Academicals

Oxford is to learn in, after all, and I have been meaning to get to post on that end of things for some time. But as to the stuff of our studies here - collectively and individually - it is hard to know "where to have it," in at least two senses (each of which I'd locate somewhere in the region between the value of commodities and Mistress Quickly, the poles that Marx [Karl] sets out for 'having' or its failure, whether aptly in our case you can judge from the following). On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays a group of us meets for Shimer's senior course on the History and Philosophy of the Western World (Part 1), familiarly known as IS 5 (Integrative Studies 5). For the last few weeks, it's been a movable feast, literally and figuratively (that is, again, academically). I came to Oxford shrouded in an unwarranted optimism (despite warnings) that we'd find amenable public spaces in which to discuss the materials we're reading this year, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Citizen Kane (the latter will be the last selection in IS 6, i.e. the Western World Part 2). So far, we've made it through Gilgamesh (and related Sumerian myths), Homer's Iliad, Hesiod's Theogony, and lyrics by Sappho. And we've done so around town, including at the tearoom of the local posh-set Randolph Hotel and a few select public houses (the Red Lion and the Waterman's Arms), congenially over refreshments, but unfortunately also to the occasional accompaniment of lunchtime chatter and stray strands of rather less inspired (viz. piped-in) musings than Homer's or Hesiod's. Anyway, today we seem to have located our place, a room in the West Oxford Community Center, a sequestered bit just around the corner from our flats, just past the Oxford Canal, and across the street from St. Frideswide's Church on Botley Rd. (on the Saint, see below), the local parish church. We'll be continuing to take in other bits of the city as the term and year progress, including some mornings in the seminar rooms of New College, the University's Old Library, and the Quaker Meeting House on St. Giles.

As to where we 'have' our studies in a more academical way, I can mention only a few of the tutorials that students are currently taking to indicate in a microcosm quite how various the life of the mind is in Oxford. French for conversation and translation, feminist theory, lute for performance, the history and craft of stained glass, the philosophy of power, and the history and theory of modernity and industrialization are some of the topics Shimer students are covering this term. All that on top of the history and philosophy of the west (and for a few others of us, a more concentrted look at "philosophy and theology to the early modern period," the third in our Humanities sequence). It's still beautiful here (though ever chillier and breezier), but we are all hunkering down over the books as the autumn gathers in and spending a bit less time wondering what the spires themselves are dreaming.















To finish, a bit of the academical Oxford on display at the Old Ashmolean, now the Museum of the History of Science (see below). Above is the chalkboard that Albert Einstein used to demonstrate his ideas on the expansion of the universe in a lecture here in town in May, 1931. It's available in facsimile as a mouse pad in the gift shop. (Not, I presume, that Einstein's work deserves any of the gnawing criticism to which Marx laments that he had to consign his work for so long.)

St. Frideswide

Here are a few more images from my ride up to Wytham Wood (see previous post) and a story along the way.














Some English blackberries. These line the roads, hedgerows and fields everywhere and, as you can see, are very much in season.


















Here is the interior of Saint Margaret's Church, Binsey. Founded in the 12th century (and rebuilt from the waist up in the 13th), it's at the end of a winding lane a few miles out into the fields northwest of town, beyond the Thames, surrounded by a family farm. Just west of the present church is St Margaret's Well (apparently still there, though I did not find it). With water from that well, the story goes (in the main - versions vary), the 7th century Saxon noblewoman Frideswide cured the blindness of Algar, a Mercian King. Algar had been blinded by a flash of lightning during a raid on Oxford, where he had come to take Frideswide away by force, she having refused his advances after taking vows of chastity on founding a priory there while still quite young. She had fled from Algar up the Thames a few miles to Binsey, where she tended sheep for some local nuns, and prayed for deliverance. It came in part in the form of the treacle well (cf. Alice in Wonderland, a delightful children's book by a former Christ Church, Oxford mathematics teacher) that appeared there on her striking the ground with her staff. She took pity on the blinded Algar and healed him with its waters, and for it gained his repentance. She named the well for St. Margaret, who herself was martyred in part for refusing a pagan suitor during a persecutory rage in Rome.









Here's the view of the door (the remaining bit of the original structure) from the yard (where the well is). Apparently, Henry VIII visited the church, a characteristically brazen gesture, I think. No English King before Henry III would even visit Oxford for fear of being struck blind like Algar, and one might think someone with a record like VIII (though I am not sure when his visit occurred) might have considered having at least some similar scruples. At any rate, Frideswide became Oxford's patron saint (Christ Church, the city's Cathedral at the center of one of the university's older colleges, was founded originally in her name by the Augustines in the 12th century) and the places of her story are scattered throughout the area.


















A resident of Binsey - looking thus askance I think because I had nothing to offer in the way of delectables.

The View Over Oxford

Oxford lies athwart the confluence of the Cherwell and Thames (or Isis) Rivers, and the Oxford Canal (see pictured below). A glance at a map of the city and its environs presents a tangle of waterways flowing in almost every conceivable direction. Fording one's oxen here would seem to me to have been a problem almost on the order of the seven famous bridges at Konigsberg; when I first arrived, I had a hard time knowing when I was on what side of what river as I came and went. Just now (we're told) all of Oxford's various canals, rivers, rivulets, rills and streams are "raging" due to the rains, which even the locals have been complaining are unusually unremitting this year. In fact, if the rivers hadn't swollen so much over the last few months, this past weekend - three days of calm, warm sun - would have been a perfect few days to go punting, which some of us have been interested in trying since we've arrived and before the University freshers descend on the town over the next week or so. So instead of poling here and there under the willows and acacias, I made use of our sunny respite and left the brimming banks and soggy flats along, around and over which Oxford has grown to take to the uplands that flank the Cherwell and Thames to the east and west. Channeling their winding streams separately in from the north and together toward London away to the south, these hills make a long, broad valley and offer a series of views of the "sweet city with her dreaming spires," in Matthew Arnold's well-worn phrase. Anent Arnold, a bit more in a moment. First, let me offer a few of my (somewhat more prosaic) pictures of Oxford's spires, gathered in these last rare, dry days (it's raining and chill again as I write) from the hills around town .

Here's the view approaching the heart of Wytham Wood, a University-owned preserve atop a steep ridge to the northwest of town.

This is just within Wytham Wood itself, rather more picturesque than the city from this vantage I think.

The following day I left the house in a rush a couple of hours after sunrise to get to South Park, which lies just to the east of the city, and a five minute bike ride up Southfield Rd from where I live. South Park offers a standard postcard view of the city, though I wanted to make my own version of it. Unfortunately, I found the grass rather wet, and the view obscured by what I had (beginning the day before at Wytham) begun to suspect was Oxford's smog problem. Here above, anyway, is my version of the view over Oxford the professionals somehow make to look like spun gold against emeralds.

For the rest of the day, following my breakfast-hour reconnaissance from South Park, I toiled up the higher hills further to the southest, traipsing up and down bridlepaths and narrow lanes, dodging cars (driven seemingly, as in a dream, by children, dogs, or absolutely no one, down the wrong side of the road) and avoiding backyards, trying to find a break in the trees through which I could get another view of the city. I knew it was just beyond where the branches closed in, but I failed for the rest of that afternoon or evening in making good on the altitude I'd gained. I saw a lot of the other side of Shotover Hill and beyond, including the modest burg of Wheatley, itself sitting just above the River Thame (a tributary of the Thames, originating in the town of Thame, to the north east), and along the Thame a mile more, the even more modest hamlet of Great Milton (somehow I missed Little Milton).

Here's the Great Milton commons on a balmy Saturday afternoon.

The next day, Sunday, I road off to the west again, though this time toward the south, and up Boars Hill, promised to me as the single best spot over which to survey Oxford. After a lackluster ride at the flanks of constant squadrons of Sunday drivers, I arrived at the crest of Boars Hill, and sure enough, there was Oxford, relatively resplendent at the notch between two grazed-over hillocks, the view helpfully pinned down by an interpretive plaque itself ensconced within a bay in the fence at the side of the road into the town of Boars Hill.

Here's the view from the road into Boars Hill.

I then drifted off into Boars Hill proper, thinking I might find a pub to start my reading of the Iliad for class the next day, or perhaps an unexpected opening over a clearing affording yet another view of the city?

Imagine my delight when I happened on just the thing: Jarn Mound, built by the Oxford Preservation Trust in 1929-1931, as the sign announcing it told me, "to preserve the view over Oxford." Indeed, the moving force behind the plan, Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, planned the mound to include the view from Matthew Arnold's "signal-elm," which spot afforded a view over the Ilsley Downs (to the south), the Vale of White Horse (further to the south, through which runs the River Ock), the Thames, and Oxford. At any rate, I like a handful of others I saw there that day, dutifully mounted the steep, blocky steps up the unprepossessing Mound (called Jarn, apparently, through some local mangling of "Jardin", i.e. garden) only to find that any view it promised has long disappeared behind the exuberant upper stories of the woods around Boars Hill.

Here's the Mound from below, with the hint of the squat pillar atop which fades an interpretive map of what one should be able to see - a five-county panorama, no less - from the mound's apex.

Here is what I in fact did (or didn't) see having clambered up onto the interpretive plaque itself, at the apex of Jarn Mound. I made a promise to myself to return in the winter, after the leaves around the mound will have had their fill of the view and retire to give us a chance. At least I was able to enjoy the unintended irony in a somwhat fuller quotation of Arnold's An Oxford Elegy:

And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:
That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not summer for beauty's heightening
Lovely all times she lies, lovely today.

Indeed, she may need not summer or anything else, but nowadays it leaves the rest of us out of luck. (On another note, it's Jarn Mound that could use some heightening.)

At any rate, I did get to read a bit of the Iliad yesterday afternoon on Boars Hill, reclining in "Matthew Arnold's Field" (if I remember, another gift from the Oxford Preservation Trust), watching the blackberry pickers and picnickers in the generous sunlight.

And here is a pair of perfectly picnicky Oxonians (?) come to find out what I am up to on my side of the shade tree we shared.

Ta!

Originally uploaded by stuart.patterson

One of my new friends here in Oxford. Someone I can really look up to. I met up with herhim hanging out behind Exeter College. I'm seeing a lot of these off-the-wall boys and goyles in Awksfd streets and lanes. (If you tap herhim on the nose [with the cursor, with the cursor], shhee'll take you to meet some cranny cronies.)

The Rowan, on the Oxford Canal

This is one of the more austerely finished of the boats one sees along the canal that runs just west of Oxford, athwart Port Meadow (see photo below). This, the Rowan (as you can just see painted on the cabin side at the stern) is parked just below the bridge that runs over the canal at Wolvercote along Godstow Lane. Many of the other boats one sees further along the canal are inhabited, and look it, adorned with all the colorful detritus and practical make-shiftery one often sees surrounding the lives of somewhat unconventional folk. We hear tell that it's nearly impossible to get permission to live in one, so we think many of their denizens just try not to make too much noise about it. (For similar reasons, I felt compelled not to be the shutterbug as I passed by the ones that were clearly homes - and sweet ones, I'd say.) I'd like to buy a few of these craft and turn them into Shimer's regular dorms and classrooms. No one else seems to think this very feasible. Here's another shot of the canal further down, just beyond the smallest drawbridge I've ever seen.

Aristotle Lane from Port Meadow

Clarendon, Sheldonian, Old Ashmolean and Exeter College on Broad Street

This is the view, roughly, from one of the three entrances into Blackwell's, bookseller to Oxford, across Broad Street (which was, times past, the town garbage ditch outside the city walls). The Clarendon Building, on the left, was built (c. 1713) to house the Oxford University Press, which had been in the top floor of the building next door - in the center here - the Sheldonian Theatre, an early effort of Christopher Wren's. (Between these two are hints of the upper stories of the Bodleian Library). Further to the right is the Old Ashmolean, now the Museum of the History of Science, and beyond that a bit of Exeter College. One could go on about all of these buildings, all at the heart of the early modern University, but I'll just let the names tempt you. Again, the picture's my point - this is a standard prospect of monumental Oxford. If you could get a little closer, you'd likely find yourself bemused by the series of busts that top the columns in front of the theater, all late reproductions of comically lugubrious miens - of whom no one apparently knows anymore. I've come to think of them fondly as the dynasty of ice cream.

Here's one of them (sometime I'll post the whole line):