This entry is about my weekend so far, which subsequently means that it is pretty much only about my English Novel in the 19th Century class. It gets incredibly – though I’d like to think not painfully – long near the end; I almost want to apologize but I don’t because I just really want to share with y’all all of the awesome things I am seeing! So skip over it, I won’t be offended (I guess), but it’s pretty cool stuff, yo.
Tuesday was a yucky day, weather-wise, but I think it added to the whole experience. I spent the morning trudging around Chiswick House, the Earl of Burlington’s old digs in west London. The grounds are pretty (gorgeous labradors running all over green lawns!), and every room of the house is a different shape: rectangular rooms flanked by a circular room on one end and an octagonal on the next; the whole idea is not very space-efficient but I didn’t think it nearly as heinous as I would expect myself to.
Then it was another afternoon of English Novel, in which we chatted about Jane Eyre and sat for a 40-minute lecture (I mistyped 400-minute at first, which seems more accurate) on “What is a metaphor?” because we were not performing up to snuff in Professor Ferguson’s (known forevermore as Fergie Ferg) group activity. It was painful, to say the least, but we made it through and definitely earned our pizza at a delicious little café nearby campus. The pizza was a pitstop en route to north London (though we were all convinced she was actually taking us to Scotland), where we saw a community theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest, in this teeny theatre above one of the neighborhood bars – cozy alarm. I always forget how much I absolutely LOVE The Importance of Being Earnest; the pacing and wit of the play are to die for, in my opinion. Aunt Augusta forgot some lines and hilariously broke her umbrella (at which point the scene was toast; Gwendolyn was sitting right in front of the discombobulated accessory trying so hard to keep a straight face for the rest of the act) but all in all I was impressed. It was still a torrential downpour by the time we were heading back, but it was an absolutely fantastic trip with countless hilarious moments. It was a bonding experience, to say the least; I loved it!
Wednesday was spent inside doing work and pilfering away a fantastically beautiful day, which I intended to make up for Thursday only to wake up to more clouds and rain. I made it out of the building finally last night, to Piccadilly Circus for the three-story O’Neill’s bar: there was a live cover band, with a few questionable song choices (“Creep” by Radiohead? What am I supposed to do with that in a scene that is a glorified frat party?) but a good night of dancing nonetheless.
I woke up this morning to another great sunny day! I just tooted around most of the morning before meeting my Novel class at the British Library, just down the street from my dorm. I pass it every day, and after today’s adventure I will be stopping by much more often! Here is where it gets long, but read on for an extensive list of all the things I saw!
- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. As of this morning, I was a total stranger to this, so hearing about it for the first time ever from a woman with a relatively heavy Scottish accent blew my mind on impact. It’s a translation, most notably by Edward FitzGerald, of Persian poems attributed to this Omar Khayyam fellow. The quatrains were displayed all throughout the exhibit, and just from reading a few of them I’ve decided to read them all on my own and then revisit the exhibit so that I have a better idea what I’m looking at. I noted a few that I particularly liked:
“With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own Hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd --
‘I came like Water and like Wind I go.’" (30)
“Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd -- "While you live,
Drink! -- for, once dead, you never shall return." (37)
- Samuel Johnson’s first English dictionary. This was the beginning of the manuscripts room, and I was impressed by it largely because defining words is such an interesting science. When you try to do it, it’s always so hard – remember in elementary school when they’d lecture us not to use the word in the definition? Imagine being the person to assign words meaning! It’s like a modern-day Noah. Look at me, calling 1755 modern-day; maybe I am coming to grips with how old everything in this country is? But probably not, it still really freaks me out. Also, “his selection of illustrative quotations ‘from the best writers’ helped establish the literary canon”; no pressure, dude. Finally, one of the placards in the case had this quote of his, which I loved: “Language is the dress of thought.”
- Beowulf manuscript. To be honest, it went pretty much right over my head; I’ve never read Beowulf and haven’t heard rave reviews (though all the reviews I’ve heard have been from high school students, who have been scientifically proven to hate reading and, to some degree understandably, especially when it’s assigned for those pesky high school English courses). But still, it’s the only surviving manuscript of it in the world so that’s pretty sweet. And to be the oldest is impressive when it’s believed to have been written TEN TO THIRTEEN CENTURIES AGO. What is that. (Besides being 1,000 to 1,300 years, which I can tell you what that is: utterly nuts. Nutterly.)
- JANE EYRE MANUSCRIPT. “Reader, I married him." To see the first-ever version of this line – the one Charlotte Bronte literally penned herself – was incredible. Next in the case, Persuasion was sitting on Jane Austen's actual writing desk, as were her glasses. The ones on her face. They touched Jane Austen’s face as she wrote a novel that I just studied in class.
- The original Alice in Wonderland. Complete with incredibly Tim Burton-esque illustrations in the margins; I felt like I was back at the MOMA exhibit! I thought it was really interesting that two men, both so drawn to this story, had such insanely similar drawing styles, over 100 years apart.
- So much music!
-- Manuscript of Handel’s Messiah, and the libretto used for the first ever performance. No explanation needed.
-- Autograph score of Mozart’s Horn Concerto in E-flat. A young girl stood in front of it doing what I, in my musically-inept state, can only assume was reading it and singing it under her breath. It was such a beautiful example of music’s transcendence of time and space to see someone born in the 21st century interacting with pieces from the 18th century.
-- Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in G Minor. It was covered in editing marks, which made me like it more than had it been pristine. I love seeing artists work through a piece. It reminds me of the first time I saw Monets in person, which was actually just this past fall semester at the MOMA. In one of the pieces (forgive me, I don’t remember which), he didn’t take the paint all the way to the edges of the canvas, which I really liked. Becca and I both noted how it made it feel so real, how you could feel him sitting there putting this beautiful art together piece by piece; in fact, B recently blogged about the sensation I’m trying to describe! Yeah, that was a plug, but I love her and so do you so go read it. Besides, she says it a lot better than I ever could.
-- Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It was pretty surreal to see the origins of something that is now such a tradition – I totally fall for wonderful things like the viral wedding entrance to “Forever”* (still h8 you Chris Brown), but there’s nothing like those chills you get when this start, everyone stands up, and she’s standing in the back of the church. And it all started in this notebook!
-- Beatles. There was a whole case with sheets of the lyrics for some of their biggest songs: Yesterday (working title: “scrambled eggs” – so incongruous, right?), Help!, Michelle (on the back of an envelope), A Hard Day’s Night (on the back of a birthday card), a few lines by George Harrison on the back of directions to their agent’s flat. The ones scratched onto the back of other papers were my favorite, because I love the image of being overcome with an idea and needing to get it out into the world as soon as physically possible – even if that means you have to go buy your son a new birthday card because you’ve just grabbed the one that was supposed to be his. And these ideas became worldwide hit tracks!
- Intricate notebooks and bindings from Switzerland, France, Spain, England, Italy. Still too gaudy for my taste; I don’t want to shut any doors and say I will never be down with the baroque/Rococo style but I really am beginning to wonder if there’s hope for me. Nonetheless, the elaborate decoration of the covers – and the edges of pages even, not just gold but with full-on art on them! - is suggestive of so much respect and reverence for the words and stories inside; if the books are this beautiful closed, imagine what they must be like once opened and delved into.
- Codex Sinaiticus. Produced around the middle of the 4th century, it’s the earliest manuscript of the New Testament in Greek, and earliest and best witness for some books of the Old Testament. Just SO OLD. Also, the Codex Alexandrinus, and Psalms 12-15 on papyrus, from the 3rd century. Seriously, older than most dirt.
- Copy of the gospels completed by presbyter Constantine 27 May 995. I flipped out over this because, though I wasn’t entirely sure (I put a question mark over the word “presbyter” because I’m a nincompoop) I liked to think that they meant the Constantine; but alas, we have about a 600-year discrepancy that tells me two things: I was wrong, and I suck at history. But, it was really gorgeous – scripture arranged on the page to be in the shape of a cross; beautiful writing – and just so freaking old.
- Early sutras – to be continued; at this point I had to regroup but I will be back to see... the Magna Carta! Gutenberg Bibles – 2 of them! And, the 19th Century Photography exhibit - the whole reason we were supposed to go for class, the exhibit I’m supposed to write a short paper about but was on museum-overload by the time I got to it.
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