A Field Trip to Norway

I know, I know. This blog is called Ann's Adventures in London. It seems foolish to be in Europe, however, and not take advantage of the relative closeness of all the fabulous places I've never been and always wanted to visit. First stop: Scandinavia.

I've said it before, but I am super fortunate in the friends I've made in England. My friend Ane invited me to come to Norway at Christmas less than a week after I'd met her, so I obviously took her up on that invitation. We've spent a lot of time together in London, and she studied in New York during her undergrad so she's familiar with the US, but I think the first time we really discussed the cultural difference between our countries was when I was in Norway.

The best way to get to know something about a country is to stay with a family. Ane's family was entirely generous and welcoming to this American girl of Swedish heritage who speaks absolutely zero Norwegian. They did their best to make sure I understood why they did all the things they did, explaining the origins of various parts of their culture. It may just be my experience, but I think this is something we overlook in America. Perhaps my favorite conversation occurred less than an hour after I'd arrived in the Bruasets' home in Ås.

"It's too bad our Christmas tree is against the window so we can't get all the way around it."

"Um. That's OK. Why would we need to go behind it?"

"This way we can't join hands and walk around it and sing."

I don't know about you, but this immediately conjures up for me an image of the Whos down in Whoville. They like Christmas a lot. That evening, however, I learned that in Norway it is a common custom, particularly in households with small children, to join hands and sing Christmas carols around the tree. This strikes me as entirely charming. I think I'll try to import that custom.

(Shortly after this I learned about the princess who talks to horses. Seeing my somewhat startled face, they assured me that this isn't considered  normal in Norway.)

In keeping with the theme of learning about culture, Ane took me on a day trip to the town of Strömstad, Sweden. This was the obvious choice for a couple of reasons. 1)My dad's family is from Sweden, and now I can say I've been there. 2)Everything is super expensive in Norway (I actually stopped trying to convert things into dollars because it just made me sad), so Norwegians drive to Sweden to buy things like alcohol, tobacco, and candy. (Nebraskans: it felt to me like those giant fireworks superstores right after crossing into Missouri. Except these were for alcohol and candy.) Strömstad is a really pretty little town on the coast, and it was fun to walk around it. Not much was open because it was December 27 and that apparently still counts as Christmas.

When we realized we weren't going get lunch in Strömstad, we drove back into Norway. On the way back to Ane's home, we stopped in Fredrikstad. We spent an hour or so walking around the Old Town inside the fortress. It's also a pretty little town...with nothing open on December 27 because it's Christmas.

Deserted streets in Fredrikstad

We had a full day of sightseeing planned in Olso the next day, but the weather did not cooperate as well. We went up to Holmenkollen  for a beautiful view of the city, but it was so foggy that we couldn't even see the turns we were supposed to take. For this day's adventure in Oslo, however, we had a sweet little dog named Luna with us, and she provided entertainment in the car and enjoyed the stop she got to make at Holmenkollen to run around in the snow. (Incidentally, that's really the only snow I've seen since last winter. There wasn't any in the other parts of Norway or Sweden that I saw.)

Sunny, Ane, and Luna at the museum

The only downside of having Luna with us was that it somewhat limited the places we could go. There aren't a lot of museums or fabulous buildings that really like dogs inside. Fortunately, to continue my cultural education, Ane thought to take me to the Norwegian Folkemuseum. Because there's an outdoor section as well as an indoor, Luna got to walk through part of Norwegian heritage with us. Many of the traditional buildings showing Norway's history had been decorated for Christmas and had information on signs about typical Christmas customs in various parts of the country. I learned, for example, that prior to the rise of Christianity in Norway, the Norse celebrated the solstice in December with ritual beer drinking. With the advent of Christianity, the observance moved a couple of days and became a Christmas celebration...with ritual beer drinking to the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

I've always loved museums that set up period houses and rooms, so this one was totally fascinating. If it had been a nicer day (it periodically rained most of the afternoon), I would have liked to spend longer exploring all the buildings and grounds.

Being able to fly to Norway - or many other places in Europe - in two hours or less is something I still can't quite get over. My visit was far too short; I really would have liked to stay in Norway longer. The country is beautiful and I'd like to see more of it, and the Bruasets were very kind in opening their home to me. The moral of the story is that I learned exactly enough about Norway to want to go back. Probably in the summer.

And since I know you'll ask: no, I didn't take butter with me. Ane and her mom did when they flew home from London earlier in December, though. :)

London Is Good at Christmas

No, seriously. London is really good at Christmas.

Whether you prefer to spend your December shopping like a crazy, with big splashy attractions, or looking at slightly quirky holiday displays, London is the place for you. PLUS, on December 23 it was 55 degrees and sunny. How do you beat that?

I celebrated with two theatre productions: the perennial holiday favorites "Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the Musical" and "Noises Off." Again, I don't know what could be better.

Earlier in December, a couple of my girlfriends and I spent a delightful afternoon at the London Chocolate Festival at the Southbank Centre. When buying hot chocolate at a festival like this, know that the chocolate is better than anything you've ever had. My first wish was to swim in a giant vat of it (or at least submerge my whole face). But unless you're planning never to look at anything sweet again in your life, I assure you a small cup is enough - or share with your friends. Oof.

When we left the chocolate festival, we stumbled upon a charming German-style Christmas market on the banks of the Thames. Again, if you've ever thought that you really needed to buy anything gingerbread/Christmas/chocolate/sauerkraut-related, I cannot recommend this more highly. The whole atmosphere, including the lights on the trees as it got dark (which it does around 4:00pm), was truly delightful.

If your preference is for more traditional carol singing, there are choirs performing in Trafalgar Square in front of the giant tree every night in December from 5-9 pm.

If you like the idea of a large tree, but you don't really feel like fighting the crowds to stand outside, may I suggest the St. Pancras train station? There's a tree here every year made of...something...and this year it's legos! I love that London embraces its quirky side. While I love my stuffy British period dramas more than (almost) anything, the quirk of the real London is way better.

If, like most people, you really want to celebrate the season with a giant carnival, then Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park is for you. Wait. A giant carnival, did you say? Why, yes I did. There's even a scary drunk-looking Santa-clown in front of the fun house. (See video below!) If you prefer the Christmas market to the scary Santa-clown, Winter Wonderland is still the place for you. Warning: a trip on a Saturday or a Sunday will require all reserves of crowd-patience you have.

But if you're a reasonably poor student, you can still have a delightful time making your own decorations out of paper. A whole room of Christmas fun for £2! And I only super glued myself to a tiny cardinal once!

Happy Holidays to all! Peace, Joy, Love, etc.

A Thanksgiving in London

What's better than a hand turkey on Thanksgiving? Surely nothing, you might say. Unless it's a Pilgrim-hatted cardinal.

I'll vote for the cardinal.

(Look, I made a hat!)



This is my first Thanksgiving away from family and friends, so, if you'll indulge me, I decided to make my own list to celebrate the day, London-style.

• I'm thankful that today it was 55 degrees and sunny in London, and that I got to take a walk in the beautiful autumn leaves.

• I'm thankful continuously that I have the opportunity to study here, and that I have a job and a family that allow me to fulfill my dream to live in England.

• I'm thankful that I have supportive family and friends at home who have made a tremendous effort to make sure I don't feel lonely or forgotten, both today and all the other days I've been here.

• I'm thankful to have found a website streaming the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in real time. Right now there's a marching band playing a medley of "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

• I'm thankful that my best friend has found love.

• I'm thankful that my artistic abilities stretch just far enough to make a tiny Pilgrim hat. (If you don't think it looks like a Pilgrim hat, I'll only accept verbal complaints. What was that? I can't hear you. The Atlantic Ocean's in the way. You can tell me when you come visit.)

• I'm thankful for dorky/awesome theatre friends who immediately recognized the Sondheim reference I made at the start of this post.

• I'm thankful to see so many amazing things every time I walk out the door that I start to look past them. Can you imagine? So much history, culture, and charm crowded together...I can't even see it all anymore.

• I'm thankful that the British Royal Mail is so unreliable that the second half of my birthday present from my sister arrived today and became a lovely Thanksgiving gift.

• I'm thankful to have made fantastic friends here who I would never have gotten to meet if I'd stayed at home. There are lots of reasons they're fantastic, but I'll submit this picture (posted by another American in celebration of today) as an obvious one: 

Ooh, look! There goes Pikachu in the parade!

• I'm thankful that my cat has a good home while I'm gone (Pilgrim kitty made me think of Lucy). And I'll be thankful to get her back next year.

• I'm thankful that tonight I get to go to class and discuss both a fascinating poem and a novel that I found truly beautiful. While I sometimes get bogged down in reading, I am constantly grateful to have intellectually stimulating conversations about literature at least twice a week. (Discussing the same novel two-three times a year for a decade doesn't lead to many new ideas, it turns out.) There is so much new literature to read; I'm glad to have the chance to do it. 

• I'm thankful for my friends and family. I know I said it before, but isn't that what Thanksgiving is all about? The emails, chats, Skype sessions, Facebook messages, tweets, etc. have reminded me that I have wonderful people at home and that technology makes the distance (though not the time difference) much less.

Today I accidentally slept through breakfast (which always means the day begins with profanity - never a good start), and I'll miss the Thanksgiving dinner planned tonight in my dorm because of class (there are enough Americans living here to justify the attempt at it). But spending part of an afternoon collecting leaves bigger than my hand and making a tiny Pilgrim hat isn't too bad. More days should include elements of whimsy. For now, I'll enjoy the rest of the parade with a cup of tea. Happy Thanksgiving to all! 

A Celebration

Today is the opening performance for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Andover High School.

There is no accomplishment of which I'm prouder than that theatre program - and to all the people who helped it along the way, I'll be eternally grateful. It would be easy at this point to sound a bit melancholy about the amazing experience I'm missing today. Instead, I'm so very excited for all the students involved who I know will be truly fantastic in this show and will keep the theatre thriving. And to the two former students who stepped up to take the reins this year, I couldn't be more proud or delighted. There is no other way I'd have it.

In the spirit of celebration, I'm going to a friend's flat for dinner (rather than moping in my dorm room alone). Andover Theatre, all that you are and will become is in my thoughts tonight and I'll toast to your success.

Break a leg!

A London Patchwork

Monday: Halloween and the Jack the Ripper Tour.
Tuesday: Christmas Lights turned on in Oxford Street.

Anyone else feel like we skipped November in there? No? Must just be me.

You know when you're walking down a tremendously busy street and you feel a little like cattle being herded? That was Oxford Street on Tuesday as the lights were about to be turned on. While standing in a crush of people, trying not to lose my friend Ane or get trampled, I looked up and saw Eric Whitacre crossing about fifteen feet in front of me. (If you don't know his music, shame on you, but you can find him here.) If you've spent any time in big cities, you know that they are loud, and in this ginormous crowd on Oxford Street, it was especially loud. So when I saw Eric Whitacre, I thought I said "Oh my God, that's Eric Whitacre" at a totally reasonable volume. Judging by his reaction (head snapping around to see me staring with my jaw dropped), I was a little louder than I intended. He was very kind to come over and talk to me, but I'll admit I would rather have shown a bit more poise. There is some comfort in the fact that I'm certainly not the first choir geek to react like that when faced with him.

Saturday was Bonfire Night. This was fun (though we didn't see Guy Fawkes burned in effigy). My favorite thing about spending extended time in London is finding all the cool neighborhoods I have never seen as a tourist. For the fireworks we went to Primrose Hill. There is not an official fireworks show there (but there were a awful lot of unofficial fireworks going off all around us), but the hill offers a really great panoramic view of London so we could see several displays in the distance. People who planned better than we did made an evening out of it, packing picnics, champagne, and the like, but we contented ourselves with going to find dinner after the fireworks (I was actually pretty proud that I thought to bring a blanket). If you don't know the story of Guy Fawkes, this site sums it up pretty succinctly. They also sell shirts: Guy gear and Fawkesy Lady wear. I've been giggling about that for about ten minutes.

Princess Amneris Gold Atlas Sandals
(designed for the Royal Opera, London)

For this weekend's cultural outing, we branched out of the typical museums a bit. Instead we went to "Shoes for Show: the Sculptural Art of High Heels." The only bad thing I have to say about this show is that it wasn't big enough, but with shoes from 1850 through 2011, it was certainly interesting. But perhaps the most interesting part of the day came when we tried to get to the gallery in the first place. Four different train lines were down today for scheduled maintenance, including every line that went to the three closest stops to our destination. We got as close as we could and then walked the rest of the way. London is endlessly fascinating to me: the architectural variety (buildings hundreds of years old next to twenty-first century offices), the diversity of the people, and the charming stretches of shops and restaurants interspersed with the residential areas are just a few of the things I adore. Sometimes I think wistfully of streets laid out on a seemingly logical grid, but the unique possibilities when streets intersect at all manner of angles are fantastic. Today we wandered for a few hours, saw parts of London we've never seen but to which I can't wait to return, visited a gallery show of amazing high heels, found a craft market and vintage clothing sale by accident, and generally enjoyed the fresh air and autumn weather. That is an exhilarating day in a fabulous city.

Fawkesy Lady. Good stuff.

Diagon Alley!

Unexpected perk of the Jack the Ripper tour: we walked through the alley where many of the exterior shots for Diagon Alley were filmed. The tour guide told us it was coming and I thought "um, ok." But when we walked in I totally geeked out because it was so completely Diagon Alley.

I'll go back during the day and get better pictures. I was simply too excited not to say something about it now.

Oh, and the Jack the Ripper tour? Gruesome. The tour guide has a projector and at various points he projects on the wall or ground sketch artist renderings or actual photographs of the victims where they were found.

After listening to the description of the third woman being sliced and then "splayed open with her intestines drawn out and trailed over her right shoulder," the man behind me whispered (loudly) to his companion "I don't want the verb 'splayed' to ever be used to describe my body." That lightened the appalling scene for me somewhat because I was trying not to laugh, but it was still pretty horrific.

That said, it's a fun tour. I would recommend it. But when the guide says "if you're squeamish you might want to look away," BELIEVE HIM.

Happy Halloween!

See? I told you Sunny and I would go back to Trafalgar Square after the NFL vacated it. Conveniently, we were going to the National Gallery on Saturday, so we stopped for a little bit to take some pictures first.

I've been fighting a bit of a cold all week so I was perhaps less ambitious with my sightseeing and general wanderings than I would have been. The true downside to this cold was that I was already exhausted when I arrived at the National Gallery with my friends Ane and Floor. The National Gallery has a very extensive collection, ranging from the year 1250 to the 1900s. This is truly too much to see in one day, particularly if you feel as though your head is being smothered by a pillow on that day in question. Because we knew at the outset we weren't going to accomplish the entire collection in one visit, we probably should have been more discerning when we entered and headed to the areas we really wanted to see. Instead we turned left and landed at the chronological beginnings of the collection and art from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. We did our best to power through, but the section of altar pieces really did us in.

This particular work made me giggle for quite some time, however (maybe not the right response). This work is called "The Abduction of Helen." This is a painted "birth tray," given to women in anticipation of or in celebration of childbirth. In this scene, Helen is being carried away by Paris while her companions stand helplessly and elegantly by. (I'll wait a second while you look at it. Let me know when you're ready.)

In my head the scene sounded something like this:

HELEN: Oh, help. Help. I'm being abducted. (sigh)

GENTLEWOMEN: Oh no. 

(Figures at the left can't be bothered to turn around)

The lack of emotion and movement from all the figures in this painting made me spend about ten minutes in front of it enjoying the nonsense. I'm also particularly fond of the tremendously out-of-scale boats at the right. Look at that boat with the GIANT man standing in the stern. And how is Paris possibly going to fit into that tiny row boat with Helen? 

Anyway, we skipped to the 18th-20th centuries after we had seen enough altar pieces, and we were just in time to hear a discussion of William Hogarth's six painting series, "Marriage A-la-Mode." The subject of the series was easy enough to understand without the explanation: a noble family had fallen on hard times and had to allow a marriage between its daughter and a wealthy, but "new money," merchant. The Earl's family would get a much-needed cash injection and the merchant would gain respectability and, following the Earl's death, a title. The social commentary Hogarth was making would have been entirely lost without the explanation, however. Even the paintings in the background displayed the merchant's daughter's poor taste as she tried to prove her respectability, as did the antiques from which she failed to remove the auction tags. Moral of the story: New Money is always lower class and the mere addition of a title doesn't fix that. 

Unfortunately by this point we were pretty well exhausted and all but ran through the rooms with the Impressionists - this will effectively assure our return to the gallery. Not only would I like to spend more time with my old friends Monet, Pissarro, and Seurat, but those rooms were CROWDED. Fighting my way to a decent view of a Van Gogh would have taken much more perseverance than I had patience for at that point. So we'll go back.

Saturday night we went to one of my new favorite places: Gordon's Wine Bar. It is the oldest wine bar in London, established in 1890, and is down in a cellar. Honestly, I felt like I was temporarily living in something from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. I realize that's a ridiculous description, but it's all I've got. If you come visit me, I'll take you there. You'll like it.

Now it's Halloween and, while it's not as much of a thing here as it is in the States, the kids in my dorm took the opportunity to have a fairly raucous party and dress up on Saturday. Because I was at the far more civilized wine bar, I missed it, but I got the description from some of the other postgraduate students who live in my hall at brunch Sunday morning. Because it's mostly postgraduate students who live on my floor, this dorm isn't an awful place to live, but there are certain things that remind me how glad I am not to be a teenager anymore. It's just too exhausting.

Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, we're doing the Jack the Ripper tour. I'm pretty excited about it (and you should go to the website - the creepy music is pretty cool). 

In the meantime, I'll finish this week's bizarre postmodern novel: Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve.

Musings of an English Teacher: Thomas Pynchon

WARNING: Postmodern Literature ahead.

It's no secret: I'm a little bit of a literary snob. Yesterday an 18-year-old who lives in my dorm asked me who some of my favorite authors are. After he had heard my answer he responded with "But those are all school books. Who do you read for fun?" I don't think he believed me that "school books" and "fun" could be the same thing.

The Master's degree I'm working on in London is in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I feel comfortable with Modern Literature, largely because of what I've gotten to teach over the last decade, but Contemporary/Postmodern literature has never been my focus. When I started teaching CIS Literature (College in the Schools: the first-year Literature course at the University of Minnesota) a few years ago, I was woefully behind my new colleagues and had to quickly read fifteen novels that summer, and I feel like I've been playing catch-up ever since.

In pursuing this Master's degree, it's my goal to fill in some of what I feel is lacking from my own experience as a reader. This week's assignment: Thomas Pynchon's second novel The Crying of Lot 49. I've never read any Pynchon before - I've been debating with myself all day whether I own a copy of Gravity's Rainbow; it seems to me it's on my shelf, but I don't know then why I would never have even attempted to read it. I didn't even know that much about Pynchon until today (and I still don't know much about him as a person, but that's apparently the way he prefers it) except that he's appeared on a couple episodes of The Simpsons.

When I finished this novel today, I didn't feel like I knew much more about it than when I started. The opening sentence, which begins in a fairly straightforward and unassuming manner, quickly turns into the labyrinthine prose that characterizes much of the rest of the book: "One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." "Tangled" is an apt choice in this first sentence; not only does it characterize Inverarity's finances, but also the journey upon which Oedipa is about to embark and Pynchon's language through which it is told. This passage is neither the longest nor the most confusing, however. That (somewhat dubious) distinction belongs to the plot of the play "The Courier's Tragedy" which is narrated twice in the novel. The first time, it is relayed by the members of the band "The Paranoids" (a group with "Beatles haircut[s]" who sing with English accents because their "manager says [they] should"(16-7)) and their girlfriends, all of whom are smoking pot and trying to collaboratively relate the convoluted plot. The second time, Oedipa goes to see the play, and the telling of the plot is no less confusing (and it stretches for seven pages). The most memorable part of the play (though not the scene Oedipa explicitly went to see) occurs right before intermission: one character entices another into "foolishly bending over and putting his head into a curious black box, on the pretext of showing him a pornographic diorama. A steel vice promptly clamps on to the faithless Domenico's head and the box muffles his cries for help. Ercole binds his hands and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple of times, pours into the box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies, including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray, agonized struggles from the victim. With the tongue impaled on his rapier Ercole runs to a burning torch set in the wall, sets the tongue aflame and waving it around like a madman concludes the act by screaming"(45). When the lights go black Oedipa distinctly hears someone else in the audience say "Ick."

Thomas Pynchon is funny, there is absolutely no doubt about that. I laughed aloud several times while reading, but mostly the laughter was coupled with clapping my hand over my mouth in horror/disgust/disbelief. That's the thing about Postmodern fiction: dark humor isn't uncommon, but it comes with a multi-centered narrative, contradictions, and nonlinear movement of plot. While students reading Samuel Beckett would complain that "nothing happens," the opposite is true with The Crying of Lot 49. This book is full of events, characters, clues, and ideas - more than I could keep track of in only one reading, as a matter of fact.

What did I like about this book? First, there were several references to The Great Gatsby (one of those "school books" I find inexplicably "fun"), from subtle comparisons of Pierce Inverarity to Jay Gatsby to more obvious language choices (the "grey dressing of ash" covering the cars Mucho once sold(8)) to the overall theme of wastefulness in America. I was also captivated by the overall thematic idea of Oedipa's journey from a typical suburban housewife to a woman who hopes she's gone crazy and half-heartedly attempts suicide, rather than dealing with some of the things she's learned. Because, as she puts it to herself with some dismay, perhaps Pierce Inverarity's "legacy was America itself"(123).

What was challenging about this text? Many of the things that define Postmodern literature (as problematic as that term is). There are no either/or solutions, rather there's a continuum of both/and. This is a difficult thing to reconcile for a person looking for "the answer" at the end of the book; fortunately, that's not me. I've read enough contemporary literature to know better than that. I think my favorite, and the most telling, passage comes right in the middle of the novel: "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back"(66). There are many and varied ideas, there are no direct answers. At the end of that same paragraph Oedipa "saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this." Ultimately, it is that labyrinth of possibilities in Postmodern fiction which is both intriguing and daunting (or frustrating) for a reader.

The reclusive Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons

Will I read more of Mr. Pynchon? Absolutely. I am one of those who finds the nonlinear and multi-centered in literature intriguing. This was not my favorite book ever, but I am certainly looking forward to learning more about Pynchon through his work.

In the meantime, I'll head back to the slightly more certain footing of Modern literature.

Birthday and Other Reflections

This week I had a birthday. On Wednesday, after spending a wonderful afternoon with Sarah Waters' novel The Little Stranger (shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize; I totally recommend it), I thought about texting some of my friends to meet for a drink after class, but it seemed too late. Instead, my delightful new friends had planned a surprise birthday dinner for me and greeted me at the door singing happy birthday in masks of the royal family. What could have been an anticlimactic day ended up being one of the best I've spent here. I'm reminded constantly how lucky I am to be here and to share my experience with these phenomenal people.

Culture this week? The National Portrait Gallery on Friday. I hadn't ever been there before, but I found it really interesting. The chronological structure to the galleries gives a nice overview of British history and, for this American girl who hasn't covered much of this since college, it was a good refresher. Start at the top floor with the Tudors and work your way down to the 21st century for the best look at the collections. We didn't buy tickets for the special exhibition "The First Actresses," but there was a free extension of it called "The Actress Now" that caught and held my attention for a long time. Including both photographs and paintings, it reminded me just how many of my favorite actresses are British. Particularly amusing for me was reading on so many of the mini-biographies a variation of this sentence: "Known for playing _________ in the Harry Potter movies."

Jane Austen

Wm. Shakespeare

But what struck me most at the National Portrait Gallery was the shift in focus required of the viewer. Generally when I'm at an art museum I'm focused on the artist who created the work, not necessarily the person shown. The Portrait Gallery all but requires your attention to be on the sitter rather than the artist, and I often found myself not paying any attention to the artist's identity at all. It was only when I looked at Andy Warhol's portrait of Elizabeth Taylor that I really recognized what I had been doing. Paying attention to the sitter allowed me to focus on the historical context of the work and the connections between the different subjects of the portraits, but also allowed me to totally overlook the person creating the work. I feel almost like I owe the artists on exhibit another visit so I can pay them more attention. Additionally, portraits have never been my favorite type of art; I'm usually more drawn to scenes from nature or something more abstract. Yet when I found myself faced with portraits so familiar, particularly those of literary figures, it felt a little like coming home. That happens to me a lot in museums: when I suddenly come upon a work I know so well, it gives me a feeling of comfort and contentment, as though all is right with the world. Even though portraits still aren't my favorite, I can't overlook that feeling of sheer satisfaction that came from seeing some of these works in person.

I had planned to get some pictures of Sunny in Trafalgar Square playing with the pigeons while we were there Friday, but instead I found Trafalgar Square had been taken over by the NFL. This was a touch surreal. I've never been a huge NFL fan (growing up in Nebraska requires one to tend toward college football rather than professional), and I had no idea that the Chicago Bears and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were playing at Wembley Stadium this weekend. Apparently it's a thing (here's the website). There was a fan rally in Trafalgar Square Saturday afternoon including bands, cheerleaders, and food. I did not go. There have been several small things that have made me miss America in the month I've been here, but this wasn't one of them. I'll be honest: I usually turn on a football game on Fall Sunday afternoons, but most of the time I nap on the couch while it's on. Fortunately Trafalgar Square is only about a ten minute walk, so Sunny will have more chances to play with the pigeons.

Living in Bloomsbury is a really wonderful thing: not only is it so central that I can walk almost anywhere I wish, but there's really no reason to leave on a regular basis. Everything I need is right here. Instead of the NFL rally on Saturday, I went to Russell Square to check out the Bloomsbury Festival. The festival took place at several locations within a few minutes of where I live, but I went to Russell Square because so many events were happening there. It was a pretty chilly day yesterday, only about 55 and windy, but Londoners are a hearty people and bundled up to enjoy the cultural events, exhibitions, food, and live music. Probably my favorite part was the Poets' Path. Festival-goers were encouraged to choose three words from three poems of different eras and put them together to make a phrase (sort of like the magnetic poetry I have on my refrigerator); then the phrases were hung from the arbor and people could walk in and amongst them, becoming part of the poetry themselves. Sunny and I didn't create a phrase because there weren't many interesting words left to choose from; they had already been well picked over by the afternoon. Plus, it was really crowded within the arbor with so many people jostling to create phrases and hang them up. It thrilled me in a dorky, English teacher way that an event centered around poetry would be too crowded for me to want to stay and be part of it.

So now I'm 34, I have wonderful friends, and I live in an interesting place where creating poetry is a popular thing to do. What more could I ask for?

Here's something I learned today...

Apparently this expression is one I've been making for kind of a long time.

(If you're curious, that's Muppet Ann on the right. She's what I would look like if I were blue, dressed like the Statue of Liberty, and still a blonde. She makes the face, too.)

Saturday Wanderings, Part Two

(Monday update: bank account opened after one more visit to the International Office at school. The poor girl at the bank tried to tell me that the information I had wasn't going to work again, but I think scary Ms Johnson showed up and intimidated her into opening my account anyway. She looked decidedly shaken for the rest of our interaction. Oops.)

After the surprising encounter with the "Occupy London" protest, I crossed the Millenium Bridge (the one the Death Eaters destroyed in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) toward the Globe Theatre and Tate Modern. The Globe's season ended at the beginning of October, but it's available for tours and the gift shop is delightful. I'm glad to have seen two productions at the Globe previously (a very memorable--for most of us (ahem)--"Titus Andronicus" and a somewhat sleep-inducing "Henry VIII"), so I didn't do a tour, but I always like to visit the theatre.

I've always wanted to visit Tate Modern, but it's never fit into a tour schedule when I'm with students. The perception is always that modern art will scare high school students away from museums, but I've found the opposite to be true. The one time I've convinced a tour company to take us to the MOMA in New York, it provided the best opportunities for discussions and opened the door for more discoveries of what art can mean. I was really excited to have an entire afternoon to poke around the Tate Modern by myself, so that if I ever do have the chance to bring students back I'll have some things to say.

Sunny likes Matisse

Every time I have the opportunity to encounter works by artists such as Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Pollock, Warhol, or Lichtenstein in person, I'm thrilled. While seeing them in books can be informative, it's nothing compared to experiencing them in person. The Mark Rothko room took my breath away, and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg simultaneously make me feel happy and a little sad. All of that said, the star of the day for me was an extraordinary exhibition by American artist Taryn Simon.

From a description of the artist's work, partially available on Tate's website:
Tate Modern premieres an important new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.


Each work in A Living Man Declared Dead is comprised of three segments. On the left of each chapter are one or more large portrait panels systematically ordering a number of individuals directly related by blood. The sequence of portraits is structured to include the living ascendants and descendants of a single individual. The portraits are followed by a central text panel in which the artist constructs narratives and collects details. On the right are Simon's "footnote images" representing fragmented pieces of the established narratives and providing photographic evidence.


The empty portraits represent living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are included in the text panels and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever, and women not granted permission to be photographed for religious and social reasons. 


Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents, making them recognisable as variations (versions, renderings, adaptations) of archetypal episodes from the present, past and future. In contrast to the methodical ordering of a bloodline, the central elements of the stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the highly structured appearance of the work. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and disorder.

In almost all of the portrait panels, there were several empty spaces for people who could not be included for the reasons listed above. In each of these cases, I found myself returning to these absences as the most important of the family line - particularly when the reason given was "abducted" or "missing, presumed dead." Many of the stories included longer family narratives, like those imprisoned under Francisco Franco's regime for homosexuality, or long-standing feuds between members of a family. One portrait panel included pictures of rabbits in a lab in Australia that had each been injected with a different fatal disease to see the effects - the rabbit is considered an undesirable animal in Australia, to the point where it's no longer an Easter Bunny delivering chocolate eggs to children, it's an Easter Bilby (see this website for the Australian Bilby Appreciation Society, highlighting the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia). The "footnote image" for this work was the mass grave of these rabbits who had all died between the time the original portraits were taken and the exhibition.

After so much emphasis on "absence" in the family lines, a very arresting portrait panel for me was one of a family in China where every single member was present. In the family's narrative, the artist noted that she had to appeal to the Chinese government for permission to photograph a family for inclusion and she was told that this was the family she would use. She could not get any details about why this family was chosen and no member of the family had anything to say to her about their lives or personal experiences. In many of the portraits, the absence was the most telling feature about a family and their life. For this portrait, the government-mandated presence of all members seemed somehow more ominous.

The view from the terrace of the cafe.

I couldn't find it in me to write about this part of the Saturday wanderings sooner - there was too much processing I needed to do. I'm still not sure I've done it justice, and I'm not certain I can; this is the type of work one needs to experience on their own and I'm certain I'll head back to this exhibition before it closes at the beginning of January 2012. When I finished with Taryn Simon I bought myself an espresso and sat on the terrace outside the cafe for awhile, because my brain was too saturated to take in anything else.

Because I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment, when I got back to my neighborhood, I - once again - began reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I own two copies of this book, though I've never managed to get through the whole thing. The second copy I bought because I had literally thrown the first copy against the wall in frustration so many times and the binding couldn't hold up to much more; that copy is at school and I read from it as an example of stream-of-consciousness for my students when we cover the Moderns (they always get really mad at it - it's cute). I need to have read a few chunks of this novel by the first week in December for class and, knowing my unsuccessful track record with it, I figured I should start early. Thus far I'm not tempted to throw it against the wall, but I would not be surprised if there's an angry blog post about James Joyce in my future. Regardless, I did my reading in Tavistock Square Garden, the garden in the middle of the square where I live. It's really a lovely spot and I enjoy watching all the people who take the long way around to cut through a garden almost every time they pass one. In the States, I often look at parks as I go by (usually in a car), but I wouldn't go out of my way to walk through one unless I had some extra time. Here, every day I see busy commuters with briefcases, rushing toward the nearest Underground station, who nevertheless take the extra minutes to cut through the garden on their way. Londoners have a special place in their hearts for these gardens - which occur quite often - and it's really lovely to see. I think more city dwellers could use the reminder to take advantage of the green spaces where they find them, and personally, I need the reminder to get out of my car. I glance wistfully when I see a Prius pass me, but I'm very much enjoying the freedom from driving. Regardless, I'm convinced I would fail at driving here - if crossing streets as a pedestrian is difficult, doing it in a car is much more so. I'll leave you with some pictures of Tavistock Square Gardens now. I'm heading out for another bout with Mr. Joyce.

Statue of Ghandi in Tavistock Square Garden

Connaught Hall, where I live. 

Saturday Wanderings, Part One

This morning, after another frustrated attempt to open a bank account in England (another story for another day), Bishop Sunshine Gibbons and I decided we would take a stroll around London. When I've been here as a tourist or leading students, we take the tube because we're usually crunched for time. The result is that I'm super familiar with London's public transportation system, but have really no idea how the different areas of London fit together.

Sunny told me this morning that he really wanted to see the spot from Mary Poppins where the little old bird woman comes to "Feed the Birds." Tuppence a bag. Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag. (Are you singing with me now?) So I set off to St. Paul's, singing show tunes, and taking charming, British-y pictures along the way. The closer I got to the cathedral, however, the more police I saw. When I arrived, I found myself in the middle of the London branch of the now-global Occupy Movement. The protesters had already gathered and the police were just converging. Sunny and I realized pretty quickly that we weren't going to get our picture with the steps today, so we thought about seeing the inside of the cathedral. As I started to weave my way through the protesters on the steps, I glanced behind me. The police had cordoned off the area and weren't letting anyone in or out, nor were they letting any traffic through on the roads around the square. While I had planned on spending the afternoon in and around St. Paul's, suddenly it seemed like a better idea to try to get out of there. I pulled out my camera and my most American sounding accent and batted my eyes at the nearest policeman who let me through after a minute or so. I did hang around a little longer to see if anything developed (behind police lines), but the police started letting people leave if they wished and not much happened. This BBC News version is pretty much what I saw happen.

This was an unexpectedly exciting start to our day, but we continued on to other nearby destinations.

Sunny still really likes St. Paul's. He'll feed the birds next time.

If you want to see more of my pictures, check out the London album on Facebook. (Ann Celeste Johnson) I've made it public.


Update:  (Oct 26) When I walked into Occupy London, it was at the very beginning of their occupation of St. Paul Cathedral Square. There was no true "occupation" yet. That has changed in the last couple of weeks, as this clip from NBC's Today Show demonstrates.

Musings of an English Teacher: Samuel Beckett

WARNING: Literary references abound in this one. Be prepared.

Sometimes, I'm pretty sure English teachers assign things because it's hilarious for them to watch their students get wildly angry at a text. I'll admit it: part of the reason I insist on teaching The Scarlet Letter is because the struggle is hilarious for me. I've been told this makes me a sadist, but I'm okay with it; I'm convinced I'm not alone here. The best way to improve reading skills is to encounter and overcome the challenges in a difficult text, after all. Nathaniel Hawthorne is not the most difficult author a student will ever encounter, particularly if that student intends to pursue their studies to college or beyond.

That said, I remember the days when I was that high school student really angry at my English (or occasionally Social Studies) teachers for assigning us something that seemed so deliberately obscure as to make me want to blow up my head. The first time I had such a violent response to a work was in my AP Literature class as a senior. The text: Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."

This play made my whole class angrily question the purpose of reading it. From Estragon's first line: "Nothing to be done," we should have felt our impending doom. Shortly thereafter, we witnessed the first instance of Vladimir and Estragon's common refrain:

ESTRAGON: Let's go.
VLADIMIR: We can't.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We're waiting for Godot.

Because this conversation recurs in various forms countless times throughout the play (fine, they could be counted, I'm just not going to do it here), it obviously leant itself to parodies and became our symbol for hopeless causes through the rest of the year. It's not my goal to ruin this masterpiece of absurdist theatre for you here. Suffice it to say that both Act I and Act II end with this sequence:

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.

For high school seniors who are always looking for something to "happen" during a play or novel, this was bound to lead to ... frustration. (Andover Theatre people, I hope you recognize these lines that were parodied in Don Zolidis' hilarious one act "!Artistic Inspiration." Symbolism, Symbolism, Symbolism!)

In my undergraduate time at St. Olaf, the Beckett I ran up against was "Krapp's Last Tape." I remember being only marginally less frustrated--partially because I knew what to expect, and partially because we read the play before going to see a production of it at the Guthrie Theater. Seeing absurdist theatre is a much better experience than merely reading it, but I still was not a tremendous fan.

And now, in graduate school, Mr. Beckett has reentered my life but in prose form. For class this week we're reading First Love and Other Novellas. I'll admit that as a more mature reader I now see the humor in Beckett and I was only tempted to throw the book at something once (that one of the four novellas is going to get another read later this week. I gave up.), and I really did laugh--or at least chortle--aloud in the library today. From talking about how children and "all their foul little happiness" deserve their own sidewalks on busy streets to keep them out of everyone else's way, to tripping an old woman and responding with "I had high hopes she had broken her femur, old ladies break their femur easily," the irreverence with which Beckett's nameless narrators treat other humans perfectly fit my somewhat angry mood today(38).

That is not to say that I found unbridled delight with reading Beckett this time. Particularly, two of his sentences brought back the old "I want my head to blow up" feeling, both of them from the novella "First Love": "For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably,"(70) and "It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, for of all the other songs I have ever heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physically impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough"(76). The first sentence made me involuntarily twitch and reread it six times. The second made me laugh, but I still had to rest my head on the desk for a few moments afterwards. (If you're curious, it was "The Calmative" that did me in--probably because it was the fourth piece of Beckett's I tried to read in a row. My limit is apparently three.)

I still felt frustration with my reading this afternoon, but this quote about Beckett by playwright Harold Pinter opened my eyes to some things:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. 
     His work is beautiful.

There are so many horrific, truthful, agonizing, and beautiful--to borrow Pinter's word--beautiful descriptions in Beckett that I was sorry to have missed them before. They are never descriptions of beautiful things; Samuel Beckett does not deal with happy people generally, but they are people who are so totally isolated and alienated from their society that a reader cannot help but be emotionally moved by their plight. I still think Beckett's language has a tendency toward obfuscation, but I'm willing to forgive him much more of this now.

This morning I was extraordinarily angry at the library's website, various online databases, Amazon's Kindle store, and having to walk to a bookstore to buy an actual copy of a book. My anger was not least because, after spending three hours looking for a particular article in seventeen different places online through the University of London and the University of Minnesota and even checking four London libraries for the hard copy of that journal, I found that article in five seconds when I typed it into Google. Google! (I'm hoping none of my students are still reading, since I yell at them for doing precisely this.) At the end of the day, I'm glad I found the article I needed online, but mad about the three hours I could have used more productively. And I'm glad Samuel Beckett and I have reached an uneasy truce. We'll see if the ceasefire lasts through class discussion on Thursday.

First Week of Classes

Gordon Square, right by my dorm. Sometimes I read here.

I've learned several new things this week (and relearned several old things, too):

I love the sparkly, rainbow bubbles of my screen saver. Honestly, I hate to move the mouse to disturb their frolicking, but I know that if I wait 60 seconds, they'll be back.


Being a full time student again is fun. Don't get me wrong; college was fun the first time. Saint Olaf will always have a special place in my heart. I also enjoyed my time at the University of Minnesota, but working full time (much more than full time, usually) while going to school doesn't exactly lend itself to all of the experiences college can mean. I was not able to devote enough time to my courses nor to the social aspects of being a student.

This time I'm doing a better job. First of all, I know myself and my work ethic better. I'm really interested in what I'm studying now, so I don't mind doing the hours and hours of reading every day (I'm already planning on talking more about my reading in future posts, so I won't bore you with it now. If you're curious, I'll send you an exhaustive summary of what I've learned this week). Additionally, after years of reminiscing about college and listening to "Avenue Q" sing about all its wonderful aspects, I'm doing a better job with the social parts, too.  Too often at St. Olaf, especially freshman year, I didn't take all the opportunities as they came.  Maybe I was shy, maybe I was homesick...whatever the reason, things passed me by which I later came to regret.  Hindsight is 20/20, after all; at 33 I'm unlikely to make those mistakes. Suffice it to say: college is fun.


Currently I'm in the midst of a phone crisis. For years, my phone has been my only source of the internets away from work, so I'm attached to it all the time. It's always in my hand, on the table, on the back of the couch, by my bed: never out of arm's reach, in other words. In London I don't have a smart phone. I have a phone remarkably similar to the first one I got in 2001, and I'm having to relearn to text without a full keyboard (and no T9 function--this phone can do that for Spanish and French, not for English). I have learned my number--you're welcome to call me--but mostly I give it to people to text me. It's been the strangest cultural experience for me, and I'm waiting to feel liberated from technology. Mostly I feel cut off from the world and inconvenienced. I'm sure the sense of liberation will come. Won't it?

Museums should always be free. London is an expensive city, no two ways about that, but I think they have several of their priorities correct. Yesterday my Norwegian friend Ane and I went to the British Museum for a few hours. I've been there twice before on previous trips: neither time was very successful. The first time the fire alarms went off about 10 minutes after we arrived so we had to leave. The second time I had a monster headache, and it's hard to be interested in learning when you're considering self-decapitation. When Ane suggested the British Museum, I agreed immediately, but not with an overwhelming excitement. Mostly my associations with it aren't the best. Yesterday, however, all that changed. First of all, there was no pressure to see everything in the museum in one shot: it's a six minute walk from my dorm to the museum. Because it's free, I can and will go back. We spent some time in the Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece and Rome sections and then decided to save most everything else for another day; there was a nearby Mediterranean restaurant beckoning us for linner (Get it? Lunch/dinner? You got it). I'm super excited to have the time to go to the other museums and galleries over the next year at my leisure.


When I got home from linner yesterday, there was a new friend request waiting for me on Facebook. It was from a former student at Andover who graduated three years ago, and it came with this message: "Are you in London? I think I just saw you at the British Museum, but when I did a double-take, you were gone." This world is amazing and vast, but incidents like this remind me of how very tiny it is, too. I know I made this point last week, but we are much more similar to each other than we are different, and, clearly, we're much closer than we think.

Medals for the 2012 London Olympics

My new Canadian friend Justin said something last week that I've been pondering since: cities have moments when things are happening and moving there, and they have moments when they feel a bit stagnant. This is London's moment. Really, this city is the place to be. So many things are happening and upcoming, it is really startling. This relates to what I've been reading about the beginnings of the Modernism movement in literature in the nineteenth century (again, if you want to know, I have things to say), and this city feels like the place to be in the twenty-first century. The Olympics in 2012 (the medals are on display at the British Museum) are only one very obvious example. Walking down the street today, I was stunned again by the beauty of this city. I said aloud "Wow, I live here" while walking (alone), and I'm convince the guy next to me thought I was crazy; it's a small price to pay.

Really, come visit. Things are happening here.


Addendum: Two minutes after I finished typing this I got a very exciting text on my crappy, crappy phone.  Congrats to two of my very favorite people! Tyler and Katie, I know you'll be amazing parents! Ethan is one lucky kid!