In lieu of a substantive post, a round of Bardiac's Game

Guess the poet!

Photos, belatedly

I was going to write a proper back-from-Green-Country post a couple of weeks back, but I was about to leave for some islands (blessedly alone) to celebrate getting tenure and surviving my first travel-with-students experience, so I'll just post a few photos in which you can see the many fine shades of greenness that Green Country has to offer.

Yup, that's one of our students up on the wall. Nope, nobody fell off. There were times I felt like it wasn't for want of trying.

And nobody fell off the cliff either, so it was all good.

The sculpture had particular relevance to my class, so I showed an image one day, only to find that the students had already stumbled across it and wondered what it was. I like it when that sort of thing happens.

Why I love my university, in pictures

Because sometimes, art installments appear overnight.



Many spectators gathered on the stairs to watch the balloon.





But alas! Not all is well in balloon-land.

travelogue, part 4

It is the first day of classes, and it is rainy and unpleasant and threatening to turn the entire world into a big lake, so I thought I would post some pictures of sunny places. Besides, I never did finish the summer travel series.

So, after a long night on the bus, I came to Istanbul:

(Note the double-tiered bridge, by the way: fish are caught from the top and eaten on the bottom.) The ferries go up and down the Bosporus, back and forth between Europe and Asia; at the end of the line you come to this little village, where there is a castle you can climb up to and some more places to eat fish:

The classic touristy shot of the Hagia Sofia:

And an early-evening one, taken from the rooftop at the hostel:

After a couple of long days on trains and buses (and a quick dip in the Black Sea), I came to Sofia, Bulgaria. I don't actually have a lot of pictures of Sofia, but here is a nice one of Rila Monastery, a couple of hours away.

Frescoes:

And, back in Greece, I went to visit some more monasteries with an even more impressive setting.

(There was a helpful sign saying "Ladies in sleeveless dresses, slacks, or pantaloons will not be admitted." Hiking up the pinnacles in a long skirt is perhaps not ideal, although it was OK until I decided to take a shortcut down, which turned out not to lead much of anywhere except into a patch of blackberry bushes.)

So, finally, I went back to Athens and took a day-trip out to a temple, only to find that someone from the Brit Lit survey had been there before me. Can you spot him?

Travelogue, part 3: On Shakespeare and Travel

So, my last travel post got me as far as the Greek islands -- Rhodes, to be exact. There was another continent right across the sea, one that looked temptingly near and tantalizingly new and strange. So I got on a boat and went there.



I paid my 15 Euros for a visa, and went outside the ferry terminal trying to get my bearings, and went to an ATM to get some Turkish money. More or less immediately, a man approached me and asked me if I needed a place to stay. I said no, I already had a reservation. Then he asked, "Are you Fretful?" and for a moment I felt as if I had come to a very weird place, and he said "There are two ways to get there, you can walk twenty minutes that way or you can take a taxi." And then I worked out that he was, in fact, the owner of the pension where I had a reservation, which also happened to be the most popular backpacker-type place in town, and there was nothing weird about it at all. But for half a minute, it was all very uncanny and disorienting, and I really understood what Antipholus of Syracuse is feeling when he thinks the town is full of witches. And I hadn't even gotten to Ephesus yet.

(I went to Ephesus the next day. It was pretty amazing.)



This is what's left of the temple of Diana. (You know, the place where long-lost children go to be reunited with their mothers. Because when you've been separated from your husband and kids through a maritime calamity, becoming a priestess of Diana or an abbess or something is The Thing To Do.)



What I hadn't known is that it is quite a way from the ancient city of Ephesus, easily a mile or more down the road. I walked. It was very hot and there were goats. It was fun to imagine the whole pack of them -- Antipholus and Antipholus and Dromio and Dromio, and Adriana and Luciana and the goldsmith and the courtesan -- running pell-mell down the road.

You might have gathered that I like traveling to places that appear in Shakespeare's plays. Actually, I kind of want to travel to all of them, and maybe take one of those plush Shakespeare dolls with me, only Pentapolis poses a problem, since it's apparently in Libya.

The first time I went to Venice (OK, sadly, so far it's the only time I've been to Venice), I wrote this in my travel journal: Walked through the old Jewish ghetto, trying to imagine Jessica throwing down a casket of jewels from a seventh-story window. (I've come to the conclusion that I read too much fiction and not enough history; I keep thinking: that is the sort of palace Brabantio would build; would Othello have walked here?)

Eight years later, I'm not sure I care that I don't read enough history. Fiction is fun. And sometimes you learn unexpected stuff, as I did when I went to Windsor three years ago and realized how incredibly imposing Windsor Castle is, and how the whole town is pretty much in its shadow. And how much you don't get that feeling from reading Merry Wives, where it's just this place in the background, and people talk about the court every now and again, generally in not-especially-flattering terms. (Which, actually, totally tied in with the argument I made in my dissertation chapter about that play, only I hadn't gotten it on a gut level before.)

So if I'd had a little more time to explore, I think I would have liked to go to Mytilene and Tarsus and Antioch and Philippi. (Sadly, I didn't. I went to Istanbul instead, by the overnight bus, which was a little surreal, especially the part where they put the bus on a boat to go from Asia to Europe.) But then, you always have to save something for next time.

travelogue, part 2

My dad went back to the US, and I took a plane to a much hotter and sunnier country. The hostel in the capital had a rooftop bar with quite a view.



Here there were many ancient ruins.



I took the overnight ferry to an island:



I went to visit King Minos, but he wasn't in. His interior decorator had done some pretty impressive stuff, though.



I continued on to another island, this one more medieval than ancient.

travelogue, part 1

So, first I went to a cool and rainy country.



It had fences.



And there were many cliffs.



(My dad was with me for this part of the trip, so we did quite a lot of hiking, and even tried to climb a mountain; which, however, was not a great success as it was entirely covered in bog.)

We traveled north, across the border, and found some murals.



There were also a whole bunch of hexagons.



And a puffin. (With Dad along, you do a lot of birdwatching as well.)

Voyage to the Antipodes, Part Two: Awesome Australian Animals

Of all the things I saw on my voyage, I liked the kangaroos the best. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, as kangaroos have been my favorite animal ever since I first had Winnie-the-Pooh read to me at the age of three. So I was pleased to discover that they are, in fact, very personable animals, and curious about people.

This is the "Yeah? What are you staring at?" stare, which they have down to perfection.



Grazing on the lawn:



An emu. Emus, I can confirm, are not such nice animals, but they're fun to stare at.



And here is a koala, doing what koalas do best:



There were also many, many gorgeous parrots of various kinds. It was really amazing seeing all of these birds that I'd never seen outside of a pet shop.

A Voyage to the Antipodes, Part 1

Hi, everyone! I haven't abandoned this blog. I have been on a Voyage to the Antipodes.

I saw lots of pretty rocks:





I even brought home one of my own:



(More pics to come; Blogger seems to be acting grumpy when I try to upload too many at once.)

Secondhand

The Friends of the Library held their semi-annual book sale this weekend. I always like it when I get home with the books and discover traces of their previous lives:



David, I am sure, must have been a perfectly charming houseguest! Here are a few more of my favorite inscriptions:

The Old Dramatists: Webster, first printed 1857, picked up in a used book shop in University of Basketball town. Allan H. Gilbert, the meticulous annotator whose notes are at the left, was also the prior owner of my copy of James Shirley; a still older owner (John somebody?) has signed his name at the right:



The Diary of Mr. Pepys. I was also in grad school when I acquired this one, during the course of a delightful and impecunious summer wandering around the UK. Inscription at top left reads "HONOURS PRIZE SENIOR CAMBRIDGE (SCHOOL CERT.) 1930. Below Eric WR Warm's name is what appears to be his entire genealogy.



Sonnets from the Portuguese, bought at the Bruton Parish Church book sale in Williamsburg, VA, in 1997 or 1998. I find this one tantalizingly poignant, and have always wondered about the story behind it.



The Student's Catullus, bought secondhand at the Beloved Alma Mater's bookstore. (Unlike the others, I do in fact know the person who wrote this one. Ah, good times.)

The Small Nephew at One

I haven't really been around babies much. I used to babysit, but only for kids old enough for their parents to trust a youngish teenager with them, which usually meant preschool and up. And on the two previous occasions when I had met the Small Nephew, he was either a newborn or just out of surgery and under heavy sedation.

He's not under sedation now, and he's getting to the age where babies are seriously interesting. One-year-olds can do stuff, like standing up ...



... and vacuuming! (Who knew he was going to be obsessed with vacuum cleaners? He certainly didn't get it from me.)



... and sliding:



... and screeching! (This, unfortunately, is another favorite activity, and he can hit some notes that are positively operatic though not melodious.)



He can also walk -- five or six wobbly steps at a stretch, sometimes, before falling down -- but I was sadly unable to capture this on film. And he's starting to talk, or at least say "Mamama" at sort of appropriate moments. One is a cool age.