Cool People

Today we went on our second and final Bing Grant Trip, this time to Stratford to see Hamlet. Okay, you all knew this, but man, that's a great play. The production (by the Royal Shakespeare Society) was quite good--I especially liked the way they portrayed the ghost: half-naked, powder-white, dragging a massive sword and swaying in a kind of ghoulish ballet. Hamlet himself was unfortunately histrionic even in the lull bits, but it happens. Oh, and Polonius was the most brilliantly comic self-important Polonius I've seen.

We also toured Shakespeare's 'Birthplace', which was a big laugh--basically nothing is known about Shakespeare's early life, and so we saw all sorts of replicas-of-spoons-of-the-kind-the-bard-might-have-used and that sort of business. And before that we saw Blenheim palace, with a quite good exhibit on the importance of the Battle of Blindheim and the War of Spanish Succession, and I managed to get watchlessly engrossed and hold everyone up for fifteen or twenty minutes.

But what I really wanted to mention, because I think people ought to know, is that the people in the Stanford-in-Oxford Programme are really cool. Like last night, I was hanging out down the hall (in a very extended sense of "hall", making allowances for the shape of the building. A hall of the kind that has doors and staircases in it.) until the wee hours, with Matt and Jenna, who were both SLE kids, with JD (for Jarrett Daniel), who was a high school Latin scholar and is also my roommate, and with Lisa, who is Jenna's roommate and a history major, and therefore also cool. And the five of us hung around in Lisa and Jenna's room until almost three am talking. And such wonderful talk! This programme has above all things been for me a realm of wonderful conversation, talk without end. I have never found a shortage of argument, discussion, or banter. Last night we talked about grammar and poetry and reverence for language, and an occasional smattering of international law. There have been countless impromptu discussions of accents, library policies, grocery stores, politics and religion, sustained by a passion for understanding one another and the world more clearly and the joy of conversation for its own sake, seasoned with wit and liberally sprinkled with laughter. Maybe being thrown together mostly strangers with our first two weeks holding almost inexhaustible leisure time brought this about. But I think a good deal of it is that we're basically nerds, and particularly the sort of nerds who thought that the Oxford programme, whose main attraction is doing a lot of hard independent learning and writing and talking about it, sounded like a good time. Anyway, I'll take it.

(Lisa said (about Stanford students, I think, not the Oxford programme), "Basically, we had to be uber-nerds to know when the application deadline was.")

The coolness is by no means restricted to the Stanford students. Dr. Greif, our Stanford-faculty-abroad-with-us-guy and economic historian, knows about everything and loves to chat on any terms. And my tutor, Dr. Oswald Hanfling, who has been doing philosophy for probably fifty years and has written books on stuff from logical positivism to aesthetics, is great fun to spar with, though I know he's only toying with me. And there are a miscellany of Corpus students I've been gradually getting to know through choir or rowing or the CU, and though I can hardly make out half of what is said in those circles the coolness is spread pretty thick there too.

Which is not to say that I don't miss the rest of you, because I do. But I thought you ought to know that I'm in good company out here.