A Conspiracy of Cartographers

Epilogue

2008-07-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

...Come, my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses, Tennyson

Continue...?

2008-07-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

When I make my next blog, I'll post the link here so y'all can see it. I'm thinking it'll be just a record of the parts of senior year I want to remember. Any thoughts for titles?

::COMING THIS SUMMER, 2008::

SENIOR YEAR:

http://howdyadoagain.blogspot.com/

Undiscovered Country

2008-07-06T13:03:00.001-07:00

Back in the U.S., and things have never felt so different. Everything realy IS too big around here, people DON'T dress HALF as fashionably, and for the country with some of the greatest expanses of forest and wildland around (which are especially visible from the air), we are a country with some of the grossest excess imaginable, as if cities and towns were trying to spread as far as possible and failing. Just the gas it requires to get from place to place! And the brand names and the strip malls...

I'm sorry. I flew into Newark. It's not the best first impression of America. I was suddenly reminded by the Jersey Turnpike how much New Jersey resembles Bosnia.

But I guess that's all to be expected. I've got plenty left to say on my re-adjustment, as the wardrobe door slams shut, but I don't think I'm going to say it here. Not yet, at least. I think I need time to digest all that.

And so, with England done, this blog is going to come to an end ... so to speak. I'll leave a post above to tag any thoughts, things I miss about England, and I'll keep that one post updated. There's a lot about this blog that I haven't finished - such as the infamous post about Ireland, which maybe will come up in later blog-related writings - and a lot I haven't been able to put into words, but I think, for the time being, that it would be better for me to keep those things unsaid. Digest them first. They'll come back around at some point. "Nothing is forgotten, just not remembered until the right time," and all.

So I'm taking a quick hiatus from reporting on and analysing my life in a narrative format, but I'll continue again with a blog about senior year - it'll probably start up mid august, if any of you are interested.

I just wanted to take a quick second to thank all my readers, I hope you've had fun, and I've enjoyed your comments and your patronage.

It would be a mistake to get overly sentimental about England passing into the background. It would be just as much a mistake to deal with the subject in a cold, objective fashion. Suffice it to say that one of the more important things England has left with me is the knowledge that we, as Americans, are not the only crazy ones. Nor are the English, Scottish, Irish, Swiss or Germans. I'd even venture so far to say that we are, in fact, all pretty sufficiently crazy. I remember writing something in my moleskine like "the West Country puts American political troubles into perspective: 'Yes. We know. That country is run by madmen who can bomb each other to bits and ruin lives and manipulate the country against itself for their own ends. That's just what Americans do. Good. Got that settled. Now let's go have some scrumpy.'"

And although, after nine months, it's very obvious that England isn't just a fantasy land, there is a kind of enchantment that lives on there in the culture, somehow. I won't try to put my finger on it. It'll ruin the mystique.

I have yet to find the same enchantment here. But I'm only really just starting to look.

Schtammelbachspike

2008-06-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

So now on to some cool, quirky bits of Germany, now that I've probed the scary parts.

Everyone rides bikes in Germany, including a five year old kid we saw today.

There's a lake nearby our flat that looks like Lake Nockamixon in Bucks County, and it's got a landscape that is pretty reminiscent of BC as well. We went out to it with one of our flatmates, her girlfriend, and two of their friends, who were dating, and one was German while the other was Spanish, and our flatmate's girlfriend was Spanish. And we all went out to the lake to have a picnic. It was a thoroughly international picnic.

Everyone has a way of impersonating different languages with jibberish - if I were to try to imitate French without actually speaking any french words, I'd say something like:

Oh la la bou rapapla (phlegmy throat noise) toi.

I asked my German flatmates how they'd do that for English. They responded in two ways. First, to imitate American English, repeat the following phrase:

(said as nasally as possible)

"Rah rah rah rah rah."

To imitate British English, repeat the following phrase:

(as condescendingly as possible)

"Raw raw raw raw raw."

They asked what German sounded like, and my friend and I looked at each other for a split second, then said:

"ACHen de FLACHen BLOOCHen BLACH"

And our flatmate said "that's Arabic!"

Some interesting German words include:

Knoblauch: the word for garlic. It looks like it should be proncounced "Knob launch."

Schtammelbachspike: meaning "the warehouse by the shipping area" or something. It's the theatre were ShakespeaRE: 08 is taking place. It's just fun to say.

Also, the only serious German words I know come from action movies like The Bourne Identity and games like Call of Duty: Medal of Honor, so words like "Schnell!" and "Fruchen!" and "Polizei!" and "Nein!" So my flatmates and I tried putting them together in as many ways as possible. For instance:

Fruchen?
Nein! Polizei!
Schnell?

Nein polizei! Fruchen schnell!

Nein fruchen polizei schnell.

And so on. Can you think of any?

Will write more later.

Auslanders!

2008-06-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

And now I'm in Germany.

We caught an early bus to Germany, and I ran to the station with my one giant rolling piece of American Tourist luggage, having bought a small pink mobile for myself because that was the cheapest one they had, and wearing four layers of clothing so I didn't have to pack them, on no sleep because I had stayed up all night jetesoning clothes and blankets in order to keep under the weight limit.

I almost died of exhaustion lugging my overheating self through the hilly terrain of Exeter for the final time.

I left the way I arrived: exhausted, overpacked, and on a bus.

At Heathrow there was a baggage scale, and it turned out I was actually a few kilos over, so I just ended up carrying a lot of "reading material" with me onto the plane.

Even from the sky, Germany and England are uncannily similar. Where I am, at least, in the west of Germany, everything is flat, and it shows from the sky. As opposed to the random patchwork fields in England, Germany is a little more organized. It actually reminds me of the Midwest, and of Ohio, a lot.

The train system and the treatment of strangers reminds me of Switzerland, but less totalitarian (is it rude to make a joke in these parantheses? This is another such issue I've dealt with, when, if ever, it is right to mention the war).

Deciduous is a good word for Germany, Germany is very deciduous. Often people look at you as though they were frightened forest animals assessing whether you were vegetarian or not.

However, our hosts have been down right fantastic all around. I, for instance, live with a friend of mine and one of the actresses from Midsummer who plays Puck, in their flat which is one of the older buildings in Hildesheim, and filled with, as on of our hosts put it, "Hippies and Homosexuals." She said that like 5 times. There are fish painted o the wall and words like "We're just looking for ... the Everlasting Laugh." They know a bread maker who comes into town with organic bread, and then they actually sell his bread for him amongst their friends. So I'm living with organic bread dealers.

And intelligent ones at that. These guys speak English, German, Spanish, you name it, and there's very little in the way of "ownership," we all share our stuff, and I can't decide whether that's German hospitality or hippie hospitality.

One of our hosts took us shopping, and I was looking around for peanut butter - she was talking with a friend of hers she met in the isles, and I kept asking her if she knew where it was and searching, before I gave up and went away. And as I did, this friend of hers just looked at me and said, with very pronounced Rs, "Peanut Butter." "Thanks," I said, since that was the most effective comeback I could think of without breaking down and punching the guy, and walked away. Aparently my host took him up one side and down the other.

We were getting on the bus to head to our performance space for the first time, and of course our first tactic to buy our ticket was "Sprakenzie English?" because we were told everyone spoke English. But of course, really, they don't. So this bus driver didn't. Somehow, we told him we wanted two tickets to the Bahnhof, and somehow we got them. As we were walking away, he turned to the person next to us and said, sighing "auslanders!"

Our piece, sadly, pales in comparison to the other German Music/Theatre pieces. We essentially watched their production of Midsummer, with a cast of 60, taking place in the top floor of an abandoned warehouse, with costumes made from duct tape and designer clothing ... There was cross dressing, there was dancing - the Pucks were played less as a character and more as a 20-person force of nature, each with his or her own crazy thing (this one girl went around with an electric drill, drilling into the concrete pillars and the floor, while our host carried a megaphone with the chorus of "Sweet Dreams are Made of This" programmed into it and turned it on at random points). Oboron wore a leather jacket and gold hot pants, and he kept biting cashews and spitting them on the ground. He sat in a little wooden treehouse, and for the first part of the show he was covered by this big gold foil thing. Throughout the show, he would point to the pucks, who would make their individual noises depending on which one he pointed to. When it came time for him to send out the potion, the pucks all pulled out condoms and swung them around like morning stars. Helena (Hermia? The ugly one) carried around ice cream coronets that she was always unwrapping and eating onstage (and of course they were melted so they deliberately got everywhere), while Demetrius had a hanky he wiped Hermia with that he kept stored in his underwear, and pulled out to dab his head. There was a rave on more than one occasion, one orgy, and a chest full of fake (hopefully) semen that one of the lovers had, and his/her partner (I leave it gender ambiguous because by that point they were swapping genders right and left) took a big index-finger wipe of it and licked it off.

Germans. In their defence, I can't speak German, so of course all I remember is the startling visuals.

One fantastic thing about the production was how they did Bottom's Transformation. The mechanicals were these little narrator girls, who came in from time to time smiling and looking freaky (cause they didn't keep the mechanical scenes), and they had finger puppets and stuff. Anyway, after the Pucks were told to find some crazy thing for Titania to sleep with, these girls had a scene. They were singing a German lullabye, when the Pucks came in and, of course, turned it into a dance party. Then they lead one of the little girls away from the rest (FREAKY PEDOPHILIA style) and shoved this giant duct-tape stack of boxes on her, with a mouth hole where she could hold a megaphone. So essentially Bottom as an ass was this giant walking cardboard pole with cute girly shoes, and he could only take small steps, and couldn't see, and then Titania wakes up and fawns over him, and he keeps trying to get away but he's a pile of boxes, so he can't. It was great.

Sexual tension abounds in our experience, as well, as girls here from Exeter have been followed home at night more than once, and I myself was traveling with a group of girls and one other guy, and we were followed by two guys. We kept our normal pace and didn't allow them to think they'd scared us. After a little while, they started playing music on their phone. I asked my host what the number for the police was, and opened my phone, and they left us alone.

We also happened to have arrived on the week when Germany is in the finals for soccer. The second night we were here, they played Turkey. There are a significant amount of Turks living in Germany as German citizens too, so tensions were very high. I went out that night with the other people on the program, staying in well lit areas and having dinner. On the way back, though, I had to walk half an hour through the streets from their flat to mine, with one map clutched to my side so no one would see it. I made it back fine, but I was always worried about the soccer fanatics.

And I talked to some other British students here, and they felt the same way, I talked to German students here for Pete's sake, and they felt the same: seeing these footballers was frighteningly like rallying the troops. Germany has only been able to show its flag without being afraid since 2006, and I suppose there's a surge of nationalism right now, but still. I suppose I know my liberal arts degree has been put to good use: I was able to instantly identify the fear I was feeling as the same fear I had felt when I saw Rhinoceros, and chose how to deal with it with the kind of wisdom of that play in mind.

And I don't want to paint Germany as a bad place. I will want to go back. Hildesheim I think is a little xenophobic at times - I've mentioned how I get looks like I'm from Mars when I go most places, right?

But I recently had to be interviewed for an informational movie on Exeter, and in it they asked me about adjusting to England. And I said essentially, not in these words, that jerks are an international phenomenon, and you're going to get made fun of and harrassed and even attacked (first week of Ken-Ex it happened to Rob Galloway and Steve Bertozzi), but that when you interact with another culture and meet the people, that connection is worth whatever xenophobia you encoutner. And I'd say the same about Germany.

There is a beautiful, fairy tale quality to Germany, similar to England, that comes from that deciduous setting, and also the attitudes fo the people. It seems like, at least here in Hildesheim, there is a definite good and a definite bad, and people you meet are always looking out for the best way to tell the difference between the two, whether you're on the positive end of that or not.

Or maybe that's just an escapist way to rationalize the fact that I've been treated both amazingly and like crap.

The Eye of a Needle

2008-06-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, gas prices have become so bad that airlines have changed their back policies, from allowing two bags to go from Europe to America, down to one. This posed a large problem for me, since I'd packed with two bags, counting on having that extra 23 kg of kapow to keep me going.

So I shipped. A lot. Mostly books. In fact, almost entirely books. 27 kg of books combined. Shoot me in the head.

But even then, and even with my vacu-suck package bags, I couldn't fit all my things into 23 kg. So I dumped. A lot. Mostly old clothes, but some significant things were left to be donated to charity. My fleece blanket, for one. I'll miss that.

I also left a number of books with people as gifts, like a book of Scottish fairy tales that I bought in Edinburgh. Giving away so many books was minorly frightening.

And all in all, this packing frenzy denied me the ability to say proper goodbyes to a lot of people in Exeter, which was no fun.

BUT

Condensing everything into one bag, going over and over again and again what was necessary in my life and what wasn't, was very cathardic. It was harrowingly rewarding, picking that little bit that really mattered, and although I miss the rest, learning to live without it.

I still don't know what to make of England being gone. I have one final visit back to Heathrow, and then I leave for good. But this is a large preview of life outside of England, being in Germany, I mean. More on that next.

There the men are as mad as he

2008-06-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

Today I got to play Hamlet, although only for a selection of scenes (Ghost Scene, Play-Within-a-Play, and Death-Scene, to be precise). I couldn't help but feel pretentious, as we hadn't had much time for rehearsal, and here I was, holding my moleskine notebook ("my tables"), in my black jeans, my inside-out black shirt and reddish leather shoes, trying to do it justice. I ended up looking at it a bit like Luke trying to get his X-Wing out in the swamps of Degobah (you know you're a nerd when...).

And now that it's done, I wonder what criteria I was assessed on, as this is Exeter Uni and they lean more towards theatre than drama. And as I've voiced far too many times before on this blog, that's not what I expected "British Acting" to be.

Apparently, though, I was wrong.

I met with a working dramaturg recently - he's 28 and about to have his first book published on Contemporary British Drama - and he said that a lot of theatre in England is strictly devised. In the South West most of the theatre takes place outside of theatres, either as site-specific or found-space pieces, or street theatre, etc., while in London there's been a big push towards "Event" theatre. He mentioned that dramaturgs in England are having a hard time, because a large demographic of English directors - the middle aged ones from the 70's - are extremely distrustful of someone else coming in to fiddle with their work, and it's only now that a new generation of directors is coming along that dramaturgs are beginning to get some leeway. These stubborn middle-aged directors follow a trend in the English theatre though, which I found completely baffling:

English dramatists are opposed to theory.

Oddly enough, drama theory is viewed as "Continental." (The American-British spectrum doesn't even enter into it.) And so dramaturgs have a hard time getting jobs. And that did a few things for me.

First, it put Exeter Drama in perspective (if that's the culture they're playing towards, then it's not the University's fault that I get weird looks when I mention structure).

Second, it aligned a number of pieces of information that I'd heard from some post-grad students, like the fact that since Universities are publically funded, their curriculums (insofar as they are limited by their funding) are determined by the English Government. One of the post-grads chalked this up to the more leftist groups in power, who he said "found text-based theatre to be too high-brow," insisting on more of a people's theatre of clowns and street performers. So of course a publically funded University would be heavy on devising - it requires minimal sets, costumes and space, with no books outside of some about the process of devising, and no royalties. Which is less out of the Government's pocket.

Third, it made me happy to live in a country where there were privately funded Universities, and that was a first.

Fourth, it made me question British theatre, if that's truly the state of it. If it's truly more theatre than drama not just in Exeter but all of England, how are you supposed to handle things like Hamlet, which are symphonies of Action and conflict, and, even more so, are your native masterpieces? I'm sure if I looked further into the state of the British Theatre, outside of a coffee with a dramaturg (informative though it was), I'd be able to answer these questions.

But fifth and finally, it made me try to take the long view. Everyone's always saying that they're worried about the state of the theatre, just as an institution. This dramaturg's concerns were that virtually all the other art forms had been blown into the stratosphere - if you look at sculpture, painting, or music, for example, there's plenty more advancement on the avante-garde levels than in theatre, if only because realistic drama is still one of the more common things seen in theatres. And he was calling for a kind of blasting-off of theatre, of learning when you've created a strong enough story to stop and have some clowns come in and play.

And yet you get a writer like Martin McDonough, who built his career on the sheer strength of his stories (and punching Sean Connery in the face, of course), who left writing for theatre so that he could write and direct movies, because he claimed that in movies they've retained a knowledge of storytelling, and the theatre has lost that.

That would be scann'd. It seems like the problem in the theatre can't be cause-and-effect narratives constricting artists' creativity as a whole if the theatre has lost its inherent ability to tell stories.

But now, actually, I need to stop this, because it's getting late. Needless to say I'm a little perplexed by theatre, at the moment.

A Nose Towards Belvadere

2008-06-17T17:07:00.001-07:00

Forgive me for waxing pastoral...again...

When I wake up there is a white castle on the horizon that I can see from my room - whenever it's sunny out, and that's now more often than you'd think (for England), you can see the sunrise/zenith/sunset playing on the battlements. It's small, it's probably just a decorative castle, but it is distinctly white.

A while ago Ken and I found pictures of this castle in the Exeter St. David's train station, and it's called Belvadere Castle - it's an Exeter attraction. We've been meaning to adventure there for a while. We even went with a friend, packed a picnic lunch, and tried to walk there... but we only made it as far as the taxi station, because we didn't know how to get there... (in that case, we just had a picnic by the River Exe).

I was talking to my mom today, because I was beleagured with final-week-in-Exeter business, and dreading my 10-Days-in-Germany-Obligation before finally getting home, and she said that whenever you're on the road to do a job and you realize you've done the last necessary thing, there's always a rush of joy at the thought of taking that very first step, and pointing your nose home. And it always makes you feel better.

I can't stop pointing my nose at Belvadere though, and all the things in England that I just don't have time to do. Glastonbury! I never went to Glastonbury, and there's even the huge concert there every year. Or Cornwall - Penzance! - or anywhere further north than Bristol for that matter (in England, that is). I did go to Torquay, randomly, so that's that. I've never been to Wales... but ...

I'm looking forward to pointing my nose home though.

Hit it, Carol King!

2008-06-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

Friday night, Exeter Soul Choir had its first concert - it was organized at the beginning of the semester by one of my friends from Music and Theatre, and they got their act together and performed in the chapel, which was built to have amazing acoustics.

The chapel is also staged in the traverse, so the audience sits on either side of a long isle, and at one end is the entrance, and the other is the sanctuary. So when you're sitting there, you can watch what's happening in the sanctuary, or you could watch the people across from you.

And I took a big advantage of this. Soul music is great, all well and good, but it's not exactly... the most British thing ever. And we were in an Anglican chapel - these are the people who made fun of the Methodists for getting to into their worship (which is sort of the spirit of Soul Choir. No grudges of course, because it looks like the Anglicans and Methodists in England might reunite after all...). And it was just strange, because here is this amazing choir, downright knock-your-socks-off amazing, singing songs like "Itty Bitty Pretty One" and dancing and clapping, or "Oh Happy Day" and going full out Gospel, or "Man in the Mirror," or "I Feel The Earth Move," or "Zero to Hero" - in which they outright acted the muscles and the oogling comments. So there's this crazy choir, and then us, the audience. We were partially drama students who were totally into it, but there was just as many brothers and parents who were slouching and looking bored. I almost got the impression there were people scowling, but maybe I was on crack.

And so much of soul music involves audience participation, clapping and all, and we were just the WHITEST crowd - and by WHITEST I mean boring and out of beat and lame, not necessarily entirely caucasian. We never sang along if we were asked, and when we were asked to clap we only did so for a little while. Everyone loved it, as far as I can tell, but it just seemed like the whole point of Soul was sidestepped by manners. I wanted to stand up with my hand high in the air and start clapping and, like, do call and response or something. Just to shake things up.

At the end everyone raved about it, people shouted for an encore (which we got), but it was like watching Chekhov in an elementary school, or Footloose done by the RSC ... they were doing this fantastic stuff, and here we were in the audience, potato-faced just staring at the choir, who were clapping and dancing and having a great time. It was a kind of exercise in incongruity.

Worst Terrorist Ever

2008-06-05T03:34:00.000-07:00

Also the worst blogging ever, I forgot to report on a key event in Exeter history.

Exeter has a shopping mall, newly built, called Princesshay. It's in the town center, and loaded up with tons of designer shops and restaurants, from Next and Apple to Nandos (YUM) and Giraffe's.

Probably about two weeks ago, Princesshay had a bomb planted in it - specifically in Giraffe's. Specifically, in the bathroom. And it went off - it wasn't a big bomb, it was a nail bomb, and supposed to take out someone as they sat down.

The story is that it blew up in the terrorist's face, and they've since apprehended him. Apparently everyone was sitting in Giraffe's, and then there was a sound and the lights flickered a bit. And then, after they figured out what happened, they shut down the entire city center and sent the bomb squads in. Good to see everything working properly, but kind of off putting.

What kind of moronic terrorist would bomb EXETER? There's nothing IN Exeter! I don't find myself terrorized in the slightest.

Devon's a Prison?

2008-06-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've been roped into doing a number of things in the start of my "summer break" here in Exeter.

1:
I'm playing Hortensio/Sophocles, or "The Best Friend" character, in an MFA Staging Shakespeare director's final project: "The Taming of the Tamer ... Tamed." It's a splicing of scenes from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, and The Tamer Tamed, a play by someone named Fletcher (he has a first name, I don't know it) which was written as a kind of sequel, but much later. They're spliced so as to try to form one complete story between the two of them.

Because I was busily involved in my Music and Theatre piece - setting "Shall I Compare Thee..." to music in a variety of different devised-theatre ways, I missed the first week of rehearsal. When I did show up, they were already on their feet, and the cast was mostly American MFA Staging Shakespeare actors. So, professional actors who came here to study Shakespeare.

Needless to say, little old me, who hadn't acted in 6 months, was completely blown out of the water and brought to contrition. And I loved it. And I continue to.

2.
A guy from "The Taming of the Tamer...Tamed" asked me to help him out with HIS final MFA Staging Shakespeare project, a 50's-style radio play presentation of Hamlet and Titus Andronicus as a "cultural hour" for a cold-war audience, until the acting turns real. It's odd. But interesting. I've never done radio drama before, and even though it's actually live, it's fun to at least touch on it. Radio drama still happens here in England. I think it's largely unheard of in the States. I wish there was more of it.

3.
Music and Theatre is taking our final, mentioned above, to Germany at the beginning of July, as I've mentioned before. However, it's with half the people, and the comments we got back on it don't really make any of us feel like we should be presenting this piece at a scholarly conference. Hopefully, though, we'll get everything together and it'll be great.

HOWEVER, these three large pulls on my life have taught me a few things:

For one, the Music and Theatre presentation really makes me wonder about theatre outside of America. Is this what there is, not "British Drama," there's no Laurence Olivier and no intensely crafted acting - is it all just devised theatre? Because I haven't encountered much theatre at Exeter that ISN'T devised. Am I wrong to hate devised theatre? Because I really do. Not unconditionally, of course, but I really just hate it. And I don't know what I'm doing with it, and I wonder (although I've done no research into it and am utterly ignorant of what is so often reverantly reffered to as "the devising process") does anyone REALLY know what they're doing when devising? What's the state of devised theatre in America? Cause it seems to me like it's just a cheap way to get people to act, which can be taken different ways. Either it's good, because it allows people to experience theatre no matter what. Yes, that's cool, I love that part! But the other hand is this: devising theatre is what a department does when it can't pay for actual plays ... or doesn't want to. And in that, I find it a misleading financial tactic. Am I an ignorant prig, or am I actually having an honest reaction?

Secondly, the reason that I bring up financial issues is that I really want to know what the state of British drama education is. Because we're force fed this idea of British Training being the upmost state of acting perfection. It's like a club card you can wave around to get into V.I.P. rooms, a silver bullet to shoot through auditions with. People will FIGHT over you if you have British training, or at least, that's the impression I had.

I've found no "British Training" here at Exeter, and the thing that bothers me, is that there are post-grad students, who are mostly from North America, who have similar thoughts. They're largely up in arms because they feel as though they've been asked to pay three times as much as a British student, and they haven't recieved any professional skills. One that I talked to even thought he'd gotten worse over his time in Exeter. There is the perception that they have been duped into a money-making scheme by the department. And so the question is, do I really want to continue to have anything to do with, or defend, a department that is charged with that kind of conduct? I've stuck up for Exeter drama pretty decently out of the three Kenyon-Exeter drama students, though I haven't gone further above some level of ambivalence. Has my confidence been completely misplaced, even on an ethical level?

I just thought I should write about that. I missed my chance to tell Exeter exactly what I thought of them because I was blindsided by the feedback session - and clammed up. I still wonder whether it's just the fact that I'm American that's somehow coloring my vision, but I don't think so. And so, in part, I'm writing to other Americans who might be thinking of going to Exeter drama (even though I'm pretty sure none of them read this blog):

I have had a lacking experience with Exeter Drama. I find faults in how I've been treated by the administration. There are some good classes and plenty of good students, but the good classes are the theoretical ones, where there're books to use in your defense. Other than that there are few rules, few agreed-on concepts, few life-lessons that can be articulated, and little "technique" that you learn in any of the dramatic fields. Or at least, I haven't found any. But there are professionals who share my opinion.

And now I'm stuck until the very end of my time in England - Europe even - involved in a project I would rather just abandon, frankly. I'll do it, but I can't seem to find much fun in it, because I have no idea how to make it work. I think they've pushed through a system that states no requirements, teaches no methods, but still finds a way to grade, even though it's not always clear how to make what we're supposed to make. And so how can we fix something we don't know how we broke?

And I'm tired of defending Exeter Drama when it's treated me like this, when it's incensed its post-graduate students, and when it's keeping me, in part, from going and enjoying my summer. I signed on to Hildesheim thinking it would be a great experience. But I want out, and I know I can't get out. Either that, or I want to know how to fix this, but I don't think anyone will teach me. So I'm going to try to figure it out, but I don't know how well that will work. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to drop a line.

** Sorry to sound really pessimistic, and, dare I say, emo. But I just finally sort of concluded what I thought about Exeter Drama, and I wanted to get the word out. Question me, encourage me, suggest things to me, or wait for another - brighter - post. But thank you for continuing with the blog so far. **

Unknown Wisdom Epiphany

2008-05-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Unknown Wisdom Epiphany" is actually the name of a charm in Exalted, the RPG that I'm tooling around with right now. While I went to Oxford over the weekend, I was exposed to the BBC miniseries adventures of Horatio Hornblower, and so I'm seeing if I can insert some of that naval-awesomeness into an Exalted character I was working on.

And Oxford, as it turns out, is beautiful. If it weren't for Kenyon-Exeter's amazing awesomeness just as a program, I would have every reason to feel bad about not having gone to Oxford on my year abroad. Being at Oxford made me realize how much more I could have learned this year. And I tried duck!

(Exeter, I guess, has that salt-of-the-earth, make-your-own-food and suffer-under-the-beaurocracy kind of experience going for it, I guess, though. So I learned something valuable.)

But the real point is:

On the train back from Oxford, there were a lot of Americans. I don't know why, but for some reason there were a lot of Americans. Like maybe 7, probably between the ages of 18 and 20. We sat down behind a bunch of them, Ken went to read his play ("Our Country's Good"), and I poured over my character sheet for this Horatio-Hornblower-slash-Hatori-Hanzo-swordsmith-pirate-Solar-Exalt character, adjusting dots and selecting flaws and all that other fun stuff you do. And the Americans behind us were just talking, and talking, and they'd make fun of the landscape as it went by ... the train we were on was a kind of local train, so it stopped at a lot of local stops in the countryside and eventually it was going to Reading and we'd change there to get to Exeter. And as we stopped at all these little stops, they'd make fun of the names. "Goring Streadle? What weird names!"

And I wanted to turn around to them and smack them. They were guests in this country, can't they appreciate it for the lovely little place that it is? Or, perhaps, as Mrs. Weasley would put it:

"GET AWAY FROM MY ISLE, YOU BITCHES!"

And it wasn't just England they were going after, it was the countryside. It's a plenty crazy place, I understand, and London can do things to people, but you mess with the countryside, the bastion of pastoral beauty, and I will personally take you down to Dawlish town and make scrumpy out of you.

But seriously, it's a crazy little place - England - and it's eccentric and dangerous and bitter and beautiful and cold and wet and green and it has that kind of sumblime power to melt you where you stand ... and you're making fun of the names of the train stops?

Yanks.

(They weren't really THAT bad, but it did stand out to me, and in standing out to me, taught me how much I had become accustomed to England in the first place. So maybe I have integrated after all...)

League of Nations Attacked by Pirates

2008-05-25T05:42:00.000-07:00

An alternate title might be "Jolly Rogers Go!"

On May 24th, I was privy to a rare European tradition - yes, not just English, but European. It is an international phenomenon that defines how these loose and ragtag countries, so often divided because of religious or ethnic differences, find a way to keep together towards a common goal.

And that phenomenon is: Eurovision.

There are many defintions of the Eurovision Song Contest - here's what wikipedia told me about the history:

Eurovision was started in the 50's as an attempt to get a war-torn Europe together again, when international broadcasting was still a huge feat. It was held in Switzerland, and countries submitted songs that competed for votes, whoever got the most, won. Switzerland won the first time around. As it became easier to broadcast, the phenomenon grew. Voting became more of an event, and while the votes were being tallied, there were interval acts, including the first ever performance of Riverdance.

But that's just history. I'll sum up the one I was given by my hosts, Michael Sykes and James McIntosh, as they hosted their Eurovision Party:

Eurovision is basically an American Idol for all of Europe. Each country submits a song, and each country votes via calling on who they want to win - but you CAN'T VOTE FOR YOUR OWN COUTNRY. Each country "tallies" their own votes, and awards seven countries between 1-7 points. Each country's top three get 8, 10, and 12 points, and these are the highly contested rankings, because after all the countries have submitted their scores, whoever has the most wins. It would be like each state in the US submitting a song to American Idol, and then voting on which song would win. The songs go through elimination rounds, and at the finals someone wins. Last year there was a big upset because Serbia won, and now the finals (which I saw) are held in Belgrade, which makes everything interesting because Kosovo is now a seperate country and all.

That said, it's the most political voting ever. Regions always vote for each other - the Balkans usually stick together, the Norse always vote for each other, and the former Soviet States always keep their points within the former Eastern Bloc. Voters use current events to determine their votes as well - the year the UK went into Iraq, nobody voted for it. Also, there're plenty of countries involved in Eurovision that aren't actually in Europe, many of which are seen as diplomatic moves. Azerbaijan submitted a song that made it to the last round. So did Israel.

And, on top of that, Germany, the UK, France and Spain, because they're the main financial backers, are gaurunteed slots in the final round. So, none of these countries take the contest seriously at all. And so, Spain, Germany, France and the UK never get any votes (except maybe the odd sympathy vote.) Also, there's an Irish commentator named Terry who is the only real reason to watch Eurovision, because he's been there for years and is so completely jaded by the whole thing.

However, for the rest of Europe, it is a serious occasion. Lots of countries put lots of money into making sure that their Eurovision song will win.

So, on May 24th, or whenever the finals are held, it is customary, at least in England, to get together with a bunch of friends, drink, and watch Eurovision. Internationally, there are entire clubs devoted to Eurovision - parties in the streets of nations' capitals. Last night, a serious drama unfolded before us. Here're some of the entires we saw:

Spain's Entry - "brikindans" is "breakdance," "crusaito" is like a box-step, "miqualyason" is Michael Jackson, and you can figure out the fourth part.

Russia's Entry - which features an Olympic figure skater.

Greece's Entry - keep an eye out for the lightning fast costume change, and also listen to the singer's accent. Sound familiar (she's actually American)?

Ukraine's Entry - "I'm gonna strike like thunder!"

Georgia's Entry - Check out the costumes, and the SHEET!

Obviously there're a couple of rules to the genre of a Eurovision song. A costume change, a key change, a pop dance move, special effects, and so on. Coutnries like Denmark tried to break these rules, but it didn't end up really paying off for them.

For the votes, the show went to a broadcaster in each voting country (so lots), and they'd announce who got their 8, 10, and 12 points. Odd moves happened, like Serbia giving their 12 to Bosnia-Herzogovina, and vice versa - these people had just been ethnically clensing you for years, and you give them your 12? People I was watching with suggested it was probably part of the peace treaty. They'd also shout and bet to see who was going to give the UK points ("Come on Greece! We gave you Byron, you fuckers!"). The Eastern Bloc sucked up big time to old mother Russia, and Serbia in general got the odd 8 or 10 for hosting the contest. From Jerusalem, Israel's announcer gave the 12 to Russia - the Holy Land giving their 12 to what used to be the most violently secular of secular states. The only country that voted fairly, based on the quality of the songs, was Switzerland.

Ultimately Greece and Russia were neck and neck, but suddenly Russia pulled ahead, and Greece ended up in third. Is this the harbringer of a return of the Reds? I'm going to get out my list of known communists involved in Eurovision and make my way to the Senate...

There was, however, one unsung hero of the whole night. If you watch only one of the things on this entry, watch this. It is a song that should have won by any proper standard, but didn't, probably because of the freaking communists, was:

Latvia

And you know the only people with true taste who gave them a 12? Ireland.

you don't know how lovely you are

2008-05-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

Readers-

Come with me on a break in the timeline. Ireland, yes, is still in the writing - it takes forever for my camera to download pictures, and I don't have a laptop of my own. When I can borrow a laptop from the library, I often have other things to do with it. It will get done, but other things have happened that I need to write about.

Since Ireland, I've entered that final, wistful phase of the year, when summer is bright and beautiful, when the season or something compels you out into wonderful adventures - and yet you're acutely aware that the academic year is almost over. England's summer is blooming and greening everywhere, but as for me, these are my autumn days. In two months time I turn back into a pumpkin. A big, fat, American pumpkin.

I don't think I've done spring, or summer, in England justice in this blog. Everyone has the percecption that England rains all the time, and yes, it often does. But think of where the island is on the globe. It's that much more facing the sun during the summer. We had a thunderstorm last night as my friends and I bunkered down to watch Heat. We didn't finish it (it's really long).

My Dungeons and Dragon's character is going strong. I've been playing since the beginning of the second semester, probably, with friends of mine that I met in my Victorian London class last year. He's a dwarven warrior (like that hasn't been done before). A few weeks ago we spent a whole session, as characters, simply planning how to fortify a town from an impending zombie invasion. We've been living that invasion once weekly since. This week we killed something like 40 zombies between us, and a good portion of that lopping of the horrors of the underdeep was my doing.

I made gumbo, again. Probably two weeks ago. A side note, kind of a Three-Uses-Of-The-Knife kind of way of thinking, is that the only two times I've made gumbo, it's because I was inviting someone I was seeing over. To impress them. And both times our semi-formal "seeing each others" were called off. I'm making gumbo a third time, for the Kenyon-Exeter potluck. I think that's the right way to do it. (I'm not bitter.)

I've been recruited to play Hortensio and Sophocles in an MFA Shakespeare director's production of The Taming of the Tamer (Tamed), his own splicing of The Taming of the Shrew and it's sequel, written in the 18th century and not by Shakespeare, The Tamer Tamed. It's frightening, because three of the other actors are, like, REAL actors. I haven't acted in ages, and on top of that, I know I'm not the best actor in the world. And yet for some reason I'm acting for my thesis.

My thesis was approved: Copenhagen. Acting in Copenhagen, November 13th and 15th. I stopped to think whether I wrote those dates in the British sense or not.

My devised theater piece for Music and Theatre goes up a week from today. I'm trying to write a short scene for it that takes place in cyberspace. We'll see...

My piles of junk lay strewn around my room, a haunting reminder that I'll have to pack them. I brought so many books, for so many different reasons. I feel like a World War I general - I brought so much stuff I had that I thought would be useful, and it turned out some of it was, but for reasons I could never have anticipated. And the rest clutters No Man's Land.

I feel like I've become much more okay with saying "oh well" to things. I don't know if that's necessarily good. I've started doing things I consider "old," not like smoking a pipe or wearing sweaters everywhere, but looking at 18 year olds and wondering what they'll be like when they've matured just a little more - which might make them dateable. Or picking out and planning major events in my 20's, cause I'll never get to try them out agian. Looking at grad schools.

Have I mentioned the snails? I was coming home from the Vicar's house the Sunday after I got back from Ireland - he gave the few students who had gotten back and normally came to Church an informal eucharist in the evening, and invited us all back for potato-leek soup at his house. Walking back, it was dark, and I kept hearing these crunching noises. A tree must be dropping nuts, I thought. I reached the public footpath, which goes along the side of a hill covered in trees and underbrush, looking down on a small valley where cows graze. In the lamp light on this footpath, I could see a snail on the path. I feel bad for snails, particularly on roads, and so I knelt down, tapped the shell a few times so he curled up, and then transported him where it looked like he wanted to go (lightspeed!). I walked a few steps. And there was another one. As I bent down to repeat the process, I noticed that, in the lamplight, there were dozens of snails, I don't want to say "tons" or "hundreds," but maybe something like twenty something that I could see, dotted across the path, communing with the lamps, perhaps? The problem is, the public path isn't always well lit. So I took out my cell phone and walked along the white line in the center of the path. And I hoped I didn't hear anything go crunch.

At some point I'll post the postsecret I wrote for myself on a notecard at the beginning of the year, which, oddly enough, did significantly change my life.

I've played Mario Kart Wii. IT IS AMAZING.

I saw Iron Man. IT IS AMAZING.

I wrote a paper about Tom Stoppard and David Hare as political playwrights, and why they break the mold and establish a better political theater. It was really fun.

***

We went to a party tonight at Wendy's house in Topsham - the final party of the year. Contemporary British Drama finished up its final class with Far Away and Blue Heart by Carol Churchill (which, oddly enough, were both incredibly interesting. "Heart's Desire" is hysterical. Far Away is chilling and beautiful, to a point.). Read made shish-kabobs, among other tastey things. I had a bottle of London Pride - as you might remember, my nominally favorite beer: I picked it up one day at Sainsbury's in the fall because it had a griffin on its label - a glass of white wine, and a guiness. Although this may seem like just a laundry list of alcohol, it was pretty representative of my year. London, classy Exeter parties (one hopes), Ireland. Avery didn't want to see people go. Foss and I shared youtube videos, among which was Coldplay's new songs - they sound amazing. And I actually sat with Wendy and some students and just talked for a bit. Read was mostly cooking, but I did see him, and he was happy to see us. Words were bandied about like "thesis" and "Lentz" and "Wiggin Street" that put me off balance.

You see, I've been smelling the Hill Theater in Winter at odd moments in the day, just for a split second. And I've been reinvigorated to try to direct The Winter's Tale with Shakesperiment. I'm almost kind of longing for the stupid vent in the Black Box that you can never turn off, and thinking about the frozen pathways and slush on Brooklyn Street (is it Brooklyn? Those two that run on either side of Middle Path near the book store) honestly just made me take a breath. The Suicide Lights. I stayed up just reveling in the fact that I'd be out in the world and actually doing something the other night, instead of writing a paper. Some of you may have recieved gleeful postings about my thesis - that was that.

And there's so much of me that I just don't remember from this year, mainly those winter months. There're no... historical qualities to it yet, I can't say "this period in my life was marked by X qualities." But I am starting to look back on September - on Sin, on getting here, and on that horrible night when I was woken up at four in the morning by a fire alarm to go stand in the rain, the night after I had flown in to England with six suitcases - and I'm starting to remember those feelings and events like I remember the Hill Theater (which I almost just spelled with an "re").

The main thing that happened at the party, though, was that I thought about what it'll be like to see my family again for the first time. And I teared up a bit.

So if this is the Final Act, I'm totally ready for it. There's that story about the saint who's playing golf, and an angel comes to him and says "the Armegeddon is going to happen in 15 minutes! Prepare yourself!" And the saint says, "alright. I'll just finish my game." So, time to finish my game.

Another Tidbit

2008-05-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

Hey all-

Again, sorry for the continued delay. I like to think I've just gotten so involved with things that making the trek to the library once a day to reflect on them is too much of a nuisance. Also, I've purchased a handy-dandy moleskine notebook, in which I can now easily jot down all my artistic reflections... so this blog has some competition.

But a moleskine can't do this: check out what Wendy has published in a newspaper about Kenyon-Exeter! She hits it pretty much on the mark in some ways...

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/opinion/edmcleod.php

I will write more later, though. I miss ranting to all you guys...

The Secret of Kells

2008-04-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Yo kids-

I do have lots to write to you about Ireland, but as this will be my first trip in Europe when I had a digital camera (I bought myself one the day I left), I wanted to upload a few pictures to make it a picture-riffic entry. Said camera is giving me a little trouble - I have to install some other software, but, since some of you have been urging me to update this blog, I figured I'd give you a little interim thing that has a lot to do with Ireland and my experience of it:

I was tooling around on google today, searching for things related to my experiences in Ireland, mainly, a trip to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. We got to learn all about the highly stylized decoration for the manuscript, the printing techniques of the monks, all that cool stuff. So I'm looking up stuff and what should I find but news of an animated feature... after some investigation, I found this website:

http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/website.htm

You'll have to click on Animations, then Projects, then Brendan and the Secret of Kells. There's only a few pictures posted and some minor animation, but apparently it's due to come out some time this year.

This also has a few pictures:

http://markjberry.blogs.com/way_out_west/2006/03/the_blog_of_kel.html

I'm certainly no critic of cartoon animation. I know little about visual arts and less about what it takes to make something like The Triplets of Bellville. I like what's been done with Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, but I can't put a finger on why. But this has really got me excited, and I figured I should pass along the news in case it interests any of you cyber people out there.

More to come on my adventures, from the Book of Kells to Kilkenny.

Super Smash Brothers

2008-03-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of people/things/characters that need to be in a Super Smash Brothers game, regardless of their connection to Nintendo:

- Daniel Kramer (Final Smash: "Intensify...Intensify...Intensify...BOOM!" Taunt: "yeeEEEAAAHHHHhhh.")

- The Queen

- Facebook (like Mr. Game and Watch, but with newsfeed and stalking instead of sausages and all)

- Nutella

- Martin McDonough

- Richard III

- Lady Macbeth

- Cid Highwind

- Doctor Who

More...?

Drop a post with who you think should be in it, with details. This is purely for fun, as I'll be in Ireland for the next few days starting on Wednesday, may not post until after that, and so it'll be interesting to see what piles up.

An Improbable Sunday

2008-03-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a sequence of events. Believe of them what you wish, but I'm telling you that they happened. Of course, the whole point of this blog is that England is merely a figment of everyone's imagination, so you have a perfect reason to disregard what I'm saying.

- Daylight savings time started in England. As such, I was late for the Methodist church service I wanted to go to.

- Half an hour late for the Methodists, I hopped over to the Exeter Cathedral's 11:15 Mattins service, where the pastor ate a tin of dog food during his sermon.

- At some point either before or during the tin of dog food, Helle Slutz - a friend from Kenyon who was studying abroad in Cork, Ireland, but visiting her sister studying abroad at the University of Kent and so travelling with her sister and two of their french friends, one of whom had a passion for seeing cathedrals - noticed that I was attending the service, and waited with her friends in the cathedral, who were wandering around being tourists.

- After the service, Helle tapped me, and we all went over to the nearby Cafe 21 to have an authentic Devon Cream Tea.

- I decided to write this blog entry.

- I wrote this blog entry.

And that is how a minor time shift drastically affected Griffin's day, for the better.

And actually, looking further back, there's one missing piece to the puzzle, if not causually, then thematically:

Saturday Night, before Daylight Saving's Time began:

- I watched Stranger Than Fiction.

An Hour in Dawlish

2008-03-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Today I went to Dawlish. It's a £2 train ride away, and, according to Lucia Pizzo, there's really good ice cream there. I even think I remember her saying there was an ice cream FACTORY, but I don't know whether I made that up or not. So I put on my Orvis British-looking rhinohide jacket, my Orvis British-looking madras cap, grabbed my Young Person's Railcard and saddled up to catch a train.

It's vital to know that I had £20 pounds to live on the rest of the week - I've got decent food supplies but I could use a re-stock on several key items, like bread and milk. £2 train ride to Dawlish, 18 left.

St. David's station was its usual self, except this time, while walking there, the notion of spring hit me like a ton of bricks. Things have really gone green here, and there are little flowers popping up everywhere. The sun actually DOES come out, and consistently as well! And it really reminded me of how happy I was to be at Exeter, not somewhere in London (sorry, Londoners), because of the sheer amount of life.

Dawlish is the first stop on the train to Paignton - I don't know where that is, but it's apparently further towards Cornwall than Dawlish. It's also one of the few trains that I've taken that goes AWAY from London, and the trip showed me an entirely new part of Exeter, and the countryside. I'd never taken the Paignton line before.

One thing I saw was the ocean. Within 10 minutes. We passed by Topsham, where I'd been, on a train line that crossed the bay and I thought to myself how I'd seen this train from a ferry only 5 months before (see Nanci Griffiths is my Porn), and then we passed by Powderham Castle - even more specifically, I saw the road that I nearly hiked on with Wendy et al. to get to Powderham Castle, I was riding the train that was right next to it. Through a tunnel we went, on the other side, I had a moment where I looked out at the ocean, and the sky was cloud-covered, but light. And since there wasn't enough blue in the sky to make the water blue, it was whitish, and I really had another moment where I couldn't tell where the horizon was, where the sea ended and clouds began. I felt distinctly like I was on the train in Spirited Away.

I got off the train on a sunny day in Dawlish - the station was rusty, since it was right next to the sea (literally). I got off, and there was no crowd, no rush, no hurry. The train itself really resembled more of an ancient transport system used by a fallen technologically advanced civilization in Final Fantasy VIII (Esthers, were they?), or IX (I'm thinking Lindbulm post-getting-the-crap-blown-out-of-it), or VII (Midgar +500 years.). Actually, that's probably in most FF games. Anyway, the point is that Dawlish, from an American standpoint, is an odd mix of the Jersey Shore (sans the complete tourist attraction), a carnival, a small Florida town (sans the warm weather), and with a dash of Wisconsin (in that there's an odd obsession with dairy products). The town center is really more of a town oval, revolving around a park and a stream that runs directly into the ocean (it's about 3 ft. deep, max, and you can literally play in it as it heads out into the sea.), and a big green in the center. Around this oval are a variety of neat stores, and pastel-colored houses, which you only ever seem to find in seaside towns.

The beach at Dawlish is more or less just the space near the ocean. There were the remnants of something nearby the mouth of the stream, but it was really just for kids to play in. The jetties seemed useless as waves never got too big, and the sand is brown and pebbly. No lifeguards, no entrance fees, it's just there. You deal with it. More on that in a moment.

Dawlish does have a love of ice cream. As I said, Lucia Pizzo told me of great ice cream adventures to be had. Mmm, I thought to myself, an ice cream factory. I'll go find it. Either a) Lucia mislead me, or b) I exaggerated in my own mind. Dawlish has no ice cream factory. I stopped in to get a pasty (I'd had nothing to eat that day) and, after paying, tried to pull a suave, Final-Fantasy-esque talk-to-the-non-player-characters-to-garner-information. Either I botched my Charisma role, or I just flat out made myself look stupid, but I walked up to them, suave, and said that someone'd told me there was an ice cream factory around here, and I wondered if they knew where it was. They looked at me funny, as if I'd come in and said "excuse me, can you point the way to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, a magical place of mystery and wonder?" They told me there were ice cream shops, but no factory. And I got the distinct feeling that if I talked to them again, they wouldn't repeat what they were saying over and over again. After recieving my pasty (you recieved "pasty"), I apologized and left.

Dejected, I found a place on the green to eat my pasty, and was approached by a seagull, that literally emmitted a cooing kind of noise and kind of grovelled. I think it'd learned how to beg. I felt bad giving it a pasty though, which has meat in it, and so I ate the whole thing in front of it and threw away the remnants. Does that get me dark side points?

Resolved to enjoy my time SOMEHOW, I wandered the town oval, deciding to go to anywhere that advertised ice cream. The first was Gay's Creamery, which claimed to have locally produced Devon ice cream, and take away cream tea sets. Yum, think I. But, as it turns out, Gay's Creamery was not really much about the ice cream at all. It was really just a freezer behind the counter and some cones, just barely more advanced than Shaker Maker (see Uncanny/Milkshake). What they did have, though, was large quantities of locally produced sweets, and more. Devon chocolates, Devon toffees, Devon clotted cream fudge, and, of course, Devon cider. In case my Topsham trip went poorly, I bought myself an emergency bottle of Devon cider.

After getting my ice cream cone, my cider, and a tub of clotted cream (YES), I found a little bench by the central stream and ate my ice cream cone. It wasn't that bad, I thought. Yes, I was alone on a day trip while other people, like Ken, were in Paris, and yes, I had yet to find the mythic ice cream that Lucia had mislead me to seek, but I had ice cream. I had clotted cream. Inspired by an option in Gay's creamery, I went to dip the one in the other, but slightly broke the tub of clotted cream trying to open it. Not enough to spill it, the cap was/is just unsecure. But ice cream + clotted cream ended up equalling "okay." Things weren't that bad. Then my cone broke, not sufficiently enough to ruin the ice cream, of course.

I decided, at that moment, that was my trip to Dawlish. It's pretty nice - SNAP.

But, in that, it had its charm. There were the gulls and ducks I kept passing on my frantic search for ice cream. The bush of what I came to call "Sommerset Roses" after the red rose faction from the War of the Roses, that sense that you were actually involved in some kind of cosmic comedy. I kept thinking of the idea of "comic angels" in stories, like It's A Wonderful Life and Love Actually. I finally found the tourist center, and I asked the lady there about ice cream, and she pointed me to a little shop on the sea side of the oval, called "Sticky Fingers," that looked more like a newstand. Except, on the sign above it, was the store's claim to fame: it'd won some nation wide ice cream contest. So I went in, got myself a brownie-cream scoop in a chocolate dipped cone, some clotted cream chocolates, and went out to the beach.

The beach, like I said, is really just where the ocean meets the shore in Dawlish. Maybe there's more attention in the summer. The train is propped up by some cement supports that make it resemble its own little Normandy beach - shrunk down to 50 ft long. The train heads off into another mountain, and if you go out onto the jetty, you can see one of those rock formations you often see in pirate movies, where there's the cliff/mainland, and then a sort of lower-case "n" shape of rock that sticks out into the water.

I went as far as I could go on the jetty, and was alone, and sat there. Me and my ice cream and the gulls and the sea. I came to a series of conclusions:

First: I was missing a variety of things. These include:

- Someone else. I'm still mastering the art of traveling by myself, for myself.
- A camera.
- T.S. Eliot. I couldn't help sitting there and thinking back to lines like

"At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves and the sea.
Quick, now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well..."

Okay, so not the whole thing, but Dawlish requires Eliot. Bits and pieces of that kept bubbling up. It's a very meditative place, the end of a jetty. Think of this bit from The Dry Salvages read aloud on a jetty:

"The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation..."

or

"That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavendar spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back."

or

"... And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil."

T.S. Eliot demands light waves and a jetty.

Second: I was going to have to come back, because I couldn't really accomplish Dawlish without at least one of the three missing things above.

So, with a bit of sorrow at a side-quest uncompleted, I went to go get on the next train home. I had spent about an hour and a half in Dawlish. But before I left, I slid down the seaweed encrusted part of the jetty to get as close to the water as possible. On the train ride back, I kept smelling some fishy, grimy smell. Then I realized it was my shoes. And I was happy.

"Every poem is an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start."

***

I had one of those "oh" moments today. My stomach was sick from the ice cream and the cider, and Stephanie Reiches said something like, "you look so sick. This is what you look like." and she imitated me. And I said to myself, "oh. That's the nature of drama. Right."

Norwegian Euphamisms

2008-03-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

My Norwegian friend Thomas and I were talking about euphamisms regarding the bathroom today, such as "taking the Browns to the Super Bowl" et al., and he informed me of some interesting Norwegian ones, loosely translated into English:

"Taking the Browns to the Super Bowl" = "Calling for the Moose"

Vomitting after a night of heavy drinking = "Talking in the Big White Telephone"

I'll continue to report on this as new euphamisms arise.

This Blessed Isle

2008-03-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

Now that I've come at least three quarters of the way through my English experience, I have to sit here and wonder, what does it take to be British? Is it just the tea, the class struggles, the calling of things what they're not usually called (i.e. cookies = biscuits, etc.)? Or is it something else?

Because the dissimilarity between British and American culture is readily apparent. I was talking to a lady in church today (separate story, but I went to Easter Communion at the Exeter Cathedral. It was pretty sweet.), who was originally from New Mexico but had moved to Bristol and stayed there. For the most part she spoke with a Bristolean (?) accent, but here and there I could sense semblances of American left in her voice. She showed me around to the grave of Charles Wesley's brother, who was an organist in the Cathedral and got his own burial place beneath it, and we just talked about differences in cutlure: across America, across England. How New Mexico and Santa Fe were one world, and Bristol was another. The geography, the cultural influences (in this case, the presence of Spanish/Mexican influences on Easter practices), political climates, so on and so on.

Of course, the similarities are just as easily visible: England imports a lot of American culture, and returns things like ideas for American Idol and Dancing With The Stars. And Doctor Who. The only two places a musical can be "born" and recieve any amount of success is either on Broadway or in the West End. And, I mean, we both speak the same language.

But what kind of life do you have to lead in England to become English? Do you have to be raised here? Apparently not, since I know at least two people I'd consider English who both were raised in America. And if it can grow on you, what does it take? A proclimation of ideals? Do you renounce manifest destiny, the hope of becoming a movie star, and the American Dream in favor of taking up the Realm, politeness, and the Queen? What on earth is a national identity made up of, and is it a conscious choice, or is it just a sort of lump of all the experiences you have rolled into one?

I love being different here, but I love fitting in. Not that Englishness and I have always gotten along very well, as the occasional emo-rant on this blog can illustrate. But when it comes down to it, I do love being in dialogue with Englishness and English culture, as an outsider. But then, I get offended and start ranting when someone honestly suggests that "American" is a separate language. I rant to myself about how that's denying my cultural heritage.

But is England my cultural heritage? The English are said to have two books: the Bible, and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That's what was put in the time capsule in Our Town. To what extent is the American experience a reinvention of the British one? We both had bloody civil wars. We both struggled with the question of when it was right to overthrow a king. What is the American Cultural Heritage, anyway, if not somehow connected to where we all moved in from anyway? Apart from whether democracy can work, and what the equality of man could be, in the end, what major questions has America answered in 300 years? What are our defining characteristics? All I can think of is what we're percieved to be. We can be perceived as wealthy, or idealistic, or business-driven, or stupid, or laid back, or wild, or any number of things. But among all these percieved characteristics, I can't think of one thing that it takes to be American. And maybe it's as simple as national identity not existing at all. Maybe it's just a label and a handed down set of themes that historians and literary critics dictate to us. Maybe it's that in America you can be whatever you want to be. That sounds oddly sappy.

When I was in Bath, I was talking to a high-school-age student involved in His Dark Materials. She said that she couldn't understand why anyone would ever come from America, to England. England, she insisted, was dull, and slow, while America was fast-paced. I told her England was quieter, and I don't remember exactly what else I said but my feeling about it is that England is more profound, that still waters run deep. And, in that, I can't see why anyone, being English, would want to go to America. I mean, a change of pace is always good, and of course people often don't appreciate things until they step back from them, and maybe not everyone in England particularly likes the English lifestyle, but if you've got this inborn connection to the culture on this peculiar, wonderful little island - if you can tell someone's birthplace and education just by hearing them speak, if you've endured the weather here, and been brought up with the BBC, and lived among solid history - why would you want to leave? Why would you want to give that up for the American experience, which seems somehow more superficial, or at least less profound? I mean, I've got a family and friends in America, what have you got, Hypothetical-British-Person-To-Whom-I'm-Speaking? You're just a conceptual target for my direct address. You don't even have feelings.

The clouds move faster in England, and the weather is more sporadic. Tea solves everything. Faith is easier to talk about, but only %2 of people attend religious services. When you turn 18 you get a bigger pint of beer than the one you're used to (apparently). People are most commonly nice, though some get frustrated by little things (like paying before you bag your groceries). Lots of people have dogs but only a few let you pet them. No one talks about personal subjects unless you corner them. More people have seen Shakespeare than you would normally expect. Grape jelly doesn't exist, clotted cream does.

***

I'm headed off to Dawlish and Glastonbury soon, so I'll try to get in some good travel writing about them. Thanks for keeping up with my adventures so far, my readers, even if they don't often make much sense.

A Ghost Town

2008-03-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

Just writing to say that Exeter is a frickin' ghost town when everybody leaves. Like everybody. Ken left this morning, meaning my only source of entertainment - his copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl - is unaccessable. Whatever is a boy to do.

I'm trying to get an RPG going when people come back, either Exalted or Werewolf (possibly of the Wild West variety). Leaning towards Werewolf, but there's plenty still to learn...

Uncanny/Milkshake

2008-03-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

I had a quintessentially British moment the other day:

Two of my friends from my Music and Theatre class went out to lunch in the break between our two three-hour sessions. They came back covered in mud. In the best way, these are the kind of girls who are energetic enough, and human enough, to still play in mud. "What happened?" everyone asked, and they said they'd found a big patch of mud behind the Imperial (the nearest pub, across the street in fact), and they'd had the sudden unresistable urge to tackle each other and goof around. I just realized this could sound sexual, looked at in the right way. It wasn't. It was utterly pre-school. They spent the next few hours laughing crazily, saying how it had been such a release for them, to just go and play in the mud and have fun.

After class, they implored me to come play in the mud with them. Hesitant, I obliged, saying I'd just come and hang out, and not play in the mud myself. The mud was literally just a patch on a hill behind the pub, between some tables set up outside. It existed because patrons walked on it a lot, and the weather was, as usual, wet. I decided, what the hey.

The game was run at the mud as fast as you could, and then jump onto your knees and see how far you could slide. This included sliding on your side, chest, face, etc. I managed to get just my jeans completely covered. This is what happens when you don't have SNOW IN THE WINTER!

After about five minutes, someone from the Imperial came out, and in the plainest and calmest of all voices, asked what on earth we were doing. My friend tried to explain that they were playing in the mud, to cheer up the other girl with us. Again, plain and calm, though the ire lurking in wait was starting to become visible, the man fussed at us about the sod costing hundreds of pounds to redo each year. My friend answered that it wasn't much damage at all that wouldn't have come up from people walking on it anyway.

Then, politely (but boiling - my friend insisted he was laughing inside), the man told us to sod off (i.e. fuck off, for those unfamiliar with the term).

And it hardly detracted from the experience at all. If anything it made it funnier. I even thought of a good comeback five minutes later:

Mr. Impy: Sod off.
Me: Sod off, get it? Get it? Cause we're on his grass. Sod off. No? No?

I think it's funny.

Anyway, in retrospect, this just rang true to me as inherently British. There is some kind of rigid authority, Victorian in its love of rules and not showing feeling, who can't see past the commodity of the grass to the joys that the younger, more innocent (dare I say, Dickensian?) children see in the mud. And the children play in it, not caring about what he thinks. And he yells at them, though material arguments don't make a dent. Finally, he concludes with the most polite equivalent of "go fuck yourselves" that I, as an American, have ever heard. And this discipline does not matter at all, it's in fact just a way of life, part of the game. We packed up and went home after that.

My jacket still has a patch of mud on it, and I wear it like a badge.

***

Ken took us to a milkshake place that he found recently, called the Shaker Maker, or something like that. The central conceit of the store is that the "menu" is really just a big wall of practically any kind of candy, biscuit, fruit, ice cream, whatever! You name it, they'll stick it in a blender with some ice cream and milk and give you a milkshake. I had a milk-chocolate-hobnob milkshake. They'd never made one before, so they took three milk chocolate hobnobs, put in some vanilla ice cream, some milk, blended it, then let me try some to see if three hobnobs was enough, and asked if I wanted more. I settled for three, which ended up being a good number. It was amazing!

I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!

***

And, for your viewing pleasure, here's an old favorite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNVYWJOEy9A

When November Ends

2008-03-10T18:53:00.000-07:00

English weather is, essentially, many months of November. Actually, since November, it's been November. So about four months of November. Just last night there was one of the larger storms in the year, with winds ripping through Exeter and tearing things apart, blowing trash everywhere, and so on. Now it won't stop being windy, and November has broken.

November being over is a joyous occasion though. No longer are things dull and only partially green. The green's flaming up all over the place, the flowers are blooming, and even though things are wet most of the time, things are growing.

The sad version of England, I'd like to think, is falling away. For a spring season, I feel oddly autumnal. I'm preparing to leave, after all. It's not quite to the get-your-ducks-in-a-line stage, but I'm encountering people I haven't spoken to since last semester, and I'm reminded how much I need to hang out with them before I leave. Maybe I'm just too wistful for my own good.

Medieval Echoes

2008-03-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."

-T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" Four Quartets

"So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity."

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

"Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought."

Call me pretentious (again), but I had to include these quotes.

I just went and saw Henry VI, parts i, ii, and iii, in addition to Richard III, all at the RSC's theater in Stratford, all by the RSC, and, together with the Henriad which I saw in January (mentioned earlier in "The Difference Between a Cow and a Bean" and "The Dirty Duck"), means that I have seen all eight major Histories, and only had to read one of them. It's odd, I can't think of any other way to see any of them, including the often-performed Henry V or Richard III. In the second scene of Richard III, when the body of Henry VI is wheeled on and Richard tries to seduce Ann in front of it, how can that have any meaning without seeing the rest of Henry VI? Henry's wounds open up again in the presence of Richard and bleed before him, but without seeing Henry's pilgramage in the other plays, or the scene where Richard murdered Henry (or did Henry martyr himself? He spends the scene subtly prompting Richard to murder him), if you hadn't seen Richard rip a Bible to shreds and proclaim that he was no man's brother, that he was himself alone, and then whimper, how could this scene be anything other than an awkwardly timed seduction? What on earth does one think of ex-Queen Margaret when she comes on and curses the entire cast of the play (in this production she carried her dead son Edward's skeleton around in a bag for the whole play, and opened it during the curse, assembling another part of the skeleton with each prediction), except that she's some crazy deposed monarch? Actually, she's lead armies against the Yorks, had one of their young children murdered and stuffed the blood-soaked hankerchief into the father's mouth, sacrificed much for her son Edward's sake, divorced Henry VI for his attempts at peace, but you can't get any of that without having to sit around for another 10 hours of Henry VI.

The effect of producing all eight, from the RSC's perspective, is that no show is divisible from the others (though for some reason they set Richard III, and only it, in a semi-modern world with uzies and Kevlar vests, but even then it draws on the other seven.). The weighty significance that people put on one moment, or one scene, or even one show (like Richard III) was nullified, spread out into the larger whole, and ultimately for the better. No one had any "Here's My Famous Speech" moments. It was all just the rampant course of history. This fits in with the theme of the plays as well, so much is gained in the course of the Histories, and so much is lost. Henry V takes his entire play to gain land in France. By Henry VI, that land has been lost because of the War of the Roses. There's nothing close to the certainty of the Divine Right of Kings, although people throughout the play keep trying to invoke it. No one can trust each other because they've spent the whole time stabbing each other in the backs. By the end of Richard III, when Henry Tudor finally takes Richard down and ends the War of the Roses, you're happy just to be on the upper end of the wheel, but you're fully aware that history repeats itself.

The other thing I really liked about the play, as in the script, is the character of Henry VI. In Richard II, Shakespeare told the story about a more introverted, sensitive man who happened to be born as a king, and what a tragedy it was that he was such a thoughtful person (somewhere - Richard can be a serious ass most of the time), but he couldn't manage a state. Henry VI is another such person, a generally good person who was born a king, and crowned at a very young age. Throughout Henry VI, part i, you see him innocent and young, and oblivious, as machinations happen all around him, and you think "Oh gosh, he's gonna get it by part iii, SO bad." Part ii begins like that, but then he actually realizes how much he's been used (as the War of the Roses begins all around him), and gosh darn it, he stands up for himself (or tries). And he doesn't die (yet)! It's so refreshing to see someone who's a pretty okay guy not get corrupted by a position of power. He doesn't make the best political decisions, but he holds his own. And then by part iii, it's not that his incompetance finally undoes him, it's that he realizes that he wasn't cut out to be king, though he tries to use his power to stop the War of the Roses, rather than getting too caught up in it. By the time Richard gets to him, Henry is more a king in ceremony than practice, and although he's been captured by the Yorks, he uses his time to study the Bible and meditate. In such an inherently war-time drama, it's good to get an outside perspective from the violence, and that's exactly what Henry helps you do. And it's even better to see a potentially tragic character get his act together and pursue self-actualization, without having to die for trying (he dies cause Richard can gain things out of it). Richard II approaches this state by the end of Richard II, but he realizes it right before the murders come to get him.

And it's these two characters, Richard II and Henry VI, that I really care for the most, out of all the Histories. It's these two that only ever get a shot at the deeper meanings behind what they're doing, from Richard's "now doth time waste me" (mentioned in The Dirty Duck), to Henry's contemplation on a grassy hill:

"Would I were dead! if God’s good will were so;
For what is in this world but grief and woe?
O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass’d over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah! what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy
To kings, that fear their subjects’ treachery?
O, yes! it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherd’s homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him."

Yum yum yum.

And having just come from a "what on earth am I doing in England?" crisis, to a "oh, I'm a capable person" revelation, it's good to see an unsure king discover who he is and what he can do.

And speaking of capability, my adventure in Stratford didn't just include the plays.

We had tickets to the Henrys, that's for sure, but Richard III had long since sold out. But, the theater reserved ten tickets that it released only on the day of the performance, first come, first serve. So, after Kenyon-Exeter resolved to be a part of this, I, and I alone, woke up at 6-ish in the morning, and was at the door of the Courtyard Theatre, with both a meager breakfast of digestives, hobnobs, and coke, along with a copy of The Everlasting Man, and I was the first in line. I waited there until 9:30 - the rest of Kenyon-Exeter showed up at around 7:30, but one other person had arrived in the meantime, meaning that we didn't get all ten tickets. Patrick Smyth and Ann Pedke, among other people, ended up waiting in line for no-shows right before Richard III, and the two of them ended up scoring SWEET seats house center, ground floor.

But I waited for hours for Shakespeare tickets, and that is enough reward for me. I've never woken up early to get in line for anything before! Not a concert, not Star Wars, nothing. It's intense.

Plus, the girl who showed up in the meantime, who got the second spot in line, was really nice, and we ended up sitting next to each other cause we both got crappy early reserve tickets. Her name was "Veritie," and as soon as I heard it, I said "oh... 'Truth.' " She said not many people get that. And she was pretty and stuff.

I just thought it was very Morality Play of me to sit watching Richard III, which centers on a character based on Vice characters, while I was sitting next to Truth, who was a pretty, early-twenties Uni student.

And I had one final moment of Shakespeare geekdom. I'd never seen or read all of Richard III before. In fact, of the Histories, I'd only ever read Richard II beforehand. I'd never seen the end of Richard III, but when we got to it, and Richard was killed, and Henry went to crown himself, he says the following:

"Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again,
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land’s increase,
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp’d, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God ..."

-- And then, the actor paused, I mean he'd been pausing all the while, but there was just enough time for my thoughts to align themselves. I had been going with the meter, going with the logic, and it was the very end so I was extremely attentive, and, although in retrospect I suppose it wasn't that hard to do, I intuited the last two words of Richard III. I mouthed them with the actor silently while he spoke them out loud:

"... say amen."

An LGBT with Olive

2008-03-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

We were discussing the acronym LGBT today - Ken, Patrick Smyth and I - and it was put forth that "LGBT" should be some kind of sandwich. But what would it have in it?

Lettuce
Gorgonzola
Barbecue Chicken
and Tomato?

or

Lamb fries
Guts
Brains
and Tom Basinger?

I'm interested to hear.

Also, we studied Voyage today in Contemporary British Drama, which made me get out my Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard last night and read up on his politics. My Companion was published in 2001 - before Voyage - so it wasn't much help finding material relevant to the play, but it re-introduced me to all of the reasons that I like Tom Stoppard. Beyond the wordplay and the prismatic structuring (a term used often by Wendy in class), Stoppard refuses to provide a singular voice or message in any of his shows, because a definitive answer would stop, or at least oppose, an individual's questioning abilities. Larger over-arching movements - like the post-modern movement he is so often shunted into - are, as one essayist described it, "countries" that he moves through: he speaks the language but is only ever a periphery member, never a citizen. Becoming a citizen would give his shows a voice, they'd suffocate his ability to toy with an idea.

And beyond that, the "never a citizen" bit is always interesting, considering his relation to Vaclav Havel and the Czech revolution from the USSR. He actually really got involved in it - USSR agents stole a petition he was taking back from Prague for Amnesty International!

And this isn't hero-worship, by far. The real Mr. Stoppard would probably hate talking to me and I've accepted that we'll probably never bump into each other. It's more that I've been reading his work for years, now, and I always come back to his plays understanding more and more. It's a neat little phenomenon, that.

Cheers, Mr. Stoppard.

Teeny Todd

2008-03-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

For your viewing pleasure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdlUNM_QqI

We discussed this in Music and Theatre. That's right, we discussed THIS in Music and Theatre. I heart that class. It features "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from Company.

Level Up!

2008-03-03T20:16:00.001-08:00

This is the tale of a sidequest:

First step, rally funds. This was tricky, because the exchange rate is never pretty, but I managed to get together some pounds to head out to Tesco with.

Next, at Tesco, I got to run around and select from whatever was leftover. It was six in the evening, you see, and the large parade of Monday shoppers had come and gone. It turned out that I was missing a green pepper, tabasco sauce, worchestire sauce, french onion soup, and red pepper - I think that was it. But all other gumbo ingredients were purchased, and some were finagled. The only sausage they had there were British, breakfast, cumberland sausages, which was not what I needed. The only chorizzo they had there came in thin slices! So, I bought some cumberland sausages and made due. But, I did get two secret bonus items!

Extra Virgin Olive Oil - why settle for less when the oldest in the world drinks two glasses of it a day? It's supposed to work wonders for almost any and everything in your body

Quinoa: (keen-wah, like Quina!) a super-food that Clay von Carlowitz got me on to. It was tucked back amongst other healthy foods at Tesco, and I checked the bag out. It can be substituted in for pasta or rice...hmm... Aquired Quinoa! ::Zelda item song::

Next, loaded with groceries, I began to return home, but made one final stop at the Co-op to look for a green pepper, and there it was! Aquired Green Pepper! ::Zelda item song::

Alas, when I got back, I got back late, and had to go make buckeyes with Ken, which was an amusing and rewarding experience in its own, but a complete and utter side-quest to my already important side-quest of making gumbo! I got to eat some though, so it was all good - you throw a buckeye in front of a roving Griffin, and he'll stop to eat it. It works much better than sylkis greens or kupo nuts.

But, once they were finished, and even though it was 11 p.m., I went about making my chicken-sausage gumbo. At first I thought I had too many vegetables, but then a sauteed them, and they shrunk. Then I had to deal with the cumberland sausages, which aren't meant to be cut up before they're cooked so they kind of squirted around. I managed it. Then there was cooking chicken, and I'm a huge freak about salminella, and how I don't want to get it, so that was interesting. And I almost set off the fire alarm with all the smoke in the kitchen, so once all the ingredients were cooked I stopped and waited for probably 5 minutes and just vented the kitchen.

Then came the making gravy from powder (because NO OTHER GRAVY EXISTS IN ENGLAND), and straining out all the little chunky bits that didn't want to disolve. Then I split the soup contents into two pots cause there was too much, so I had to halve everything I was doing. There was this awkward phase where I was putting a little gravy and then a little cream of mushroom soup for the broth, then stiring. And it was all working, until I put the soup in first, and when I went to strain the gravy chunks, I left the strainer on top of the just-plopped-in soup, so I had this gravy-soupy mass stuck to the bottom of the strainer, it was all quite amusing. Then stuff started sticking to the bottom of the pan, it was crazy.

Then I cooked the quinoa. An interesting experience, because quinoa, when it's cooked, looks like this. It's crazy! It has naturally occuring swirls in every bite! And it fills you up right quick, especially when served with chicken-sausage gumbo on top of it, which turned out to be AMAZING.

And I know this sounds absurd, but the sheer act of cooking in the kitchen for probably something like 3 hours, followed by the discovery of quinoa being good, followed by the even better discovery of the gumbo being good, has really made my, well, not life, but week, at least. I don't often get things right - I get things close enough to good, or acceptable, or something, but there's aren't a lot that I can claim to have done outrightly right. This gumbo was right, because it was tasty. And I'm kind of ecstatic about it.

Level up!

Utopian Brain Gumbo

2008-03-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

I have three adventures planned for today:

Firstly: I have emailed my dad and procured the tasty, tasty recepie for his Chicken Sausage Gumbo, which I intend to make on Wednesday, when all us Americans gather round with all those French people and all those people of other nationalities and make dinner. I have my shopping list, and so there are two sub quests here. First, I, like Quina the Blue Mage, must go and procure all the tasty ingredients, although, unlike Quina, I have a definite gender and do not fight using a fork. Then, once ingredients are found (some optional ingredients, like Okra, will probably involve me completing some kind of side quest, dressing up in drag a la FFVII, or some such business), I get to play Frankenstein with them and experiment until I finally get something resembling gumbo out of them. It'll be a fun time tonight.

Secondly: I get to read Voyage, the first part of The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard. It'll be an adventure.

Thirdly: An email just went out from the neuroscience department - I signed up in the beginning of the year as a volunteer in science experiments - and they want people who are interested in wearing a tiny camera for a few days, and then later are shown some images that it took while under an MRI. And if you bring a blank CD, you get to keep your brain pictures! And you get £15! I think I'm doing it, I just need to check my schedule. Meaning, that on the days that I'm wearing this camera, I need to be having magical amazing adventures so that I can remember them. They specifically ask to have you doing something rather than just sitting in your room. A call to adventure!

It'll be fun.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2008-03-02T05:16:00.000-08:00

So I've got a computer with a keyboard that sounds like a typewriter, which has lightened my mood immeasurably for this post.

Dateline: 2 March 2008. University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom. Stop

Given departure 26 June 2008 - Hildesheim - the suggested options are put forth for peer review. Stop

One: Write. Stop

Two: Meditation, research necessary, but most likely a good cure for the "long dark night of the soul." Stop

Three: More Roleplaying Games. Proved useful after first semester, why stop a good thing? Stop

Four: Long walks. Worked for C.S. Lewis, and also mom. Stop

Five: Travel. Re: expensive; limit wanderings to nearby, select specific destinations for distant travel. Stop

Six: Fix computer, alt. : buy a CD player - music is essential. Stop

Seven: Cream Tea. Stop

Eight: Puppies. Stop

Nine: Personal reading, outside of class reading and thesis reading. Stop

Ten: Write worthwhile blog reports of life in England. Stop

Normal coverage, sans crisis, will resume momentarily. Most likely tomorrow. Stop

A Midterm Crisis

2008-03-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry I'm in this funk, but it has laregly to do with England, so though it is an emotional response (which I said I wouldn't cover in this blog, only to break that rule pretty early on), it's firmly grounded in England.

I'm having a midterm crisis. Spring break is coming, which means that there's not much sand left in my England hourglass, but enough to get something done. There are two countries left in the UK that I will have left to visit once spring break is over, if all goes according to plan, those being Wales and North Ireland. There is the mythical abroad-relationship I have yet to find, since no one will touch me (no pun intended) due to my expiration date. I want full-blown "the one that got away" romance, darn it, but no, no one wants to get attached and then have to end it in a number of months. Forget that noise, I want to be rendered utterly contrite and heartbroken when I leave England, I don't want it to be just another matter of consequence. I want romance (dare I say, love?) that makes me forget that I have an expiration date.

Oooh, deep. Maybe I'll revise that so it's not quite so completely and utterly emo.

This being cynical thing really isn't as fun as all the cynics I know crack it up to be.

Anyway, the point is that now is the point of brainstorming solutions to the problem, the problem being that I want to have an amazingly rewarding end to my Kenyon-Exeter experience, but what does that entail? A complete piss-up with random British people? Various tickets to Wales, North Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Kosovo (A NEW COUNTRY, IN OUR LIFETIME, A SECOND VELVET REVOLUTION), Italy, Iona (an island off the coast of Scotland, not really a country but more of a destination. And there's no airport...)? Is it trips to London? Is it non-stop research? Or playwriting? Or exploring?

I guess this is the old "I never saw Paris" situation, except I'm not dying. I just probably won't ever be back to Europe, is all. And I have these fluctuations between sprees of action followed by collapses of inaction, the first being: what on earth can I do? Let me think of everything; and the second being: maybe the essence of England is just being here, and maybe having tea. I think this is the same reason why my room is always a mess: OOH! I could color code my entire bookshelf...but I still need to fold my clothes...oh well, none of it will ever get done, but the idea is what counts.

More on this crisis as it develops. But in the meantime:

halp.

A Springtime Epiphany

2008-03-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

And that is:

Life in England is approaching normality. I've gotten used to it. England still holds wonder around corners, but I'm used to the corners being there. I'm finding America harder and harder to remember, and with the amount of growing that I've had to do, just as a person, time has warped, and I feel more and more like America is a distant past rather than an eventual future.

That said, of course it's perfect timing that I'm reaching this state now, a handful of months before I have to go back. By "perfect timing," I mean both that it's too bad - all sarcasm included - but also that it makes sheer sense. I don't have my deadline of a return to America in the near future, and I've been here long enough to feel like it's a significant amount of time.

And it is a significant amount of time! I've been here for five months! Five crucial months of my college experience, which couldn't be spent at Kenyon, which couldn't be spent with all my friends at home, which couldn't be spent moving around in the little friendships and intricacies, which I couldn't spend playing with my dog, or spending quality time with my family, or exploring America, or seeing American theater, or working in an American job, participating in American politics, reading American magazines...

There's probably a lot more to that rant, but I'm going to cut it off there. This may end up being one of my more ranty, impassioned entries. I don't quite know yet, it's kind of a strange place to be.

There are who seasons of shows that have come out that I've missed entirely, not that this is unusual since these things rarely penetrate the Kenyon bubble, except through filesharing. But I don't even have that! I have the BBC. When I went to Scotland I had Scottish TV. I had the Glasgow regional network. There's not that much good on. And I'm a token - remember how I used to say that being in England made me feel special because I was novel? - I'm a token. Take American politics, you get asked a lot about Barack and Hillary. People talk about Hillary like she's this evil witch that they can vote out of office. And they look at you, like the fate of the world is resting on you, and I guess in some ways it is, and then they change the subject to British politics because you aren't saying anything. Or if you do say something, you drop words like "democrat" "republican" and so on, and they nod knowingly and have large conversations, but who in England knows the reality of dealing with democrats and republicans?

Maybe I'm just angry at England for being normal. This isn't a disillusioned "the magic is gone" rant, but maybe things are starting to get to me. People not saying what they mean, is one. My run in with my directing lecturer after the class was over ("Griffin, I read your portfoilio, and it was really funny." when I didn't mean it to be funny at all), or just unexpressed thoughts you can see - or think you can see - lurking behind people's eyes ("The nerve, did he just take my place in the cue?"). I'm tired of stratification - people can talk about class here to no end - and hills, and endless drizzling, and the complete and utter lack of winter. Maybe that wanderlust that England ignited in me is now spurring me onward, I don't know.

Few. That rant is out of the way. I leave you, as often is the case, with Shakespeare (in particular, more Richard II):

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leas’d out,—

Ojai-ho?

2008-02-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm sending in my resume to return to the Ojai Playwright's Conference. I'm hoping that all of my magical adventures that I've had in England will play into Robert Egan saying "oh yes, I do think we'll take him back. Oh yes indeed. Etc."

I considered posting an excerpt from my resume, but I don't know if that's somehow bad form? Here's the stuff I included that's happened to me since Ojai...

Experience

Conference on Shakespearean Music
June 2008 The University of Hildesheim. Currently researching the relationship between music and theatre with Dr. David Roesner at Exeter; will apply this research to a song from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then present it at a scholarly conference at Hildesheim.

Education Intern
Dec. 2008 Bath Theatre Royal. Helped the Theatre’s Education Department as they put on a production of His Dark Materials with teenagers. Also worked with the producer, Katherine Lazare, as a personal assistant.

Production Intern
Aug. 2007 Ojai Playwright’s Conference. Specifically assisted the production of Lloyd Suh’s American Hwangap, helping the Stage Manager and wherever needed around the conference.

Crossing fingers...

Cherry-Blossom

2008-02-24T05:07:00.000-08:00

So Ken and I went and saw Be Kind, Rewind last night, and while walking back we passed through the "sketchy alleyway" (mildly referenced in "The Wheat from the Chavs," just before the quotation of Robert Frost), and we were talking, and randomly these cherry blossom petals started falling. We looked up, and we were standing right beneath a cherry tree. Ken decided that it was our official anime moment, and that now we could be in any anime or Final Fantasy video game.

Also, I had a date (or was it just lunch?) that I don't quite know what to make of. The cherry-blossom moment helped clense me of my anxieties about it.

Sublime

2008-02-22T17:11:00.000-08:00

I was walking back to LaFrowda with Stephanie Reiches, and a thin layer of cloud had moved in front of the moon - you could still see it - and the moon was really bright. And so the light, when it went through the cloud, created a sort of nimbus-rainbow around the moonlight. It was pretty.

Tiebreaker/Heartbreaker

2008-02-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

Hey kids-

Just filling you in on the new KLXG updates:

In looking for a trusty sidekick, Professor Rhodes came down to two major candidates: Adelle Davidson, his long time friend and collegue, and Wendy Macleod, a wry and calculating, not to mention intensely feminist, mind. Given the choice, he decided to favor an objective business approach, and nominated Wendy for the job, although his heart was torn in two (one might even say there was a TIE of some kind). So Wendy has the job of plucky sidekick, Rhodes has asked Adelle to go back to researching Shakespeare, and to write to him, and Adelle is sadly packing her bags. Rhodes insists on seeing her off though ...

So, introducing Wendy Macleod, the Plucky Sidekick! Her super powers include:

Scene Analysis: By glancing at a room, she can easily deduce what everyone wants and how bad they want it.

Raise the Stakes/Increase Obstacle: By focusing her chi powers on the latent dramatic power struggle people are going through, she can instantly make things mean more (raise the stakes), or become harder, or both! A killer when a room full of hitmen are suddenly unable to fire with just a glare!

Women's Strike: Wendy deals +50% damage to any person with male genitalia and who identifies as a man.

But, as with Rhodes, she has many close to her who can be used against her. Her weakness is:

Sophie's Choice: Wendy's family is a competing priority to her position in the KLXG, and Professor Rhodes is in for a taste of that Women's Strike if he makes her put her job before the needs of Read, Foss, and Avery. In addition, Read, Foss and Avery could become targets, and must be extra-protected...

Be sure to vote on who will be the team's Lovable Tank, the hero who takes the most, but deals out the most damage! Who will it be......????

Chekhov "Uncle Vanya" from the Drama Reading List

2008-02-20T08:49:00.000-08:00

The above pun was manufactured by Clay von Carlowitz.

Last weekend I took a quick trip to Bath to see Uncle Vanya at the Bath Theatre Royal - I can't quite say it was the most amazing Uncle Vanya ever, as I'm not an Uncle Vanya conessieur (spelling?), but it was good. It was funny, it was quick, and the only part I missed was some chunk in the middle because an old lady fainted two rows in front of us (again, this was a moment where I was apalled by the amount of 'stiff upper lip' shown, though I myself was showing a good deal by simply sitting and watching while the ushers quietly rushed up and carried her away. See the entry 'Stiff Upper Lip.').

It was the first time I've seen Chekov acted by professionals, as well. It played with the old naturalist stereotypes, like a complete set, and random noises that accompany the action to give you "a slice of life." The set, for instance, had a square of floor that was the playing space (for the most part), and then a variety of furniture outisde that space between it and the cyclorama. Doors were designated with two chairs on the edge of this space. And you wonder "Mr. Set Designer, what's all this clutter over here?" Then, Act 4 comes around, and all that clutter is moved onto the playing area, becoming Vanya's room. The set from before is pushed to the back, and so the entire estate is always onstage, if not always being used. There was also an autumn birch, which didn't move, but which set the mood.

What astounded me was how funny Uncle Vanya was. I guess a lot of people say that. But they really got it down. And that they were talking about conservation and deforestation a hundred years ago - it had a particularly green resonance for me. Astrov keeps asking "how will people remember us, one hundred years from now?" His response is to plant forests to preserve the wild. I find myself asking the same question about how people will think of us 100 years from now, especially if the world tanks and global warming kicks in (I, unlike certain readers, am concerned about this...). But even then, I got a flashback to Our Town. Autumnal is how it left me.

British acting, also, amazes me. I mean, I have my qualms with the Exeter Drama department, yes, but every show that we've seen here has always been so exceptionally acted. Maybe it's just my American upbringing that gets me tricked by the British accent into thinking that everything is under control and professionally handled. That is what I wanted to get a snapshot of, and sadly (since I was denied my acting class) I don't think I will.

Moan moan moan, blogs aren't for moaning, right? (Millions of teenagers would care to disagree) I did find myself in a particular autumnal funk, though, and it stayed with me through that day in Bath, and I'm sure Ken and Clay can vouche for that. We caught some food and went to see There Will Be Blood at a tiny theater in Bath, which put me in even more of an autumnal, satirizing mood, and by the end of the day I was getting royally pissed off because people kept asking me to repeat things or kept saying that I was slurring syllables together.

I like to think it was just a funk, and that further forays into Chekhov won't induce this state in me again, but all in all it was a good day. I miss home, but I guess I can't keep saying that. I'm studying Wagner and Brecht in my Music and Theatre class, just finished reading The Weir for Contemporary British Drama, and I've got to write a paper on Safety Last, a silent film, which has ignited in me a giddy dream of running a game of Changeling: The Dreaming, set in the Roaring Twenties. Mainly, Roaring Twenties New York City. 'Twould be fun indeed...

Peace.

Royal Rhodes FTW

2008-02-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

It looks as though, due to the poll on the right, Royal Rhodes will now be leading the Kenyon League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His super powers include:

Mystic Sight: Using his infamous large glasses, Professor Rhodes can pierce through any veil or disguise, but only for noble purposes (never to look at Adelle in her underwear...or less!)

Aura of Tolerance: It takes a strong will to become angry in Professor Rhodes' presence. Super-villains often find themselves incredibly at ease around him, and usually end up spilling their secret plan as long as Professor Rhodes keeps his cool, which he always does.

Quotability: "Royal," as they call him on good days, can reach into the deeper substance of the Universe and quote one poetic/religious text, calling forth an effect equal to the quote. Many a time he has abjured the five fairies in the circle outside of Storer, who wanted to lure him off to a frightful, if arousing, demise, by saying "These woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep..."

But alas, he has a great hero's weakness:

Unrequited Love: Professor Rhodes has a secret love, and he dare not tell anyone about it, for his enemies could use it against him. She doesn't even know, either, because he can't risk telling even her...

And now, who will be Rhodes' teammates? Vote and find out!

P.S. This has nothing to do with England, again. I'm at a loss of things to say about England, because it's currently Valentines day, and my singleness has made me desire to concentrate on other things besides my immediate surroundings, and the lack of a special someone in those immediate surroundings.

Nothing to do with England

2008-02-12T17:19:00.000-08:00

... but today Stephanie Reiches pointed out that I had one eyelash, on my left eye, that was THREE TIMES as long as the others. At least. She could flick it without even touching any of the other eyelashes. Then my friend Thomas examined/played with it. Then they showed it to the French girls.

Then I took a fingernail clipper and tried to cut it off while looking in the mirror, because the thought of its existence just made my whole face crawl, but I ended up taking a chunk out of the rest of my eyelashes, so now my eyelashes are incredibly uneven. Finally, though, it fell out of its own accord. I was on my way back to the kitchen with it resting on my thumb, looking like I just pulled it from my arm, and I was hoping Thomas, Stephanie and I could blow it away and make the biggest wish ever, but when I opened the door, it blew away by itself.

So much for dreams and world records.

Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

2008-02-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll admit it, I've never read Gulliver's Travels. Which makes the title for this post officially pretentious. I confess it. Forgive me.

I just couldn't stop myself from drawing the connection, because my recent weekend trip to London was filled with lofty, logical, socially-enlightening events, as well as silly, crazy people. And horses. Lots of horses. I'm starting to think that the recurrance of horses in my life indicates some kind of synchronicity.

It started on Friday:

After sleeping in because I stayed up late writing emails to people saying that I'd be gone Friday, I ran around quickly packing only what I needed for my trip to London (Ah, London! London! our delight...). From there, I dashed off and arranged for money for London, but, more importanly, for the horseback riding lesson that I had rescheduled for that day. I hadn't been horseback riding in two weeks, and I was missing it, and on top of that I felt bad for the girl who rode with me, who had to pay for the taxi by herself last week, and who had her fees hiked at the stables because she was the only person at the lesson. So, off I went on a BE-A-UTiful day to ride horses.

Sadly, we were inside, again. And I was riding Ginger, again. And Ginger was still itchy from having been groomed, again. Oy. On I hopped and we began the lesson.

I do feel that I actually did get something done. I finally got trotting, though my form obviously could always use improvement. I've started to realize and correct some of the ways that I've been sending mixed messages to the horse while controlling it, which might be one of the reasons I never get any respect from Ginger in the first place.

HOWEVER

I only really started doing this after Ginger had a serious Come-To-Jesus with the instructor. Before that he was walking around, disobeying what I wanted him to do - "kick him, kick him!" my instructor would should, and in my head I'd be saying "I am kicking him!" It got to the point where Ginger actually began moving around without listening to me. He started trotting when he wanted to, turned when and where he wanted to, and I was really just there for the ride. I didn't fall off, and he didn't kick me off, but the instructor noticed and started coming over. THEN it became Ginger trying to get away from the instructor, and I was a middle-man in the arguement. She eventually took him by the reins and verbally scolded him - and odd punishment I thought, and then gave me her switch. She told me to use it if I needed it. That freaked me out.

I did end up using it, but only when she told me to. It wasn't a full-out, jockey-at-a-race-track-smack-on-the-behind, instead I held it with the reins in my hand, and when she told me to, I tapped him on what would be his shoulder. I imagine it hurt more than a tap, but that's what happened. I stopped needing it after a while.

After the lesson, I got down off Ginger and made sure to pet him a lot. This was, after all, the horse that had rubbed the whole length of myself, from toe to head, with his head because of a good lesson once. He watched me go, and I felt a little uneasy.

Taxi ride back, in which I had an amazing conversation with a really young taxi guy about how England was crazy. He told me where the word "chav" came from too: "CHeltenahm AVerages." These were average-joes from Cheltenham in the 18oo's who wanted to be like the fancy rich people, and so they dressed up like them and paraded themselves around, trying to fit in. So, the rich people referred to them as "Cheltenham Averages." Anyway, post-taxi I went to a late train to London with Clay von Carlowitz. We almost missed it, actually. We were in line for the 1:54 train at 1:52. It was intense.

Arrived at London, dropped our stuff off at the Vicarage yet again. I discovered that my mobile was running out of batteries, which sucked, because I had rather complex aspirations to hang out with two lovely people who were in London at the same time: Charlie Cromer (BADA), and Sean Bye (semester break). I ended up kind of jerking Charlie and Sean around most of the weekend, because we'd try to meet and then things may not work out, but I did eventually see both of them, and it was great, as you'll find out if you read on.

We tried to meet up with Sean AND Charlie at the Waterloo station, because Clay and I were on our way to the National to see War Horse, but there were a few issues. We missed Sean entirely because I suspected it would take less time to from Notting Hill to Waterloo than it did. Poor Charlie was waiting out on the bank of the Thames for a while, but he met up with Ken, who was also supposed to meet us there, and then Johanna and Rick Carrol as well, so they all went to dinner. Clay, Stephanie Reiches, Meghan Gibson and myself all finally made it there with about half an hour before we were supposed to be at the National. Charlie and I had an intense catching up over coke and a sandwich, and I also tried to catch up as much as I could with Rick. Kenyon, however, is still a distant and misty kind of place to me, though, despite visiting Charlie. So much has probably happened there while I'm gone - but more importantly I got to grill him on his adventures in BADA, which are both plentiful and interesting (but then again I think a class is counted as an adventure, I mean, when you have classes 9-6, one of which is an intensive Shakespeare course). We reminisced about past games, talked of potential games in the future for senior year, and of course the usual - shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings ...

Off to War Horse. It's actually based on a children's book about an English boy - Albert - who manages to raise and befriend a horse he names Joey, just before World War I. But, Joey ends up being sold to the British Cavalry (the British started out using cavalry until they discovered German machine guns. This discovery, sadly, happens onstage. Reversal: they die.), and Albert, after much deliberation, ends up running away from home and enlisting, despite the fact that he is under age, in order to find his horse and bring him back. Both Joey and Albert go through their own adventures in No Man's Land, encountering new owners, crossing political lines, and trying to survive in a hell of modern warfare.

Sounds good, but the plot isn't the best in the world, there are deliberate coincidences - fortunate and unfortunate - that are really there just for pulling on your heartstrings. At the same time, the only play that has made me cry more is Godspell. And there's a darn good reason for that. The plot, while not perfect, was good enough, and the spectacle in the show was down-right amazing. Joey, of course, is a HORSE, but look at how well he's done:

This is Albert, played by Luke Treadaway, and Joey. The man you see holding Joey's head is a puppeteer - I tried to find out the name from the cast list, but obviously there are several people manning Joey. This man you see takes care of Joey's head, along with his neighing (done as a stylized discordant yell with one of the people manning Joey's legs), his snorting, and all the fine-tuned body language through his head and neck. He, I suspect, is holding a trigger somewhere that controls Joey's ears, moving them (independently) around in circles, or up and down, into whatever position he wants them to be in, essentially. Besides the head man, there are two people that make up Joey's body, one controlling his front two legs, one controlling his back two.

Joey is ridden. Joey gallops. Joey is whipped, shot at, and sometimes wounded. Joey has a general blown off of his back by a cannon. Joey takes part in a cavalry charge. Joey pulls artillery and carts, he kicks people, he sneaks around, he rubs up against people, he has conversations with few words, and he has an itch on his leg that he's often reaching down to scratch. At a point in one of Joey's adventures, his German owner who has taken him in is shot during a raid, and he is confronted with the new Western artillery, and has to stand up to it onstage:

This picture REALLY doesn't do it justice, but he faces down the equivalent of a panzer. It's a stunning moment.

Stunning is a good word, overall. War Horse isn't the best plot in the world, and one could easily describe it, sneeringly, as "sentimental." And, like I said, there are a few times when the script specifically toys with the audience's emotions (one of them is at the climax of the show, so I don't want to give it away.), so in some ways, it earns that jibe. As a whole, though, it seems to me that these are minor defects in a larger, greater piece, which isn't sentimental, but simply emotional. Overall, I'd say it's absolutely breathtaking - a good enough story with outstanding design. It has heavy amounts of incidental music, all drawn from the era - the songs of the Great War, but also country songs. Joey and Albert, after all, (GET THIS) live in Devon! Joey even has a line about having a bike stored in Exeter. And the acting is darn good, all around, and Treadaway does justice to Albert's wide-ranging story arc.

I've been saying I need a good cry for a while. I think I got it, or something close to it, with War Horse, and, of course, it made me want to go back to the Oakland Stables and give Ginger a big hug.

Saturday morning, we had yummy Vicarage breakfast (poached egg, toast, yogurt, orange juice, corn flakes, hot chocolate, sausage, a tomatoe, and English bacon). We went to the Tate Britain, where a friend of Wendy and Read's gave us a tour summing up British Art History. He brought us by a George Stubbs painting, featuring - get this - horses. George Stubbs, as it turns out, studied anatomy so he could paint horses correctly. The friend of Read and Wendy said it always made him think of Gulliver's Travels, how all of Stubbs' horses reminded him of Houyhnhnms, the rational and calm horses that Gulliver meets. Again, haven't read it, I'm pretentious, but that's what he said.

Saturday afternoon we went to see Othello, with EWAN MCGREGOR as Iago, in the Donmar Theatre, which is small. I was in the first row of a balcony, center-house. I was, probably, within 50 feet of Ewan McGregor, and I was at the perfect monologue-giving height, so if he looked up, I was THERE. The show itself was okay, I suppose I don't much care for the play. I found that there was a lot of yelling. The actor who played Cassio was very good, and the design was simple enough (beds, cushions, etc. combined with a French drain upstage that had water in it in Venice, which people could splash in, and which dried up in Cyprus. There were a few lighting gimicks, with monastary-like portals in two walls that light spilled in from, which were replaced with Middle-Eastern screens, with interweaving lattice-work.) Roderigo was also pretty good. But I nodded off sometimes, I confess.

For dinner, we met up with Charlie again and went to Waggamama's, Wendy treating. Waggamama's is a chain of noodle-restaurants throughout England, and they are scrumptious. Dinner with Charlie again, and then we went off to see Absurd-Person-Singular by Alan Aycbourne. Charlie got ready to depart, but Read offered to see if he could get a ticket for him at the last second. Not only was there one available, there was one available right next to where we were sitting. I had tried to work something out with Sean, but it didn't work out, and he met me outside the theater. We made plans to eat lunch together on Sunday before I left town, which happened, though not without further complications.

BUT, in the meantime, Absurd-Person-Singular was certainly funny, but as far as I can tell it didn't have much of a plot, or if it did, somehow it illuded me. Funny though. And afterwards, we got to go backstage and have wine with one of the actors, who Wendy was friends with, and who's going to be in the movie Valkyrie, which is coming out soon. That was fun, though we were cut short by the backstage requiring that people leave by a certain point.

After that, Clay, Charlie and I adjourned to a pub called "The Volunteer" on Baker Street, which was pretty okay, and we hung out until 12:30, when the pub closed. We bid Charlie goodnight, and as Clay and I wandered towards the bus station, we were accosted by two partily-dressed and presumably inebrated teenage girls. The disccusion went something like this:

Girl 1: Excuse me, excuse me, do you know where the bus station is?
Me: Yeah, I think there's-
Girl 2: Where're you from?
Clay: America. (indicated to himself) Ohio. (indicating to me) Pennsylvania.
Girl 1 (in an American accent): America? That's totally cool.
Girl 2: We're heading to Paddington.
Clay (to Girl 1, sardonic): That's a great impression.
Me: Yeah, well supposedly there's a bus station somewhere down here.
Girl 1 (to Clay): Really?
Clay: Yeah, it's like, Valley-Girl.
Girl 1 (to Girl 2, impressed): Valley-girl...

Then I think they ran away to the bus station nearby, because they saw a bus for Paddington leaving. Clay and I processed this peculiar run-in and decided it should go like this:

Dramatis Personae:
Mr. Subtle: Clay von Carlowitz
Mr. Obvious: Griffin Horn
Yahoo Girl: Girl 1

Yahoo Girl: Where're you from?
Mr. Subtle: We're from America
Yahoo Girl (thick, fake American accent): Oh my gosh, America? That's, like, totally awesome!
Mr. Subtle: Oh, that's a great accent, there.
Yahoo Girl: You think so?
Mr. Subtle: Yeah. It's a great version of a Southern California Valley accent.
Yahoo Girl: Wow.
Mr. Subtle: You're talented. We've got to go catch our bus.

Mr. Subtle and Mr. Obvious leave. Mr. Obvious stops and turns back before he goes.

Mr. Obvious: WHORE!

Exit Mr. Obvious. Curtain. End of Play.

They're probably perfectly nice girls, in reality. Our little play is pretty mean-spirited, but this kind of run-in happens so often, it seems. I like to think I'm not really reacting to them, I'm trying to deal with that kind of run-in through humor. Sean mentioned that one of his friends told him "British people'll make fun of your accent, but they'll be secretly jealous of you because you sound like a movie-star." But, this did give Clay and I the idea of forming a two-man comedy troupe, Mr. Subtle and Mr. Obvious. Someone earlier in the weekend suggested we have our own radio show.

Sunday morning, another tasty Vicarage breakfast, and sadly the last one I'll have on K'Nex, because we're not going back in to London as a group again. I had friend eggs this time.

We hung around the room for a bit, Clay, Ken and I, and finally took the Tube up to Morningston Crescent, where we were meeting Sean. We got there early and had lunch - Clay was videotaping a bunch of things on his digital camera, and I accidentally almost broke it when I bumped into him, which was scary. Then we met up with Sean, but Ken, Clay and I had already had lunch, meaning that when we did get food, it would be Sean eating and the rest of us full. Big cock-up on my part, cause Sean made clear the night before that we'd be meeting up for lunch, and since
Sean is a regular reader of this blog, it makes it even more of a cock-up because I would feel bad not reporting how much of a cock-up it was. Cock-up.

Anyway, we went through Camden, the part of town nearby Morningston Crescent, which actually had had a huge fire the night before in its main market. Luckily, this had not hit the part of the market with the comic book store that I, at least, had wanted to hit up with Sean. I got a fairly mediocre story arc of the X-Men called "The Extremists," which was just slightly less disappointing than the Ultimate Galactus plot that I had read in the Devon Library earlier that week (which SUCKED). Ken, however, bought a book called Iron West (I think?), about a bunch of robots in the Old West. Sounds weird, but it's not only wonderfully drawn, but it's a great, funny little story. Perhaps even worthy of the phrase "graphic novel." I'd recommend it and I only read the first third.

Then on to second lunch, where we all hung out. Then off to a train and away to Exeter. I got a little further in G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. It goes through human history, and combined with my reading done while I got there, I've made it to the dawn of civilization.

Anywho, I don't know quite what to make of the repeated horses this weekend. Maybe I need to get in touch with my passionate side? Maybe I need to open up to the concerns of people around me? Who knows. If it is synchronicity, though, it will acausually connect to some kind of meaning.
Think dream-logic and meaning. Any thoughts?

Peace out cub scouts.

Magic Carpet Ride

2008-02-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

Just a neat note-

On the way to the library tonight, someone stopped me. This was our conversation:

"Excuse me, mate-"
Instantly I thought of all the canvasers I'd met this week, particularly from the Evangelical Christian Union on campus, but also from various other people who wanted me to go somewhere or something like that. Were they still out this late?
"Yes?"
"Do you know anyone on campus that sells weed?"
"No, sorry."

Without thinking. "No, sorry." It's the utter truth as well, but there was very little difference between him asking me about weed and someone stopping me before going into Devonshire House asking me to come see their production of The Miracle Worker or visit a nightclub they worked for.

I'm also sure this happens tons in America, but since the UK is currently reconsidering their declassification of cannabis to a class 3 drug (or is it class 2? It's lower than usual), I figured I should throw that in.

Also, there was just an investigation of the whole campus done for traces of cocaine, and guess which toilets had the most cocaine on them? The administration building's toilets...

Funky times at the University of Exeter.

Anamnetics

2008-02-06T13:19:00.000-08:00

This could also be called "My Life as a Contact Drama."

I had a wild and crazy day that was, on the whole, British. I think. Maybe it was just cool. Judge for yourself.

Start of the day, I checked my diary (which is a datebook in England, not a little locked doowacky with rose-colored pages) to see what was going on, and WOW everything was going on. 11-1: Comedies, Comedians and Romances. My first seminar after sitting around and watching It's A Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day the two previous classes, which the professor did not attend, since they were just viewings. 1-1:45ish, LGBT Lunch. 2-4, Contemporary British Drama, in which we were discussing The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonough. Then Pancake Dinner, how the French celebrate Mardi Gras is that they make a bunch of crepes and eat them, and since we usually have Wednesday Dinner in Lafrowda with a bunch of French people, it was decided to have Wednesday Dinner as Pancake Dinner, despite the fact that Mardi Gras was yesterday.

And on top of that, it was Ash Wednesday! So I had to make it to a service somewhere. And it was 10:50 and I had to run to the Queen's Building for Comedies, Comedians and Romances.

Which turned out to be amazing. Not quite as free-form as I had expected a seminar to be, but amazing.

First off, I'd never seen either of them until I watched them in the screenings, and WOW what good movies. It's A Wonderful Life for all it's old-timey goodness, had genuine frightening moments in it. If you've seen it, go back and watch when Jimmy Stewart's in the dystopic Pottersville, when he goes to what was his home and it's a run-down wreck because his wife never insisted on buying it and fixing it up. The policeman and the taxi-driver, once the comic duo, become zombi-like exuders of menace as the follow the seeming-crazy Jimmy into the house. Like seriously, look for it. The light from the taxi-driver's car shines from behind them and blots out their faces, except for a quick glimmer in their eyes. It's frightening.

And Groundhog Day made me long for Pennsylvania, even with it's crazy groundhog traditions. It opens with Bill Murray doing the weather, talking about how a storm is going to blow in and hit Altoona, and I got a sudden pang of nostalgia, cause I know someone who lives in Altoona! AND I know PLENTY of people that live in Pittsburgh! Pennsylvania, its lawns, or level downs, and flocks grazing the tender herb ... But Groundhog Day gets a lot of the small town insanity as well. Go back and keep an eye out for the "Pennsylvania Polka" that's played in the background of the groundhog festival.

So anyway: class. The professor divided us into groups and asked us to answer certain questions, and thankfully I was in the group withe the questions I wanted to talk about: COMPARING AND CONTRASTING. Yes! I ended up having a really cool discussion with the professor about exactly that, how both movies use the force of comedy for a kind of moral force, to teach their main characters how to be better people, and he added how they also welcome both the main characters into the small-town American community, and we had come up with that point as well, which was great...

During the break while people had gone, the professor leaned in to me and said, "Are you from Kenyon?" "Yes," I said, beaming, "yes I am." Kenyon students are highly competed for by the English professors at Exeter, and I was happy to be an in-demand commodity. And also representing my school well and all that. That too.

Then, after break, we watched a television program, made by Rowan Atkinson, about comedy, which was, yet again, amazing, as he played most of the characters in the movie, but also demonstrated, very effectively, why each technique he investigated worked. For instance, he talked about physical comedians as developing characters that were, essentially, uncanny. Or alien. They were similar to humans, but from another world, and they were often possessed with an odd innocence to this world: this creates many gags in and of itself as these clowns encounter normal physical objects that they don't understand, and their battles with these objects imbue the objects with a kind of life of their own. Rowan Atkinson demonstrated this with a skit about washing his hands. He'd go to wash, and the soap would slip out of his hands. He'd pick it up and it would slip out again, and this grew into him chasing the soap around the sink, like he was beating a drum, until it finally flew off camera and he went to get it. He didn't come on for a few seconds, and then the soap bar flew across the screen and hit something on a shelf above the sink.

I learned A LOT about why I like to clown. I think I should drop out of Kenyon and go to clown college, except I don't know what kind of plays they read in clown college.

So on to lunch, which was fine, except my food took a while to get out, and I had to scarf it down and leave for class.

Contemporary British Drama was a big discussion about Beauty Queen, which I had already been a part of when I took Playwriting with Wendy last year, but nonetheless it was good to revisit it. Mmm... good plays...

From there I went home and caught a quick nap, then on to pancake night, which was YUM. I started out with a ham-and-cheese crepe, then a cremed spinach crepe, then another ham-and-cheese crepe, then a strawberry-blueberry-nutella-and-whipped-cream crepe (whipped cream is called "Squirty Cream" here! SO FUNNY!), then a bananna-nutella-blueberry-and-whipped-cream-crepe...then I think I might've called it a night. I can't remember it specifically.

But, during conversation, someone mentioned it was Ash Wednesday. "Oh no!" I said, "I haven't been to a service!" Then Meghan McClincy, a new K'Nexer, mentioned she was going to the Catholic Chapliancy for the service that night, so Clay and I joined her.

The service was uncanny, but in that clowny kind of way. The only other Catholic service that I'd been to had been inside a serious Catholic Church. I mean, it wasn't St. Peter's, but it was ornate, it had screens, and kneeling cushions, and statues and things. We went when I was a kid and my brother was playing football with a Catholic school team, and so my family essentially pretended to be Catholic for a year, I think, so he could play football. It was worth a Mass, apparently (NAME THAT HISTORICAL REFERENCE!). Anyway, I went to service once, and like the good little Calvinist I was (raised in Doylestown Presbyterian Church, after all), I was outright offended by all of the ornate garb and singing in Latin. After the service, the priest stood by the door to shake hands with everyone as they left. I refused to shake his hand. Me. At around age 12 or something. I was a snob.

Anyway, not only had I aged something like 10 years since then (I just felt really old, on top of this being Lent and having just come from being told that I was "dust, and to dust [I] will return."), but this was far from being an ornate place. I'd been to the Catholic Chaplaincy twice before, both in Freshers Week, and both because the Chaplaincy was holding a number of Cream Teas to encourage people to come see what it was about. It's described in "The Wheat from the Chavs," particularly how far it is from campus - it's actually off campus. It's a put-upon little place, the rooms are small, the building itself is small, it's not like the Anglican Church which has astounding acoustics and a ~50-foot vaulted ceiling.

So we missed the bus and had to walk all the way there in the dark, Clay, Meghan and I. All the way across Streatham campus, down Cardiac Hill, out to the very outskirts, across the overgrown path with a sign on it signifying that we were entering a Residential Neighborhood, and that the campus had ended. Through the Residential Neighborhood and finally, to the Catholic Chaplaincy.

We were late, but we were quickly shown in to a small room, no bigger than someone's family room, maybe half the size of Philo, for all you Kenyon folks. In any case, there were cushions to sit on, it was lit by candles, it smelled like incense, there was a small band in one corner, and apart from a crucifix on the wall, a power point with the responses, and an altar with some candles by the Bible, the leftovers of their Pancake Day, and a basket for a fast they were having on Friday, there wasn't much for the now-thawed Puritan in me to accuse of "graven images." The priest sat in a chair amongst the congregation (or would it be a Mass, as that's one of the Protestant-Catholic issues: whether to translate eklesia as "congregation" or "Church"), and there was a metal box hung on the wall with a flame on it, where I think they kept the Eucharist. That in particular struck me. I had only heard of that in classes like Reformation and Literature.

My first reaction to the whole place was ridden with thoughts of Mage: The Ascension, of magical thinking, talismans, etc., but I tried to put it from my mind. Next I started thinking about all the little details I learned in classes like Reformation and Literature - I found myself at a loss of what to do when we all had a response-prayer that talked about the Blessed Virgin. I ended up skipping that part, and I usually feel bad when I hear people do that in Church.

Next I was came to how G.K. Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy (I think... I mean, I read this from a snippet in amazon.com...), asserted that people needed a kind of romantic dash of orthodoxy in their lives, in order to defend the practices of the Catholic Church. But again, these were all analytic responses. They weren't the point of going.

One of the things I did discover, though, was how downtrodden, how contrite, the Mass, the Church even, felt. Here they were in a little room with candles while the Anglicans had a complete traverse-style, all-out church and highly-competitive chapel choir. These Catholics had some candles, a power point, and a band. I found myself surrounded by that kind of contrite hope that so many people of various religions must have felt when practicing their faith by whatever means they had. Stories of the first Christians that met in catacombs and had secret symbols (i.e. the Ixthus, the "Jesus-Fish") to alert each other of whether the meeting was on or not. Protestants that were repressed under Bloody Mary, Catholics that were repressed under the Protestants. Joan of Arc, Jews, Muslims ... the Cathars, the song "Anatevka" from Fiddler on the Roof... But the hope that was present there, despite the semi-bleak world outside, was almost tangible. Looking back on it now I can think of Bill Caine, the Jesuit priest / playwright I met at the Ojai Playwright's Festival, who visited the Tower of London and was appalled by the sign that read "No prisoner was ever killed in the Tower" - a blatant lie - and even more appalled by the fact that a Jesuit's cell had been turned into a gift shop. How that Jesuit carved words into the wall that Bill read.

Maybe it was just the change of pace, but I felt a lot more awake to everything there, much more alert. Everything was very present. It was really fitting for Lent.

And the priest showed us how they made the ashes for Ash Wednesday, by taking out a blow torch and burning in a bowl some of the palms from Palm Sunday, grinding them up, and then (I think) he added holy water. He sang part of the pre-Eucharist prayer just like Karl Stevens did, and presumably does, at Kenyon, which made me feel like home again. While he was blessing/breaking the bread, "...in remembrance of me" was skipped over, and I wondered if it was to emphasize the transubstantiation rather than the commemoration of the last super, which was a big argument in the Reformation. Then after he blessed the wine, he added "...in remembrance of me," and I was really happy. That's kind of my favorite part of the Eucharist.

And then I got to walk around with ash on my forehead, and a bunch of people literally said, "uh, Griffin...you've got something..." My friend Thomas suggested it looked like a penis. But I just laughed it off and came right here to write about it to all of you.

Have a lovely night, everyone.

Decimation: Free Time

2008-02-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

Dear All-

I'm sorry I haven't updated this blog in a long time. As it turned out, I needed one heck of a break.

After classes ended and I had that wonderful talk about families, my week was kind of depressed by news of my mark for Lysistrata. Actually, I didn't even ask for the mark, because my professor's first words when I walked in were "Well, Griffin, I don't think that worked."

That was the first Monday of my first week of being 21. The rest of the week I spent setting up a variety of pen-and-paper RPGs, specifically Hunter: The Reckoning, which I was more than pleased to get going, but also to finish. With Hunter out of the way, me and the rpg group have moved on to a much more fun game, in my opinion: Changeling.

My poor little computer has broken, fixed itself, broken, fixed itself, and it seems to have entered into a more permanent phase of being broken, which sucks, because not only did I have all my Changeling pdfs on there (that was another magical adventure, downloading them on the exeter network and printing selections out to show to my players), but it has all of my plays, and with the Kenyon Playwriting Festival coming up, I'm somewhat at a loss because not only all of my half-started story ideas, but my older drafts of previous works, are on that computer. I'm endeavoring to take it to a tech guy in town, but I doubt the price will be much good.

And finally, Clay von Carlowitz and I are trying to host a Murder Mystery party. After 10, yes 10 hours, of brain wracking and plot-devising, we decided that making our own was too far over our heads, and we settled for downloading a premade one online, which is by far the MOST HYSTERICAL SCRIPT I'VE EVER READ because it's so awfuly bad. I guess that's the point though. We literally have two days to get it set up, too.

Today I'm missing my horseback riding lesson because I didn't realize I had a class during it, becuase said class was supposed to meet all this week, but decided that by "this week being the first week of classes" it would make Friday the first class, meaning that I didn't have any classes until Wednesday, because Drama delays their classes a week after exams. So, although I've had absolutely no academic requirements, except attending this class today and Wendy's class, I have been utterly innundated with planning, creative activity of the less-fruitful, more-spontaneous kind, and assorted other wonderful things. And I'm actually very tired. My brain hurts.

My classes this semester include:

Music and Theatre: Drama. We examine the history of music in theatre and what makes it work. Apparently a lot of opera, but we have a final project on Shakespearean songs.
Comedies, Comedians and Romances: English. The history of comedy in movies and Hollywood, includes analyzing When Harry Met Sally.
Contemporary British Drama: Wendy. That's right, the class that was all the rage last year is now MANDATORY for the Kenyon-Exeter group because Wendy's teaching it, and oh-how-sweet-it-is to be garunteed a seat. Sure, Turgeon isn't helping out, which would be fun, and most of the students aren't Drama students so there's had to be a quick going-over of Aristotle's Poetics, again, but after our first class on The Homecoming I am very excited to see where this goes. Sillily, I didn't read The Homecoming, but instead read The Caretaker, which is just as fun, but in less prostitution-y ways.

Oy.

The Fam

2008-01-21T04:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was walking with a bunch of British students to the Impy, and they were talking about their family trees, how some had traced theirs back to the landed gentry, where the money dried up, how this one sister married an escaped convict from Wales, and how, mostly, those whose families were Devon families had stayed in Devon.

I was struck with a complete sense off otherness, because none of their geneologies have to do with discovering who took a boat over and from where, what names were changed at Ellis Island or wherever it was they got off, which flood of immigrants it was that their family was a part of, or even which floods. It didn't have to do with speculating what the Old World, or the Homeland, or wherever used to be like, and wondering what crazy things your ancestors left behind that you could go back and discover. Instead, their geneology had to do with something like being part of a family that had lived in Bucks County since the dawn of time.

We had completely different understandings of where we came from, but I couldn't tell them this. It was one of those things you just sort of grok.

I've been thinking about families a lot recently. I entertained a whole slew of fatherly delusions of grandeur about raising my kids - specifically the family meeting in which I sat down and explained the burden of responsibility balanced out with an earned allowance, and also a new pet. Previously I've also had a delusion about making a variety of sandwiches before a child's first day at school so that he can pick which one he wants in his lunch.

I never said I was %100 sane.

A Riddling Glass

2008-01-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw the first panto of my life, and perhaps the only panto I will see ever again. I have to say I went in with low expectations, but interested in whatever it was, but furthermore, I went in after having pulled an all-nighter the night before. Bereft of sleep, bereft of computer (it died right after I had finished my essay. Holding out till the end, poor old guy), and bereft of any and all major deadlines and nagging responsibilities, I took my seat in the audience with the rest of the K'Nexers.

For one, there was a big title screen with lots of glitter and pink. That was almost expected. During the overture, there was a whole light show that went on featuring just this title screen, and then it was lifted into the wings and we never say it again. Yes!

What proceeded was an odd retelling of the tale of Cinderella, set in what I now understand as a pantomime set - neoclassical procenium (I think there's a term for it) with nested flats (which we didn't get to see change, those bastards) and a back drop, and everything was SUPER cartoony. Prince Charming's steward comes on bearing invitations to the ball, but she's a girl. Moreso, she's a black girl who can belt, but playing a man, but she had no pants. I mean she had a little hanging thing that draped her unmentionables, and some dance shorts, but she was wearing tights and heels. But she was a guy. I get that there's cross dressing in pantos, but this wasn't nearly enough. They were, for all intents and purposes, women who were refered to as men. I found it odd.

Then the Prince comes out - ALSO a woman. And they talk some more and then the Stewart goes to Cinderella's house.

At Cinderella's house, we meet Buttons, seen here in poor resolution ("poor resolution" is the ultimate fate of this panto). This is the only picture I could find of the production, but thankfully it has Buttons. Buttons, as it turns out, is the Scottish servant of Baron whatever his name is, also featured in the picture, who is Cinderella's dad, and he has a huge crush on Cinderella. He's also the protagonist, because while the whole Cinderella-Prince Charming thing happens, he's trying to work up the nerve to tell Cinderella that he loves her and ask her out on a date. I actually think he does it at some point, but the song gets interupted by the Fairy Godmother, so though something should come of it, nothing does. Also featured in this picture is Dumpling, a horse, who Buttons has been assigned to train, and who at one point wears makeup. While Buttons teaches the audience a song to cover the final set change, we learn that, in fact:

Dumpling likes his cornflakes.
Dumpling likes his hay.
[something something something something]
to get his five-a-day.

He can eat a carrot.
Parsnips are okay.
But give him some hay
And then he'll go NEIGH.

"NEIGH" must be read with flapping jowls as you shake your head back and forth, just so you know.

So, the central conflict is Buttons trying to ask Cinderella out, which is actually great, because Buttons is lovable, makes terrible puns, and finds most things incredibly funny - to the point where the actor's voice is hoarse by the end of the play. So there's a lot of the two annoying sisters, played by men, running around and making sexual advances despite the fact that they are, obviously, ugly and men. (Oh yes they are!)

That's another thing, the call and response. Many Americans don't know this, but in a pantomime there are specific audience cues for call and response. "Oh no isn't" or any conjugation thereof is one of them. "Oh no they aren't." Audience: "Oh yes they are!" If you get into it, it works to great effect.

Five stories are born from this panto: first, pantomimes, living up to their name ("imitating everything") rip off and plagiarize songs like nobodies business. This show borrowed heavily from bands like The Sweet (Ballroom Blitz) and The Scissor Sisters (I Don't Feel Like Dancin), and musicals such as Grease and Into the Woods. Specifically, they STOLE part of "You Are Not Alone" from Into the Woods, and actually tried to play it as serious, and I sat, appalled, pointing an accusing finger at the stage. But they do this for a reason, and that is, that whoever wrote this pantomime either a) isn't that good at writing music, or b) is so good at writing appropriately bad music that we don't know whether it's serious or not. The love song between the Prince and Cinderella goes like this:

"I'm looking at him
Looking at me
Looking at me
Looking at him..."

And we, the obnoxious foreigners in the back row, were the only ones cracking up because we didn't know whether it was supposed to be funny or not.

Second: Buttons, the two bad sisters, and Dumping are all in a scary woods to cover a set change, and Dumpling, who only speaks in whispers, says, through Buttons, that he wants to sing Zippidy Do Dah with everyone, complete with motions (apparently there are motions to Zippidy Do Dah), because Dumpling can't sing. "Why can't he sing?" someone asks. Buttons responds, "he's a little hoarse."

The whole audience groaned, particularly me, but I did it out of vast appreciation for the sheer awfulness of that pun, and I started a slow clap. More so, this slow clap spread to all out applause, and it actually took the actors by surprise. Or at least this is the story how I tell it, and how Ken who was sitting next to me tell it. I wonder sometimes whether I was the only slow clapper, but you know what it's my birthday, so I say I am.

Third: During the Dumpling song, Buttons called all the kids onstage to sing it. All of us K'Nexers, far too old to join them, immediately looked to Avery Baldwin, Wendy's youngest kid, and urged him to get onstage. Sadly, he declined utterly, and so we didn't get to live vicariously through him, although I think most of us desperately wanted to be on that stage singing along with Buttons.

Fourth: At one point the actors went into a seemingly improvised joke that made them laugh and break character. It may have been planned. A kid in the audience yelled "get on with it!" and that kid rocked.

Fifth: At the beginning they called out people's birthdays, and I was on the edge of my seat, cause my birthday was the next day (today), but they didn't call me, thankfully.

So the poor resolution of this panto: Buttons doesn't get Cinderella in the end. In fact, Cinderella and Prince Charming go off and have a big lesbian wedding. Buttons decides to abstain from marriage and go off and train Dumpling, and it sucks.

Then, after the curtain call (final story I guess), everyone comes on dressed for a curtain call number, the stepsisters as a bottle of champagne and a cake, and they have their number and all. Then, one of the stepsisters, a community actor for a long time, came out and started giving a speech about how the Northcott Theatre, the one on the Exeter Campus, was having its funding cut and may very well get plowed under. There were petitions we were suppposed to sign.

The problem is he was dressed like a cake and taking himself entirely seriously. I couldn't help smirking.

And also I'm twenty-one now. I've been doing a lot of wistful reading of T.S. Eliot and my Greek New Testament today, and there's that line in Corinthians about "when I was a man I put down childish things." I didn't look it up in Greek, but that's kind of how I'm feeling, like I need to saddle up and ride off into the sunset. The line after it, though, I quoted for a presentation this past week. "For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face." In Greek, the phrase "through a glass, darkly," uses the word "ainigmati" which is translated as "darkly," but really it's the word for "riddle." It's where we get the word enigma.

And now I can't help thinking of the pantomime, the imitation of everything, and seeing things through the riddling glass. Acknowledging the illusory pervading people's perceptions is kind of acknowledging that the world as people see it is a kind of pantomime, everything imitated. Which makes life kind of fun.

This is my birthday wisdom.

Act Two...?

2008-01-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

In a three act work, that is...

The semester is one, long, work-infested week away from ending, but then freedom, lovely lovely freedom. I felt the need to reflect.

I have a wide variety of stories that I can tell about England. Most of them are chronicled, more or less right around when they happened, in this blog. I didn't notice it but the blog passed the 50-post mark a while ago. I think it's in the 60's now.

But my point is that I have a variety of stories. People unfamiliar with this blog can ask me, "how's England?" and I can say "It's great. I saw a marathon production of the Histories," or "I went to Scotland," or "I attached a giant rubber penis to a woman and put her onstage outside." And they can say, "wow, tell us more." And I can. And while I'm at this vantage, I've got another semester ahead of me, hopefully ripe with even more stories, and so at this demi-act-one-finale, this seeming zenith of my Exeter experience, I have a moment to sit and reflect on the stories as they've happened, and look ahead to the stories that have yet to. It's just not an experience I get to have very often. It makes me think of Three Tall Women by Edward Albee.

Also, I saw Charlie Wilson's War, and I was not impressed.

Rubbers

2008-01-10T08:46:00.000-08:00

So, Lysistrata goes up soon, and in acruing props and the like for the production, I have come into the possession, if only through borrowing, of a large rubber penis. It's at least four times as thick as a penis should be, and the veins look like they're about to pop off the thing. It sits in my bag everywhere I go, because wherever I go I'm usually coming from rehearsal, or going to rehearsal.

I don't know what to make of this giant rubber phallice. On the one hand, it's a funny prop. On the other hand, it's frightening to have around all the time. I keep wondering what's going to happen if someone steals my bag, or if my bag falls open and this huge rubber willy protrudes from it. Furthermore, despite my attempts, I cannot seem to find a cheap partner to it that's even half its size, which means the poor Spartan Herald is going to be stuck with the center of a novelty Willy Ring Toss game that looks like someone's big toe compared to this snickerdoodle of a cockfoster. Perhaps it's funnier like that though.

My adventures to try to find said mate took me, last month, into one of the stranger stores in Exeter: Ann Summers. Ann Summers is a chain of naughty lingerie shops, and each Ann Summers has a circle of the least see through lingerie, and on the inside of these racks are the racks of dildos. But they're like £40! When I went in there it was right before Christmas - I expected it to be a dirty sex shop, but no, Ann Summers is barely distinguishable from the Gap, except it's smaller. Furthermore, it was Christmas, so it was PACKED, and there I was in my big overcoat looking thoroughly sad because I couldn't get a dildo, so I looked perverted. Plus, some people had brought STROLLERS in. Strollers, with BABIES. I haven't been back.

Apparently there's a real life adult store somewhere further from the main drag in Exeter, but I'm a little afraid to go there. The poor Spartan Herland will just be left with a tiny £5 pecker.

The Dirty Duck

2008-01-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

Currently I am plagued with work, but this is just a personal note. England...

While in Stratford, after we were through seeing Henry V - a long but brilliant cap to the first part of the history cycle we saw - we walked quickly down the street from the Courtyard theater to The Dirty Duck. This is the bar that the RSC actors frequent, and it's usually hard to get a seat after the shows are done. We snuck in.

There was a terrible cover band that covered, among other things, "Wonderwall." It was bad. I had bad beer and one of the cover band artists came up to Ken, drunkity as drunk can be, and started talking to him.

But we saw the actor who played Richard II. I almost spoke to him about how amazing he was, but I didn't. I kind of wish I had.

Later this week I was rereading an old New Yorker article assigned to us while we were reading King Lear, about Ian McKellan. The course of the article came to performing in Stratford, and the 100 yard area that McKellan's life consisted of while he did it, mainly: his house in Stratford (he has one in London too), the Courtyard Theatre, and The Dirty Duck.

So I drank at the same pub as Ian McKellan. Suck on that, America.

And now, for your reading pleasure, a wee bit of Richard II:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury	36
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again; and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,	40
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d
With being nothing. Music do I hear? [Music.
Ha, ha! keep time. How sour sweet music is	44
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder’d string;	48
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;

Yum yum yum

The Difference Between a Cow and a Bean

2008-01-07T12:15:00.000-08:00

So, dear readers, I have ten minutes to write this post. How on earth can I sum up Richard II, Henry IV i, and ii, and Henry V done by the RSC in ten minutes?

Well, I'd like to draw your attention to another difference between America and England that one of my actresses in Lysistrata brought up today. She was worried about forgetting her lines, and I told her, "it's alright, forgetting is just not remembering until the right time." Then I said I thought Kurt Vonnegut said that. She responded that she loved how Americans quoted things, and not only could quote things, but knew who they were quoting. "It's a common thing for Americans to do," said this actress. I was skeptical - I think the Brits think this because Americans are incessantly quoting Monty Python, but I didn't say that there.

So what is the difference between American Shakespeare and British Shakespeare? Well, after these Histories, what I have to say is this:

Americans are quoting Shakespeare. The Brits live it.

Take, for instance, Richard II. Not, at first glance, the best play ever written. An effeminate but undisputed king wastes his power on silly wars, and gets usurped by a more practical, and older, duke. Richard decries the usurpation as a sin against the Lord, but gives up his throne relatively easily, avoiding bloodshed. He is processed through the street and people throw dirt on him, then some people decide to murder him, thinking the king wanted it. So they do, just as poor Richard was starting to understand exactly who he was and what he should be doing with his life. The blood of a now seemingly innocent, noble, and perfect king is on the new duke's hands, and, as Richard prophecies, the history of England is plagued with civil war.

But the production. The production was the best play there, it beat out Henry V. The entire set was made of rusted bronze, it echoed, it clanged - these people were like echoes of a bloody history dragged up before the audience. I thought of Kramer's Our Town. Richard has a whole scene after he has ripped off his flouncy red wig and handed off his crown to his enemy where a stream of dust falls on him from the ceiling. And then you find out people threw dust on him as he was marched through the city! It wasn't just the RSC being artsy, it's in the script! And this is what consistantly amazes me, the DETAIL with which the play was staged. There was that Peter Brook-esque "ritual" invovled, for sure, but just the simple sense of the whole thing, every knot, ever joint, every sinew of the play was there ... it was a sight. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty darn good. I should HOPE I direct a play that well.

I'll tell more of these plays later. My ten minutes is actually long past.

The Kingdom of Mist-Filled Valleys

2008-01-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Scotland.

Mmm. Lovely lovely Scotland.

But first: we began our lovely expedition to the North with a trip through Ryanair in Bristol. Due to subway complications, we arrived five minutes late to board, and Ryanair charged us FIFTY POUNDS in fines if we wanted to get on a later flight.

Cheapest air service around Europe my foot.

I had withdrawn most of my stipend to go on this trip as well, and Ken knew I was suffering a dearth of money. When they said fifty pounds per person, he turned to me and said "I'll understand if you don't want to go anymore."

"I don't know. It's up to you," I said, not wanting to be responsible for cancelling our vacation.

"Do you want to go or not?" Ken asked, frustrated.

Quick pause, quick decision: "Yes."

A good decision.

I couldn't tell much about Scotland from the air, but the rides as a whole, both there by air, then the trainride from Prestwick to Glasgow, and my future rides around Scotland, has led me to conclude that Scotland is the Kingdom of Mist-Filled Valleys, because you get all these mountains jutting up (they literally look like they were harshly forced out of the earth) and the valleys that are grey, and wet, but pretty. The hills follow suit with the mountains - sometimes you'll be going along a flat area and see this random hill - square almost, not round, with a plateau on top - just sitting in everyone's way, and you wonder whether it was man-made, or whether it was dropped there, or what. I came to the conclusion that this is what you build castles on.

But, before castles: Glasgow. Glasgow is a very dingy town. But also very eccentric. People have that city chip-on-their-shoulder, and it's certainly not the richest place in the world, but it has a huge mall, HUGE, and the most ecclectic collection of sights I've seen for a while. For instance, some of the first places we visited on our magical trip included the St. Mungo's Cathedral (which includes his tomb), St. Mungo's Musuem of Religious Life, a Necropolis (I knocked on a mosoleum and wished an empty room in another one Merry Christmas), a Science Museum shaped like an armadillo, a FAKE RIP OFF of the Millenium Bridge in London, a kilt store with very high prices, a kilt store with lower prices, a Pizza Hut with amazing prices, a tapas restaurant, and a twelve story movie theater decked with neon escalators. It was pretty sweet.

We stayed at a EuroHostel, and it was very nice. Quickly the joke developed between Ken and I: "You're a hostel!" a la Towely from South Park.

So day one: we got there and ate Pizza Hut. Day two: all the stuff listed above (except Pizza Hut. Though we passed it every time we went by the hostel). Day Three was Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is the better reason to go to Scotland. Glasgow is kind of the weird younger brother to Edinburgh's sheer awesomeness. They were setting up for Hogmannay (spelling?), their version of New Year', so some places were hard to get to or off limits. But we still valiantly explored the town.

(A tangent: Edinburgh is known as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and also has one of the best New Year's parties in Europe. They sell tickets, £100 each, I think. Ken and I settled for Glasgow Hogmannay.)

You know how I mentioned those hills? Well, Edinburgh has one in the center, except it really is more of a mountain...a cliff I guess is the best word. Crag, actually, I think is the best word. there's a CRAG in the middle of Edinburgh, and there's a CASTLE on top of it, which marks one end of the "Royal Mile," a road going from one part of the center of town to another. From Edinburgh Castle to the Queen's house. Queen of Scotland, that is, I think. Some royal house.

But Edinburgh Castle, maybe it has a name, but it's an incredibly defensible position. Years of Real Time Strategy games, as well as Turn Based Strategy games (from Castles II to Starcraft to Age of Empires II to Civilization II and III to Warcraft III) to appreciate the wonder of its defensibility. You have to go through so many courtyards just to get to the main gate, and that's the only way to get in the castle, unless you want to scale the crag. The ticket was worth the price. Inside we visited a prison where Americans were held during the American Revolution, a series of battlements and cannon-y areas, lots of places with a good view, several gift shops (where I purchased some post cards and a collection of Scottish Folk Tales, and more, later), and the keep, where they had situated not only the Crown Jewels of Scotland, but the Stone of Destiny, by which (or on which?) all Scottish kings had to be annointed. Or something like that. Something that wreaked of awesomeness.

From there we went to a Kilt Weaving museum, right outside the castle gates, which was really a prolonged gift shop. I saw a blue hoodie with Scottish designs on it, zip up and all. I boughted it, and am wearing it, and loveses it.

Down the Royal Mile we stopped at a "The Whiskey Experience," I think that's what it was called, which was a Whiskey Museum/connoseur's (spelling?) shop. They had whiskey ranging from £2.35 (a tiny sampler bottle) to £400 some pounds, which were kept under lock and key and only available on special request. Ken and I both bought a sampler bottle, actually Ken bought two - and of intense whiskey while I got a vial of Teacher's, which I could find in the KeyStore at Exeter - cause we're totally legal. I'm not the biggest whiskey fan, though. In fact that vial of Teacher's is STILL unfinished, there's probably about 90% of the original amount left in it. So that legality gets me nowhere! But I did drink whiskey in Scotland, even though I really don't like the stuff.

We stopped for a packed lunch. Actually, our lunches the entire trip were packed, because Ken had the ingenious idea of buying enough materials to make avocado-tomato-cheese-lettuce sandwiches for the duration of Scotland. So that was always our lunch, made on the spot by us. And now I lurve avacodoes muchly.

Next, we passed by the Scottish parliament, which you wouldn't know from any other hole in the wall on the Royal Mile if it weren't for the engraving nearby the gate, which is easily missable. Ken and I actually argued about which building was REALLY the Parliament. I get the sense that it might not be as high profile as the UK Parliament or the American Congress. Just a little. Which is why I like it.

Behind the Debatable Parliament was another science museum, which was similarly overpriced. And behind this were CRAGS. Big, unspoiled CRAGS, just sitting there with roads turning widely around them like they didn't dare offend the hills. Ken and I took a deep breath, and followed a number of other hikers through paths up the crags, and after about an hour (it seemed like) of walking up sometimes nearly verticle fake stairs, we got to see Edinburgh from above. Edinburgh, and the sea, and the rain clouds in the distance. And a monument on another hill on the other side of town. So off we went.

This turned out to be easier to reach. It was a monument to the Napoleanic Wars, to Nelson, and a fake set of Roman Architecture, for some reason. Also, though, at the top of the hill, not visible from far away, was a cairn set up to commemorate the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1998 or 1997 or something. A cairn. I didn't even know what one looked like till then, cairns had always just been a piece of vocabulary from Werewolf: The Apocalypse. They're these little torch burny places. Look one up on google, I guess.

From there we called it quits and went back to Glasgow and saw The Kite Runner. This movie reminded me why I like telling stories. Go see it if you can (I don't know if it's out in America yet). I haven't read the book, but I thought the movie was great.

Then we had New Years, which we spent, at first, tooling around the town doing not much of anything. We tried to see the Petrified Forrest but it was closed for New Years. We went to the Glasgow Art/Science Museum (I don't know the name really) but it kind of was simple. They were having a special exhibit on Kylie, a European pop star neither Ken nor I had ever heard of before, for instance. Then we had dinner and waited around for Hogmannay, watching Scottish TV in our room.

Scottish TV, the stuff not imported from the BBC (and even some of that) is sadly kind of pathetic. First we watched Graham Norton's quiz show about the pop culture stuff of 2007, which was funny at times (Graham Norton's a funny guy, sort of), but it was the worst quiz show ever. No one really paid attention to the buzzer, people kept shouting things out, they'd ring the buzzer without knowing the answer and then flounder once they had the floor, no one that was there actually CARED. Which made me not want to care, and if it weren't for Graham Norton's witty commentary I may have stopped caring. After that we saw a sketch show, which LITERALLY was entirely about football (all Americans, read as: soccer), and not even that, entirely about the Celtics as compared to the Rangers (the Celtics being the Catholic team, the Rangers being the Protestant one), but it looked like it was either a low budget professional production, or a high budget High School production. And the jokes could've been written by ... I'm not even going to continue the metaphor, they purely WEREN'T FUNNY. It wasn't even that I didn't get the source material, it just wasn't funny. Period.

Also, we saw a BBC news report that turned to the Scottish Local Area report, complete with a spinning graphic of Scotland for its title shot. This only proved that no matter how many ways you turn Scotland, it still looks weird.

Anyway, Hogmannay, Ken and I essentially spent it lined up outside of the Glasgow Square behind some iron fences, watching the concert. We didn't even have a clock - some fireworks went off, and we assumed it was 2008. But for that, it was incredibly fun.

The next two days consisted of trying to get to Inverness, Loch Ness, and Loch Lommond. We could get to none of them New Years day, cause most buses were closed, so we tooled around Glasgow and ended up seeing Paranoid Park, a Cannes-Winning film that, I thought, was a little silly.

The next day we went up to Inverness, and on the way got a great look at the Highlands. Remember what I said about the hills/crags? Imagine that, but with even fewer valleys, and that's the Highlands. Lots of sheep, too. Also, they have these cows called Highland Cows that are everywhere in the tourist culture: on postcards, on pins, there are even stuffed animal versions of Highland Cows. They're auburn with lots of shaggy hair, usually which hangs over their eyes. For some reason these cows are symbolic of Scotland. Same with West Highland Terriers, which I now find amazingly cute and adorable. Before I didn't really know about them.

But Inverness. Inverness is the Scottish equivalent of Princeton but without the University. Beautiful. Historic. Not much in the way of economic problems, although as you get ot the outskirts things get kind of sketchy. But it's still beautiful. It's also the site of Macbeth's Castle, although that castle was raized and a new one built in its place - on a crag looking over the river Ness, which runs from Loch Ness.

We couldn't catch a bus to Loch Ness, so we had to content ourselves with Inverness, which wasn't that bad. There're some great walking paths and parks, and we got to stand on the edge of an island on a delta of the river, and we saw these things jumping out of the water. First we thought they were seals, but they seemed to far inland. Then we hoped they were otters, but they didn't quite look it. Ken concluded they were fish, but they were too far away to really tell anything for sure. I've since decided they were Selkies. And no one can sway me otherwise.

Also, I recieved frantic news that my mom had written a frantic email to Wendy and Read, which said that I hadn't been responding to her text messages and so she thought I had lost my phone and was dead in a ditch somewhere. In reality, I had recieved no text messages. Orange and Verizon were being dumb and a bunch of our correspondacnes had been essentially lost in the networks. After my mom and I talked, she called Verizon and they worked it out. For the next few days, I recieved random formerly lost text messages at random times, inlcuding one that said something to the effect of "where are you? I need to talk to you. It's urgent" at five in the morning the night I got back to England.

After Inverness we went back to Glasgow and, the next day, checked out and headed back to Exeter. We spent the whole day traveling, and got back at 1:45 a.m.. The next day, we had to wake up for an 11 a.m. bus to Stratford, where Kenyon-Exeter had paid for tickets to a weekend marathon of Shakespeare's Histories. But, dear readers, more to come on that later.

The Last Three Days: Loot!; Gallactica; I am Rumor

2007-12-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

These are three tiny blog entries combined into one:

Loot!

My Christmas Haul:

1 Greek-English Interlinear New Testament with Reference Glossry, USB3.
1 Greek-English Interlinear New Trstament, Personal Size, USB4
1 Pair of Cool Socks (Courtesy of Ken Worrall)
1 copy of The Empty Space by Peter Brook
1 copy of Backwards and Forwards by David Ball and Michael Langham
1 copy of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, by G.K. Chesterton
1 copy of The Art & Craft of Playwriting, by Jeffery Hatcher

And I think that's it...but I'm not sure now, typing from the Library with all my presents back in my room.

Gallactica

This isn't really so much of an entry as just saying that I saw the new version of Battlestar: Gallactica since Christmas and WOW it's a little like crack. I can resist though. I have, after all, not seen an episode of Lost in ages and I used to be hooked on that like a British Person on Curry.

I am Rumor

Last night I went with some people to go and see I am Legend, at the Odeon, a classic chain of British cinemas. I have to say, I was a little weirded out by the Odeon. The theatre itself was really big, and there was an honest curtain in front of the screen, and even what looked like a playing space sticking out in front of the curtain. British people have the same problems we do at the movies - people talking, cell phones going off, etc. There are like 80 years of previews, though. And furthermore, once the previews were done, the curtain closed and we all just sat there in the semi-dark for a while. Someone, somewhere, was running around trying to make things right. Then the curtain opened again, and the movie started. If that was a conscious choice, it was a silly one, because come on, you're not hiding the fact that there's a screen there after we've just watched 30 minutes of commercials. The curtains also looked like they had barf on the bottom house right part, which was a little disconcerting.

For a horror movie about vampires, I was entertained, certainly. It was short, and the beginning was a little quiet, but you know what, he's the last freaking guy on the planet, I think the beginning is BOUND to be a little quiet. It didn't leave me particularly moved as a person, but I certainly would recommend it to other people. Short and sweet, it seemed like a good little movie, but I don't know if there was enough in it to make me see it again. Then again, it takes A LOT to make me watch any kind of suspense or horror movie twice.

But, I decided that if Will Smith was Legend because of what happened at the end of the movie, and people somewhere could at least say, "hey, remember that Griffin kid?" "...yeah..." "Whatever happened to him?"

Then, I suppose, that I am Rumor.

And now, Rumor is off to Glasgow, so you won't be hearing from me until the new year, and so, I bid you all Happy New Year, and you will be hearing about my magical adventures in Scootland when I return.

The Land of Cold and Quiet

2007-12-26T17:04:00.000-08:00

I got into Bristol Airport late. Supa late. Something around 11:15 p.m. But that didn't matter, because my flight was at 7 that morning.

Bristol International is actually a very nice airport, it's small, remote, yet fully capable. It's not bustling, it's not busy, it's just a nice little airport. I found a spot and sat down. For a while I was hungry, but eventually I found out that they had one place open, and I bought myself some treats and an apple. Also I found a vending machine in the bathroom that sold "chewable toothbrushes," so I bought a few for the journey. They turned out to be a little bristly thing and a packet of mouthwash (essentially) that you break open by chewing it, and apparently it cleans your teeth. I paid money for it too.

A few hours in, a guy that I had been sitting nearby/seeing a lot walking back and forth started talking to me. He turned out to be from Portugal - he had tried many different jobs, like being a truck driver, or a mall worker, but in all the jobs he had spent a large amount of time doing whatever he was doing, so he could send the money back to his girlfriend and family in Portugal. There were apparently days when he just wouldn't sleep. And he had kidney stones, like right when I was talking to him, and they were too big to blow up with surgery, and he'd already passed one - I don't think that night though.

He looked something like 30 something. He was 27. But we stayed up and talked pretty much the whole night. Then he left for Portugal, and I for Geneva.

Easyjet has a nice little business, I have to say. Sort of cramped and a little wonky, but it works.

I got into Geneva where I met my friend Ian, who took me to my first completely foreign food store, where he recommended a Swiss cheese, Le Gruyere (spelling?), that would come back to haunt me. We hopped on a train and away we spend to Lesanne.

It was strange being in a country where nobody speaks your language (for once I get the real abroad experience). I found myself rooting through my rudimentary french to say much of anything to anyone, even though most people know English here anyway. Usually I was too timid to even say as much as "merci" and "bonjour," and I remember hiding behind Ian as we approached any kind of counter or place where I had to talk someone to get something - throughout the entire journey. But I survived with minimal French skills. And I got cheese, and in fact not only cheese, but crackers as well, with bits of bacon in it! And in Switzerland, everything has to be in several languages and so the label advertised that the crackers were "avec epature!" (I think), but also "mit Dinkel!" Dinkel, I'm assuming, is the German word for bacon.

Heh heh, dinkel.

Switzerland, as I learned not only by riding on the train but by cumulative experience, is an overpuffed place, I think. It's shrouded in mystery cause of all the mountains, and the clouds, and the neutrality, and you think of it as this magical chocolate/clock kingdom. It's really a lot like most places, though the buildings are a little old. The government and the culture do seem very strict though. I mean, you'd be like that too if you had one of the most stunning geographical defenses known to man on your side.

In many ways, just in the feel, I suppose Switzerland is the opposite of England. England is surrounded by water, naturally defended, and chose to try to go everywhere with the Empire. That's collapsed now, but there's still a sense of what the UK has to do on a world scale. Think BBC World News.

Switzerland is surrounded by mountains and it doesn't seem like it much cares what happens elsewhere. I don't know about Swiss politics at all, but the whole place seems catered towards either keeping the money/lives people already have, encouraging the tourism, or perfecting what already is. I didn't see a single homeless person in the whole country, and for a three day visit I did a lot of traveling. What I saw were picturesque views that were refined, everything had an extra polish to it. And for some reasons pictures of George Clooney either drinking coffee or wearing a watch were everywhere. That's what Switzerland is, a place that famous people endorse. It's an "in" thing.

Perhaps I'm being very bitter about Switzerland, it really is a nice place. And there is native culture - Ian cooked me a classic Swiss meal, consisting of a dish with potatoes and cheese, and then several kinds of sausages. It was tastey.

Switzerland is also amazingly quiet. There's no such thing as bustle. People move around but there's never any street arguments or conflict - sometimes streets are just empty.

Anyway, I'm telling you all abotu the general without ever having mentioned the specific. From Geneva we took a train to Lesanne, where we met up with another of Ian's friends, who was actually American. Her louder voice and intense accent (more intense than mine) starkly contrasted her entire environment. But she was awesome. We had kababs for lunch (NOTE: Sprite does not go well with kababs), and went shopping around Lesanne, which has so many hills it makes Exeter look flat. I got myself a pair of neeto fingerless gloves.

Sean Bye once made a comment on this blog saying that Switzerland made England look cheap. It does.

Lesanne was by far the busiest place we saw, and it seems like it's the shopping center of Switzerland. It is, as Ian also pointed out, the gay city of Switzerland, but compared to the other gay centers I knew of - San Francisco, Soho, New Hope - it lacked that a certain, oh, how shall I say this... pizaz. Moxy. Sparkle, one might go so far to say. What it had was a lot of quaintness and a decent financial backing behind everything in it.

From Lesanne we went to Brig, where Ian went to college, and where we'd be staying. You all know how the Swiss make people do military service once they turn 18? Well, apparently the military training in Switzerland goes far beyond the knives ("Now: many of you have never opened Chardonnay under fire..." - Robin Williams). According to our friend we met in Lesanne, the mountains around Brig were some of the mountains that contained - get this

SECRET AIRBASES.

According to her, the Swiss have hollowed out some of their mountains, made secret militray bases, and ... well I don't know what they'd do in there since they really have nothing to need a military for anyway, but they have BATCAVES! Not only that, there are apparently huge chunks of government owned property in the valleys, complete with houses and garages, etc., that have secret entrances to these bases. As we took a train past them, Ian pointed the houses out to me. Neither of us could tell if they were real or fake.

Ian also had a large sum of knowledge about the valley that Brig was in. He filled me in on a lot of it, but I've forgotten most of what he told me. We crossed the Rhone river though. That's historically significant, I think.

Some of the mountains, called The Teeth of Morning (I think...?), literally jut up and are really narrow, so whenever the sun rises and it tops them, it looks like they're literally biting up into the sun and stuff. It's cool.

Brig was a really nice little town. Same Swiss quaint/moneyed feeling going for it, and it was tiny, in a nice way. We stayed overnight in Brig visiting Ian's college friends.

From there, the next day, we went to Bern, which means "Bear" in German, or French, or Swiss... but it's the capital. In fact, this entry was almost called "DAAAAAAA Berns." There are supposed to be famous Berns, and by Berns I mean bears, in Bern that we almost saw, but we couldn't find them. I did, however, sit next to a stone statue of a bear, and I just concluded Aslan hadn't gotten to him yet.

Switzerland is COOOOOOLD, by the way. I ended up getting sick while I was in Bern. Ian was already sick for a bit.

Instead we went to the Bern Cathedral, which was great. We saw a choir get ready for a service - they went into the main part of the sanctuary and started doing weird vocal exercises together, like bending over and padding their backs, or testing the entirety of their range. And they were all wearing black, so it looked like they were doing some weird Polynesian ritual in a cathedral. And I was like, "heeheehee, I do those exercises when I act."

Bern is also the home of the big Swiss Clock. Like THE Swiss Clock, it's in Bern. I saw it.

From Bern we went to Zurich, where we stayed overnight. Ian and I were both sick, so we stayed in and slept/forced liquids while we watched the Futurama movie. The next day we went to the airport, because his flight was a few minutes after mine. Or SUPPOSED to be. Like any good Act Three, both our planes were delayed. Mine was so delayed because of fog around London (Fog? London? I never would've guessed) that I had to wait a good four hours. It was even moved to a different terminal, so I had to get everything I had, go out through security, find the new terminal, wait four hours, then go back through security. I ended up waiting right nearby a big sign of a bunch of celebrities wearing watches, and George Clooney wasn't far off. A lot of what I think about Switzerland I concluded waiting in that airport.

I finally made it back to London, Underground'd it up all the way from Heathrow to Paddington Station all by myself with my handy dandy Oyster card, and I just barely missed the train I wanted to take back to Exeter, leaving me with only the overnight train that left two hours after when I got there, and arrived in Exeter at 1:45 am. So, I hung around Paddington for a while, and I needed food, so I looked into my bag and huzzah! There was my Le Gruyere cheese and my crackers "mit Dinkel" so I wripped open the cheese and crackers. The cheese had been...sitting there, though. I had to break off the top part cause it just didn't look right, but after that I just kept breaking of parts to put on my crackers. But I had this top rind of cheese that I really didn't want to eat. So I looked around for a trash can.

There are no trash cans anywhere in London Paddington. I even paid 20p to go to the bathroom to find a trash can, but in the advent of hand dryers, there's been no need for any. I seriously considered flushing the cheese down the toilet, and if it weren't so an inherently absurd idea with potential reprecussions just for being silly (i.e. the cheese clogs the toilet, or ruins the water supply and no one knows why, until they finally dig in and remove this one bit of cheese and exclaim, "what idiot would flush CHEESE down the toilet!"), if it hadn't been for all that, I wouldn've done it. But I didn't. So there I was, wandering around Paddington Station like a maniac with a lump of bad cheese in my jacket pocket, because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. I ended up going to the Sainsbury's Local in the station and buying apple juice just to get a bag, which I then put the cheese in.

When the train finally DID get there, I felt like I was melting just getting into it. There's no heating, of course, anywhere in Paddington Station, and all the shops were closed, and my seat while I waited was metal, so literally sitting down I could feel things in my body work again. These two people got on that, forgive me for judging, just seemed a little awry. After the train started, it turned out that they kept dodging the ticket conductor. Finally, when they fell asleep, he came up to them and confronted them about it. He was very matter of fact about it, but really, what could he do? Throw them off the train? This wasn't Indiana Jones. He threatened them with letting them off at Exeter and not allowing them to get back on until they'd paid.

When I did get off the train at Exeter St. Davids, the air was its usual moist and cold, but it was nowhere near as cold as Switzerland. It actually was balmy. And, while nightime, it was just noisy enough, with the wind in the trees and the branches, to make me feel at home again, as at home as I can feel in England.

The Yellow Town of Bath

2007-12-25T13:50:00.001-08:00

Most people will tell you that Bath is a white town - these people include Jane Austen. And not racially speaking, literally, the place is (apparently) white because the rock used to build all of the buildings is a chalky white. Bath is famous for being a little too bright to walk around in during a sunny day.

In reality, these rocks are more of a yellow. It's like how you might be able to call manilla white, or it maybe looks like, if the rocks were white at one point, a herd of smokers has run by all of them and gotten nicotene stains on the whole town.

I don't mean to defame Bath. It's a wonderful place. More so than Exeter, I've come to believe. There's more to do in Bath than Exeter, there's more history in Bath, there's a quality theater (The Theatre Royal) in Bath.

Bath also boasts a thriving marketplace, a cool abbey (big enough to be a cathedral, but not the official home of a bishop, and so not one), a Christmas market (which I suspect has been taken down), a square in front of the abbey with tumblers, jesters, street amusers, etc., a river, a series of streets that are impossible to drive in, and enough cool restaurants to really make a night worth while.

The epitome of England, so far, actually, is walking through the central marketplace of Bath and hearing chimes humming some strange tune across the crowd from somewhere near the abbey courtyard. I don't even know what the instrument is called, but I'd call it chimes from my experience in bell choir.

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/Handchime.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/chime.htm&h=334&w=180&sz=34&hl=en&start=5&sig2=nZJ6DoZv3nvMhGGG867LVg&um=1&tbnid=pcwnhBicWPHDJM:&tbnh=119&tbnw=64&ei=8n5xR4-qNqKYxAHI7qTZDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhand%2Bchimes%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den

Sadly I haven't figured out how to do that cool thing Erin can do where she highlights the word "this" and it's the link to whatever it is. I'd be cool if I could do that.

But they sound like these instruments, except they're laid out on a board and you play them with an actual mallet.

In any case, THAT experience is England to me. So far.

Jane Austen spent a lot of time here, apparently, and there's a tea shop she used to frequent that I still haven't gone to. Then there are, of course, the Roman Baths, because the hot springs are still running. The mineral water is supposed to have healing properties, but no one knows what. For twenty pounds you can get in a pool of it. For less you can have a cup (un bathed in) to drink. I've tried neither.

What, pray tell, have I been doing in Bath then?

I've been at an internship at the Bath Theatre Royal, mentioned above, helping out their education department's youth theater organization, the Young Person's Theatre (YPT), as they were putting together a production of His Dark Materials with, get this, ~150 kids ages 12-19. It reminded me a lot of McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where I was in a bunch of the education department's programs - I consider it my stomping grounds now, although it's a little pretentious of me.

My internship consisted of hanging out with Katharine Lazare, the producer, and helping her out for half the day. Then the other half of the day I went with her compatriot Lee Lyford, the director of His Dark Materials, to help out the show. My first job, for instance, was to run around Bath and find cardboard boxes that a fellow intern, Kiki Stevens - a random American who goes to Hampshire that I met there - could help make into do-fer platforms for the kids to act on.

There are times like this when being in an internship is not unlike a sidequest in a collosal RPG like Final Fantasy VII. There's a lot of running around a charming but well-animated neighborhood, talking to some people who say random things over and over again, and others who can help you. Acquiring Key Items that you can only use in the quest, like "Cardboard Boxes" or "Tinfoil." Then bringing them back and using them to get sweet sweet XP.

But, back to real life. YPT was really a great experience, because it gave me a chance to get to see how one would take more complex dramatic theory stuff, like stuff from Kenyon, and use it effectively enough that an untrained amateur could understand it. Now, these kids had a serious will to be there, in fact, that's one thing that stood out most about it to me, was the willingness of all the kids to do their part, and their director's upmost respect for them, which they were completely conscious of.

I even got the chance to know a few of the kids I saw often, which was tough, because interns aren't supposed to talk, so surely most of them thought I was probably "that weird American guy who keeps watching us." Caitlyn, one of the girls playing Lyra, Joe, the guy playing Pantalaimon (sp?), and John, the guy playing Will, were some of the people I talked to regularly. I even got the chance to be dorky enough to show Joe and Caitlyn where "alethiometer" comes from, not just the Greek word for "truth," alethes, but what alethes means:

a - lethes
a: not (apolitical, amoral, etc.)
lethes: Lethe, the river of oblivion.
a - lethes = the Anti-Oblivion = Truth

I don't know many Greek pearls of wisdom, but that's one of them. Opens up huge new verandas of understanding not just within the context of His Dark Materials, but Socrates and the Bible as well.

Speaking of which, I got not one, but TWO intralinear Greek-English New Testaments for Christmas, one of which has a big old honking index in the back of Biblical Greek and words' definitions. Mmmm...

From Bath, on Thursday, I went straight to Bristol Airport, where I waited overnight for my plane to Geneva, but that is another story for another entry.

BUT

One final reason I love Bath:
Down the road from the Theatre Royal, literally the next block over, is a pub. And guess what that pub's name is?

The Griffin

Christmas Miracle: STAT!

2007-12-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

Hey Everybody-

I have a Grinch to deal with. A Humbug, a Scrooge, who is roaming through my life and ruining my attempts to type meaningful things for all of you about my adventures and Christmas and other great stuff.

This no-goodnick's name is: The ResLife Network.

Yes, despite his obedience and efficiency earlier in the year, this loving network that so graciously connected my room to the Intarweb has decided to randomly shut down during break. Now I can only come to the library to type, and the library is only open a very limited set of hours. And until now, I could only spend a few hours here or there, because I had to rush off to my internship in Bath, which I'll tell you all about when I have the time!

So basically, the next few blog entries I'm going to be playing catch up, but I don't even know when that's going to happen because I'm heading off to Glasgow after Christmas, and then seeing the RSC do a bunch of the Histories. So you may not hear from me for a while.

But, have a Merry Christmas, and I mean this, my readers. Because...

"Maybe this Christmas
Will mean something more
Maybe this year
Love will appear
Deeper than ever before.

And maybe forgiveness
Will ask us to call
Someone we love
Someone we've lost
For reasons we can't quite recall.

Maybe this Christmas.

Maybe there'll be an open door.
Maybe the star that shone before
Will shine once more...

And maybe this Christmas
Will find us at last
In Heaven, at peace.
Pray for release,
For the love we've been shown in the past.

Maybe this Christmas..."

That's a song, oddly enough called Maybe This Christmas. It's on the first of a collection of CDs called, gasp, Maybe This Christmas that takes Christmas songs, mainly carols but others, and gets some big names to do covers of them. Then the profits of the CDs go to charity. They're quality: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen as sung by the Bare Naked Ladies and Sarah Mclachlan rocks my world.

Have I mentioned that before? I don't know.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

-Your Lovable, Plush and Wayfaring Companion
Griffin Andrew Horn

Swing Low

2007-12-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

I was in the shower today, singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which despite Mr. Gardner's horrifying game of Call of Cthulu all those years ago has retained its peaceful vibes, and I had a sudden realization. I realized something that I missed in England, something that England has a serious dearth of:

Black People.

And this must be rectified post-haste! And not only black people, but black culture as well - I missed flipping through PBS and hearing stuff about Black History Month, or encountering Lift Every Voice and Sing as a hymn in Church - in fact, I don't think the idea of a 'spiritual' means much over here.

Now, I write this as a complete honkey, I just wanted to make that clear. More so, a complete honkey, who was raised in Bucks County, a county so filled with honkeys that if you squeezed it, it'd make a noise. And even more so, a honkey who goes to Kenyon College, which has a similar problem.

BUT, there are still, like, black people that you encounter, both at Kenyon and in Bucks County, even if it's not in the largest numbers. Here, there are black people, yes, but it's not nearly as significant. England never had the race riots or civil liberties pushes to the extremes that America did, at least to my knowledge (perhaps for the better, maybe they solved the problem earlier so it didn't escalate to that point...). Talking about racism or race issues over here has a completely different context than in America. The idea of a British person talking about The Color Purple or To Kill a Mockingbird or Ragtime would be similar to how I'd imagine a British person talking about The Wizard of Oz would be: out of place, unable to grasp the piece in its entirety. Of course, if that were actually true, that means I could never talk about Shakespeare in his entirety (can anyone?), so perhaps this is just a bias of mine. Still...

So maybe, and this is very ethnocentric of me, but maybe what I miss is, specifically, African-Americans. Maybe I miss that shared and resolved cultural heritage, or - this makes me sound like bad person, I think - maybe what I miss is, even more specifically, the idea of African-Americans: the cultural trappings, the spirituals, jazz, the being able to laugh at myself by calling myself a honkey cause I'm a skinny white boy from the suburbs. I miss not being able to claim I can't play basket ball because of my race and have people understand what I'm saying. I'm not sure if I called myself a honkey over here that anyone would know what I was talking about. This means I should test that out...

So I just wanted everyone in America to know that I'm pouring one out for my homies over here in the G.B. (and, if you can, read that in as white a voice as possible. Come on, shouldn't be hard for my regular readers...)

Does this make me racist? I hope not.

Nightly Wanderings

2007-12-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

Another dream:

I was working at a factory on the Exeter Streatham Campus, which is made up entirely of hills, and it was on one of the higher ones. This factory was nuclear powered, and made money - literally it printed it.

I was in the main hall, in line to get to work, and I, the dreamer, was telling myself, "please don't let it blow up, please don't let it blow up, please don't let it blow up," because I was so afraid of there being a nuclear meltdown.

An announcement came on the loudspeaker, and it said something about there being a plutonium leak, and that we should all head outside in an orderly fashion, and that this was not a drill. So, we all walked outside and down some of the hill.

When we had walked far enough, I said, "alright, now's when we start running, right?" The people around me didn't want to run though, they didn't know why. I told them it was in case the factory exploded. They wanted to walk -

Then the factory exploded, there was, literally, a nuclear explosion, mushroom cloud and everything. The people ducked behind one of the hills and I did too, and I remember trying to time holding my breath for when the shockwave passed, because breathing in radioactive dust might kill me.

I walked around with my shirt over my mouth for a few seconds, and flying through the air were bits of money from the factory. One touched my finger, and I wondered if I was going to die.

And this dream became an event for every other dream I had that night. A related dream, later in the evening, was that I was back in my house. My mom was doing something mundane, like watching CSI or something, and I went outside into the woods behind my house. They were dead and covered with ash, and I saw a rabbit that looked really tired. Then one of my cats - Peach - came up and started batting it like she was going to kill it, and I picked her up, saying "no, Peach, it's just been shook out of hibernation, leave it alone." Or something like that. I started walking back to my house and I could see my neighbor's yard from the woods.

Now my neighbor lives on a piece of what was my family's property, that we subdivided to pay for college. His yard was all green and fine - also, by normal geography, it shouldn't have been where it was, because it was on the other side of my woods from where I was. For some reason, I was afraid that my neighbor would buy my family's house, and then later I could come back and buy his house, and then when he died I could buy our original house from his estate and finally restore the property to its rightful ownership. But I was afraid that things would work out like that, with him buying my family's house.

Those were just two parts of my dreams, but I woke up today feeling like a completely different person from the day before - the nuclear explosion, which literally became an event in the timeline of my dreams, I think kind of changed my perceptions on things. I don't know.

Some things that have happened in my life that could lead to this:

- I might've just decided on Copenhagen by Michael Frayn for my thesis. We're not approved but it's up there, and that's all about nuclear war, shattering perceptions, and the like.
- Clay von Carlowitz and I were talking about Fat Man and Little Boy, in which a scientist stops a nuclear explosion but gets serious radiation poisoning and dies.
- Winter Break just started here, meaning a serious perception shift from work-time to free-time, and also virtually everyone is gone, and I'll have to spend Christmas here with a few leftoever people
- I'm looking down the barrel of college, with its ending, and trying to plan for life after college - a large upheaval in my thought up until now.

I told my mom about this dream and we talked about it for a while. It was great. If anyone has any idea what it could mean, drop a line!

"Insubstantial Pageants"

2007-12-07T10:52:00.001-08:00

Hey Everybody-

I just wanted you to know that I started a blog-notebook about the RPGs that I run, called "Insubstantial Pageants." It's more for me and the players, but you're more than welcome to pop on over and check out what I've been STing, GMing, or Narrating recently. The link is:

insubpag.blogspot.com

Or, of course, it's listed on my profile on blogger.

But if you just want to hear more about adventures in England, the REAL England - if such a thing exists - keep checking back here.

Murdering a Curry

2007-12-06T10:29:00.001-08:00

The Imperial has a curry on Thursdays, a curry meal including that cool Indian bread stuff, crunchy bready stuff, rice, and of course, curry. You can tell I know all the technical names.

I got Hot Chicken Tikka Masala, which was REALLY hot, and the bartender thought I was a tourist. First of all, I looked it, cause I pronounced Masala as "mass-la" and I had an American accent. He asked me if I knew where the silverware was (The Imperial insists on making you get your own silverware, which they have at tables throughout the pub, along with ketchup, salt, etc.). I replied that, oh yeah, I knew where the silverware was. OH yeah.

The curry came quickly, which says to me it was frozen and heated up, but hey, it's curry. MMMMMMMMMMMMM. Not my first curry considering that a) Karl Stevens had cooked some for me at Tuesday Dinner (I MISS KENYON), and b) I'd been to curry night before.

The one difference now was that the curry menu came with a drink, and it suggested a certain kind of beer. And I had one, and the menu was, in fact, right: curry goes really well with beer. I've decided that when I'm eating curry might be the only time I really ever drink beer.

I also went to a shop that greatly resembled Love Saves the Day today (for all you New Hopians). It sold penis pasta too.

Also, I was directing Lysistrata and I realized that there was a moment in it that was exactly like an improv game that I'd played before, "Late To Work," where a boss questions someone who's late, while some co-workers who stand behind him improvise a wild story, and the late person has to tell the story to the boss.

So that's my contribution to England. I showed four people, and my lecturer, how to play "Late To Work." I guess I can go home satisfied now.

Actually that's not the only thing: I brought White Wolf, from what I can tell. I just ran a game of Hunter: The Reckoning based on this one time that I went outside and had a genuine Hunter-esque moment: a garter snake was in the middle of swallowing a toad, and the toad was still alive and sticking out of its mouth and screaming. The snake froze up cause I was near, and, without anything else to do, I looked around and picked up a nearby rusty shovel.

I slammed all around the snake to scare it (this is where my life breaks from Hunter) and finally the snake opened its mouth and let the toad go. It was pretty freaked out, so I built a little wall for it and got it some water and kept an eye on it. I realized that I was freaking it out even more, so I left.

When I came back, the garter snake was there, and there was a lump in its stomach.

So that's basically what I did with Hunter, except instead of a snake it was a were-shark, and instead of a toad it was a pregnant woman. And she was dragged into the sea cause the Hunters couldn't stop the were-shark (but to be honest, other were-sharks can't even stop were-sharks most of the time).

And, funny story, a friend of mine and I were walking through Exeter and stopped by the German Christmas Market. Christmas Markets, which are always German, need to happen in America. Germany exports these portable Christmas Markets where they sell candy and sausages and alcohol and presenty-things, but mainly sausages and sauerkraut (always good in my book). My friend, who takes German pretty extensively, had made friends with one of the workers, and so he was looking for him. He wandered up to another of the vendors and started speaking to him in German, asking where his friend was.

After about half a minute, the guy responded, "I don't speak German. I'm Ukrainian."

And it was amazing.

Katty's (Kaddy? Caddy? Catty?) Owner

2007-12-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

On the train to Bath on Saturday, I sat down across the aisle from the most uncommonly amazing sight I'd seen in a while. A middle aged woman with a dog on the train. It was little, but not a tiny yappy dog, just a mutt of some kind or another, but a pretty one.

Eventually I mentioned to her that her dog was very polite, and nice-looking. We got to talking, and she was going to visit her daughter in Bristol, who lived in a house-boat. Her daughter worked in the Bath/Bristol area and commuted via her house boat. This daughter was actually in the process of selling her house boat, so we talked about the crazy times my parents had subdividing their property - how over ten years the records in the Bucks County Archives had met a disgruntled employee who destroyed the records. Oh the absurdities of selling a house. This lady and her daughter were going to meet up and then she was also going to see her other daughter, who lived in Wales but was meeting them in Bristol, and they were all going to have a grand old time together.

She and I talked about how dogs have a special place in a family, a special connection with humans. Dogs and cats. She said that they understand so much, and wished that there were humans who understood as much as they did. Then she said she thought there were some, but there were enough humans who didn't to ruin it for everyone else. Two years before she had lost her husband, who was really close to both of the cats they had, both of which were blue persians. When her husband died, all of the animals would keep checking around for him, and the cats died a month later, having lost the will to live. The dog even continued to check for him.

The dog's name was Katty, by the way. And she was 16, though she didn't look it. She lay there the whole time completely silent, looking around but politely keeping her peace. The lady said that Katy was dreading going on the house boat because she hated losing her balance all the time.

It turned out that this lady was born and raised in Greece, on one of the islands, and that even moving to England had been a shock to her, simply in how desensitized everyone was. We talked about that for a while, because I consider myself desensitized and I kind of don't want to be. We talked about Greece for a while and me wanting to go there and where, off the beaten trail, was good to visit.

Then we talked about how her daughter was a social worker who worked, for a while, with drug addicts, but moved on to Child Services. Not a job this lady could do, she said, taking people's babies away. Though she did think, as a mother, she'd be good at it, because she could tell exactly what was a good mother and what wasn't. Her daughter hadn't had children yet, so she thought it must be different for her. We talked about how stressful it must be, how much of a horrifying job it is.

I think we probably talked about a lot I can't remember right now, but may remember later. The thing is then this guy came and sat down in the seat next to her and the conversation stopped. The guy had "LOVE" and "HATE" written on his fingers, like from Lost. I asked, "do you like lost? You've got 'love' and 'hate' written on your fingers."

And he said, "best not to think about it," or something like that.

And the conversation stopped dead. Once we reached Bristol and everyone got off the train - us to change for another train to Bath - I quickly asked her if I could pet Katty. She was happy to let me, and I did. Katty was an old dog, and not particularly pettable, but she was at least polite enough to let me do it. And I introduced myself, and this lady had some complex name that I can't remember. And then we said goodbye.

Best single serving friend ever. You ever get that sense that certain people you meet must actually be angels, and they're just pretending to be human? That's the sense I got from her.

Torpedoing the Ark

2007-11-30T16:10:00.000-08:00

I've never seen an Ibsen play until tonight - never read one (all the way through. I started Ghosts but didn't get past the first page). My first taste was appropriately one of his first works: Peer Gynt.

I didn't know what to make of it. On the one hand, I was seeing at a Theatre in Exeter that is, from my understanding, not the top-notch one. On the other hand, they were doing Peer Gynt, so props for effort. And it was in traverse, so the director probably knew what they were doing. Choreography and songs stood out as places that needed work - because we were so deathly close to the actors, it was obvious to tell when they were offbeat. And often the dances were simplistic, sometimes that was the point though. When the peasants were dancing, they did folk dances, like the ones I did the first night or two at Exeter. But on the whole, the dancing was pretty good, but not amazing.

And I didn't know what to make of Mr. Ibsen's fairy tale. Ibsen, the man who hated humanity and wanted to blow it out of the water for the sake of the world. On the other hand, the last half hour or so (which, relative to the show as a whole, wasn't that long) was really great, from a writing standpoint, a fairy tale standpoint, and a "love and understanding" standpoint. Or at least it seemed to be. Maybe I'm missing the thematic point and I've been duped into thinking it's about love and understanding, because when it comes to feeling good about yourself, I don't think of Ibsen plays.

I want to talk about Peer Gynt with Royal Rhodes, that's what I think ultimately will come of this will come to. It's been compared to Everyman, and so I guess that's where I'm putting it too.

The best part was that they did it in West Country accents. And at some point someone had an American accent, or tried. I was like, "oh you poor thing."

But, beyond that, I also got to do my horseback riding lesson today, which was just me, and I actually got the trotting-sitting thing down thing that you're supposed to do. That was fun. And I did my laundry. And had a BLT here that actually was just B, L, and T. In all other BLTs I've found chicken salad or something else besides the original B, L, and T. It's almost as though the British are afraid to acknowledge that three seeming side-dishes could meld together to form one sandwich.

I was on the radio, I don't know if I mentioned. Some radio people came around Thanksgiving to interview how I and some other K'Nexers were taking being American in England during Thanksgiving. One of the people from the stables recognized my voice. It was fun.

Call to Adventure

2007-11-29T16:56:00.000-08:00

England, The Realm, the Isles of the Mighty, is calling to me. I'm really beginning to jones for going out into the countryside and just sort of getting lost in the Southwest. I'd do that tomorrow if I didn't have so many things to do. I guess that's what always happens, though. People always have things to do, no one just outright GOES on an adventure. In United Kingdom, adventures go on you!

"It's not that I like the Empire - I hate it - but there's nothing I can do about it right now!" says Luke in A New Hope. That's what I feel like right now. Which sadly means that the Uncle Owens and Aunt Berus of my life are going to be massacred by Imperial Stormtroopers and burned alive while I'm out hunting for R2.

Hmm... what are the Uncle Owens and Aunt Berus of my life right now...

Uncle Owen: facebook/my room. I spend way too much time in my room either working on stuff, being introverted (necessarily so), or trying to sleep or catch up on more work. I need to go party or something. Or if not party, at least go have tea.

Aunt Beru: Lysistrata, plain and simple. I LOVE IT and my actors are great, but at the same I've got to do a lot of work to make sure it happens. That's fine, and it's not that Directing was an uneducational course to take, but I'll be happier taking Music and Theatre, a mon avis, when I don't have to coordinate schedules.

Okay, so applying mythic structure, in particular Star Wars, to your life isn't an entirely feasible life-coaching exercise, but you know what, it's helpful.

In other news, I had a pantomine, or a panto, described to me this week, since I plan to see one around Christmas to soak up the English tradition. What with all the cross dressing, call-and-response, and terrible jokes, it should be right up my alley, right? I somehow suspect it won't be.

Also, I just encountered the amazing Disney Game, if that's even the term, by none other than reputed scholar, Ryan Merrill. You pick a hero, a villain, and a sidekick (any secondary character) for yourself. Remember how I had that post a while back about the need to be classified? Well, as you can imagine that's come rushing back to me.

So here's my shot at it. By all means, disagree.

Hero: Jack (The Nightmare Before Christmas)
Villain: Edgar (The Aristocats)
Sidekick: Marahute (The Golden Eagle from Rescuers Down Under.)

For a while I was thinking for James from James and the Giant Peach, or Beast, for the Hero. Jack won out in the end, though. But who knows.

Asphodel

2007-11-28T10:33:00.001-08:00

Hokay, so:

I have a dilemma.

I just finished the second draft of a short play, Asphodel, that erupted out of an impulse exercise I did and has taken kind of a nice form. I want feedback on it, and I'd be happy to send it to anyone that wanted it!

HOWEVER

It's still heavily autobiographical. In fact, it specifically centers on my memories of Kenyon. So this is your warning if you want to critique it but think it's going to get to you.

Drop a line if you want to read it. It's still only in its second draft, and I'm still an egg of a playwright, so don't count on it to be an amazing reading experience. But I would like the feedback.

THANKS!

Advent

2007-11-28T08:19:00.001-08:00

Christmas is coming, and from what I can tell I'll be spending it in Exeter. I'm going to at least go see a Panto though, just for the sake of saying that I was part of a British Christmas, but apart from that I don't think Christmas is going to be very big this year. The fam's sending me presents, which will be fun.

They say Christmas has the highest suicide rate because people who don't get to be together with other people on Christmas find it excessively lonely. I don't think that's the case for me, but it is sort of haunting.

I'm looking into alternative places to stay. Like Adam Latek's famed relatives who live nearby who I've never met.

Happy Advent, ye with families!

Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

2007-11-26T06:39:00.000-08:00

London was as it was several weeks ago: big and quiet and crowded.

I learned several new things: the phrase "butt burglar." What many consecutive hours awake will do to you. How to use the Central Line and the National Railway without someone telling me how to do it.

I guess I'll do this "classic narrative" after all. I'm getting tired of trying to portray London thematically. Brecht was totally two weeks ago.

After spending a whole night sitting next to my dear friend Earl (Grey) and drinking him far too much, I completed my Directing assignment: an objective assessment of my production of Oleanna. I think I actually learned something in doing it too, which is always one of those warm fuzzy feelings.

I wandered around trying to complete Exeter University's insane amount of paper-turning-in requirements (which include hunting a tiger and bringing back its claws) with all of my London equipment on my back - I had stuffed it all in my book bag. This posed a problem, because I had to walk up and down the hill from Thornlea to the Library and the Key Store in order to print, staple, buy an envelope, fill out forms, etc. etc. etc. I don't understand why they can't just ask for it to be handed in during a class, which would seem to be the SANE thing to do, but again, I have long since learned not to question British logic.

Finally I turned it in (booyah) and made my way to Exeter St. David's, where I waited for the other K'Nexers. I saw some golden labs in the distance who were just playing around with each other, but I guess their owner came and got them.

It was cold. Like, COLD. The phrase "bitter wind" is now vividly defined in my mind. And I didn't have my hat anymore (see "Extra Care With Strangers"), but what I did bring out, probably for the first time in a while, was my scarf. So I had my scarf and my Orvis hat, my big blue jacket with pockets loaded up with McVites (?) Milk Chocolate Digestives, a water bottle, my London AtoZ; then my pants had my notepad and my assorted train cards in the back pockets, and the usual in front. All in all I felt armored up for the trip.

The train ride there consisted of me drifting in and out of sleep (Earl was waring off by now), as well as reading a few essays on Greek theatre from The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. Notice, I just said "a few" and "essays" and "read" in the same sentence. It's really the first time I've enjoyed reading essays for no graded purpose. Well, maybe not the first time, but certainly it's the time that I read the most essays without it being for a grade. w00t!

There were also these kids sitting behind me who were absolutely amazing. They probably weren't the best kids to be on a train, but they were so cool. Props to them. The guy next to me had a serious problem with them, but I thought they rocked. They'd make up songs about their stuffed animals, or talk about things they saw outside, and one even leaned over to the other one to freak him out and said "I just farted!" It was actually a whole family, too. There was a big sister who was probably about 20 with her iPod, and when one of her brothers, probably about 10, came over, she let him listen to her music, and he hopped in her lap. There was a grandpa sitting next to her who grumbled "that's not music." It was like the definition of family comedy. It hearted it.

Once the train was done, off to The Vicarage in Kensington, again, because they were awesome. This time I got a single on the top floor, so no balcony for me. Sad day. But it did mean that I had some peace and quiet in my room, which was cool, and hot chocolate all to myself.

From the Vicarage we went to Nando's, and on the way encountered none other than Japhet Balaban! We were just walking on the streets and suddenly bam, there he was. Clay, Johanna, Ken and I all stopped to chat about Kenyon and life and all - we heard news about Molly Rice's playwriting class. Molly Rice is Wendy's replacement for the year while she's gone, and Molly is producing a play called "Blood Bonds: Of Brothers and Sisters" or something at Kenyon instead of Kramer doing a piece. She's teaching a class that goes with this production, the idea being - at least I thought - that the class would right Blood Bonds, and then serve as actors in it. Apparently, according to Japhet, I was very wrong. Molly instead is taking research from the Ensemble Writing students and using it to write Blood Bonds herself. Then she'll have them be actors. This seems kind of silly to me, but oh well. I'll lump that on top of Scabies, Swipe Cards, and Neo-Naziism as proof that things go crazy without the K'Nexers there to defend Kenyon.

From Nando's we went to the Imperial Museum, which at times seemed more like a haunted house than a museum. It was centered around the 20th century wars and conflicts that not only the British Empire, but the world, had faced. So they had a reproduction of the trenches of WWI that you could walk through, and submarines and tanks on display, and this great little installation about the Cold War with the major political figures on either side making their speeches (starting with Churchill's talk about an Iron Curtain, going through Kennedy and the Cuban Missle Crisis, resting for a long time on Reagan's "evil empire," and ending with Bush in Milan. The communist side had a bunch of people I don't know, apart from Gorbachev and Stalin, but they were making similar speeches). And while these speeches were facing off, there was a little gas-meter beneath them with "War" and "Peace" on either end, and the needle kept waving between the two. I found it a rather over-simplified version of a half-century-long struggle.

Also, the British take on war and politics is much different than you would see in any American museum. Although there was a statue to veterans in the center of the main lobby, I would go so far to say either a) The British idea of War is in no way romanticized, and the grim truth of it is part of the culture, or b) the Curator of this museum is a pacifist. Not that I have a problem with either.

From there we went to dinner at a crepe place on the Thames (mmmm...beef and pepper crepe...) and Chatroom/Citizenship at the National Theater. I have to review these, so I won't really go into detail about them, but something majorly important did happen there.

I SAW ALAN RICKMAN.

He was in line to get a ticket, I think, and I was standing a few feet away with Lucia and Clay. I leaned in to Lucia and whispered:

"Is that Alan Rickman?"

Lucia looked around, "Alan who?"

Clay popped in, and I asked him, "Clay, is that Alan Rickman?"

He looked over, then back, "I'll check."

Clay nonchalantly waltzed around just barely into Alan's peripheral vision, and then did one of those fake-yawning-turns to see Alan's profile. In synch with Clay's turn, Alan turned himself and walked briskly into the bookstore, where he and his wife (who was following him) purused a book for a few seconds and then walked away. We didn't see them again.

Chatroom/Citizenship ended and we went back to The Vicarage and went to bed.

The next morning, we had breakfast and then headed off to a farmer's market in Notting Hill, featured in the movie Notting Hill, where I got a cup of warm apple juice. Tasty. From there we went to try to get into the Aquarium by the London Eye, but it was way expensive, and then Ken and I broke off to meet our friend Kristin Dolan and her dad for lunch nearby Trafalgar Square. At least I think that's how it happened. Well, Ken and I ended up in Trafalgar Square, where we waited for Kristen. We watched a guy walking around with a falcon on his arm scaring pigeons, and were amused.

Kristen showed up, and we headed off to "The Texan Embassy," a Tex-Mex restaurant in Westminster that was every American stereotype you could ever imagine. It was kind of funny. We talked with Kristen of her amazing adventures in Oxford, where she's studying History through IES.

Once we had finished, we said goodbye and headed over to the Tate Modern (THE modern art museum in London, for those who don't know), where Read Baldwin lead the K'Nexers on a Modern Art tour, complete with free pads and sketchbooks! I actually learned something about appreciating visual art, and its world and all that fun stuff. This will help in my attempts to write The Work of our Hands, a play that I keep tossing around about painting.

From there we went to find a little place to eat, which was a long and arduous adventure but ended up in a little cafe/hostel that made tasty food and had tables with comic book pictures all over them! From there, we went to see King Lear.

This I am not writing a review about, but almost wish I was. For one, we had really good seats. The theater had a square thrust out into the center and voms, a little like the Bolton, and a larger proscenium in the back. We were on the ground level, so we were right there with the action, even if we were many many rows back.

The set was this Roman-Aqueduct/Opera house pillary thing swooping along the back, covered by red drapes, with other constructions all around it and doors and things. As the play went on it broke more and more. The stage itself had lime and dust at appropriate places, like you were visiting some old site. And then Lear enters in his abdication ceremony to an organ, dressed as a Russian Czar/divine-right-of-kings style king. The play begins.

King Lear, I must confess, is one of those plays that I have been assigned to read often, and never really READ. I know snippets of it, e.g. "speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," I'm familiar with the dramaturgy, like Peter Brook's production and how that worked, and I can even comment on it as a piece of Shakespeare's writing. But I'd never really READ it. So, haha, I thought, this will be a chance for me to see a genuinely amazing piece of Shakespeare that I'm unfamiliar with - I can see it like the first audiences must have seen it.

I don't know if it was that Wendy was sitting next to me, so I felt like I was being assessed, or if I was having an off night, or if I was really in a bad seat, or if Ian McKellan's presence onstage reminded me instantly that I was watching a play, but the RSC's production of King Lear directed by Trevor Nunn with Ian McKellan as Lear didn't wow me. At least, it didn't wow me in the moment. As I think about it more and more I find myself being retroactively interested, but in the moment, there, as an audience member...I wasn't bored, but I wasn't that interested. I missed out on occasionally why things happened in the plot, and it's not that the Shakespearean sounded like jibberish to me, but there were times when it didn't make sense. And this is me. This is me who owns more than one shirt alluding to Shakespeare.

So either, I supposed, the problem was in the production, my perception of the production, or myself as a person. Being me, I first concluded that the problem was in myself as a person, and proceeded to go on a diagnostic check of my character searching for any potential threats to my ability to be swept off my feet by what I'm supposed to love best. I think that was intermission. I have to say the second half was much better, since it's where things really picked up. But again, even during the second half, things were still a little tinged with "eh..." Everyone gave the show a standing ovation at the end - they've said at Kenyon and Pennsylvania Governor's School of the Arts that you should only give a standing ovation for what you honestly like. I often break that rule, and I did that night because I figured the production must've really been good and I just couldn't get it.

It was fun sitting next to Wendy though, who loved it. I had told her about Alan Rickman, and she insisted that she saw Steven Sondheim somewhere in the first few rows, and I went down to check during intermission even though I didn't have much of an idea what Steven Sondheim looked like.

We had a little trouble getting home, Meghan Gibson was trying to get on the Tube when the doors slammed shut and separated her from the group. But we met up with her later and all was well.

The next day I went to St. Paul's Cathedral for service, and it was amazing. I kept thinking I heard organ chords echoing in ordinary sounds, like a hand-dryer in a bathroom.

Eventually I made my way home, catching the same train as Wendy and her family. Foss was reading a series called "The Vampirates" and I busted his chops about it (Me: What are these vampires weak to? Foss: Uh...sunlight...stakes through the heart... Me: Okay, it's important. Cause sometimes vampires are weak to water, so that would be silly cause they're pirates. And sometimes only holly stakes work on them, the brambles still have to be on and all. So you see, this guy who writes this could very easily mix up his lore and have things fall apart...)

Then I collapsed and went to bed. For a little while.

The Naked Stage

2007-11-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

Nudity is surfacing as a theme of my present time in England. I don't know if it's going to stick with me for the duration, making it a motif, but it's at least come up a few times here and there.

First, Rhinoceros: had a person take off their clothes as they turned into a rhino. He wandered around tackle-out for a while doing Movement until BAM, a rhinoceros charged through the wall after he exited. Very effective. It was, however, one of those moments when you look at a naked man onstage and say, "Oh, well I guess it is a little chilly in here. I'm not the only one who thinks that."

That said, uber cudos to that guy from Rhinoceros. He rocked.

Second, working naked. Now a habit of mine that I have refined to an art form, except no one else gets to see it.

Thirdly, this coming weekend I will be traveling to London, AGAIN, to see King Lear with Ian McKellan, among other plays. For those of you who have not gotten all up in King Lear's grill, at one point the text suggests that Lear should be naked. As this is the Royal Shakespeare Company, my professor doubts that they will censure this implied stage direction. So, in other words, not only do I get to see Sir Ian McKellan as Lear, but I get to see Sir Ian McKellan's balls. And theoretically his penis too.

Fourthly, Thanksgiving. What? I hear you ask across the psychic distance between us, How can Thanksgiving involve nudity? What kind of Thanksgiving is he celebrating over there?

I will posit two answers:

The first is an old response that Emma Kirby gave once when trying to justify why Thanksgiving Day was "unscrupulous" in a game of Apples to Apples. She claimed that "Thanksgiving was all about lust. Think about it, the turkey comes out of the oven, all sweaty and greased up, with a little popped up thing sticking out of him and wearing nothing but his socks!"

And if this doesn't satisfy you, allow me to flex my English-Major-Muscles (the Bull-Shitteous Maximus, among others) to attempt to fit Thanksgiving into this theme of nudity.

Thanksgiving, as a holiday, is a time when your life is laid bare. Another year down, another year lived, and why? Your preconceived notions of your own accomplishments fall away as you "count your blessings," the blessings being the things beyond you that have kept you going, whether by chance or the intervention of some human - and/or perhaps, depending on your views, divine - agency (the grocery market brings you food, your best friend stopped you from being depressed, England makes tea. And so on and so on.). The list, as you think about it, seems endless, and a sense of self almost vanishes in a sea of blessings. Until you realize that's the point. What can you call self-dependence when so much is granted to you by that which is outside yourself? You are, in a sense, laid bare before the things that have shaped you, for some reason for the better.

Actually I don't know how much bullshit that was after all.

But it lets me tangent into this: Thanksgiving In England.

As per the tradition, Kenyon-Exeter held their Thanksgiving party in a pub called "The Bridge" in Topsham, which is the only pub that the Queen has ever visited. It's old, in that wonderfully English way. It, like The Turf, chronicled in the entry "Bedlam" in October, is right on the river Exe, and you can see where the moisture in the wood has had its effect. There was a little fireplace, real local beer (which I didn't have. I made the mistake of coming there with an empty stomach and downing a pint of local cider. Five minutes later I lost feeling in my lips. This said, to me: hold off on the boozahol.). They had comfy armchairs that, honestly, I could have seen at Mancuso Antiques selling for a good deal of money, I'm pretty sure. And the fabric was faded, ugh, it was great.

A funny story, actually, is that once properly numbed by the cider, I encountered not only Avery Macleod, age 12, but his friends from school that he brought with him. So there I was, mildly tipsy, being a terrible role model. As I find a lot of joy trying to be a good role model for kids, this was a little disheartening.

Then they brought out the food. MMM. Turkey, stuffing, brussel sprouts and bacon (which I thought was just something my family did, but it turns out to be an actual thing!), mashed potatoes, gravy...mmm. The mashed potatoes were the only thing I had a little trouble with - there was something in them that made them taste sweet, and as my friends Patrick Smyth and Anne Petdke concluded with me, it could only last for a few bites before you had to stop. But it was still good. Then came dessert, which was interesting - the British attempts to make pumpkin and apple pie. They served the pumpkin pie with clotted cream, not vanilla cream, which was kind of interesting. Clotted cream you eat with scones, it's very bland and buttery. Vanilla cream plays off of the spices in the pumpkin pie, and this subtlety was lost. Also, the attempt to make an apple pie was really just apple sauce in a pie crust, but given that it was actually pretty darn good!

Then, after three plates of food and a good deal of bread, also after about an hour since the first cider, I started into my second cider - Dragon Tears, a locally brewed mastery of yum. Also it's really sour, so you can't drink it too fast: a good detail.

I also met one of Wendy's current playwriting students at the bar, which was fun. We chatted about the Menace assignment, and Three Tall Women, and lots of good stuff. There were a few other of Wendy's British students there that I didn't really get to meet, which wasn't too fun, but oh well.

And again, Reader, you may ask why is he talking about Thanksgiving, even after so stunningly justifying it thematically? I mean, hasn't this gone on a little long? Where's all the nudity?

And I would respond: I mentioned I liked to work naked, and I'm taking a break from an essay. Who's to say I'm not naked RIGHT NOW?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Almost

2007-11-21T02:18:00.000-08:00

This is the second most wonderful time, maybe? Or the Pre-most wonderful etc. Probably pre. Thanksgiving approaches and I'll be celebrating it in a strange land. I'm trying to get ahold of a Scottish host family to spend Christmas with because I can't really stand the idea of spending Christmas not with SOME kind of familial unit or at least some really good friends or something. My internship, as it turns out, is only for six days BUT, this is the best part - and seriously I'm not being sarcastic - I'll be helping out kids on a young writer's program at the Theatre Royal. This is exactly the kind of program that got me going! This might very well what I do with the rest of my life! I'm excited.

And it's in Bath, which is pretty.

In my head while I was going to sleep last night, I was rehearsing what I was going to say to the Kenyon students who were thinking about going to Exeter in two years, the ones that I would meet as an Exeter Alum and jovially give advice to, alluding and hinting at grand adventures that these kids would be clueless about unless they went. And it occurred to me that I might end up making a comment like this:

"I know this sounds weird - it's maybe not talked about a lot at Kenyon. But going to Exeter, being in England, living with all the English and other international students - you learn what being an American means. You learn it for yourself, as opposed to here in America, where you learn it by what other people tell you being an American means."

It obviously sounds much less eloquent than when it's in my mind and there are thirty some faceless, wide-eyed, pre-Exeter sophomores starring at me.

But seriously, though, you do kind of learn to distinguish qualities you've inherently had because of your culture. And it's not like it makes you better than anyone else, and it's not even that they're always good. But you get a little more insight into what makes an American by taking him/her out of America.

Not that I've always been one for National Identity. I guess I'm still not, when it comes down to it. I think it's important to recognize your heritage as a strong factor of your upbringing. But when it comes down to identity, like That Which You Choose That Guides Who You Are On The Innermost Levels, I don't think America or the American Government is the place to go. I mean I'd say the same thing about England or the English Government, France or the French Government, China or the Chinese Government, etc.

It has begun to get wet, cold, and windy around here. I guess this is what we get instead of snow. Happy Cooking-Turkey day! Happy Thanksgiving Eve! Happy life!

Lay Off the Earl Grey

2007-11-20T06:39:00.000-08:00

So

Not only have my dreams been unusually vivid, as it's Thanksgiving Break in my mind and my body clock is needing more sleep, but I've actually been very bad to my internal mechanisms.

Over the past view days I have been ingesting Earl Grey by the pitcher. Specifically, last night, because I had so little time last week due to the production of Oleanna, I went to the library and printed out three character sheets for Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension. I set about drawing up a character and a half last night, a process which took a few hours of creative revelry.

The problem is that it pushed into the morning, and I had lots of Earl Grey in me, making me trying to get to sleep a mess. My unconscious wriggled madly to try to express itself as I lay awake in bed, half asleep but unable to get there fully because of the caffeine. In a sense I kind of started semi-dreaming while awake, I responded to dream stimuli in a conscious manner. For instance, I remember at one point I felt like there were this collection of rectangular metal cubes (polygons? 3-D rectangles) that were banging into each other around the vicinity of my heart like they were part of some crazy steampunk machine, and I was standing in the middle of them (in my heart) watching it all happen around me. Constantly I felt like I was in the middle of some wind-up device gone horribly, horribly wrong.

And still I sat down to type this, finishing off last night's pitcher.

Even More Dreams

2007-11-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

As I had nothing to do today, I decided that I was going to sleep in an extra long time. This is another dream that I had while I was sleeping in.

I was with Bob Egan again heading off to another theater related program that I was interning for, along with Kate Ross, Japhet Balaban, and Stephanie Reiches. Except that Bob Egan had butchered a bunch of people and put them in a car, had in fact painted their blood on the sides of his car and expected me to sit on top of the bodies, but thought it was a secret that he had all these bodies in the back of his car. We stopped at a rest stop and I tried to tell Stephanie about the bodies, but Bob came up and asked what was wrong, and so I faked something about being really stressed out and stuff like that. Then I had to try to arrange with Japhet, who was handling the rooms, for someone to take my room since I wasn't going to be there because I was afraid Bob Egan was going to kill me to keep me quiet.

And then there were aliens in there somewhere...it moved on to another dream that I can't remember.

More Dreams

2007-11-19T02:09:00.000-08:00

So in one of my dreams last night:

I went to Ascension Hall because it was my Senior Year and I suddenly had the urge to check out what the Alumni Committee was doing. I ran into Michael, the Cornerstone who took Greek formerly with really long hair, and we said hi.

At the Alumni Committee room in Ascension they were holding some kind of contest that consisted of a blood drive. Someone remarked that their blood they gave was really old, as a joke, and I thought to myself, "I haven't given blood in a while" and missed it. A lot.

Then I think Julia Davis, the international student liaison at Exeter, was there, and the deal was that she was staging an environmentalist protest at this meeting, and she dropped an egg in vinegar for me, and it floated around and parts of it fell away. This was the process of removing the "deer feces" from it, which it had come in contact with because of its packaging by a larger corporation.

Then she told me a story, and she turned into someone else - a guy who was probably about 22. In this story, he directed Romeo and Juliet, but his lead for Romeo dropped out at the last second, and got a new guy, but...

I interrupted, "but he couldn't talk over the yoke in front of him." I pictured an actor with a giant gelatenous frozen egg in front of him.

"No, he..."

I forget what the exact problem was but the director gave the actors some notes, and then they all rebelled against him and made fun of him. Show don't tell, I know, but all I can remember of what they did was that some piece of wax fell from the ceiling and they compared it to the director in song and it was supposed to be horribly mocking.

Commiserating, I picked up a bat with spikes in it and said, "I know. Actors can be a real pain sometimes" or something.

Then my dad showed up and we tried to drive home out of the school parking lot except something held us up - I feel like there was the fear that one of us needed to go to the bathroom badly or something...

And that was the dream. I think.

Spider-Pig

2007-11-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

I saw The Simpsons Movie tonight. I don't know if anyone really understood it like myself, Clay and Ken. I mean, take a bastion of American culture and put it in Europe... I found myself
laughing out loud at jokes that fell completely flat, like when the book club gets enraged and one lady says to another "you're the five people I'm going to meet in Hell!" Maybe that book didn't hit it big in Europe...or when Homer is battered between a bar called "A Hard Place" and a very large rock. Maybe that expression doesn't exist. They certainly didn't laugh when Marge insisted that she didn't need women's razors to prevent a clerk from noticing a wanted sign with her family on it, insisting that "we're European." THAT one sucked dead air, except for me, and I was laughing in part because I was sitting next to two French girls that came with us.

Maybe I'm just ethnocentric. Maybe I'm just an asshole. Europe might want to get more of its own movies, though. So far the CineSoc has played things like "Transformers" and as Ken pointed out, even if you're a member it costs a pound fifty. KFS is free.

Goodwill

2007-11-17T12:13:00.000-08:00

I hung out with some French girls and Clay von Carlowitz today and made Christmas decorations. I introduced the concept of a "Christmas Chain" to the French, but we didn't have any construction paper. So I went with Clay and bought some printer paper and we started decorating slips of it to make into the chain. I went online and found the chorus of the angels during the Enunciation, in Ancient Greek, and wrote it on one of the chains. The classics enthusiast in me was delighted.

Although I LOVE Thanksgiving, don't get me wrong, I kind of like preparing for Christmas this early. I whipped out the "Mabye This Christmas" sound track and the Manhattan Transfer's Christmas album while we were making decorations. It was kind of awesome.

The French were doing this thing where they blew the yoke out of eggs and then turned the whole shells into heads which they stuck on construction paper (they didn't have enough to share with us, though). They also decorated the shells to look like heads, and the ultimate result is these little figures that are, they say, "Christmas Pixies" or something like that. They are, in other words, Santa's Elves. There is a definite difference between a pixie and an elf.

Also, they were talking about whether or not we knew of the story of "Red Cap," which is Little Red Riding Hood. I was amused, because in Scotland and England "Red Caps" are goblins that hang out in castles and kill wanderers, then they soak their hats in their victim's blood. Red Caps are a cautionary tale not to go in old abandoned buildings (and a playable splat in which rpg?).

I miss rpgs. Sigh.

Anyway, I wish I could prep for Christmas with all y'all. I miss Kenyon and America just a wee bit.

Life and Love

2007-11-16T17:53:00.001-08:00

No, this isn't getting romantic, this is rather a plea for action to myself.

The Independent featured a cover story a WHILE ago about the fact that tigers were dying out. If I could find the link I would post it, but essentially conservationists are saying that it's going to take a miracle to keep the species going given the current populations. The expect that by 2025 they'll be extinct.

This on top of my just having played Risk for the first time in a while have lead me to conclude that people need a lot more love in their lives (Risk is such a cold game, and all the tigers are dying). I tell myself that in response to this, I'm going to try to spend time doing things like saying hi to everyone I can, helping people wherever I can, and generally being reckless in my expenditure of positive energy.

By the way, for general uses and holiday presents, check out:

www.thebreastcancersite.com

And all the affiliated sites, one of which preserves the rainforest. I'm feeling a little environmentalist, I guess, since I remembered that my favorite big cat is biting the dust.

Also, check out:

The World Land Trust
http://www.worldlandtrust-us.org/

And goodsearch.com
www.goodsearch.com

A Little Synchronicity

2007-11-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

The main song from Stardust has been showing up in my life a lot in the past 24 hours - once last night at a party in the kitchen when the TV was left on the music video channel, and today in the cab on its way to the stables so I could ride. I think I'm being told to see Stardust, but I think it's out of theaters here by now.

Today I rode Ginger, that very same horse from my first lesson who gave me some trouble. This time, though, he was great! He listened to me more, though he would occasionally do his own thing, which was silly. I'm still learning exactly how assertive to be with a horse, how tightly to hold the reins and all, but I'm getting there. I was trotting today, and I managed to keep the horse trotting, do the little bouncey-up-and-down-on-the-saddle thing, keep my posture right (I think) and my feet in the stirrups correctly, AND, on top of all this, STEER. It was pretty cool.

Plus, at the end, I went up to pet him, and he took his whole head and with one stroke rubbed it against the entirety of my body, ankles to head. I think that means he likes me.

Also, I checked out the space I have to do Lysistrata in, and I'm proceeding to research and read up on that, Aristotle's Poetics (reviewing, rather), Greek theater, clowning, vaudeville, and comedy.

Oi.

Extra Care With Strangers

2007-11-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

So I went out to a pub called the King William (King Billy for short) tonight with Ken and some British people. We sat down, they with their drinks, I with my sober attention to my budget. And we proceeded to talk.

At some point Jurassic Park came up, which lead to arguing about chaos theory. Ken asserted that Malcolm's idea that something was bound to go wrong with the park, and so no one should have tried to build it, was a false representation of chaos theory. "If people thought that, then why would they ever try anything?" he exclaimed.

Movie convo quickly brought up a relic from my childhood - Flight of the Navigator. "OH MY GOSH!" I exclaimed.

This attracted the attention of the people in the booth next to us, a group of men in their twenty somethings. They started asking if we wanted a "burger and fries" and made sure to make their a's really nasal, their r's very pronounced. We ignored them.

I went to the bathroom later in the night. One of them came in while I was drying my hands. He asked me if I knew The Hairdressers. I said no - I thought they were a band or something. Then he told me to get my fucking hair cut.

In a few minutes when we were both back at our tables he came over and started telling me about the hairdressers down the street. Luckily Ken intervened and made jovial conversation with him and the people in the next booth. They pretty much left us alone, though they kept referring to Ken as a "Josie." Then they left.

When we finally got up to go I couldn't find my hat - the brown and white knit one that was my older brother's when he was a kid, the one that I found during Thanksgiving Break sophomore year of Kenyon and started wearing because I needed the confidence. I'm going to go back to the King Billy and I'll ask if they've found anything, but it's most likely somewhere on the streets. I can't help thinking, though, that it was somehow those people that took it. I can't remember when I took it off - I can't see any other reason to take it off than in the bar.

And I know it's just a thing, and that I shouldn't attach any value to it, and this was bound to happen as I have a tendency to lose hats. But I do miss it, I did come back to my room and hope that I had just forgotten to wear it that night, I did hope it was sitting on top of a pile of junk somewhere or in my jacket pocket. Such is the way of things. But this is the first major thing I've really lost in England.

"Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood.
They will not protect you
The way that they should..."

Shot to the Heart

2007-11-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't going to be about my present romantic escapades in Exeter, don't worry. I mean, wait, I actually can have part of my blog devoted to it. Ready?

...

That was my entry about my present romantic escapades.

Anyway, what this entry IS about is a The Empty Space by Peter Brook. I started reading it, with its opening chapter on "Dead Theater" and subsequently realized that I think I've been doing a lot of dead theater here in Exeter. I think that's the idea in the book, and why he put it as the first chapter, and I think that's the realization you're supposed to have in silent and then quickly read through the rest of the book to figure out how to fix it, but I have a scene for my directing class that went up tomorrow. So, like a Bystander (name that reference!) I am left with the knowledge I'm involved in something wrong, but no way to right it.

More on this later, as I learn how Peter Brook wants me to fix it.

Today I was in the book store to pick up some books (who'd've thought...), some of which were plays for next semester, and I came across a Camdbridge Companion that looked interesting. I own one already on Tom Stoppard. This one was on Greek and Roman theatre. Given the choice between plays I was required to read for next semester, and this, I chose this. So now I have two. When I need to put this one on a bookshelf, they're going to be right next to each other. I'll look so scholarly.

So, a la Erin Ellingwood, I'll end with a little cadre of things accomplished:

Reading:
The Empty Space, Peter Brook
The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton
If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theater, edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton

Writing (or toying with):
"The Work of our Hands"
"The Synchronometer"

Re-Writing:
"Asphodel"

Pondering:
Twelfth Night as Christmas Play
A Winter's Tale as steampunk comic book
Lysistrata (e.g. dildos)
Post Secret

Tasty Tea and Pasties

2007-11-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

A) I had found a tiny place called the Three Cooks Bakery, and they make pasties. No, not the little plastic things you put on your nipular region if your boob is hanging out, but they're actually flakey bread - like a croissant - wrapped over to form a pocket, and in the pocket you can put lots of stuff. These people put essentially beef stew in it. MMM. And, only a pound and 70 p for two. That was lunch.

B) I spent a good half hour in Sainsbury's. I decided that I could spend a lot of time just wandering around Sainsbury's and Woolworth's (which I've visited. See below). I spent a good deal of time in the alcohol isles (one for liquor, one for wine) and ultimately decided that I didn't have the money to be extravagant and buy my own bottle. That and I didn't know what to buy. Scotch? Gin? Sainsbury's Brand Gin? I didn't want to spend an exorbitant amount of pounds only to find out that I don't like something.

b1) This alcoholic curiosity was brought on, however, by a lovely lovely dinner at Wendy's house last night, which was AMAZING. Everything I ate was tasty, even the beet and carrot stuff that Read made. I'm not the biggest fan of beets but hey, they were okay for a vegetable I don't like. There was chicken, and salad, and snow peas, and risotto - and then there was a little measuring cup of chicken broth that you could pour on the risotto and the chicken. SCRUMTRILESCENT! And then there were these cupcakes and chocolate ice cream and I almost literally wanted to just roll around in because it was so moist and yummy. Plus I had three glasses of white wine too, so it was pretty kicking. In fact, Avery Macleod, the tricky soundrel, made sure to wait until I had a few glasses of wine in me before he challenged me to Wii Sports. Then, with dessert, I got a big mug of Earl Grey (YES). As things wound down, Wendy started cleaning dishes and Clay and I offered to help. She declined, but invited us to come into the kitchen and "hang out." So, I've officially hung out with Wendy. It was kind of great. And the train station nearby their house looks like something out of Spirited Away too.

C) Without money for alcohol, and inspired by the big mug of tea from the night before, I decided that my little extravagance for the week would be Earl Grey. I bought a box of Twinings Aromatic Earl Grey with 100 tea bags in it! So I'm set. And it was great, because Alison had brought me a box of Petit Beurre tea biscuits from France, and so at around 4 o'clock I sat down with my Earl Grey, my tea biscuits, and I had tea time while writing my blog. Which is this.

Philists

2007-11-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

I was just thinking about everyone who goes abroad today, because of Alison and also Michael Shaeffer and others, and then even my own experience and other K'Nexers' experience too. I went abroad because my life experience wasn't going to be complete just living in America, and it seems like other people here have the same feeling. It's not that we're going to settle in Europe, to immigrate back to the Old Country, it's just that our lives aren't complete without being somewhere else.

And why is that?

So I've decided everyone has another country in them, mine I think is England/UK, making me an anglophile. Other people are probably francophiles or allemandophiles or who knows what else. It's like a hobby, this second country, filling in for something in America that is somehow lacking. Maybe it's just the fact that we don't really have any neighbors (except for two), and so we're kind of the shy awkward kid in the farmhouse that wants to have more friends.

Today, also, was Remembrance Day in England, which is a very big thing. And of course it was another of the days I picked to roll out of bed and show up late for Church. The building was packed, and I had to walk down the chapel - arranged like a Traverse theater, by the way - with everyone staring me down. I felt stuck in a gauntlet, but luckily I wasn't alone. Everyone did keep looking at me though.

So we sat through the service, which was great, and included poetry from wartime. The pastor also added things like, "for those of you that know the Lord's Blessing" (I didn't, that may not even be the right name for it, it's just a benediction blessing at the end of the service which we were all to say together and it wasn't in the leaflets we got.), and quick little truths - he wasn't embellishing or accusing - that made it seem like he was very conscious of the fact that the church was full of people that didn't usually come to the service and just came for Remembrance Day. The hymns were great, and it was good to see so many people there. There weren't enough hymnals so a lady next to me ended up sharing hers, I felt bad for the people down the row from me because they were left without one, so I tried to sing up for them.

By the end I had really gone through an experience, I kept thinking of my grandfather, Big Bob, who I never met but who fought in the Battle of the Bulge (he made it through the whole war, though, so it wasn't quite Remembrance but nonetheless, that's something I thought about). It was sobering. Once the service was done, everyone got up slowly and started to make their way out, and I felt something on my scalp. I picked a big yellow leaf out of my hair, meaning that as I was walking in late, as I was walking down the gauntlet, as I was singing profound hims, and as I was contemplating my grandfather, there was a big yellow leaf sticking out of my hair. My only conclusions to draw from this are either that it was a message not to take things too seriously, divine punishment for showing up late, or both.

Then we had lunch at the Impy. All in all a good day so far. I love England.

Epic Theater

2007-11-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

The act of writing, taking pen to paper
or keying letters to a staccato beat
is high drama, an ancient high drama at that.

THE RETURN TO LONDON

ONE: IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER

You are reading the blog of Griffin Horn, who, in his adventures abroad in England, returned to London with none other than Mackenzie Worrall to meet their friend, Alison Byrle, for a jolly old time about town. What? you ask, Alison Byrle? I've seen her comment on facebook about Griffin's blog. She's a regular reader. If I show up in England and hang out with Griffin, does that mean I, a regular reader, will become a character in his writings?

You skip a few paragraphs ahead and double check: yes, yes it would most certainly appear so.

You learn, however, that Alison was not always present in the story, for Griffin goes on, lengthily in fact, about how he brought not one but two books with him on the train: G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. At length he discusses the postmodern effect of reading a story about a reader reading If on a winter's night a traveler and the joy he felt when he discovered a chapter in "Translatese," the form of English created when one translates on sight from a foreign, ancient, and dead language. Then look at this whole chunk about how he imagined staging it as he read it, as if he could! Everyone who's anyone knows that If on a winter's night a traveler can only ever be read, because it's about reading! Ah, but he has this wacked out theory about how it's the only novel he's read that's taken place in the present tense, lending itself to drama. Well, my word! He goes on praising it for a complete paragraph! Hmph, if you came to visit Griffin, forget about being the protagonist in his blog entry about you: visiting readers seem to pale in comparison to floofy avant-garde writers from the 70's. Is Calvino even from the 70's? you ask yourself. How would anyone ever know?

Ugh, surely there's got to be a prologue in here that's more interesting than literary analysis.

INTERLUDE: A PROLOGUE

Here we are. Conflict! Adventure! Drama! But damn, he replaced it with some kind of verse.

"I booked a hostel:
Quick and cheap - I wanted it.
Fate said otherwise."

A haiku? Really, Mr. Horn. If I paid to come to this site I'd give you a piece of my mind.

TWO: THE DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS

Well that's a catchy title! You're bound to love something so mythic-structure, so Joseph-Campbell, so Are-You-Afraid-of-the-Dark as that!

You read on, and on, and on. This part actually goes on for a while. 'London has gone down a notch on my cosmic order of cities.' Cosmic? 'We got off the train and met Alison - it was great! We all went up to a Subway at the Victoria Station and paid far too much money for mediocre sub sandwiches. So we couldn't pay for drinks. I went to fill up my water bottle in the sink in the bathroom, discovered a horrible truth, and then walked back to Ken and Alison, singing:

'Better hope your pennies add up to the fee,
We can't have you peeing for free.
If you do we'll catch you,
We, we never fail.
And we will not bother with jail.

YOU'LL GET URINETOWN'

'What?' Ken asks, a la Erin Ellingwood - another reader, you note. He's heavy on reader reference tonight. What is it they call it when George W. Bush gathers all the rich people who vote for him together and has a dinner to make sure they keep voting for him? Whatever it is, he must be doing that, but with readers. Also, Urinetown, a parody of Brechtian theater. Does this have anything to do with the title, Epic Theater? you wonder. How unbearably self-referential.

'The bathrooms cost 20p! And there's no tap water in the stores!'

'Cockfoster!' Alison moans. You wonder how much of this is true.

'Our hostel had better be darn good,' Griffin remarks, but wait! That haiku! Ah, now you see. Griffin was not simply condensing an entire dramatic scene and representing it with a haiku, but he was setting the sense of mystery, the forshadowing, as it were, of the crisis! Your opinion of him has just gone up for that subtle literary parlor trick.

You skip ahead to the paragraph about the hostel: AUGH, it's a ranting description of absolute squalor! Hooray, the juicy part! He describes it, mildly, as "some rooms around a bar, a bar that played horrible music." How simply he begins, but this is just the first note. Look, he tells about how the manager at the bar was fairly tipsy himself, and how this manager and the bouncer sat around staring at the computer for 10 minutes because they couldn't find Griffin's online reservation. Oops! What fun! Wait a minute, you skipped a paragraph that looks important.

Ah, apparently it took them a while to find this place. Apparently they walked right by it because you couldn't tell it, a hostel, from the sketchy-ass bar it was attached to, that was bouncing with all kinds of the seedy London night life that just makes Griffin knock London down a few more pegs on that cosmic rack. You have to say, though, a cosmic order of cities? This Griffin character is just a little pretentious sometimes, but hey, you've gotta love him! Oh my, it appears they walked so far that they eventually turned around and attracted the attention of a nice man on the street - see, there are good people in the world. But wait, you read that he informed them that they missed the action entirely right outside of the bar. Oh? Apparently, a man was hit by a taxi. The man from the street tells Alison, Ken, and Griffin that if they only had checked in on time they might have "been there for the action."

Okay, stop. Griffin's leaving parts out here. This man helped them! How could he portray him and this bartender and this bouncer and Alison, who's only line has been 'cockfoster' so far and that doesn't sound like her at all! Surely these people must be wholly rounded individuals, have a life story somewhere that requires us to abstain from judgment.

Apparently this matters little to the author, at least it would seem from the text, since away he goes. How brutish.

Now, where were you in that later paragraph....the bar...ah yes. They can't find the reservation. They don't quite know how to make the computer work. One of them, at least, is drunk. There's terrible metal music playing and a bar filled with a bunch of drunk Brits who sound even more British by virtue of being drunk. Well that didn't make much sense, you think. But you read on.

Fate smiles! The manager gives Alison an extra bed and Griffin and Ken room to sleep in the 'Chill Out Room.' Hm. 'Chill Out Room?' But they get free drinks! Oh what fun.

THREE: THE CHILL OUT ROOM, or IN THE ABYSS

You can't imagine this is actually true. He describes this whole thing as a "basement on steroids, with large couches and a ping pong table, and clashing colors painted everywhere - inhabited by the kind of Europeans you'd see in a James Bond video game, a sort of stock angularity programed into the faces of the nameless characters you shoot." Well that's mildly racist, isn't it? Are Europeans a race? And what's this? Hm, the three Kenyonites are reminiscing about their school that they miss so much in the face of this sketchtastic-Jackson experience. SKIP.

Oo, the bar and caretaking staff all come down to the hangout spot and drink and carry on until 4 a.m. Ken tries to get some sleep but Griffin knows better, and stays up trying to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on the TV, which somebody left on. 'Star Trek, The Everlasting Man, try to sleep, If on a winter's night a traveler, listen to the conversation and the drama unfold between the staff, who're all late teens or twenty somethings, I think, and, being drunk and in some cases stoned, say some crazy stuff. And I still need to pee, and I don't think I can make it to the bathrooms from here. I don't know where they are. Help me Obi-Wan Kanobi. You're my only hope.' The list...you find effective if a little out-of-left-field, but hey, that's what this writer is known for anyway, at least amongst his readers. Perhaps another ploy?

And he touches on a theme here, nay, a motif: a need to pee. Is that all we are? Do we go through life in the following order: born, need to pee, find a toilet, pee, need to pee, find a toilet, etc. etc. etc. die? Is this all there is in a landscape where it seems the author forgoes pleasant assumptions about the goodness of humanity and replaces it with these caricatures? How very Beckett, how very post-world-war-two-minimalist.

And yet, as he references Urinetown earlier in the piece, he seems to point out that this motif is already explored territory. Rather than shooting himself in the foot, this seems to be an even more nuanced motif: there is nothing new under the sun. That these caricatured characters, himself included, have been constantly rearranging themselves and living out these petty dramas for all eternity in a variety of different outcomes for the sake of the entertainment of someone, somewhere in the intercosmic galaxy of the time/space/literary continuum.

Oh dear, lost the spot, where were you?

THREE: THE CHILL OUT ROOM or THE ABYSS
Part Two

Now the scene is dark - all the drunkies have gone outside to shoot off fireworks. Ugh, anthropology time. He speculates for a number of paragraphs about why the English insist on shooting off fireworks from Halloween through the present day. Get to the good stuff.

Here we go, everyone's asleep and he needs to pee again: motif. The bouncer from before is wandering around looking for his credit card. He asks, they chat, the bouncer directs him, he gets lost. The bouncer finds him again -

he touches his stomach and directs him up the stairs -

did that just happen?

He and the bouncer exchange awkward conversation outside of the bathroom. ......... when Griffin gets back to his couch in the chillout room, the bouncer insists he goes to sleep and shakes his hand, lingering as Griffin lets go -

IS THIS HAPPENING?

Is this bouncer guy hitting on him? Is there going to be a triste in the hallway? That's so skeevy!

Griffin says nothing happened after that and writes it off as the guy was drunk but you think otherwise: that Griffin is a giant whore, as you know from experience, if you get what you're thinking.

FOUR: A HERO REBORN

Thank merciful secularism that allows you to thank whatever merciful entity with or without a personality or perhaps no entity of mercy at all and only ever in the privacy of your own head and never aloud in front of anyone else, a list:

'Top Ten Moments of the Good Day, November 10th, 2007.

5. Finding not one, but TWO comic book stores, and at these comic book stores, copies of the complete collection of Sandman, sourcebooks for Hunter: The Reckoning, the core rules for Changeling: The Lost and even some sourcebooks for the first roleplaying game I ever really got into: In Nomine.

8. Finding Alison a really good hostel to stay at tonight, since her plane is tomorrow and Ken and I go back on a train at 8.

4. The British Museum/taking pictures with Egyptian statues/learning the history of money/coming up with Hunter ideas around a museum.

10. Almost buying roasted chesnuts on the street.

7. Getting on a tube, noticing an unattended bag, deciding it was a bomb, considering ourselves on the brink of life and death, getting off at the next stop and waiting for the next train without telling anybody about the potential bomb, and being thankful when there wasn't an explosion and it turning out that we were just playing pretend. I think this happened today.

3. Lunch at a great cafe with Ken's friend Kyle who's at an international school in London. Not only did I discover a fun new person, but the notion of sparkling lemonade, of which I bought two cans, and the first peanut butter-chocolate square I've had since Gund desserts.

6. Discovering the British equivalent of Cracklin' Oat Bran: Crunchy Wheat Flakes, or something like that.

9. Alison's gift of tea biscuits from France.

2. Hearing Alison's stories from France and news from Kenyon.

1. The last supper at Sugo's italian restaurant in Notting Hill, recommended to all for its availability of tap water and its amazing food. This dinner included an amazing conversation between Ken, Alison and I that was simply amazing, to be redundant."

UNEXPECTED: A JELLULAR EVENT

Quick, he's making a reference to earlier publications in his blog, Encyclopedic Knowledge (A Conspiracy of Cartographers) roll: success! You remember Griffin's Orvis Leather Carry On Bag (bought at a 50% + 20% discount from the Orvis outlet in Lahaska, PA) from his first entry with sadness and despair. For snacks, is seems, Griffin brought along rice cakes and jelly, and the jelly had an accident inside his travel bag. Again, need to pee and what happens when that need is unfulfilled. The AtoZ, The Everlasting Man and If on a winter's night a traveler (which should be noted is a yellowed used edition probably from the seventies that smells of old book) formed the first line of defense against the marauding raspberry preserves, sacrificing themselves so that the clothes might go on. You take a moment of silence to remember their actions.

MOMENT OF SILENCE

FIVE: THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN

'We could've taken the midnight train into St. David's, but it literally would've taken all night, so Alison decided she was going to catch a movie and then afterwards sprint back to her hostel. Being a girl alone on the streets in London isn't a very viable option for long, even in Notting Hill. I felt bad that we were leaving her, but what with all of the hostel scheduling problems and all we couldn't really deviate from the schedule we had. He had to have a little order in our lives.

So we left Alison as she went to see ... something, I actually forget what. It might have been Elizabeth or something. Ken and I meandered over to Paddington and hopped on the train home, which was bookless for fear of making the jelly situation worse, and mostly revolved around trying to get some sleep. I had strange dreams that kept making me twitch, like the dreams I had at the hostel of what it would be like to be swallowed whole by a shark and try to claw your way out, but I can't remember what they were. It must've looked funny.

And then home again home again, "to know it for the first time."'

A Curious Phenomenon

2007-11-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

I don't know why, but I'm in the strangest mood to be classified and cast. Not necessarily cast in a show, though that would be fun, but ... like in a quizilla quiz, except they suck. But I just feel the sudden urge to find out "what herb are you?" or "what super hero are you?" or "if you were a character from X, which one would you be?" Albeit they are merely hypotheses and nowhere near to scientifically accurate, but it still is fun, and for some reason I'm craving it.

The only cause I can think of is culture shock. I know I've dealt with it a lot in my writing, and I just wanted to make it clear that I'm not trying to hammer a point home. I'm trying to demonstrate the manifold responses to it, especially since it is a constant in your life - I'm constantly reminded that I'm not from around here, even just by talking to people. And it is ... I guess "disconcerting" is the best word. It puts you on your toes.

Also, like all other high school and middle school dorks, I was a huge fan of quizilla, so not only does it appear to be maybe a kind of apollonian response to tragedy (categorize me, order, make order! sort of a thing), but you could also read it as regression.

Or it's just an urge, if you don't like Nietzsche or Freud. I mean, I don't.

That said, if you would like to offer your own casting or categorization of me within any fictional universes, or as one kind of inanimate object over another, or something, feel free to post and say whether or not you want me to return the favor, because I will.

English Weather

2007-11-08T07:50:00.000-08:00

Usually it will just spit around here for a while, and be overcast with cloudbursts for months on end, but today was the first day that I actually saw it all out rain, even if only for a little bit, since we got here.

It was refreshing to know that rain falls on England as well as America like this. I kind of miss thunderstorms though. I kind of miss thunderstorms a lot.

Cadbury Fingers and Dildos

2007-11-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

And never the twin shall meet. Hopefully.

1) Cadbury Fingers
I can't remember if I posted this already, but Monday I was food shopping at Sainsbury's and I found these little Cadbury creations that were biscuit fingers covered in Cadbury milk chocolate, and they were only 54 p!!! Even though that's $1.08 in real life it's very cheap for a box of yummy...scrumptious...adorable...sexy...
Oop, just trailed off there.
Cadbury Fingers, right, well I brought them home after paying only 54 p (!!!) for them and offered a few around to other people in the flat. Then I checked facebook and proceeded to eat them. All. The Whole Box. It was the only time that I've ever been angry at food for being so scrumptious but not presenting me with an infinite amount of itself that the only way I could eat it was by ravenously scarfing it down and all but growling at them as I did it.

2) Dildos
I've undertaken to direct a found-space version of Lysistrata that will only have four women and only be a maximum of forty minutes. I'm a little out at sea, because I imagine using the text to explore clowning, vaudeville, and the carnivalesque in theater, and, much like my experience of acting in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged in high school, finding and creating gags and routines as an ensemble and all that fun stuff. But it occurred to me I know very little about clowning, less about the carnivalesque, and virtually nothing about vaudeville. All I know of the production so far is that it will involve dildos. For lack of any other kind of directorial vision.

Also, as a post script, and for the sake of science, I just wanted to publish a bit of data I discovered. You see, at Exeter, you have a single, so if you want - in just the sense that everyone has to be naked at some point - you can just hang out in your room naked. What I have learned, though, is that this has certain limits. For instance: do not eat cookies while naked. Cause of the crumbs, they're obnoxious. Just trust me on that one.

...a beast?

2007-11-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

So my tear jerker ended up being me listening to the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack again. I can't help but empathize with a self-decpricating emo guy who locks himself up in his room and has to figure out a way to connect with people before his twenty first birthday or else he'll be trapped for ever.

England does this to you.

More Than This Provencial Life

2007-11-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

I walked out last night, and also tonight, and the air was sulfurous. It smelled like gunpowder.

Happy Guy Fawkes day.

I put on my Orvis walking jacket today (my idea of the epitome of Britishness) and my Orvis cap (also British) and I was wearing my Orvis polo (not very British but nonetheless, Orvis), and I was wearing a pair of my Orvis jeans (not particularly British at all), and I walked down to Roborough Studios to re-do some scheduling stuff. There was a pink sunset hanging by the mountains and I could just see, covered with mist, in the distance a second set of hills after the first rolling hills that you could make out for sure. I even thought I could see a third set, but I decided that those were mountains, leading me to conclude that a group of clouds should be called a "range."

I also ended up feeling very old in that jacket, in a good way. Like C.S. Lewis talks about the joy he had in taking walks: when I put on this jacket, I felt like I needed a walking stick. Or a cane. It was a very smug little jacket, it lightly rests on your shoulders just in case you're a frail person. It has these little leather details on the end that for some reason make me feel warm when I look at them. I got the sense that maybe I've been a forty year old man all my life and I'm just coming to understand it now.

Anyway, it put me in a very daydreamy, world-weary mood. So a couple of musings:

First, I'm currently under the opinion that if you want to learn how to direct, coming to England won't help. The theatrical traditions are very different, and while the journey will teach you a lot about directing, the fundamental, grokking point of that revolutionizes your understanding of the art by meditation on it is missing for me. Maybe you have to discover it on your own, maybe it can't be taught, but nonetheless, while my directing class is fun and I wouldn't really trade it for another drama class, I do wonder what would've happened if I had just taken Dramaturgy to begin with.

Second, I've been listening to the musical version of Beauty and the Beast, and - like my Christmas version of Twelfth Night - I've become obsessed with doing a reinterpretation of the musical away from its Disney roots and more towards a fairy-tale, gothic (but not in the White Wolf sense), folklore-y route. Mostly revolving around rose petals. Rose petals and flash lights (excuse me, "torches"). And at the end with the transformation the entire set collapses. That's how I'm envisioning it anyway.

I completed an impulse exercise from The Playwright's Guidebook by Stuart Spencer and turned it into a 16 page short play. And one about which I am fairly pleased. So I'm shelfing it for a few days and I'll come back to it and see what needs editing, which is probably a lot. Also, I want to try writing a scene, or short play, or theatrical script of some kind, dedicated to my son. I don't have a son. I may not ever have a sun. But that's why I want to dedicate it to him.

I need a tear-jerker tonight, I'm really in the mood for some serious catharsis. I think I'll watch Shakespeare in Love for the umpteenth time.

A Dream Post

2007-11-04T04:06:00.001-08:00

So I woke up at 8 today, realized I had a few hours before Church, and went back to sleep. I promptly had the strangest dream. This is just a few pieces I can remember with some kind of logic throwing it together.

I was first involved in some kind of traveling play or something, I think Much Ado About Nothing, because we had to work on a dance at the end and I was saying how I might be able to remember the steps from the first time I'd done the show. Other actors included the guy who plays Warrick, from CSI, Ken Worrall, and a couple of girls that could have been many of the short, quirky, ephemeral girls I know but I couldn't quite put a finger on.

Anyway, after talking for a bit, a girl leads me away to go play a new video game she has, or something. In this game, Yoshi and Mario are on a train that is crossing a continent, and every time it stops there are X number of missions to accomplish before the train leaves again. And for some reason the enemies started going from outlaws to zombies.

The train eventually arrived in a big city, and Yoshi and Mario walked in the gate to see a newly constructed building just down the road in the town square - I can't remember which one it was but it had a title, was significant, and only about 2 stories high. There was a man running on top of it, and it turned out he was running towards the edge. He jumped, fell, and landed on the sidewalk. And not only did I watch the whole thing but I heard the thump. Then he started screaming as he was still alive and a bunch of doctors and paramedics ran over to help him.

Somehow we ended up in an old church in the city, and also this had zombies in it, so you had to be careful of where you went. It also had secret passages that we snuck through, and large chunks of history behind Yoshi. The church, it seemed, had served as a military school where Yoshi's grandmother had trained, disguised as a boy. It got to the point where we'd see reenactments of history like they were flashbacks, and all of them had a meaningful tone to them. For instance, Mario, who had really just reverted to the girl who was playing him at this point, found a letter from this elder yoshi, and in an abstract sculpture of swords the figure appeared, reading the letter, deciding to take a katana broken along the edge from the sculpture for her final exam before she was let out into the field. Then, a group of people rushed in, also part of the flashback, that we had met before. They were part of the do-good, badass, outlaw team on the train, and General (something, I can't remember his name) was leading them. He had burst into another part of the room, and noticed on a large rack of guns that one was missing. He had some sort of frightened exclamation, probably something like "he's got it!" cocked his rifle, and began moving his team around hurriedly. A huge wind blew by and all the curtains flew around, and the girl who played Mario said, "it's a powerful ghost we're dealing with." For some reason the missing gun was understood to belong to the group's enemy, and we were seeing a flashback of how he got it. Or something.

Then the girl playing Mario was panicked because she didn't want to just dodge the zombies anymore, she wanted to get them out of the church. So, despite Yoshi trying to hold her back, she ran into a room and placed a grenade there. It got very first-person-shooter/Medal of Honor/Saving Private Ryan at this point. She placed the grenade and we turned and ran, and it exploded, but we had a fast-moving zombie/undead on our tail. I yelled at her for attracting his attention, and I kicked myself for not having played Suzie Six-Shooters, a character I made from Changeling: The Dreaming that was designed to fight undead, since she can make things (like zombies) catch on fire, and undead tend to be afraid of fire. So, I decided that in order to survive that Yoshi just had this ability from Changeling, Pyretics, and in my head I rolled three ten sided dice. I didn't care what they came up, cause I was running from the zombie, and so I just said they were three tens, which is six successes the way I play, and the zombie caught on fire. "Undead are afraid of fire?" the girl remarked. "YES." I said, bitingly.

Then I realized I should probably wake up, and I did. Quickly I checked my cell phone, and it was 11:48. Church had started at 11, and was probably almost over by now. So, was I trying to frighten myself into getting up in time with this dream?

Any thoughts about the dream feel free to post them.

Mind 3? Time2? Roll Arete

2007-11-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

Hey chillybeans-

I'm reminiscing about Mage, in particular Kenyon Mage. I found the file on my computer called "Mage Soundtrack." So I figured while I couldn't really upload the songs (I lack Correspondence), so I figured I'd rework it (some of the songs don't really fit) and write the new version down for y'all:

First Breath After a Coma - Explosions in the Sky
Soul Meets Body - Deathcab for Cutie
Clocks - Coldplay
The Ascent of Stan - Ben Folds [For the Kenyon Magers: Get it? Get it?]
Shades of Grey - Billy Joel
Don't Stop Believing - Journey
We Will Become Silhouettes - The Postal Service
Hallelujah - Cover by Jeff Buckley
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - U2
Two Thousand Years - Billy Joel

With the following bonus tracks:
Desperado - The Eagles
Such Great Heights - The Postal Service

And, as a general list, England has made me long for the following games:
In Nomine
Mage: The Ascension
Changeling: The Dreaming

And, since I'm longing for games, now, I want to write essays about rpging. But this will come later.

Of course, of course

2007-11-02T09:12:00.001-07:00

I just rode a horse today! And it was so cool!

A) Horses are really big.
B) Horses, except for Black Beauty and Mr. Ed, are either cold and joyless creatures, or they're so reserved that they can be easily mistaken for cold and joyless creatures.

We simply got on a couple of them and the trainers walked them around and we practiced making them go, and stop, and turn, and my horse's name was Ginger but he was a guy. SO, the point was that I kind of think of myself as an animal guy, and Ginger just wasn't up for the whole caring-about-me thing, she pulled at the reins too before I even knew how much I was supposed to give. But the trainer guy, he had sugar cubes, so she LOVED him. I mean he, cause Ginger's a guy. Maybe that's why this horse is cold and joyless, because he's named Ginger. I mean, gee. Did it ever occur to anyone that he might want to be named some more masculine sounding color, like Auburn or Burnt Orange?

Anyway, I got off the horse when we were done and my conversation with the trainer consisted of:
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"...so...you work here?"
"Yeah."
"Cool."

It was awkward.

So awkward horse, awkward trainer, but after 10 pounds and half an hour, I now know as much about riding a horse as I do about driving a car.

I'm being Shakespeare for Halloween

2007-10-31T16:14:00.000-07:00

Halloween was a bust - spent researching for a paper (on the "nether worlds" in Victorian London, appropriately enough) and talking to my mom. On a break, I found myself coming to Sonnet XXIX once again in my life, and so in order to prevent myself from gaining a point of permanent banality (name that reference!) I'm posting this poem for general appreciation. Also, though, it kind of sums up my life right now. I hope you enjoy.

WHEN in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,	5
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state,	10
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Epiphany! The Musical

2007-10-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I am either:

a) a closet extrovert

or

b) a were-extrovert

Because I feel so much better when I've talked to people and socialized and made friends. Literally that's made this week so much more bearable. The thing is, I also love just sitting in my room imagining different ways I could direct "Twelfth Night" (tonight it was a Christmas version where Viola and Sebastian are Tin Soldiers and the whole thing takes place under a Christmas tree in a 3/4 thrust. And really big presents.) or how awesome it would be to go and see X play with Y people. So maybe I'm an imaginary extrovert.

Just felt like sharing.

A Meditation

2007-10-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

I have far too much work to do anything outside of write the silly essays and rehearse and review and the whatnot. Halloween probably won't happen after all. So, of course, I'm writing in my blog.

Here are some things I am thankful for:

- "In the Bleak Midwinter," a Christmas Carol
- Sainsbury's Brand Chocolate Chip Cookies (only 56p! And lots! And just as good as Chips Ahoy!)
- Actors that take direction
- Actors that like their work
- Actors that like sucking up
- Carl Jung and the idea of mythic structure as a whole (it will get me through my essay. Again.)
- Clouds that move too quickly
- The concept of an eclectic collection of (seemingly) useless nautical instruments
- The National Youth Theatre (an internship possibility?)
- Cookies. Again.
- Biscuits too, particularly Hobnobs.
- Ready to eat sandwiches, bought in these little triangular packages.
- Nice chavs.
- Agape and phileo love, if not love as a whole indefinable thing. I might also have included eros if there was any eros to be thankful for. (yuk yuk yuk)

So I met some real life chavs today! They were from Cornwall, which is apparently like the Texas of England, in that they have their own language and are more or less a separate cultural entity. Except Cornwall sounds pretty dangerous from the way these chavs were relating it to me. Cop cars everywhere, apparently. Also, I discovered there was more to a chav than just being a gangster without ambition, as the estute Avery Macleod asserts. Rather, chaviness has a serious economic weight. They're mildly anarchic, all the antics that gives the word "chav" a negative connotation are little forms of rebellion. They apparently idolize Eminem. If you want the definition of a chav, look at Eminem.

So forgive me while I represent for my mates from Cornwall. Word.

There is the educational existential side to this meditation though, as in "am I really learning something at Exeter?" Note, this is not the angst-ridden side of the meditation. I had that already, I am allowed one angst post per blog. And it's out of my system.

Rather, this is the honest question of am I learning anything? Certainly most of what I am learning is from experience, not classes. It's from getting out there and being in England, not sitting in a classroom. But let's examine the classroom for a moment, as that is, in a sense, what I'm paying for.

I have mixed feelings about the Drama department here. On the one hand, they are, for the most part, not the Kenyon drama department. I heard people in my directing class today talk about the "message" of a play, when just last week Wendy Macleod, in our drama criticism class, had made it clear that plays don't really have messages, they ask questions of the audience by presenting them with a story. So, get the story right = questions. Also, there were a lot of issues earlier in the year about scheduling and we were put at the lowest end of the totem poll. Maybe that's just a bias ringing out. Also, they're much more into exercises, very into talking about ... things I can only classify as "weird," which makes me a horrible snob. Found-space and site-specific theater are entirely fine by me, but listening to an Exeter drama student critique a production I heard them say "it was good, but it doesn't really challenge your notion of theater at all." But do you have to? My actors have already talked about their emotional connection to the characters, how they work out what the character is thinking, emoting, showing, etc. Well, mine haven't talked about emoting or showing, but I've heard other actors talk about it. My personal sense is that the department here is more geared towards artifice than plot, theater rather than drama.

But, on the other hand, the Exeter Drama Department is not Kenyon. Whereas I spent a year learning Aristotle, these kids spend their first semester taking a required class of theater games, simply to develop a sense of play that will last them their careers. My directing class is largely formatted around us directing our pieces and asking the lecturer for advice. There's no real technique involved, though if we want to go into a topic he's happy to present for us (we had a great lecture on staging and the different known ways to arrange an audience), or work one-on-one with us on specific issues. I'm much more free to make mistakes here. I can do stuff here I couldn't do at Kenyon, for better or worse. I'm not so worried about being wrong. And there's got to be some merit in that.

And on the other hand (foot?), I have a lot of free time. A lot of free time to do an independent study of my own. And I haven't made that many British friends, which may sound depressing, but means I can actually read things like The Playwright's Guidebook and do the exercises they give me if I want to. I can actually go to the library and read, or explore the city of Exeter, or go shopping, or whatever. And I'm seeing a lot of plays I will need to know for my Drama major. And I'm taking a class on writing dramatic criticism, which I've never done before and is really interesting! But that's Wendy's class not an English one.

But, speaking of English, what about my English class? Victorian London. It's certainly given me a new perspective on ... Victorian things. And London. It's given me a lot of names and critics and books to look at and the idea of the flaneur, and I have to write a 1,500 word essay about the netherworlds of London in the Victorian era and I don't know how I'm going to do it but it sounds fun. And next semester I'm taking a class on comedy. In England.

But. It's not that it's not fun...it's just...one seminar a week. A paper every now and then, required reading, presentation. Maybe this is just the British system.

And I don't mean it to sound like I have loads of free time: what free time I have because I don't have friends. I am so busy right now my butt's going to fall off. My room is a complete wreck and there's no way I can clean it because I need to be writing something.

And ultimately I do need to be writing something, but plays not papers. I need a play done before senior year. I have Wendy at my disposal. I have England at my disposal. I most likely will never get a chance to come back here. I must make the most of it.

That said, it's very lovely here. Kenyon too, though.

41/80???

2007-10-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

On Friday I went on a fairly realistic trip to London.

For starters I only got a few hours of sleep the night before and had to wake up early to get to the station on time. The K'Nex students perfected moving like a herd in and out of public transportation this weekend, starting with St. David's station in Exeter. Reserved seats that spread the group apart? Don't worry! Everyone has meerkat-like telepathy that keeps them in tune with where each person is sitting at all times. Did we leave someone behind? Don't worry! We all emit not only a musk that allows us to identify any missing student but which leaves a scent-trail back to where they are!

And the best part was that Read Baldwin gave us 80 pounds. Yes we had to spend some on train but that meant FOOD.

But approaching London was nowhere as interesting as approaching England. There was no trepidation...it felt more obligation than adventure. For one, I have an essay to write and a scene to rehearse - I didn't exactly have time to go to London to see three plays. Not that being forced to see three plays for class is a bad thing, BY NO MEANS. I wish I could do that for class for most of my life, I think. Or maybe I'll just go see plays.

In any case, London has turned out to be I think my favorite city, and by London I mean Kensington-and-Central/Bankside/Big-Ben-and-Westminster and the surrounding areas. Because that's all I saw this weekend, except for a bit of the northeast of the city, which ...eh, okay. Ultimately I haven't seen enough to judge.

The reason I like London is that London is not a city. Not in my sense of the word at least. London, like Pittsburgh, seems to me rather a very large suburb with skyscrapers, and in this case, a handful of millenia's worth of history. A city for me is Philadelphia and New York: big, brash, loud, dirty, smelly, and most importantly overbearing. I never, really, feared for my life in London, except when crossing the street. But that's the same in Exeter. We all got lost after we got off the train out of Paddington station, and proceeded to follow the perimeter of Hyde Park until we found how to get to Kensington. We stayed at a bed and breakfast called The Vicarage (I think...). The people there were courteous and welcoming, and the building was this townhouse with four floors and red carpeting. My room had a balcony. I stood on it. And it wasn't grandiose, it wasn't flashy or gimmicky, it was just what it was. A Bed and Breakfast in a lovely white townhouse in a neighborhood of lovely white townhouses and yes, it was probably expensive as anything to live there, and yes, I got a very sheltered view of London, but I wouldn't mind living in that room and writing on that balcony. I want to go to London on my honeymoon (crossing fingers to have one...).

Mostly I didn't pick up on a sense of direction until a few days in, so I was heavily dependent on both my Oyster card and A to Z Guide, two of the most useful tools ever invented since the box. And Oyster card is essentially an EZ pass card for any public transportation within the city of London, whether double-decker buses or the Underground. An A to Z, or an "A to Zed," Guide is a book of maps of areas in the city, and an index in the back that has streets, places, and practically addresses that you can look up. You find one in the index, it tells you where to find it on the map. Brilliant!

The Underground is a fantastical adventure. Oyster cards are keys to mythic quests. I think this will be the only time I really wax whimsical in my description, because the Underground makes me go "mmm...whimsy...." For people watching it's the best, with interesting characters, and while getting in and out is hectic and especially frightening if you're trying to keep a group together, it makes up for it with really long escalators that have ads all along the walls for theater (The Wyndham Theater is doing Shadowlands! I'm trying to go back and see it.)! Plus, the street musicians are really talented. I got off a train to hear a lilting aria drifting and echoing through the tunnels to the way out. As we walked deeper into the underground and went up escalators, we found an opera singer stationed at one of the landings. She had an iPod hooked up to some speakers, playing accompaniment.

I quickly ran out of money. We saw the National Gallery, Big Ben, Westminster, then moved on to seeing The Country Wife, about which I have to write a review for class, so I'll say no more about it.

The next day we woke up, had breakfast (like the bed, it was amazing), and I promptly was separated from the main groups of people off sightseeing, and left to fend for myself with my A to Z, which I think I did. I met up with Stepahine Reiches and together we went around doing a little sightseeing, mainly St. Paul's Cathedral - I want to go to mass there so bad - and then, while looking on a map, I saw the word: Blackfriars. "The Blackfriars Theater?" I thought to myself. Little did I know there's a whole area named after the old monastery. So we wandered down to Blackfriars, the area, and realized we were running low on time before the next play. Quick, to the tube! Alas! This line is closed for the weekend for repairs! No! We'll walk (Blackfriars to Sloan Square, for anyone who knows the area)! No, we can't do that in an hour! Quick! To the double decker bus!

This is when I learned that Oyster cards work on double decker buses to. And people ask why I believe in God.

We also ended up sitting behind a blue-badge tour guide (the best kind) on his way home, named Nigel, who made sure Steph and I knew how to handle the bus. We ended up at the Royal Theater before most everyone else.

We had FRONT ROW SEATS for Rhinoceros, which is, by far, the best play I've seen in England, and certainly one of the better ones of my lifetime. I wish I was writing a review on it so I could finally get credit for being pleased with something. First of all the theater as a space was really great. The set fell apart as time went on, used dust as an image system ("This is the first play I've seen that established an olfactory sensation." - a paraphrase of Ken Worrall), and had, get this, a full bodied rhinoceros costume that charged onstage at the end of act one. And was frightening and amazing. The pacing flew by, as well, which is good because Ionesco can get very word-heavy very fast, but all of the actors flew through everything without missing a beat, which actually made it all the better. The soundtrack was, and is, haunting. As for "Rhinoceros" as a play, I wanted to hug Ionesco for being comprehensibly weird. "Thank you," I wanted to say, "for not being 'Waiting for Godot,'" which I'm sure I probably just need to see staged as well but for now I do not like. There were one or two moments in the production that were off to be, in particular the ending (spoiler?): Berenger is left alone in a world where everyone has turned into a rhinoceros. There are rhinoceros heads that have bust through every wall in his apartmnet, every door and cranny, and they're watching him. (I won't give away anything but the last moment). He picks up a shot gun and aims towards the back wall. Blackout.

Where was the gunshot? The gunshot that could have meant he killed himself or killed a rhino and we didn't know? IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT! Apart from that, I heart that production.

I want to do Rhinoceros now, if I wasn't so sure I'd screw it up. I think that sums up all my problems as a growing director/dramatist in one statement.

And that was only a matinée. We got food at a Thai restaurant and then went to see Cloud 9, which sadly was not on the top of its game. It was a preview performance. It was the... Almay Theater? Al-something theater. As a space it was great! It's a round stage with a sort of 25% thrust audience, and a balcony that is carved out to look like it would fit with the Bolton stage (nostaliga...). The set was simply the figure of a house with a central door and two windows on an off kilter platform, and the rest of the stage around it. The man who played Betty in the first act and Edward in the second was very good - most of the cast was, really. I don't know about the second act as an actual piece of theater but it was at least interesting. One of the actors, though, did blow a line, and admitted it in front of the audience. So I might not like the second act because of that.

Cloud 9 strikes me as a play I'd really like to get into, so who knows, maybe I'll see another performance sometime. Ultimately this production didn't leave me wowed, or even sort of excited. But it was better than The History Boys.

By the way, none of this criticism is actually me trying to be critical, like formally critical. This is very much just my feelings about the shows, useless in a critical sense as they are.

That night, after we made it back to The Vicarage, I stayed up with other K'Nex students playing, in no particular order, Truth or Dare and Never Have I Ever. And I had hot chocolate.

And the next morning we went on a tour of London, highlighting Shakespeare and Dickens. St. Paul's Cathedral was another highlight of the tour, and seriously the place is pretty amazing. It was a major target of Hitler's during the Battle of Britain (apparently) and so there were Fire Watchers (I think that's the term) stationed at the very top of the dome that tied ropes to secure themselves and would climb along the dome with tongs and pales of sand. When a firebomb would come down on St. Paul's, they'd climb down onto the dome, take the bomb and extinguish it. If a firebomb went through the ceiling onto the rafters, they'd climb down there too.

Our tourguide was sure to point out all the good pubs along the way, and even went by the site of the Blackfriar's theater, which was tucked away amidst the buildings that were constructed on top of its ruins, since it was torn down the Puritans, a fact I had forgotten before I went looking for it.

We ended by visiting the Globe and then hopping over to an open air food market which sold great, and expensive, food. Then there were plenty of trainrides home, from there to dealing with stuff having cropped up all weekend, watering the basil, from there to rehearsal, from rehearsal back home to check my email to find out that the study I participated in, measuring facial recognition and levels of empathy, gave me a 41/80 on an empathy scale.

41/80!? 41/80!? I always thought of myself as more than 51% empathetic. Maybe I need to work on that, if the test is even right. So a busy weekend was met with bad news. Hopefully it'll be a good week, though.

Alleys Yield Results

2007-10-25T10:11:00.001-07:00

There is a distinct lack of crazy alleys leading between buildings to alluring, hidden, and secret places in America. Exeter is home to the smallest street in the world which is barely one person wide. I haven't been down it yet but after my experience today I'd imagine there HAS to be something great at the end.

For one, between two rehearsals, I went to go find the Devon County Library. This was at the end of Gandy Street, a.k.a Diagon Alley. And...it really looked Diagonish today. It has these black and white flags hanging everywhere and it's cobblestones and there're no cars, and these big draping plants on all the walls, and really nice shops too. If I had the money to spend on something so ephemeral as expensive food, I would've stopped by the chocolate shop there... but as you'll find out, I spent my money this week on things that were SO much more useful.

So down Diagon Alley there's a theater called The Phoenix with a bunch of oddly steampunk metallic statues. Some kids were trying to determine if the bird-like one above the doors was a pterodactyl or something. I almost stopped and told them, "I think it's a phoenix." Kids.

You take another alley away from the Phoenix theatre and you get to the Library. In the library, they have a floor that is, literally, the "drama section" with its own librarians and everything. I was walking past shelves just running my fingers over the spines, I almost wanted to say "these are my friends" a la Sweeny Todd. That and I haven't met nearly enough British people, which is sort of a sad thing to say. In any case, I really did want to kind of hug the bookshelves. I need to get a library card before I can check everything ... I mean "anything" ... out, but once I do that....mmmm....

Later that day I encountered another alleyway, which was more or less a shopping mall tucked away in the facade of a bunch of buildings, called the something Arcade. It has the word Arcade in it.

First, there was a comic book/game/hobby store there, and once my travelling compatriot, Ken Worrall, told me they had RPGs in there, I quickly turned around and went in. While he was trying to order Magi-Nation the collectable card game (Ken: "It hasn't really come out yet..." Guy at Desk: "-then we can't really order it." Ken: "I know." Guy: "It's not cost effective to have a lot of CCGs, because if they don't sell, we're left with a bunch of boosters." Ken: "Yeah, I know. But I'm sure this one's about to make a comeback!" Guy: (skeptical look) ), I walked deep into a narrow path of bookshelves, and discovered none other than assorted Old World of Darkness Sourcebooks, including a Kithbook for Changeling: The Dreaming, which is an amazing find because a) I'd never seen a physical book for Changeling before this, and b) it's a Kithbook, meaning it's more or less a senseless supplemental book that no one sane would ever buy. But then, sane people don't play White Wolf. That's sort of their slogan.

So I found and bought the following:

The Silent Striders Clanbook, from Werewolf: The Apocalypse
The Stargazers Clanbook, also Werewolf.
"Urban Legends," a sourcebook for Hunter: The Reckoning that is LITERALLY, from what I can tell, just information that helps you set a Hunter game in an urban environment.

Mmm. Books.

Then at the end of that street was a vintage/second-hand store called The Real McCoy at which I purchased some elf ears for my Halloween costume: a piskie. Piskies, according to wikipedia, originate in no other area of England except, drumroll, DEVON and CORNWALL. They live in the open areas near DARTMOOR and lead hikers astray and play pranks. In other words, piskies live in and around Exeter. In other words, I am not just randomly dressing up as a fairy (there's a subtle difference between a fairy and a piskie) but I am going to be a walking folklorist exercise. It's gonna be pretty cool.

Anyway, I returned home a happy camper with no money but a lot of hope.

Embarrasing Things Said to Important People

2007-10-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

So I had my class with Wendy Macleod, my professor leading the trip who's a playwright and all and stuff and whose program gives me money to tool around England and see plays. Two things:

First we were reading "Rhinoceros" which we were going to see, and I was asked to read a part. Great! I love reading! So I was reading this part and I got really into telling this girl off towards the end of one of the selected sections. To the point where I added, "bitch" on to the last line under my breath.

Sadly, due to timing issues, that "bitch" came right after Wendy asked us to pause reading, so the chronology was:

Scenescenescene-
Wendy: "Okay let's stop there-"
Me (still in the scene, ad libbing): Bitch.

And it was awkward, cause I not only like Wendy a lot but her family too. They're nice people and they buy us all food.

After class, we figured out the logistics of going into London this weekend to see Rhinoceros and Cloud 9 and The Country Wife. We had just finished, and I had a big Cadbury chocolate bar, and I was offering it around. I had one piece left, and I offered it to Wendy, who was happy to accept. It was cool, I like having good relations with my professors! Yay! Maybe the ad lib mix up was gloss-overable!

Her piece was smaller though, cause this was a chocolate bar with nuts in it, so you try to break it down the lines but the nuts throw everything off. And so I was like, "it's okay, your chocolate has TWO nuts in it."

And then I turned around and left. Cause I was 0 for 2. Figured I should get out before I accidentally broke the TV or something.

Stiff Upper Lip

2007-10-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

I was in a musty room in part of the Old Library - it lives up to its name because it's so amazingly hard to navigate that you'd expect to find a minotaur somewhere. In the Old Library is a special collection of popular culture, particularly from the Victorian era but also from the 20th century. But, for my class, Victorian London, we weren't interested in the Mickey Mouse statues.

So we were in this musty room with a bunch of ancient books, old book smell x40 - it was great - and this girl got up to leave because she felt dizzy. She walked out of a door. Then she fainted. Collapsed.

People looked up, one or two got up to help her (including the lecturer). Everyone else watched it happen, didn't really comment except for things like, "well, we shouldn't crowd her," and "would be best to stay seated." A duck might as well just have flown into the window and gotten the same response. It seemed like they were looking up from their books towards the event and asking, nonchalantly, "really? Did that really happen? Huh."

I was worrying about a medical emergency, I was worrying if EMTs would have to find their way through this senselessly ill-planned Old Library to find this girl before she got seriously hurt, which luckily wasn't the case at all - she's fine - and so I was baffled by everyone around me and their response. Not saying they're bad people or my response was right, but just if anyone every asks you the meaning of "stiff upper lip" THAT'S it.

I think someone even told me "stiff upper lip."

A Beggar of My Own Spare Change

2007-10-22T02:25:00.000-07:00

I have an empty box of Nutri-Grain bars that I put all my spare change in. Recently I dug out all of the 50p pieces and most of the 20p pieces for laundry. Today I need to buy breakfast. I dug through and found 6 20p pieces, enough to buy a triple chocolate muffin. Paying a cashier with essentially quarters is a little lame, but I'm going to have to do it. I considered for a moment what else I could get, except that the only thing I had left in my till were 5p, 2p, and 1p pieces.

So I counted up all the 5p's and I'm going to see if I can't get anything else. This is the horror of the British Economic System.

On a lighter note, a lot of buildings have these little bowl-shaped tops to their chimneys that gulls seem to think are made for them, so they'll just sit there, but in the chimney, chillaxing. One wonders what happens when the fire goes...or maybe that's the point. Maybe it's like a little butt-warming experience.

Subtle Sympathies, Delightful Incongruity

2007-10-21T05:29:00.000-07:00

Post-Church tea at the Chaplaincy was all abuzz with news of the recent rugby and/or football game. England got all hyped up because their team, which almost lost to the American team, just last week beat the French in the finals and either is moving on or had moved on to the next finalist game against South Africa. I get these things confused because I don't keep up with them. And also, England is having an interesting time in rugby and in football right now.

So, in one of the sports they just lost. I think in rugby. And they're sad.

And in one of the sports South Africa is, or was, a threat.

So at the Chaplaincy, the one South African girl was wearing a little pin version of her flag, which got joshing attention from the other people at tea. This turned into a historical (an historical) conversation, "they [the South Africans] always say, 'you and your redcoats started the war, but really we didn't have redcoats then, it's a complete fabrication.'" Or something to that effect. And they went on about the angry farmers in South Africa and then to other parts of the British empire, meanwhile this girl sat there quiet. Meghan Gibson and I, as two K'Nex students, knew a little of what she was going through, as a citizen of a formerly colony turned rebel turned independent state sitting around at a table in her 'Mother Country.' I leaned over and said, "don't worry, we used to be part of the Empire too."

I don't know what good it did her argument to have the crass Americans side with her, but I hope it helped. That's the first time I've really felt like America was a colony, not a superpower. And I guess that's sort of the European political mindset in a nutshell: everyone is a tiny state with its own specialties, and they all have to get along to work. Concordia must be achieved. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. But treating America as it must have been in its infancy and teenage years, before the World Wars, and not just as THE power in the world...was a new experience. And one I felt like sharing.

The second was a simple repartee with a friend of mine, James Bennett, and some other people in the Chaplaincy. I mentioned the Manga version of the Bible, endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This thing does actually exist, it's the whole Bible done in manga form, and it's not a joke, it's an honest manga Bible. Anyway, I mentioned it, and James turned it into "well that's all well and good, but I'm just for the Pokemon version of the Gospels to come out."

Me: "Go, Holy Spirit!"

James: "Zechariah the Tax Collector, I choose you!"

Matt, another friend: "Gotta save 'em all."

Me (miming throwing a pokeball, "catching" Peter): "I will now make you a fisher of men."

I think there might've been more to it, too. Just felt like sharing.

Buttsecks?

2007-10-19T16:20:00.000-07:00

So a bunch of my flatmates - several Mexican girls, three or four French girls, Thomas the Norwegian, Alice and one of her friends, who are ... Italian I think?, and then Stephanie Reiches and I, the two Americans - were playing "Never Have I Ever."

(On a tangent, there needs to be a venereal noun game for groups of people of a certain nationality. "A Freedom of Americans" or "A Souffle of French" or something.)

So we were playing "Never Have I Ever," which no one could really get down as a statement ("I have never never," or "I haven't ever ever" were some replacements.), and people had been saying things like "Never Have I Ever tried a cigarette," or "Never Have I Ever cheated on my boyfriend." And then it came to me.

So I posed the question to the group, "do you want this to be a dirty game of Never Have I Ever? Or do you not? Because I can make it dirty very quickly..."

And instantly everyone encouraged me to make it dirty. Little did they know ...

"Never," I asserted, "Have I Ever ... received buttsex."

A hush swept through the room.

"What is this 'buttsex'?" someone finally asked. Stephanie and I were already cracking up.

"Buttsex? Buttsex? It is, uh, how you say, buttsex?"

Instantly a flurry of translations and attempts at explanations in three or four different languages were shooting back and forth across the table. Some had misheard me, some thought I was saying "bad sex" and so, begrudgingly, were drinking. "SO-DOM-Y" I called out, but it pretty much was a cry in the wilderness.

Finally they caught the gist of it. "In British English, they say 'arse,' so it would be 'arse-sex'" one assured me. And they were all laughing, embarrassed, and some gave me a really bad look. But ALL of them were watching everyone else in the group like a hawk to see who would drink.

I also found a cat today and went on an adventure in Exeter, but these somehow pale in comparison to a bunch of Mexican and French girls sitting around a table saying the word "buttsex?" over and over and over again, vainly attempting to figure out what on earth it could be.

Bedlam

2007-10-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.

I've seen it written with "Way" capitalized too.

I've had a couple "I really need to cry" moments in the past couple of ... well, hours, and I don't quite know why. Not cry like, "Oh my gosh England is too big and lonely and I don't know what to do," more - at least I think - more "Things are so beautiful and dangerous I really just need a moment." That sounds so sappy and so unbearably me-ish that I can hardly read it.

But like it was sunny out today. MIRACLE. I went to an amazing tea place today, called Boston Tea Party (any former Exeter students reading this can agree) that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's not just a creature comfort either, I don't think. I mean the food is good but the place is old wood, they give you tea in pots if you choose to stay in, there's an upstairs lounge with a long Saxon-mead-hall-esque table and comfy chairs, students reading books. And I'd been to Boston Tea Party three times already, so it's not like it was a brand new experience. Tomorrow I'm hoping to spend the whole day in town, finding the secret floor of the Exeter City Library where they keep all their plays and just reading all day. I hope.

And I started directing Act Two of Oleanna by David Mamet for my Directing class. My actors, even although they insist on getting into the character's heads and feeling what they're feeling, are great. The hurtle is that I have to do it with two women, but with minor changes of "his" to "her"s and readjusting the sexual tension for two women, it looks like it's going to be fine. But even then, whatever issues I was worried about between the Kenyon drama training I've received and the English drama training these actors have received have begun melting away.

I was skeptical about the girl-on-girl Oleanna before today, and now I'm not. Now I'm excited for it. That sounds sketchy but since I am no longer skeptical I am happy.

I went to a vintage shop with Ken and bought a shirt WITH A GRIFFIN on it. And the vintage shop itself was like (Kenyon people:) The Pink Flamingo times 10; or (New Hope people:) Love Saves the Day but without the Penis Pasta and naked things. And bigger. (If you know neither of these places, I'm sorry. I tried.) Like I'm starting to think about what I need to be for Halloween (any suggestions feel free to comment)!

So it's been a beautiful day, fun class, fun adventures, prospects of an even more beautiful day tomorrow, and then I went to a late night "Kabob and Pizza" store just now with Ken and Stephanie Reiches. It was pretty sketchy, but for some reason when I was sitting there I had one of these moments. Among Christian mystic circles I've heard them described as "mini-sabbaths" but who knows if that's what I was actually experiencing. Maybe it was just that there were four bobbies down the road and I felt suddenly safe and a part of everyday England. Or maybe it was that I was out with friends. It wasn't warm and fuzzy like Boston Tea Party, it was poignant, almost. I don't know.

I think I've finally come to understand England as a real place, though I stand by my claim that it's a fantastical kingdom. Now it's just a REAL fantastical kingdom. Which makes it ... magically realistic? Oho, literary genre humor, do you ever get old? Yes.

But there is a reason this post is called "Bedlam."

After I was done having that moment at the Kabob and Pizza joint, my mind was stuck with an appetite for lofty things. Of course I can't induce a perception of beauty, so I turned to far-down-the-road, speculative, and semi-existential thinking. Like "how much longer will I be in England?" "How much do I miss Kenyon?" "What would've happened if I had stayed?" "What would've happened if I went to Saint Andrews?" "What am I going to do with my life once I graduate?" "What am I going to do when I get back, over the summer?" "What am I doing now?"

I find myself now punching tables and then regretting it.

I've had much more time to write, much more time to read, now that I'm here. And maybe it's just the change of pace but England is very inspiring. So am I going to settle down and be a playwright? How will I make money? Will I go to grad school? Where? Will I direct? Will I dramaturg? HOW DO YOU LEARN ABOUT DRAMATURGY? I need to get more organized. How do you get more organized?

And maybe it's just that I am some sort of overstimulated sap, who spends all his time enraptured by the English countryside. Maybe it has kind of driven me mad, but I don't think that's entirely true. England fills me with contrition: a lot of preconceived notions are beginning to fall away and there's nothing else left for me but this lovely, horrible contrition. Like pulling a baby tooth out, or pouring steaming water on a poison ivy rash.

So I guess this makes England practically too silly to be real, not entirely too silly to be real.

There was a guy we met at The Turf, the pub near Topsham I talked about in my last post. He was in the first year of the Kenyon-Exeter program. He met an English woman that he fell in love with. I think then he went back to Kenyon, finished his degree, then moved to England, married her, bought a house in Topsham, has a family, and he and his wife earn their living as food and wine critics.

THAT is how to use an English major. Like, when you think about it, that seems just like the perfect life.

But is it? Is it really?