I Sit In Thy Shadow, But Not Alone.

 Despite having a nearly constant stream of essay writing over the months of March and April, I have still managed to get out and about southern England and London in search of anything Pre-Raphaelite. I have mentioned in my previous post that I had a course on Pre-Raphaelite art last semester but maybe what I didn't stress is how hard and fast I fell in love with it. I was completely surprised by how enthralled I was during that class as I had almost no interest going into that class and it ended up being my favorite one of the entire year. Britain, and particularly southern England, is simply dripping in Pre-Raphaelite art, architecture, and relics from that period. I decided that, given I am writing an essay on such art, it would not be completely irresponsible to take a few selected afternoons off to have a look at various related things to do with the period. At the end of my course, my professor, Barrie, took us all to Oxford (where he lives) and gave us a tour of the Pre-Raphaelite aspects of Oxford. That trip really inspired me and ultimately made me decide that I want to continue studying them and write about them for my MA dissertation this summer. I also had a field trip to the Frederick Watts gallery (not Pre-Raph, but still an influential symbolist painter of the period) in southern Surrey, a visit to the Tate Britain in London, and a trip to Kent to see the Red House (William and Jane Morris' arts & crafts style home). I have only scratched the surface into all things Pre-Raphaelite and over the summer I hope to cross a few more sites off of my list.

So here is a montage of photos from my last months worth of visits and day-trips. I hope you enjoy them, though I realize that the beauty of some of these art works cannot be adequately transcribed onto a photograph.

Watts Gallery, Surrey

The most famous painting in the collection Hope

Inside the chapel at the Watts Gallery

Oxford Debating Hall

Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Debating hall

Barrie giving us a lesson on Exeter College

Tapestry by Morris & Co

Burne-Jones stain glass in Christchurch College

Millais' Ophelia at the Tate Britain

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Mona Vanna

Millais' Mariana

The Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent

Royal Holloway in Spring

A Sharing of Art

Last term one of the classes that I took was Pre-Raphaelite Art, a movement that hearkens back to medieval art and focuses largely on the use of unorthodox female models. The pre-raphaelites had their biggest influence from about 1850-1870, the most famous of the artists being Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris (though he was more of a writer/poet). I loved this class and found my professor to be incredibly knowledgable as well as captivating as he told us the stories of these highly controversial men. They are the men that we now get our image of the eccentric artist from: men full of passion, uneasy temper, abusers of substances, and supreme womanizers. Their art is beautiful and fascinating, but to me their lives are just as intriguing, if not more so. I just finished writing an essay for that class and thought I would share a few of my favorite pieces of the movement.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Lancelot's Vision of the Sanc Grael (1857).  Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine (1874). Tate Britain, London.

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bocca Baciata (1859). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851-2). Tate Britain, London.

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853). Tate Britain, London.

John Everett Millais, Mariana (1851). The Makins Collection.

Enjoy!

A Closer Look at Berlin

I have now passed a MAJOR milestone in my life. I have officially finished my classes at Royal Holloway for the year which is neat, but what is really cool is that I have now (hopefully) finished classes as a student for life. It is exciting to think that the next time I return to classes it could be as a teaching assistant or professor rather than a student sitting in a desk. It feels good to have them completed, though I am spending the greater part of the months of April and May in the library typing my essays for them.

On a different note, I have recently returned from an 8 day vacation in Berlin, Germany with my dad. We decided back in the fall to meet each other once my classes finished (as now for the rest of the program I am doing independent study) and since we both share a love of history and seeing new places, I suggested Berlin. Now, I have been to Berlin two other times but both were whirlwind trips and so I really loved the idea of a slower paced visit to the city. My dad had never been to Germany before and so was up for it. 

The thing I love about Berlin, and Germany, is how easy it is to be there. People are friendly and kind, have great English skills, public transportation is phenomenal, and I look like everyone else. Trust me, after living in and visiting places in Europe where I stick out like a sore thumb, it is nice to blend in. Plus, I finally felt like I was in the land of tall people and was thinking if I ever wanted to find a boyfriend in Europe who isn't 5 foot 6 I'd better move to Berlin. 

Our apartment

Schloss Charlottenburg

Outside the Brandenburg Gate

We spent the week doing all of the touristy things and even took a guided bike tour around the city which was one of the best tours I've ever had. We took things slowly though still managed to stay out until about 5pm each day enjoying the museums, beautiful vistas, and memorials that Berlin has to offer. Surprisingly, Berlin has very little to offer in terms of German food or restaurants. Apart from the Currywurst and sausage stands, most of the food in Berlin is of Asian decent. Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, Italian, and vegetarian restaurants are bountifully abundant in the city and we enjoyed eating out as well as cooking in our apartment in Charlottenburg.

Berliner Dom

Painted portions of the Berlin Wall

It is undeniable that an aura of a dark history looms over the city's sites and it is hard to escape some reminder of Berlin's nazi and communist history. Sites such as the Berlin wall fragments, the Holocaust memorial, the communist era TV tower, and even street signs indicate what the city used to be like. While it is interesting to visit and learn about Berlin's sordid past, the city's new generation of citizens breath new life into an increasingly cosmopolitan place. Berlin has much in common with cities like London and New York as multiple languages can be heard on the streets and immigrants from all over the world seek out a better life. It is significantly cheaper place to live than other big American or European cities and as a result is a haven for musicians, artists, and writers. It is a place that is truly up and coming and I would recommend to everyone to put Berlin on your radar as a place to pay attention to in the future.

Holocaust memorial

Division of East and West Berlin

On the bike tour

By the berlin wall

Enjoying flammkuchen at a biergarten

"Tripping stones" reminding us of residential holocaust victims

Inside the Reichstag, the parliament building

The wonderful S-bahn train stop near our apt

Poetic Melancholia

I have been busy reading quite a lot of poetry over the semester and wanted to share some of the poems that I find particularly enchanting. These poems tap into the darkness of love and life, particularly the Arnold poem, and how being aware of feeling intensifies the senses. 

I love these poems not because I have a thing for depressing poetry about loss or anger, but because through the poet's expression of their feelings I am able to temporarily commune with my own. What makes a poem meaningful to me is not just the subject matter, but the way that the language of the poem creates a symbiosis of poet and reader. To feel the love, hurt, or loss of the subject helps me learn about my own ability to feel. John Keats wrote that 

"poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".
Anyways, I hope you enjoy a small taste of a very poets that I admire and that you love their beautiful bleakness just as much as I do.

'Prologue'- Arthur Symons, London Nights
MY life is like a music-hall. 
Where, in the impotence of rage, 
Chained by enchantment to my stall, 
I see myself upon the stage 
Dance to amuse a music-hall. 

'Tis I that smoke this cigarette. 

Lounge here, and laugh for vacancy, 

And watch the dancers turn ; and yet 
It is my very self I see 

Across the cloudy cigarette. 

My very self that turns and trips. 

Painted, pathetically gay. 
An empty song upon the lips 

In make-believe of holiday : 
I, I, this thing that turns and trips ! 

The light flares in the music-hall. 
The light, the sound, that weary us ; 

Hour follows hour, I count them all. 
Lagging, and loud, and riotous : 

My life is like a music-hall. 

'Before the Mirror': Part III- Algernon Charles Swinburne

Glad, but not flushed with gladness,

Since joys go by;

Sad, but not bent with sadness,

Since sorrows die;

Deep in the gleaming glass

She sees all past things pass,

And all sweet life that was lie down and lie.

There glowing ghosts of flowers

Draw down, draw nigh;

And wings of swift spent hours

Take flight and fly;

She sees by formless gleams,

She hears across cold streams,

Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.

Face fallen and white throat lifted,

With sleepless eye

She sees old loves that drifted,

She knew not why,

Old loves and faded fears

Float down a stream that hears

The flowing of all men's tears beneath the sky. Matthew Arnold "Dover Beach"

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That City That Never Sleeps

 Well, it has now been a week since my big adventure to the other side of the pond and it already feels like it has been months since visiting. For those of you that maybe didn't know, I took a trip during my midterm break to New York City to visit my dad and to have some much needed time in good ol' americana for ten days and the trip could not have gone smoother.
The flight to NYC was actually quite a quick and pleasant (as pleasant as being jammed into a 3 seater side aisle could be) seven and a half hours with no connections. I landed in NY by lunchtime and made my way to our hotel which was located near Central Park in Midtown. We were so close to famous areas like 5th avenue, Rockerfeller center, and Times Square; it was a beautiful thing to be able to have a leisurely stroll in Central Park and then walk just a bit further and arrive at such places. Needless to say, I immediately fell for the Big Apple.

Rockerfeller Center

NY Subway

                                                   

                                                               Empire State

We did all of the touristy things such as go up to the tops of the Rockerfeller and Empire State buildings, see the Statue of Liberty, take a tour of NBC studios, see a taping of David Letterman (I made it on tv!), visit Yankee stadium, experience top-notch art at the MoMA and Metropolitan, and have some ah-mazing meals out. Two definite highlights were seeing both a Broadway play (Anything Goes by Cole Porter- laugh out loud funny and catchy score) and an opera at the Met (Madame Butterfly). I can now say that I've seen theatre in the two best theatre towns in the world, London and New York. I adore theatre and so getting to go to one on Broadway (pricey as it was-theatre is SO much more expensive in NYC than London!) was a dream come true. 

View from the top of the Empire State of Brooklyn Bridge

View of Central Park

Grand Central Station

For all you Seinfeld fans....

In the Yankee's dugout

Degas at the Met; he never fails to inspire me

Central Park in twilight

I was also fortunate to get a chance to spend time with some new people on my trip as well. My dad invited his new girlfriend, Kathy and I had the pleasure of spending half of the trip (she left halfway through) getting acquainted with her. We also got to meet her nephew, John, who is a third year at Columbia University and he was good enough to show us around his neck of the woods and join us for dinner occasionally. I enjoy meeting new faces as I feel different backgrounds and perspectives change one's way of viewing this crazy world and I was, and am, very grateful to spend time with someone who is beginning to factor so significantly in my father's life. Kathy, it was a pleasure, and hopefully we will do it again soon. 

What can I say that hasn't been said so many times before about New York? Probably not much more than the cliched idea that the city feels so alive and dynamic. There is simply something magical about being in a place that contains SO much of one's own history that you can't help but feel connected. I have travelled all over the world and learned about everyone else's history tens of times but this was the first time that I really felt my own history. It made me intensely proud not only to be there but to be from a nation so diverse yet unified under one flag. Walking the streets you would hear every language yet over the top you would still hear plenty of "fogedaboudit's" reminding you of exactly where you were. 

New York is gritty yet beautiful and nostalgic; I thoroughly enjoyed the strikingly different neighborhoods such as Midtown, Brooklyn, or Greenwich as it reminded me of London in ways. It's a good place to be, put simply, and I do hope to visit many more times over my lifetime. It was a breath of fresh air and I felt exhausted yet rejuvenated once I boarded my plane to return to England. The trip put my literary and scholastic goals into focus once again and I realized that if I ever want to land a job in a place like NYC I had better get cracking now. 

Not to steal from Bogie but New York, New York, I have the feeling that it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Brooklyn Bridge

Times Square

Met Opera House