Travel article published in Galavanting magazine

I saw today that an article I wrote on traveling with laptops was finally published on goGalavanting.com:

Protecting your laptop while traveling

Trip to Oxford with some fellow Shakespeareans

On Saturday, some girls in my Shakespeare course convinced me to travel to Oxford with them for the day. Even though more than one of us was worried about finishing essays on time for this week, I think we enjoyed ourselves...

We ate lunch at a pie restaurant in a covered market in Oxford. I think it will be my goal for the rest of my time here to learn how to make these: in case you can't tell in the picture, that's mashed potatoes with a meat pie on top (mine was cider pork and apple, yum) and minted smashed peas on top of the pie, all drenched in gravy. True British fare. From left to right: Jen, Ashley, Amanda.

This is the largest room in Blackwell, supposed to be the largest bookstore anywhere. Three miles of bookshelves. Three miles! I bought a Shakespeare magazine.

Somewhere near the Bodleian library, Oxford University's famous and ancient copyright library.


A close-up of one of the heads.

The Divinity School, where our tour of the Bodleian started. We weren't allowed to take pictures in the rest, which was a shame.

The outside of the old part of the Bodleian.

St. Mary's church, just opposite the Bodleian.

Me outside the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings (including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien) used to meet every Tuesday morning for over twenty years (from 1939-62) to drink beer and read and discuss the books each were currently writing. They referred to the pub as the Bird and Baby.

The 'Rabbit Room' inside where the Inklings would sit every week. You can see a picture of Lewis on the far right.

Me and Jen in the Rabbit Room with our mulled cider. Worth going back to Oxford for.

No matter your job, it's still who you know

Jane Austen is my sixth cousin eight times removed. I’m also related to John Steinbeck, Hans Christian Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, Robert Graves and Elizabeth Browning. My mother is into genealogy, you see. And one of the features of Ancestry.com is that if you enter in your family tree, they can tell you which famous people you’re related to. Our list has an impressive number of writers; Mom wondered if talent can be inherited. I’ll admit, I feeling almost like coming from this long line of writers must legitimate me somehow. Almost.

Last summer I read Old School by Tobias Wolff. The first chapter talks about his anticipation as a schoolboy of a visit by Robert Frost to his school. He said that, as an aspiring writer, he wanted to have a "great" take him under their wing. Lay their hands on him. Give them their blessing.

It’s who you know, right? A lot of times now it’s not where you studied, it’s who you studied with. As an undergraduate, I wrote a thesis and asked Lee K. Abbott to direct it. When asked by a fellow student who was directing my thesis, I sometimes got this response: “Oooh, Lee K. Impressive.”

That undergraduate thesis was a collection of short stories that attempted to mimic Shakespeare’s writing process by using the sources he used for his plays to create my own work. I explained: if trying to learn how to write by studying a specific writer, why not go to the best? But maybe, just maybe, I was also hoping that some of his—what shall I call it? mastery? magic? mojo?—would rub off on me.

Harold Bloom calls this the “anxiety of influence.” Strong poets, he says (although this applies to other writers), will creatively (and/or purposefully) misread a previous author. That’s exactly what I was doing, and I’ll be the first to admit that I did not get anywhere close to Shakespeare’s level of genius. But I did pick up a few tricks.

I don’t know if I have it in me to be a “strong” writer. And even though I’ve been reading a lot lately about the theory of writing and about canonical works and what the next major novel is going to look like, I still have no idea. What precisely, for example, does Bloom mean when he says that we’re about to usher in a new theological age of literature?

I am reminded of reading recently on the back cover of A Dash of Style by Noah Lukeman one of the marketing quotes, calling the book a “pageturner.” It’s a grammar manual. Normally, seeing a quote like this, I'd assume that at least one person was really enthralled, no matter how bad I thought the book was, this was not the kind of book you would read straight through, much less not be able to put down. I would hope that this is an extreme example, but my gut is telling me that it's not.

These quotes on book jackets seem to have dropped a long way from their original purpose: they’ve always been used as tools to help sell the book, but now no care is taken by those who are expected to give them. (I wish I could ask that these readers would take the time to think intelligently about the books they’re commenting on instead of churning out the clichés of the book reviewing industry, but this might be too much to ask.)

Isn’t this just an exercise in proving who you know? An extension of Bloom’s theory even into the vast body of writers whom he would not class as “strong.” But it seems to me that they also want this laying-hands-on.

And really, if I were the focal character in Old School, I’d want Robert Frost’s blessing too.

A mission statement for a new blog

Write what you know. What curious advice this is, for I often feel as if I don't know what I know until I write it down.

There's a term for this: epistemology, which is the theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't know a whole lot about the scientific field, but for my own purposes, I think there are three ways of, basically, getting smarter. Simply put, they are:

READ MORE
One of the things I learned as an undergraduate which has really stuck with me was something that a professor who I never took a class from said in passing during a chance meeting I had with him. We were talking about the possibility of my doing graduate work, and he said something about "when you're older, when you've read more and gotten smarter."

Isn't it funny, the way it sometimes takes someone saying something for us to get it? Of course I knew that reading makes you smarter, but until I heard this guy say it, I didn't realize that I knew it. The purpose of education is to introduce ourselves to new ideas and to broaden the way we think. Professors do this very well, but books do too.

DO MORE
Another professor (one I did take classes from) gave me a piece of advice which is now famous among my family and close friends: the way to become a better writer is to work for a year at a 7-11. This is not something I ever intended to do, but I see his point. The way to better understanding, to a greater knowledge of the world, and to a greater sensibility and flexibility as a writer is to gain new experiences.

This fall I will be moving to London to begin a Master of Arts program (should I write programme?) in English at University College London. As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." I am looking forward not only to what I will see and learn in London, but the opportunities in my most favorite of cities for jobs in publishing.

WRITE MORE
This brings me back to my original thought. In London I'll be furthering my education and also trying to make it in the publishing industry and as a freelance writer and Copy Editor. This blog will reflect my thoughts about what I'm reading, what I'm doing, and what I'm writing. It is an intellection: an attempt to understand the world around me and the place I am making for myself in it.