Since I last posted...

A recent e-mail exchange with my friend Mara reminded me that it has been a full week since I last posted to the blog.

Since I last wrote on this blog, Sebi and I at least have recovered from our colds ( but unfortunately Jackie still has a nagging, nasty sounding cough and nasal congestion).

This past weekend was the Architectural Open House and we returned (for the Nth time) to the East End to see the inside of Toynbee Hall and 19 Princelet Street (a 17th Century Huguenot house later converted into a synagogue that is now a museum of immigration). We had a bit of excitment while we were sitting in a greasy spoon for a late lunch. Some (possibly drunk) young British guys who'd just come in were accosted by a well dressed Bangaladeshi guy with a heavy East End accent swearing about one of the Brits "giving my brother a dirty look". Later another Bangaladeshi man came in and profanity laced insults were exchanged between the two groups. I was certain they were going to come to blows but a third Bangaladeshi man arrived to diffuse the tensions. Scary.

On Sunday we met up with Brian and Stephanie Shaw -- the couple from Columbia College in Chicago who are here for a sybbatical -- and their kids for an afternoon in Holland Park (which is very close to our house). We spent a few hours at this very cool adventure playground -- which has rope swings and amazing climbing walls. Later we sauntered over to the Cricket Ground where a "Peace in the Park" fair was taking place. There was music, and jugglers, and Aleeza and Sebi got to play a pick up game of football (soccer) run by two teenagers from Chelsea's developmental youth team. That's right: Chelsea, the most expensive football club in the world, the New York Yankees of professional soccer!

The week was busy as well. On Monday, I took my film class to a screening of some newly restored 1930s British documentaries at the British Film Institute. In the 30s, these government-sponsored documentaries were really the only interesting development in British cinema and we got to see works directed by Greirson, Jennings and Cavalcanti. My favorites were Night Mail-- which I'd seen before-- and Way to the Sea. Night Mail was produced by the post office to celebrate the overnight mail train that ran from London to Glasgow and features, amazingly, the voice of W. H. Auden declaiming a poem he'd written specially for the film over a montage of shots of a train coursing through the highland landscape. It begins: "This is the Night Mail crossing the border, carrying the cheque and the postal order." The Way to the Sea-- also about trains, this one the line from London to Portsmith-- features another voiceover from Auden, shouting "They seek the sea!" The students didn't really know what to make of these films but they are a vital part of Britain's cinematic heritage, especially as they helped to make "social realism" such a central value for British filmmakers for years to come.

Our BLC lecture this week was about British art and art museums by an art historian who works as a docent at the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a very informative overview of how these various collections were formed and did a nice job of setting up Wednesday's field trip, a guided tour of the Tate Britain. My group of students was scheduled to take the tour at around noon, which meant Jackie could come along. The tour and the museum itself gave us a nice sense of the course of British art from the Tudor period to the present day. I expecially liked the room devoted to the Pre-Raphelites (which includes the lovely and hilariously hyper-moralistic The Awakened Conscience by William Holman Hunt).

On Thursdays, I don't teach until 2:30 (the scheduling of these London term classes does leave something to be desired). So, Jackie and I took the morning to visit the British Library and its display of old books and important historical documents. They had a manuscript page from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and you could use headphones to listen to a recording of the man himself reading from it. Hearing it made me realize that that work really should be read aloud rather than consumed in silence. [Aside: Some of the readers may know that I once was involved with a group of avant-garde performance artists who had a child they named "Liazon Wakist". The name Wakist was of course a homage to Joyce's great sound poem novel.]

The library also had Lenin's application for a Reading Room ticket and a whole display full of the Beatle's handwritten lyrics. Oh yeah, they also had two copies of the Magna Carta on exhibit, a Guttenburg Bible and a copy of Galileo's Starry Messenger. Fascinating stuff.

Today is once again a free day for me. I have some grading to do and then Jackie and I are finally going to walk through the Portobello antique market before picking up the kids. Tomorrow we are going to make a day trip to Oxford. Till later...