june 4: a very fond farewell

Today is our last full day in London and in the UK, and I am in the process of saying my goodbyes.

I’ve said goodbye to Scotland and Wales, I made my farewells to Dr. Khwaja, whose lack of presence was noticeable almost immediately, and now I am in the process of saying goodbye to England and everyone who has been on this trip with me. On Friday, I am flying back to Atlanta with everyone, but then I am checking into a hotel for the night, and flying back home to Chicago the day after, likely incredibly sleep deprived and lethargic.

I am most likely not going to see many of you again after this.

I’ve tried not to think about it that much for the past three weeks, but now that I’ve graduated from Agnes Scott, leaving you after three weeks of getting to know everyone better is going to be a bittersweet experience. I will not be following a lot of you back to Agnes in the fall, and I have no idea of where I’ll be at that time. If I ever do get to see you guys again, they will be rare but altogether treasured.

I’m half-ready to go home and half not. I don’t know what I feel. But I guess that’s just life, an eternal cycle of not knowing but trekking on regardless of what you don’t know.

It’s been a blast, guys. All the best for you.

‘Ta.

june 3: london calling, see we ain’t got no swing

At the behest of my mother’s wishes, during our free time after the Tate Museum and being wowed by seeing the real paintings of Turner and Blake, I took the Tube to Green Park station with a groupmate, and got to see Buckingham Palace.

It’s nice, I guess. Looks a lot like a big courthouse, but nice. It’d would’ve been nicer if I could’ve gotten a better shot of it for my mother, if not for all of the tourists crowding around the gates to see the actions of the castle guard.

(Speaking of which, why don’t the Scots guard get a plume? Why do the Irish Guards get a blue plume? Isn’t blue Scotland’s color? What gives?)

It really is the most touristy thing that you could do while in London, but I guess if you go there, you should at least try to see it if you’ve got the time. See a national landmark, and all. Even though I still haven’t been to DC and seen my own country’s national landmarks that the US is most known for. Whoops. I haven’t actually had the opportunity to go see DC, but I’m sure that there’s plenty of different walking tours for the city and all of the national landmarks, with a guide telling tourists from within the US and out the history behind all the monuments, warped and white-washed as they could be, depending on the guide.

Sometimes, I really like walking tours. I think they can be really informative and interesting depending on what kind of walking tour it is, and what you’re going on that tour for. If you’re going to World War Two landmarks, well, London has a plethora of those to offer, and you can easily go on a tour for those. If you want a ghost tour, like we saw in Edinburgh, you can go on one of those. I really enjoyed the walking tour of Westminster Abbey this morning because the guide knew of our focus on literary figures, and while I can’t show the pictures of the Poet’s Corner of the Abbey, I assure you, it was gorgeous and seeing C.S. Lewis’ memorial slab and Oscar Wilde’s stained glass memorial made me almost squeal. Though I’m still confused as to why Wilde’s there in an English Abbey. He’s Irish. No, England, he’s not yours. He’s Ireland’s.

My gripings about the lack of female authors and figures of peace being commemorated aside, I enjoyed that guided tour, but then after we dispersed for the day, I wanted to explore the city on my own, and see these famous landmarks for myself without being led around. I find it more fun to explore new places by finding your own way there, and I found myself in the gorgeous St. James’ Park after Buckingham Palace (with a lot of ducks), and found the Canadian Soldier Monument in Green park, then meandered our way to Trafalgar Square and observed all of the tourists and kids hanging off of the lions and sitting on the steps of the National Gallery.

Like the yeti, my selfies are elusive.

The best part of traveling, for me, is hours you get by yourself or with a friend, wandering about a new city and finding your own way to places famous and not.

If only we could have more time in London, but even then, I don’t think even a native Londoner knows all of its secrets.

june 2: i wander thro’ each charter’d street

Today, we arrived in London. What an overwhelming experience.

I’m not sure what I was expecting upon reaching London after taking a nap on the bus after a quick visit to a very windy Beach Head, windy enough for the collected sea foam to fly over the roof of the visitor’s center at Burlington Gap, and rainy and misty enough that I could barely see several yards ahead of me. I think I was expecting something similar to the images we get in the poems about London itself from pre-20th century writers, though I already knew beforehand that London was a contemporary city. I still haven’t seen nearly enough of London yet and I still need time to absorb the city as a whole before that completely sinks in for me. Sometimes, I feel as if I’ve adapted to being in the UK to not notice it so much, but then there’s times where it still floors me that I’m actually in England and I’ve been in Scotland and Wales. Wow.

Just walking around London after checking into our hotel, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of construction being done around the city, along with renovations. Reminds me a lot of Atlanta and Chicago, where in the latter, there’s two seasons; winter and construction. London is still building upon itself, which is baffling considering its size, but all right then. I guess it comes with the territory of being an international city, much like New York, where it’s constantly growing and building despite the fact that it’s already huge and kind of over crowded. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, well, I guess that’s up for you to decide. The Romantics like William Blake and Charlotte Turner Smith saw the exploitative nature of England’s industrial growth, and it makes me wonder how they would’ve thought of London as it is now. Hard to say.

I will say this about London, though; their underground train system is smooth enough for me to nearly fall asleep on while riding it.

june 1: god save the unsung voices

After yesterday’s tour through the grunge of Bristol, there have been several things nagging at me ever since, and I am glad to see several people talking about why there was something so off about the tour, and I wanted to say my piece and my thoughts about it. Due to the internet being godawful in this hotel by the coast, I’m afraid we will have to suffice with this post maybe being late. But I’m not here to complain about the wifi, I can live with the bad wifi.

I’m not so okay with the reluctant language of the English natives about their ugly moments in history. I’m a self-admitted Hibernophile, probably to a disgusting degree, so I am all too aware of the terrible things that the English have done in history, and not just in Ireland, but everywhere in the world that the English have staked their flag into the ground. My problem is not with Englishness, but the reluctance to take responsibility for the terrible things that England has done, being the slave trade, colonialism, exploitation, and in many cases, cultural genocide, and this reluctance to admit to these wrong-doings show in the way I hear people talk.

“That’s just how it was then”

“It was the times”

“It was a terrible thing, but it’s not like that anymore,”

Sounds a lot like the things we hear in America about our ugly history of slavery, plantations, genocides and removal of the Native Americans, sexism, and other forms and prejudice and exploitation, doesn’t it? And if you’ve paid any attention at all to the news in America the past year, you will see that yes, these were terrible things, and yes, we are still wrangling with these wrong doings. There is a consequence to every action, and we have the responsibility to deal with those consequences. They will not go away.

I think this reluctance to talk about these ugly moments in history (and every country has them. Every single one.) comes from this idea that if we talk about these awful things and bring them to light to people who don’t know the history, it puts their country in a bad light and people will think lesser of it, because you’re not being patriotic. This is a false line of thinking, because if you were actually patriotic and loved your country, you’d want to improve it. You’d want to talk about these things, bring them to light, and then talk about how to fix these issues that are rooted in your country’s history.

England cannot hide its skeletons in the closet. England cannot turn a blind eye or pretend that it’s not there when more and more of these marginalized voices are coming out from the sidelines and bringing them to light. Bringing the subject of this trip back into play, several writers (many being female, unsurprisingly, since colonialism of humans and exploitation can happen within a single country all too easily) of the Romantic movement did indeed talk about exploitation and the ugliness of England’s actions, many also being of the younger generations. On the flipside, many writers didn’t talk about it, while touting the ideals of personal, individualized freedoms without the foresight to think of those whose individual freedoms are being stomped on.

Maybe it’s due to a generational difference. Maybe the younger generation is more aware of their country’s ugly history, maybe they’re becoming more exposed to these facts of history. Or maybe they’re not. Who can say?

History is uncomfortable, but necessary, and it is necessary that we talk about these things, or nothing will change. We’ve all got our ugly spots, England. America has them, and so do you.

Own up.

may 31: memories in the wood

After a walking tour of Bristol, a city that reminds me of the grunge of Minneapolis and Detroit, we saw Alefoxden, the home of Dorothy and William Wordsworth.

The sight of the house in complete disrepair, cracks in the wall and walls boarded up, on the frays of complete collapse, was a sad sight to see after the splendor of the restored and maintained Dove Cottage, the birthplace home of Robert Burns, Burns’ house in Dumfries, and Coleridge’s cottage. For whatever reason, the house had been completely forgotten as a historical sight. I overheard Bethany, the tour guide of the Coleridge cottage, of her disappointment and sadness as the disrepair of the cottage and the desire to get the cottage and restore it to what it would have once been. Alfoxden could, if the National Trust could have enough money to get it, be restored just like Dove Cottage.

I hope they do one day, because that house had a lot of historical and poetic impact on both of the Wordsworths, and that house is in such a sad state, that even if the National Trust couldn’t get it, I’d just want to see it renovated and restored. Why did this particular house get completely forgotten and thrown to the wayside.

I don’t know.

Why do certain sites get restored and maintained by organizations dedicated to their history and other don’t? Why do certain people get remembered and others, who created equally wonderful works, get forgotten in the crushing slow moving molasses of history? Sometimes it happens on purpose, other times not.

How many great American writer’s homes and historical sites have had other buildings built over them? Plenty more than we can count, likely.

Here’s hoping Alfoxden can get restored and rescued someday, though.

Though the ghost of Wordsworth, or whoever was in the building who looked at us, might not want us on his property again..

may 30: cymru am byth

I woke up this morning not realizing that I would be stepping foot into Wales. I didn’t even realize that we would be going into Wales until it was announced to us on the drive to the bridge. It was kind of a magical moment.

Wales is gorgeous. Though I only got to see a relatively small part of the country in a short span of time, I was still struck by just how beautiful it was and the pride that hums through the country. On every sign, there are English words and Welsh words, and I’ll admit to having a large laugh to myself when hearing my groupmates try to pronounce the words they’d see on the signs. (I tried, too. Never again. Not without a proper dictionary and grammar book.) I’d heard of the pride that Wales has in its language, history, and culture, and I was happy to see it for myself in person, even though I butcher the beautiful and confusing language that is Welsh every time I try to pronounce the words. Typical American, right?

I love these Gaelic languages that look nothing like how they’re pronounced.

It’s interesting how Tintern Abbey has become so famous in the English psyche and consciousness because of an English poet, when the Abbey itself is in Wales, a country that was invaded and taken over by the Normans and English, a country that still doesn’t have its own parliament, but fought hard to keep their language and culture. I don’t know if Wordsworth thought much about how this Abbey was in a country that wasn’t England, and for all we know, he didn’t. Why would he have? Wales had been pulled into the union of Great Britain long before Scotland or Ireland, and even if he did acknowledge that Wales was a different country, I didn’t see that reflected in the poem, “A Few Lines Above Tintern Abbey.” If anything, he thought nothing of it, even if he were aware. But again, we cannot say for sure.

It’s a shame that Wales is oft the forgotten of the three countries in Great Britain (though Northern Ireland takes the prize for the forgotten country on the whole), because there’s a lot of history that hasn’t been talked about, and there’s probably many poets that have created beautiful pieces of art that we haven’t seen yet. Scotland has a distinct past, language, and literary arts, Wales does, too.

Tintern Abbey doesn’t belong to an English poet. It belongs to the Welsh ghosts that live in the valley by the river.

may 29: aut vincere aut mori

With it being rainy, dreary and my feeling under the weather (ha), the day didn’t start off on a good foot. But once the Jane Austen walking tour of Bath started, not even the cold wind and rain bogged me down.

My kind of people.

My heart still belongs to Bonnie Scotland as of right now, but Bath is edging its way up there.

I’ve wanted to see Bath for years, ever since I heard of the Roman Baths existing, but I didn’t know that Jane herself lived in Bath for some odd years and how they inspired her to write the city into two of her novels; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I haven’t read Persuasion yet (but Moira’s, our walking guide, love for the book has me wanting to borrow it once I get home), but I’ve read Northanger Abbey and enjoyed that book, but now I want to reread it again to find the sights and buildings and streets that I saw in the city, and imagine how Jane and her characters must have seen them. With information explosion about the “Season,” and women coming to Bath from October to I think March (an odd time of the year to choose to come to a place that rainy) in order to show off their wealth and availability, I can see how Jane was inspired to write her novels about marriage, engagements, and the relationships between men, women, and the different classes (especially if she’s talking about these standards and dynamics in a spiteful way, she did not seem to like the idea of the “Season” at all).

It’s nice to see that no matter where you are, we still write these cities into our work and bring their character into our work, because every city has its own character, beat and rhythm that it lives and breathes by. Every city we visit, no matter how little time we spend there, if it’s just catching a glimpse of the place, you can see the personality of a city. You find that personality by watching how the people around the town move, talk to each other, how the streets are set up, how the buildings have lasted, or haven’t, over time. Watch the city, and you will find the personality of the city, and that personality is remembered in the way that people write about them and the people in it. Jane Austen seems to have had complicated feelings for the city and the people in it, and those conflicting thoughts reflect in her writing through her characters in her portrayals of the city and the people who live there.

Look at the way your favorite writers write about their cities and the cities they visit. Look at them closely, and you will find the personality of those cities, as experienced by those writers.

We also visited the Roman baths, and I now feel so invigorated with life. Perhaps the healing waters do work.

may 28: madness, idolatry, and bears

On the topic of the famous rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge, I will have to put myself on the latter side.

With such a beautiful campus, how could I not?

The fact that I didn’t feel so underdressed the minute I stepped onto the city grounds helped my decision.

Due to the length of time that’s passed between their lives and our own, it’s difficult to really picture literary giants like Coleridge, Byron, and Wordsworth living their lives as regular college students, just like the members of this group. They had to go to class, wake up early (or not), have some kind of meal, do their coursework, have meals with their friends, and just.. being regular guys coming into their twenties.

Or if you’re like Byron, bringing a bear onto campus and frolicking with said bear on the grass of Trinity College because you can’t have pets on campus, whose lawns are just as sacred and precious as the lawns of Agnes Scott. Except for fellows. They can do what they want. I guess.

While my inner editor screams about the format of his poetry, John Clare’s work, like Robert Burns in many ways, is a poet that thrives in his peasant origins, and like many of the Romantic poets, was a rather troubled man. The historical reports of Clare’s ‘madness’ and bouts of ‘insanity’ makes me feel nothing more than empathy for the man, because he needed help and could not receive that help in the way he needed as he was alive. Not a cure, but help, because there is no cure.

Seeing the little poems and notes for John Clare and his work in the Dovecot made me laugh and made me smile, especially the note I saw (and unfortunately forgot to take a picture of) is of an anonymous writer thanking John Clare for understanding them and their struggles. Call it cliche all you want, but my heartstrings were pulled a little.

John Clare was not mad. He was ill. He was ill, and he deserved better treatment than what he received. But even 150 years after, he still resonates with those who are similarly ill. And that’s important to remember. John Clare did not just speak to those of the common land, but even those of the common land who could be ostracized because of the chemicals in their brain. Readers feel a connection with him and find a place for themselves where they wouldn’t find it otherwise. Isn’t that why we write? To maybe convince ourselves that we aren’t alone in this isolating world?

These writers are not godly literary beings. They were men, talented men, but regular guys all the same who probably liked to hit the pub and get up to their tricks when curfew hits on campus.

And then maybe scale the walls of the colleges at night and somehow get a car stuck on the senate building.

may 27: archives and markers of genius

Today, we took a tour of the Bodleian and Weston Library, and looked at manuscripts hanging from the ceiling in the exhibit at the latter. If it were permitted, I would’ve taken some pictures of the interiors of the library, but alas.

It’s one thing to see the reprinted version of all of these texts, but it’s another thing entirely to find the original manuscripts of so many of these texts in one place, as was evidence by the overwhelming nature of the Marks of Genius exhibit at the Weston Library. Hanging on thin string, I saw the letters exchanged between the Shelleys, Austen’s incomplete manuscript first novel, the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and the original illustrations of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence. The color was a little faded due to time, but I could just imagine how vibrant it must’ve been when the book and collection was first published. Like the archives back in Dove Cottage in Ambleside, there really is nothing compared to touching the real thing that these authors have written on.

Though when I went into the Ashmolean Museum of art during my free hours, I couldn’t help but be kind of angry at the museum for keeping those precious pieces of Greek Marble and reliefs in England, and refusing to return them back to their homeland, where they were stolen from. I saw many different pieces of art in the Greco-Roman and Aegean collection that were familiar to me; the Charioteer, the Priestess with Snakes, the High-Priest at Knossus, Agamemnon’s death mask, ect., all of which were pieces of art I studied in AP Art History in high school.

It felt strange and exhilarating at the same time to see all of these precious pieces of art first hand (and even more pleased to see that they’d made casts of existing sculptures and painted them as they were meant to be; painted and colorful), but also had me feeling kind of angry because it makes me wonder how these precious pieces of art got to England in the first place (Sir Arthur Evans doesn’t count, he’s a disgrace to the study of archaeology). Donated or stolen? Given how England refuses to give up certain pieces of the Acropolis back to Greece, probably the latter.

They’re marks of genius, but they don’t belong to you.

may 26: who gives a toss about the oxford comma?

I spent the night at the same hotel Bram Stoker stayed at, his luggage found near the old railway just outside the hotel car park, and walked the same staircase his colleague Henry Irving died on, and we have left Bradford, brief as the stay was,

A vampire was probably staying in the hotel somewhere.

And we have since entered Oxford territory.

It’s the most young people and people my age I’ve seen in over a week. Well, since Oxford seems to be mainly an expanded college town, that’s not too terribly surprising. What was surprising was just how many colleges are in the city center, all under the same umbrella known as the prestigious and intimidating Oxford University, the same university all of us perhaps fleetingly thought of applying to as undergrads, and then possibly as post-grads. I will admit to being one of the latter. Cambridge might be a better choice for me, though, we’ll just have to see.

Nice beard.

After being in villages with mostly people in their 40s, their very young children, and elderly folk, it’s strange being around people around my age again and seeing so many of them at once. The smaller villages and even the towns, like Bowness, were quiet, even during the long weekend where there were a lot of tourists sailing on Windermere. Seeing college-age folk again, aside from my groupmates, was a bit jarring. The close proximity of all of the colleges was odd to me, too, because there were about three or even four different colleges associated with the university on one side of the street, all presumably for different academic fields. The closest equivelant we Americans have are the larger state universities where the campus is spread out over a city (i.e. DePaul University in Chicago) or across a state (University of Illinois, bear with me, this is what I’m more familiar with than other states, it might be different elsewhere).

Pretty sure these guys were headed to one of the colleges.

Something I appreciate about being an alum of Agnes Scott (wow, that’s weird to say), is that despite the constraints of conflicting personalities, interests, beliefs, academic major differences, and everything else, there was still a sense of community due to its small size that I didn’t feel at my former college, or my high school. A sense that you’re not just some dot in the middle of a painting done by an artist practicing pointillism. Just a faceless piece of flesh in a sea of humans. You’re part of something. Well, I don’t know if everyone felt that way at Agnes Scott (I’m sure some people didn’t, which is unfortunate), but I did, and I doubt I’d find that at a university so large that it splits into many branches of colleges. Makes me grateful for the smaller community and size of Agnes Scott, and makes me pause to wonder if the students here feel a sense of community at all.

1/3 of the squad

Note: the song referenced in the title is “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend. Listen to (the uncensored version of) it here! And I do in fact care about the Oxford Comma.

may 25: arrival at haworth

My favorite thing to do while on this trip, aside from getting to see all of the literary sights of the Romantic movement and all of the writers inspired by them, is to go on walks.

After a walking tour of the house of the Bronte sisters and the area in which they lived, taking a tour through their home and finding the ‘E’ carved into the top of the dining room table, reading the tiny little book of stories that the girls and Branwell wrote as children, two groupmates and I went for a hike, and we walked through the Haworth Moors.

The sky was appropriately gloomy for a walk with the Bronte sisters in mind, and I even saw that there were signs leading towards two trails related to the Bronte sisters; the Bronte Walk, and the Bronte Waterfalls. It would’ve been fun to walk to either or both of them, but there’s only a limited amount of time when you have strict deadlines and you do not know the area that well at all, and you’re only there for a brief few hours. (I learned my lesson last night, at least I didn’t dare think about going alone this time. Okay, maybe a little.)

Ignore the white thing the bottom right corner, that’s just my bag. It was really windy.

The more we walked around the moors (haha!), the more I could see how the sisters were inspired to write the Gothic Romances that they did, sans Anne; with their unusual upbringing for their times, the treeless environment around their home in Hawthorn, the grim and gloomy climate, winds, and grey clouds blocking out the sun, it’s really no wonder.

While we were walking and found our way up onto one of the higher hills, we found a little reservoir of water that must’ve been collected from all of the rain, and noticed other little ones that we’d passed by on our way to the top. Somehow, we missed them on our way up, and it had to have been because of all of the bushes in the way. It would’ve been a lot of fun to have gotten to walk around even more, but maybe I’ll get to walk it again someday.

The sisters sure walked around it a lot. Maybe I can, too.

may 23: the creation of daffodils

At the museum next door to the Dove Cottage in Ambleside, I carried and unwrapped a ten thousand pound painting and held a fragment of William Wordsworth’s poetry in my hand, the original copy, with the revisions, the blots of ink, and all the scribbles in the margins.

Wow.

I also studied this painting in AP Art History back in late high school.

This is the original fragment of “Home at Grasmere” by William Wordsworth.

There’s really not enough words in the English languages, or even in any language, to accurately describe how it feels to hold history and someone’s voice echoing through the present in your hands. I held something that was hand-written, possibly by several people, over a series of time. We can look at these pieces of art on the page and they might still strike us, but it’s not the same as seeing the real, tangible thing and holding it between your shaking fingers, praying to whatever might that you don’t damage it in any way. My hands were left shaking quite a bit afterwards.

While he’s not my favorite poet of the period, I enjoy Wordsworth a lot and appreciate his work, but holding the actual material in my hands, feeling the weight of those echoes, I appreciate his and Dorothy’s work even more.

may 22: ae fond departure

After a brief trip into Dumfries to visit the grave of both Robert Burns and his poor, beleaguered wife, we have left Bonnie Scotland, and have entered Merry England.

At least she’s not an old woman in this statue. Poor woman.

I miss Scotland already.

When passing through Carlisle, the city near the border we had to drive through to get to Kessik, and then Burnes, I noticed just how much more suburban many of the English cities and towns are in comparison to the Scottish towns and cities. Looking at the town as we drove past, I noticed an Aldis (a grocery I like to go to since it’s pretty inexpensive), a Tesco’s, and a Salinsbury’s, all what seem to be grocery stores or supermarkets.

It’s probably a result of being an American and being naturally kind of ignorant of a lot of things, because while I knew that there were suburban areas in the UK, I never really knew how to picture them. The idea of the suburb feels so much more like an American aesthetic, a part of our landscape, than something that the English and the Scottish would adopt to their own, too. I’m not sure what I think about that, but the Scottish landscapes seems to be primarily villages, rustic and rural, and the few large cities, while England has more larger villages and smaller cities, and several large cities (i.e. London.). It’s going to be difficult to not compare London to Edinburgh once we travel down that way.

In the meantime, we leave Scotland behind us, but hopefully, not for the last time. Maybe one day, I’ll come back and explore it further.

may 21: a national problematic hero

Today, we went to Alloway, Robert Burns’ birthplace, and, after several months of studying him and writing about his work, I’m all burned out.

(Get it? Get it? I’m hilarious.)

While I’m a wee bit exhausted by Burns, I do understand why he’s so important; his work is an object of national pride for Scotland, because he wrote in their language. Not a dialect of English, but Scots, because there are no such things as dialects, not in the way that we initially think about them. Those languages that share a common origin develop on their own, have their own syntax, system of talking, hand gestures, colloquialisms, and ideas about grammar, and build their own literary traditions. Scots is a language, not a dialect, just as much as the English we hear on television, German, French, Chinese and the languages within that common origin, are all languages. Disagree and I’ll be happy to fight you about it. Civilly. Maybe.

But the curator at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum brought up a very good point: he mentioned that many feminists hate Burns, as do several of his female coworkers, for very good reasons. Robert Burns was a serial adulterer, a womanizer, and type-casted women as either witches, nagging wives, or an idolized woman on a pedestal standing to be desired from from a distance without a physical consummation, as far as we know (looking at you, Clarinda). Much like almost all of his male contemporaries and followers, he was misogynistic, sexist, and treated his poor wife Jean Armour like garbage. And he almost emigrated to Jamaica to probably take part in the slave trade. That sure isn’t heroic, much as Scotland adores him. Again, when these men talk about liberty, they talk about individual liberties as per their own selves and lives over everyone on the whole.

Mary Wollstonecraft would have some words to say to him.

Does this delegitimize all of his work?

We deal with this issue today, and there’s still no clear answer: how do we handle artists who produce great works when there’s some very ugly, damaging sides to them? Do their damaging beliefs mean that their work has no worth at all? Do we stop liking their work when our morals conflict with theirs?

There is no clear answer. If only it were that easy.

Like everything, it’s all on an individual basis, and everyone handles it differently. If someone has already come up with a clear solution that’d work for everyone, I’d love to hear it. No, seriously.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy and appreciate Burns’ work as a poet for what he’s done for poetry, Scotland, and language, but not care about him at all as a person because he might’ve been kinda awful in many ways. Men of the Romantic movement are often just as, if not more, contradictory.

We can all appreciate a lego Robert Burns, though.

may 20: auld lang miles

We do a lot of walking on this trip. I like taking walks, so I am more than okay with this development. It’s not easy to compact how it feels to walk through an abbey that’s been burnt down, rebuilt, burnt down again, then abandoned, to walk through one of the most expensive houses in Scotland (using money you didn’t quite have, Sir Walter Scott), to walk down the streets of one of the oldest cities in Europe, to walk through steep, rolling hills with the wind strong enough to send you almost falling over, or to walk through the hometowns of famous, now canonized authors and writers.

I like walking with my group, a lot, but I treasure a moment I get to walk alone, by myself, and get a moment to just breathe and let it all sink in.

After a long drive, dehydrated and tired, and a delicious dinner with baked salmon, roasted mushrooms and what I think were cream puffs, I took a much needed after-dinner walk around Ayr.

It’s rather cold and windy

Arran Island stared at me from a distance.

I also found St. John’s Tower, and that was pretty cool.

may 19: gales of the borderlands

When up on Smailholm Tower, looking down at the hills full of grazing or resting sheep, you can’t hear the sound of cars. The only noises you can hear when up on the roof of the tower is the wind and maybe one of the sheep bleating at you when you sit down on the bench by the entrance. It’s an otherworldly experience, to hear nothing but the sound of the wind, especially when coming out of a country that never stops talking or making noise.

That feeling of being surrounded by nothing but the quiet, and the wind blowing at you so fast your hair gets stuck in your mouth, your eyes (even when protected by glasses), your face and gets tangled up, and makes your hood fly at the back of your head as you stand on a large shape of rocks, looking down at the fields and the yellow bushes of flowers, is the best example of sublime you could probably get. I certainly felt the vastness of the borderlands when I couldn’t hear any cars rushing by.

I thought for a moment, “Wow, now this is somewhere I’d love to live in,” to be able to sit in my house, away from most of civilization, and just write. But it was quickly pointed out to me that since Scotland’s rural borderlands is something completely new to me, I exocticize it without realizing, and then I find it ideal in comparison to my own experiences. Given how I’ve grown up in the busy, cold Midwest, she was probably right. No, most definitely right.

It’s nice to be away from society, but what about when you want company?

may 18: Edinburgh the City of Old Whispers

Working on more than 32 hours of no sleep makes for a strange sensation, especially when you’re coming into an entirely different country. It felt live I’d missed and entire day, but I think that coming into Edinburgh first on this trip made for a powerful first impression.

Walking into Edinburgh felt like I was stepping into a movie set. At first, it didn’t feel real at all. Typical American response I guess. Maybe we, being such a young country, just have an entirely different view of what a city is and what a city is supposed to look like. Actually, we do. When we think of cities, we see sky scrapers and jungles made of metal. We hear the honk of cars, the trains running underneath the city, above the city, or between the city streets. We think of streets littered with McDonald’s paper bags, Starbucks on every single street corner. When we in America think of cities, we think of something new. When you walk into Edinburgh, you are reminded of just how young you really are, how young your country is, and how you are swallowed by the sheer age of Scotland, its cities, and its streets. I nearly tripped over more cobblestone sidewalks and street than I can count.

.For all of Edinburgh’s age though, I did see more than a few Starbucks. At least they look nicer in comparison to the ones that I generally see in the states.

The architecture of the city itself reminds me of Chicago, and the hills swooping down remind me of San Francisco, but it’s most likely the reverse: those two cities probably took some inspiration from Edinburgh or other cities that shared a similar style in architecture.

American cities define themselves by their skyscrapers. Edinburgh defines itself by the buildings that have endured centuries of rain, snow, war, political upheavals, revolutions, shifts in culture, and the buildings that did not survive. Edinburgh builds from and exists in its own history. Our history, as the United States of America we know, is an infant.

Trans-Regional Tongues: Robert Burns and the Scottish Brogue

I’m also going to spare you all having to see the horrible formatting of copy-paste, so I’ll attach them.

Trans-Regional Tongues – Robert Burns and the Scottish Brogue

Works Cited

Bibliography

Research Plans

midnight philosophizing on the sublime

From April 8 to April 12, I was traveling to and from Minneapolis for a conference, the Association of Writers & Writing Program Conference. And on both plane rides, I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a 500-some paperback tome about a murder at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, a whydunit story with a lot of smoking, drinking, and the debauchery that only self-absorbed, privileged, rich college students who never worked a day in their life take part in. It was all right. I picked up the book at Barnes & Noble because I was looking for a book to read while on the plane home to Chicago (it was a delayed reading) and I’d heard good, if polarizing, things about her newest book, The Goldfinch.

To give a full, comprehensive review of what I thought about the book, what I enjoyed and what I didn’t, would require a likely 15-10 page essay. Single spaced. I’ll save that for another day, but what caught my attention while reading the book, sleep-deprived and aching for more caffeine, was this phrase that the ‘charismatic’ professor of Richard Papen and his cohort, Julian, says constantly; “Beauty is terror.”

Edmund Burke would have a fit.

I may have laughed a bit when I read that line. Burke attempts to draw a thick line between what he considers the beautiful and the sublime whilst The Secret History offers the idea that the line between the two is either blurred or nonexistent. While I have some rather conflicting opinions over The Secret History, I do purport the idea that the line between the two is nonexistent because the concept of beauty is such a subjective thing, and its definition is individualized. There is no one way to define beauty, nor the sublime, no matter how hard the Romanticists tried to. What beauty is depends on an individual’s perception and their relationship with nature, the vastness of life, the inevitability of death, and the human soul. All of things are beautiful in their own way, and they are also terrifying in the same way; it only depends on a personal perception. There are beautiful things to be found in the sublime and the vast might of nature, just as there are horrible, terrifying things to be found in the things that are classified as ‘beauty’ or beautiful. Who, exactly, defines beauty? What is beauty? How is it different from the sublime? Those are  the questions I’d rather ask.

The Romanticists constantly ask themselves this and it shows in their work. The description of nature is both beautiful and haunting, and the vastness of nature and the inevitability of death comes up in their work often (Coleridge and Wordsworth come to mind).

Maybe I’m just reading too much into this idea of beauty being terror. Maybe not. The Romanticists certainly are fascinated by this question, ironically enough espoused by an elitist Classicist professor. Just a question to ponder on.

I suppose there’s just one other thing I’d like to take away from the book; I’m pretty sure that any college student who drinks as much alcohol as these kids do would’ve died from alcohol poisoning already.

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