Stratford in Pictures

Last night, the seventy Loafers rode up to Stratford for Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." This event is just one of the many flashing neon signs (okay, wait... Stratford-upon-Avon... maybe one of the many "swinging, hand-painted signs") that reminds me of 1) the high level of thoughtfulness, construction, and execution in the Bread Loaf program as a whole and 2) the enormous luxury of being here at all. Sure, it all comes at a price, but when else is one welcomed at a bus parked a couple of blocks away, handed the equivalent of $28 for dinner and a RSC ticket by an on-site, smiling Bread Loaf organizer, and told to go have a good time?

Not only is this a great picture of Lena, but you can get a sense of the countryside north of Oxford through which our coach sped for about an hour-and-a-half to Stratford.

Here's a pack of Loafers disembarking the bus (and trying not to get hit by cars or bikes, a genuine concern given the amount of traffic and the fact that traffic comes from The Other Direction) in front of Stratford's Swan Theatre, undergoing renovation currently. Instead, we saw the production of "Midsummer" in what is known as the Courtyard Theatre, where we'll also see "Hamlet" in just a couple of weeks with David Tennant from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and Patrick Stewart.

It was really wet in Stratford. Think Seattle on a stormy day. No, think stormier than that: wind blowing sideways and umbrellas not really covering or doing very much. Here we are under umbrellas trying to walk to Shakespeare's believed birthplace.

Here's Lena and me in front of the house where Shakespeare was supposedly born in 1564.

And a sign commemorating that fact. And the fact that you can pay around $24 to poke your head inside.

(For some reason, I'm having trouble spacing or indenting this next part, so pardon the One Huge Paragraph. This looks like my college essay-reading nightmare, a big block of text on six different topics...) This shot is from our walk (check out that crazy sky!) back to a pub to meet Heather and Heather for cider before an incredible Malaysian dinner (vegetarian hot pot, fruit sorbet...) near the theater. Afterward, we walked about five minutes to the theater itself and enjoyed a funny, accessible, well-acted, enchanting (think lots of different forms of light -- 1000 points with a more positive connotation -- all over the theater) "Midsummer" with sort of a London punk/street/sci-fi look and feel. For those who saw "Children of Men," imagine if "Children of Men" looked like "Children of Men" but was so full of heart (this is a stretch, I know) you just leaned forward in your seat to get closer to it for 3.5 hours. I'm so lucky to have seen it. I'm so lucky to be in England at all. (Annie, a friend from both Bread Loaf and from college admission/counseling, posted her great review and a production photo of "Midsummer" in her blog, linked at right. I posted Alison's, my first year roommate's, blog there as well, and they'll both do justice to the performance better than I can.) Anyway, today, 70 bleary-eyed Loafers rubbed the fairy dust out of their eyes and woke up for class and the less magical, albeit pretty darned awesome, Oxford day-to-day. My class met, and discussed what I lovingly call "Moby D." for a couple of hours. We hit on all the big issues: homosexuality, religion, science, metaphysics, at-sea politics, race, whiteness, intertextuality (a lot of books referenced within "Moby D."), and What Exactly Does That Big Whale Mean Anyway? More "D" on Thursday. Inspired and ready to write, I might wrap up tonight my 12-page paper on (in a nutshell) whether the whale = art (broadly defined: literature, visual art, music, philosophy) and whether Ahab is just hunting art (i.e. all that is beautiful). The text really does hold up this argument, which is not as cheesetastic as it sounds. This paper grew out of a big conversation Ed and I had earlier this spring on "Moby D." Props to you, Ed, for making my paper-writing life so darned fun (really) today! More late tomorrow (Wednesday) night after another High Table Dinner. Have a great day!