling through the country is hardly worthwhile repeating. I left with nothing but impressions. Impressions of men who frightened me, no matter their politics, with stories about their roles in violence and murder. Impressions of the dead castles, the green hillsides, the waves crashing steadily against the mathematical rocks of the Giant's Causeway, that pay no heed to whose feet stand or whose blood flows. I came and went as a tourist in the purest sense of the word, unable to contribute anything useful to the argument. Unable to articulate anything, really, except a great sense of loss and frustration, even though I have nothing personally at stake.

I can't write this post, you see, because I can't possibly tell an accurate version of what is happening, what has happened, in Northern Ireland. It's too complex, and I'm bound to get something terribly wrong, or oversimplify, or just plain insult. It's over my head.

What I can give you, however, before I slip down any further into my own deep morass of rumination, is

THE RED HAND OF ULSTER

Zing! Here it is. You can, I don't know, stare at it for a while.


This was a mural in the Shankill area of Belfast. In comparison to some of the others in the area, you might consider this particular mural "lighthearted." A sign on the side reads, "There are many legends telling the origins of the Red Hand of Ulster. This mural depicts only one of these."

I think this mural depicts the "race" version of the legend. According to Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898:

"In an ancient expedition to Ireland, it was given out that whoever first touched the shore should possess the territory which he touched; O’Neill, seeing another boat likely to outstrip his own, cut off his left hand and threw it on the coast. From this O’Neill the princes of Ulster were descended, and the motto of the O’Neills is to this day 'Lamh dearg Eirin' (red hand of Erin)."

I love how in the mural O'Neill is saying, "Yay I won!" while waving around his one remaining hand.


Also he doesn't seem to be wearing any pants. Couldn't he have, I don't know, just cut off a finger? You've got to hand it to him - he was determined. I guess he handled it the best he could. It's a good thing there wasn't a seagull nearby, or he might have been caught by it red-handed. Hand to mouth, you might say. It's okay that the other guy lost, though. He wouldn't have wanted the land anyway. It was a hand-me-down.

Okay, I'm done.

The Red Hand has been used as a symbol by both Loyalists and Nationalists. So there. I'm safely apolitical. This post has been entirely evenhanded.

Er...

The Election Word of 2012

Every presidential election season generates its own special buzzword. It's a word that comes out of nowhere, maybe by the pen of some unknown reporter who, working late through the night, sees it fluttering mothlike in the light of his lamp among countless lesser phrases and makes a snatch for it, stabbing it on his pen tip, as the perfect expression of his thoughts. So perfect, this phrase, in describing the political atmosphere, the field, the best of a candidate, the worst, or whatever the particular flavor of that particular race, that soon it's repeated in other articles, on cable news networks and talk radio, by the candidates themselves...it has become THE WORD.

It's a word common enough for most people to immediately understand in context, more or less, but unusual enough that no one had ever before used it on a regular basis. It begins to leap out each time it appears, a florescent marker flagging the extent of political punditry's shared consciousness.

In 2004, the year of Bush’s stand against Kerry, it was gravitas. As in, “Kerry has gravitas, but no charisma,” or “John Edwards needs to show more gravitas,” or “Bush has no gravitas whatsoever.”

Remember? It’s when we as a nation were craving seriousness and respectability in a leader. Somehow it seems like we were a lot more mature back then.

In 2008, the year of Obama's extended fight with Hillary and (seemingly) dozens of GOP candidates' fight with each other, it was throw under a bus. I suppose it shows what a catty tooth-and-nail campaign it was for both parties that THE WORD...or well, I suppose in this case a phrase...was one that represented blind ambition.

Thankfully, I can no longer quote an actual quote containing "throw under a bus." I was so sick of hearing that phrase, I think my brain purged all memories of it. I DO remember saying, "Stop saying that! There is no bus! There never WAS a bus! LEAVE THE BUSES OUT OF IT!"

Ladies and gentleman, for this election season, the campaign for President of the United States in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I am pleased to announce that the official WORD has finally made itself known.

feckless

Every candidate has been called this at least once, often by another candidate. It has now appeared in the mediums of newsprint, magazine, and television. "Feckless" it is. As words go, it's not nearly as irritating as "throw under a bus" or "gravitas," but it's still a little disturbing that it's neither a course of action nor a virtue. Yes, the word of the year is an insult, and one meaning "lack of vitality" at that.

Is it a reflection of our feeling about our nation as a whole? Do we cringe away from the very weaknesses that we fear to find in ourselves? Does it reflect four years of losing footing on the global economic stage, the loss of faith in our military focus, our inability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? How much significance should we attach to a word that rises from our collective subconscious, a word reoccurring, like a mantra, in our popular dialogue?

Personally I was hoping for "widdershins," but I guess there's always the next election.