Of Miscellanies

The roster for my class has been 100% female from day one. Who would have thought that Jane Austen would only interest women? Who? Of course, Hollywood and BBC might have something to do with that... As delightful as Colin Firth (BBC P&P) is, especially when jumping into a lake.

Or so they say. My personal taste swings toward Matthew MacFayden (2005 P&P with Keira Knightley), whose character is made to run through rainstorms and appear out of the rolling fog of dawn in a state of undress-- But he plays the silent, prideful role so well. I almost believe Austen intended such things between the lines despite myself.

Our UT Professor is the tall woman behind me. She's European born-- and still knows the English language better than anyone I've ever met before. She also knows the topic of Jane Austen better than anyone I've ever met before and, possibly, in the universe. She took a semester off to write a book on Austen-- you should read it when it's published.

And I will read it, unless she hides it from me and my burgeoning thesis with a pen name.

I am working with Laura (in the period attire on my right) on my thesis, speaking of Austen and burgeoning theses and reading relevant books about her. That is a research task we can, and I do, proudly say we've already begun. Currently we're reading a critical biography of repute by Park Honan, and next up is an anthology of letters written and read by Austen herself. Laura and I meet over coffee (chai tea lattes, to be precise) on a weekly basis in an effort to force ourselves to ponder on our honors theses as we read. There is a key difference between us: she knows her topic. I-- I do not.

When I use the word "ponder," I definitely intend to bring to your mind the delightful golden bear of yesteryear, a la A.A. Milne, with little stuffed arms crossed over a large stuffed belly and a scrunched, intense expression as he puzzles some grand, great question that eludes him entirely. Usually, in Pooh's case, that question involves acquiring and eating great masses of honey even though he is a stuffed animal-- In my case, that question involves Jane. And her novels. And my senior year at UT.

Laura's doing her best to help me along with these coffee sessions, but we sometimes (usually) get sidetracked by such intriguing topics as drunken dogs floundering in Lake Austin and gnat swarms landing in my hair and chai.

As for a more concrete history of this photo, it was taken as a rite of commemoration of the day when our Professor called us to order for the first time. Her practical intent was to give us syllabi and introduce assignments (and put the fear of her grading pen into our souls). But there was another purpose at hand: she wanted to introduce us to the mysteries of the HRC, also known as the Harry Ransom Center, a library-museum hybrid which is renowned for the amount of primary sources meticulously maintained within its dungeon deeps. It is truly a dragon lair of a library-- countless research treasures and trinkets (I like to imagine as being) in towering heaps and glittering piles with librarians lying supine atop them, gentle flickers of flame periodically emanating from their bespectacled eyes and lighting the gloom.

That was a tangent.

The point is that our Professor wants us to take advantage of the HRC in at least three of our five research papers. And... the HRC is actually, quantifiably, ridiculously intimidating enough that you want-need a Professor to hold your hand the first time through. This particular long ago day, the HRC also had an eighteenth century exhibit going on the first floor as an additional lure to our Professor, who wanted to take advantage of the interactive photography feature. She asked us to appear in period attire.

Liz missed that day, which is why I can't point her out to you in the photo.

Kathleen is the dark haired one in navy to my left. She's genius at planning itineraries, as I've hinted; I am definitely holding her back with my inexperience. But she doesn't seem to mind, bless her. I do pride myself on the ability to agree and be supportive; perhaps those abilities are enough to offset my failings as a virgin traveller.

I also know Beth from my sophomore year, she's the one directly behind me on the left, with red hair. She's already worked a publishing internship in Austin. Which is to say: she knows the only publishing company in Austin. There really is only one-- if I hold to my current course, Austin will shortly be in my rearview mirror. The next year will tell, that's all I can say. Beth and Laura are both exercise gurus in my humble, apathetic opinion-- one runs and one swims. I myself walk and sink, and thusly feel respect for both. Long live good health.

I'm less familiar with others in the photo, but looking forward to getting to know them, and there are a couple of missing faces, too. There's another Amanda, for instance, leading to a determination that we must have nicknames.

Despite the fact we are all female and have some sort of an interest in Jane Austen in common, the group is surprisingly variegated. There are a lot of different personality types and backgrounds. I've had the opportunity to observe this at various points of the past semester.

Because, if you wondered, yes, we did get together and drink genuine English teas (peppermint and black and one that bloomed flowers in the teapot, I kid you not), courtesy of the Professor, while eating scones and watching the 2008 BBC productions of Austen.

You know you're jealous.

When I told the STA travel agent this today as Kathleen and I booked Eurostar tickets, she laughed at me. Goodnaturedly, sweetly, but a little too loudly, as I'm sure you are now. Or perhaps you're just smirking at me, gentle reader, since I am not there to ask you just what that particular curl of lip is meant to signify.

Okay, and on a topic switch, this is Brasenose, also known as my home for five weeks. (In an aside apostrophe: Forget you, mold-infested Waterford Condiminiums with your lead in the wall paint, your leaking parking garage that's made a lake with spoking rivers of the parking spot my roomie makes me park in, forget you with your broken toilets and broken elevators--I'm off to a building worthy of Rowling's Harry Potter! Where porters will know my name!)



This is another shot of Brasenose, pilfered as is the case with the other, from someone else's tourist collection.

Isn't the grass green? That would be the magic in the air.

Of Jane Austen

Why Jane Austen?

Because she's a classic, you might say, dismissing completely the question I've proposed. Because she's been revived by pop culture and Hollywood and BBC productions, you could further claim, coming perhaps a little closer to the truth.

This is a relevant question because I did not understand (and hence did not enjoy) Austen's writing at first. I was young, I was naive, I knew little of the ways of the world.

So let me take you back to my first interaction with Austen.

I picked up Sense and Sensibility in 7th grade at a book fair. I loved the book fairs; my middle school hosted one annually. It was my heaven on earth: surrounded in every direction by new, fresh smelling books, their covers untattered and perfect, 90% of them fictional-- several hundred universes awaiting my keen eye, legions of words waiting to march across the blank slate of my pre-adolescent mind-- I found the copy of Sense and Sensibility on a table designated as "Classic," a period portrait of two fresh-faced, bejeweled young women on the cover.

"Ooh," I said, and I bought it.

(Just like that. That would be how I've always bought books, and how I still buy them. I look at the cover, and I go "Ooh," and my hand is drawn of its own accord to my credit card.)

When I tried to read it, however, I understood none of it. I was too lazy, as a youngling, to actually look up the definition of "Sensibility." After many hours of thought (as is often the case, in being lazy, I created more work for myself), I puzzled its meaning out incorrectly, and applied it with an audible slap to Marianne Dashwood-- "Obviously these words share a root!" I growled at the two young women gracefully situated on the cover, who had tricked me with their rosy cheeks, satin dresses and demure expressions. "They share a root, and thus must mean the same thing, and so why are you opposites? I don't get it! Your character traits MEAN THE SAME THING!"

That misunderstanding was frustrating enough to make the book inaccessible to me. I don't like not understanding something; it nags at me.

But that wasn't my only problem. The novel's opening, with its analysis of the Dashwood inheritance problems, also danced over my head.

And the relationship between Eleanor and the Ferrars lad. It made me groan, even as a 12 year old-- especially as a 12 year old. Where was the passion? And where were the longwinded descriptions of their physical beauty? WERE THERE NO SOULMATES IN THIS BOOK?

I flung the book into a corner of the gameroom's bookcase and forgot about it.

In 9th grade, a trifle older, not much more mature in matters of taste, I tried my luck with Persuasion. In the same year I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and my preconceptions of a green, rectangle-headed Munster ruined it for me. Objectivity was yet an undeveloped tool for me, you see, and Persuasion fared little better-- have you read Persuasion? It was the last novel Austen completed. Again, at 15, I was still searching for the modern trappings of romance. The glitz. The empty glamour. The Fabio cover.

After those two forays into the mind of Austen, I gave up. I packed it in. I wrote her off my list of favorite authors-- for good, as I thought. Throughout high school, if you had asked me about Jane Austen, I would have told you that her writing is boring. Unfunny. Unwitty. Worse than-- worse than-- if a book could be transmuted into a food: worse than BRUSSEL SPROUTS.

And I am NOT one of those gourmands who has been able to acquire an appreciation of the sprout since gaining adulthood; no, brussel sprouts, I will shout it from the roof tops, trigger my gag reflex.

I held determinedly to that opinion of Austen, Austen as a round, green, foul-tasting sprout, because I knew no better. I had been taught no better.

It took an intensive college course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, untranslated from their original Olde English, to convince me that eighteenth century texts in general are actually quite modern, quite easy to understand and quite delightful to read.

So was an immature mind opened to a clearer understanding of that which came before the year 1986.

The course I'm taking in Oxford is geared around Jane Austen. I will have (re)read four of her novels and written five research papers about them by the time all is said and done. I will have toured her birth home, jumped from the same Lyme-Regis rock as Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, toured the same palatial houses as Elizabeth Bennet, and walked some of the same paths as the Hollywood and BBC portrayals of Austen novels.

And, as if all of that weren't enough of a total Jane immersion, when I come home to Austin, I will be spending my senior year writing an honors thesis about gender roles and feminism and conservative politics in her novels.

(But don't quote me on that. My thesis advisor has directed me to find "some little problem" that I can realistically answer in one semester of research and 40-70 pages of doublespaced type, and the huge issues of feminism and politics definitely don't follow those instructions. Give me time to think. I'll whittle them down in the end.)

As for how I came to light upon Austen specifically, from the body of eighteenth century texts I found so attractive post-Chaucer experience, that would be because-- well, yes. I have seen the movies. And yes, I've seen the biographical ones, too.-- Austen is accessible in a way most eighteenth century writers are not, thank you BBC screenwriters.

And her writing IS witty, contrary to my adolescent opinion-- extremely so. I would imagine, when read by someone with good voice control, these books have the potential to come totally to life, every carefully crafted sentence of them. The ironies are there in subtle spades; those less obvious can be teased out in nuance. Park Honan, one of her biographers, writes that her books are actually quite good to read aloud because "one of the greatest qualities of Jane Austen's prose is its 'ear'" (245).

In the end, of course, I didn't have that much control over the Oxford course: my options were Austen, Shakespeare, or Romantic Legends-- hands down I was registering for the eighteenth century female author. No questions asked.

Of a Beginning

Oh, but so much has come! And so much has gone! How can I choose a beginning for this story, really?

I could, of course, try to remember back to a year ago when things really began-- I remember a tea party, for instance, I see a wash of faces smiling, talk of Jane Austen and giggles float through the air, and Anne Hathaway overshadows everything-- but my memory is a foggy piece of work, as you can probably see, a faulty thing with many veils, many shimmery gauzy veils, between clarity and actual recall (if memory is a heritable trait, then mine I probably got from my father)-- which is all to say, simply, I think it for the best that we begin with today.

The sun rose, my alarm chimed, and I got out of bed.

In a fictional tale, at any rate, that's how my day would have begun.

In reality, the sun rose, hours passed, my alarm chimed-- and then I hit the snooze button. Ten more minutes. Ten more precious, comfortable, gloriously warm minutes of life I decided really should be lived under a mound of fleece piling and memory foam pillows.

Half my allotted time passed in sweet silence before my cell decided to intervene.

The reason for the alarm, and (what turned out to be) the reason for the phone call, was a planned meeting between myself, Liz, and Kathleen at the student Union. Liz had no Internet, and thus no Facebook, and thus was calling to discover the appointed time and place of our rendezvous.

I must have been surprisingly coherent in my half-asleep state because by the time I strode into the Union, half-melted and sunburnt, Liz and Kathleen were already there. I sat, I flicked the sweat and dripping makeup from my face, and the meeting was called to order.

The task at hand?: Our itinerary. Theoretically that was the task at hand at any rate. Kathleen had brought her trusty laptop along, placed reverently before us on the table (til it started to crash and we had to quest for electrical outlets), and we began to research things.

By "things," I mainly mean modes of travel, the problem that I had not previously conceived to even be a problem and which is most definitely a very key problem.

We decided bikes would be clever. We will rent bikes, we cheered, and bike ourselves cost-effectively whither we wish to go. If properly caffeinated, we might even make London on a clear day if we set out early enough. London is only an hour away from our lodgings in Brasenose via train (30 dollars per trip) and two via the bus (10 dollars).

This clever decision depends entirely, in my mind, upon a heat wave. Should there happen to be a heat wave, I might have to put my foot down and declare with authority, "The train, my ladies, the train."

This clever decision also depends upon my will power. Should there happen to not be any (highly likely occurrence), I might have to put my foot down and declare with authority, "I have a mysterious disease and must thusly avoid sweating. The train, my ladies, the train."

Earnest vehicular brainstorming researches aside, we began attempting to list the places in London proper that we want to go.

Only to be struck down by the universe for our audacity in even thinking it possible to list all the places-- obviously, obviously, there are an INFINITE number of places that we want (need) to go! By attacking such a dense, infinite sort of topic with our delicate sheets of notebook paper, scrawny pencils, and finite mental energy, we posed a threat to the universe, and the universe knocked us flat.

Or that was my feeling, as I dazedly smiled down at my scrawled, two page list: Natural History Museum. Madam Toussand's Wax Museum. Millennium Bridge. A standard flight on the London Eye (What makes it "standard"? You go slower? Liz asked. Don't question the eye, I retorted. You offend the Universe. Don't question the standardization of the Eye.). Big Ben (I imagine that one's hard to miss, Kathleen noted). Tate Modern (Of course we'll see that when we're at the Globe, Liz decided. Free admission then, Kathleen explained to my confused face. Mysterious, how they know all this). Tower of London (I bet there're ghosts. Royal ghosts.). Westminster. The Royal Parks. The National Galleries.

And I could go on, but your eyes are crossing, aren't they?

I'll admit to a minimal amount of eye crossage myself. How to untangle all of these places properly? How to fit them all into the schedule of classes and day trips? What about Paris? What about Scotland?

What about the surrounding neighborhood of Oxford? Kathleen inquired of my starry eyes and raised fists.

What ABOUT it, indeed? I bet it's amazing! I bet it's beautiful! I bet it's territory we have an actual hope of exploring on rented bicycles on balmy, British summer afternoons!