Bread Loaf 4: Oxford!: Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Monday, July 7, 2008

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

One quick addition to say a card arrived today from Mom and Dad! When I got to lunch today, there it was, sitting on the "mail table." Thanks so much! It took less than a week, and I love it. Now it's on my bulletin board in my room. Way to go! Big love to you both!

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Important Dates, Bread Loaf Oxford

July 7 - "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Stratford
July 9 - High Table Dinner with Christopher Ricks
July 10 - "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Globe, London
July 15 - High Table Dinner with Freya Johnston
July 17 - First paper due
July 18 - Lena's birthday!
July 21 - High Table Dinner with Joe Dixon from RSC
July 22 - "King Lear", Globe, London
July 30 - Dinner with Emily Bartells from the Bread Loaf "Home Office"
July 31 - "Hamlet" (with Patrick Stewart!), Stratford
August 3 - Possible "Literary Oxford" tour
August 7 - Second paper due
August 9 - Alison's graduation and departure

Bread Loaf Oxford Director Peter McCullogh's Rain Tutorial

Living on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, one has to make some allowances for the weather. But this has been a rotten ‘summer’ so far, even by English standards. If locals aren’t complaining too much yet, it’s because last summer was (if you can believe it) even worse, with some of the worst inland flooding England had ever experienced (Oxford was cut-off by rail and most roads for over a week). A particular irritation this summer has been the wind – gale-force we’re used to, but not in July. It wreaks havoc on lush perennial borders (watch for flattened delphiniums), and (as I understand) on games of Ultimate Frisbee.

But the English are obsessed with the weather – it’s one of the most frequently-appealed-to ‘safe’ conversational topics. When absolutely cornered and unable to otherwise avoid conversation with another human being, the Englishwoman or man will take refuge in the weather. So, in case you accidentally terrify an unsuspecting Brit with a conversational overture, be very polite, delicately avert your eyes, and talk weather. But be careful, because you’ll probably actually get a response, and the Brits have a breathtakingly refined meteorological vocabulary (what would you expect if that’s the only thing you can show verbal excitement about?).

So here’s a short list of some of my favourites:

‘forecast’ -- there is no such thing here as a ‘weather report’. Weather-obsessives are well-catered for by the BBC Weather website, where you can track the various forms of rain on the up-to-the-minute satellite display: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweather/

‘sunshine and showers’ -- like yesterday (and the day before that, and the day before that, and . . . ). This is always said with optimism. It is not a bad forecast. It expresses that quintessential British ability to make the best of a bad situation (cf. Dunkirk). Learn to coo about how ‘fresh’ that occasional sprinkle makes things, how the garden sparkles, how the scent of roses hangs better in the air, and to appreciate the fact that the sky is more attractive given the beautiful contrast of clouds (what other nation could produce the paintings of John Constable?).

‘showers’ -- these are very different from ‘rain’ (the latter being continuous for more than a 30 minute period). Hence, ‘showers’ can be:

‘sharp'

‘thundery’ (isn’t that sweet? I love the understatement of the diminutive form)

‘broken’ (i.e., more or less continuous, but not quite)

‘bands of’ (organized version of ‘broken’)

‘frequent’

‘occasional’

‘fading’ (optimism again)

‘squally’ (another adorable diminutive; hides the fact that these are nasty – heavy rain with high winds)

‘fast-moving’ (less poetic version of ‘squally’)

‘slow-moving’ (this is bad – on a day of ‘sunshine and showers’ you want it to rain only very quickly on your picnic / garden party / walk to the library)

‘beefy’ (a recent addition to the BBC Weather Centre vocabulary; you get really wet in these, and I think that it has something to do with the size of the drops involved)

BUT ‘torrential’ is never used to modify ‘showers’; ‘torrential’ for some reason can only modify ‘rain’. Just in case we ever get to warm weather, what you want to see as a high temperature is 25C. This is hot enough (given the strength of the sun this far north) to make shorts a comfortable possibility. Anything over 28 becomes unbearable, usually because accompanied with humidity. BUT don’t use the word ‘humid’ – the term is ‘close’. This sounds vague, but it’s actually quite evocative and accurate since it captures the sense of foreboding, low black thunderclouds, haze, and oppressive temperature all-in-one. But come to think of it, that all sounds rather attractive at the moment.

Description of, and texts for, my course

7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/Ms. GerrardThis course aims to explore the cross-currents of British and American literary culture of the nineteenth century. By looking at key texts across a wide variety of genres and modes, including romance, the gothic, realism and naturalism, we will examine the sometimes tense and competitive relationship between American authors and British cultural models. We will explore a variety of themes such as American innocence and European "sophistication"; landscape and nature; history; self-reliance and community; sin, guilt and the "double self." We will conduct seminars around key pairings or groupings of pivotal British and American texts, supplemented by other contemporary materials. (This cross-listed course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.)

Texts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner (1798); Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851); William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799); Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself " from Leaves of Grass (1850); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799); Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (1837), especially "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"; William Wordsworth, "The Thorn"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Most of these texts are readily available in Oxford World’s Classics editions. There is an Easy Read edition of Edgar Huntley, ed. Philip Barnard (2007).

Bread Loaf 4: Oxford!

Monday, July 7, 2008

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

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Important Dates, Bread Loaf Oxford

Bread Loaf Oxford Director Peter McCullogh's Rain Tutorial

Description of, and texts for, my course

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