Magical Thinking

As for England, the days here are getting shorter, even more noticeably now because our clocks have turned back an hour. And it's starting to get much colder outside; it doesn't get above the forties during the day, and at night, it's below freezing. As for me, I'm reaching that point in study abroad where things start to have that feeling of everydayness. I'm settling into a routine. There are things to get done, places to go, essays to write. It takes me thirty minutes to run my errands instead of the two hours it used to take me before I knew my way around Oxford. I can pick out the tourists when they walk by. And I know to say that I want a single or return ticket instead of a one-way or round-trip and to ask "What are you reading?" instead of "What is your major?" and that I want aubergine at the grocery store instead of eggplant and that Renaissance is pronounced "Reh-nay-sense" not "Ren-nuh-sance" and that it is always a queue, never a line. In short, in many ways I'm beginning to feel like I'm a part of this place and no longer an outsider. And it's so hard to believe that, in a few days, Michelmas term will be half way over. On one hand, it feels like I've been here for such a long time, and on the other hand, it doesn't seem like so little time should be left before the term ends.

I got my "mark" on my first Modernism essay, and I got an upper 2.1. Their marking (grading) system is very different from ours. You can get a 1 (called a "first"), which according to Lynn means you're pretty much a supergenius. Then the next grade down is an upper 2.1, which is a a really strong A. Then there's a lower 2.1, which is an A/B. And so on. So I was very pleased with my first mark. Tony, one of the other residents in the Spencer House, told me that an upper 2.1 from Julian (my Modernism tutor) is excellent because he is a really tough marker. But Julian told me earlier that it would be very easy for me to improve my grade to a first because basically, to earn one on the last essay, he would have only wanted me to explore a couple more poems. So that's exciting. I had my third tutorial with Victoria (my Medieval tutor) today, and I handed her my first essay, which she said she was pleased with. I'll get my mark on that next week. In the meantime, I have two essays due next week, one for Victoria on Monday and one for Julian on Wednesday. So far so good.

I had my first experience at the Bodleian library today. Click on the link to learn more, but pretty much, the Bodleian is like England's version of our Library of Congress. They have a copy of every book that has ever been published in England plus tons more. But they don't lend out books. So you have to request them to a reading room, and then you're allowed to use the books there. But back to the point. The Bodleian, I learned today, is pretty much like a steel fortress. You have to show your student ID card at the front desk. And you have to let them look in all your bags when you enter one of the library buildlings, move from one part of the library to another, and when you leave. It was very cool, though, to feel like an Oxford student -- headed to the Bod to look at books while groups of tourists snapped their pictures of the door I was walking through. On my way to the Bod, I walked down a street that I remembered from when I was here in 2005, and it was quite surreal to see myself as one of those tourists three years ago and then to see myself as an Oxford student now.

On Saturday, Dr. Ross and I went to see the final showing of The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre in London. And it was marvelous. For those of you who don't know about the play, here goes. The playwright, Joan Didion, wrote a memoir called The Year of Magical Thinking, which was published in -- 2005, I think. The book is Didon's account of her grieving process following her husband's (the author, John Gregory Dunne) sudden death because of a heart attack. She calls it The Year of Magical Thinking drawing upon the anthropological definiton of "magical thinking", which refers to the beliefs shared by many ancestral peoples that taking a certain action will bring about a certain supernatural effect; for example, tribes sacrifice a virgin in hopes that the rain god will supply rain. Didion, too, experiences a type of magical thinking because she spends the year following John's death thinking that if she takes certain actions she will be able to hold off his death or allow him to come back. For example, a particularly powerful image from the book (and the play) is her refusal to throw away his shoes, insisting that John will need them when he gets back. Throughout the book, she comes to terms with her grief through various means and finally accepts the reality of his death. But the book ends -- in a very Modernist way -- not with a sense of resolution, that all is will, but with the idea that death is pervasive, that the effects of grief never fully disappear -- in short, that the idea of the (re)integrated self is a fallacy. After Didion published the book, she was approached by the Broadway director, David Hare, who wanted to turn her book into a play. In rewriting the book for the stage, there were the typical issues to address about how to translate a written work into a visual work. But there was also an extral layer of complication because in the interim space between the publication of the book and being approached by Hare, Didion's thirty-nine-year-old daughter, Quintana, also died of health problems. So it was necessary for Didion to deal with Quintana's death and the grief that resulted from it in the play because, as Hare said, they didn't want audience members to know something more than the speaker of the play, i.e., that the audience would know that her daughter dies but that the speaker wouldn't. So those issues resolved, the play consists of Joan Didion, played by Vanessa Redgrave, monologuing to the audience for the play's entire 2.5 hour duration. And it is pure brilliance. In the play, you get this very powerful sense of just how grief-stricken Didion is and how "crazy" her grief is making her that you don't get in the same way from the book. In the book, you're so inside of Didion's thoughts and you empathize with her so strongly that you almost take on her grief as your own, and the irrationality of it comes to make sense -- almost like you're experiencing it with her. But with the play, it's like you're able to look at her in a more objective (but equally touching) way because there's a visual inconsitency between Redgrave's mannerisms and her words -- as she tells you that she's fine, but you know differently based on the way she presents herself. Redgrave just portrays a traumatized person so naturally -- from the way she nervously fidgits her hands, plays with her hair, moves in the chair in which she sits for most of the performance to the sudden pauses between thoughts that allow her to portray the stream-of-consciousness manner in which a grieving person moves from one idea to the other. You really get a sense of how talented an actress Redgrave is -- because she is able to act so nervous and raw and traumatized that it becomes so real. Really, it was so haunting and moving that I can't get it out of my head. Absolutely wonderful. Go read the book now if you haven't.