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"Travel"
This is just a little hello to say that we’ve been over here in England since Thursday, visiting some friends, hanging out in Bath and Oxford, seeing things that range from sorta-old stuff (clothes from 1800 and onwards at the Fashion Museum here in Bath, chapels in various colleges at Oxford) to really-old stuff (like the antiquities at the British Museum), and, in a day or two, to very new stuff (we decided to make the trip scarcely a month ago because we didn’t want to miss the Richter retrospective and the Tacita Dean installation at the Tate Modern).
Otherwise, we are just filling up on crumpets and chocolate-coated biscuits and reading books and enjoying a few days away before the semester begins next week. Jolly good.
After a blissful ten days of no travel, I’m packing up again, and I’ll be at two conferences in the next two weeks: in Grand Rapids at the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin this week, and then just down the road at Princeton for the Kuyper Center’s Calvinism and Culture conference next week. So if you see me, please say hello!
The last couple weeks have been very roller-coaster-y: some excellent time in Hamilton and in the Cardus office for a bunch of work on Comment, then returning home to stacks of work and some very late nights.
Good things, though –
- I got an incredibly exciting call when I was sitting late in my office trying to meet a deadline: I got into Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative nonfiction! I’ve deferred my acceptance to the fall term, which means I’ll start at the Glen West in August. I did a lot of research and soul-searching before deciding to apply to SPU because, frankly, it’s the best program out there: selective, rooted, low-residency but also very rigorous. And I’m so glad I got in.
- Yesterday, my spring course load was rearranged, and now I have my ideal schedule, giving me freedom to schedule conference and Comment-related travel into my week when needed.
- And I’ve caught wind of some exciting teaching opportunities in 2011.
Leaving shortly for my sister-in-law’s wedding in the Richmond, VA area. Relishing the idea of Monday, which starts my first full week in the office in a month.
It is cold, grey, rainy, and wet in New York, and because this is New York and not England, it feels as if it’s been this way forever, even though it’s only been a week, or maybe less. So we bundle up and drink coffee and other warming things and pray for autumn sunshine.
I just noticed that my piece on “little magazines” for the Center for Public Justice was broadcast on Dordt College’s radio station (and I recorded it myself, so if you’re itching to hear what I sound like, now’s your chance). You can read it here or click next to it on this page to listen – though you’ll need Windows Media Player (grumble).
Also, have you read Lorrie Moore’s piece on the (objectively) best television show ever to hit the small screen, The Wire? (I haven’t, but it’s coming home with me tonight.)
Ask an academic about procrastination.
After class on Thursday I catch a plane in Newark bound for Toronto for almost a week of work on Comment mixed with visits with friends and many late nights of good conversation – balm for this weary soul.
And now it’s time for this academic to stop procrastinating and get back to work.
You know you’ve been away from New York too long when a man walked through the N train with a turquoise parrot and you actually look up.
Rodney Clapp quoted Wendell Berry in his lecture last night at the Glen:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
I’m writing this from my iPhone as I wait for my plane in Dallas to finish loading en route to Albuquerque, ending later today in Santa Fe (Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, since I’m in Texas and all).
Up too early (3:30am EST) and will undoubtedly be up too late (TBD MST), but I sense good things are coming this week, even if I had to leave my trusty traveling buddy (Tom, obviously) at home this time.
On Wednesday, June 16, I was waiting for my plane at LaGuardia, en route to a work trip to Hamilton, Ontario (which also, by extension, is filled with a lot of fun), when Apple called and said that no, my dead computer wasn’t covered under warranty because it was showing liquid damage to the logic board and I could either pay $750 to fix it or just cut my losses.
It’s two years old, so I chose the latter option, which of course means I’ve been computerless, since I immediately hopped on a plane (with my husband’s laptop), came home two days later for twenty-four hours or so, then boarded another plane at another airport bound for Dublin. (After much deliberation, I ended up ordering a netbook from Asus. I hate Windows – a feeling that has not abated but grown since I started using it again – but the iPad lacks a lot of functionality I need from a portable computer, and I lack the funds to buy another MacBook.)
Dublin, though, was great. We immediately rented a car and headed out of the city for a few days to Cashel and other places, spent the night in Kilkenny, then climbed a very tall hill in Glendalough before returning to Dublin:
Not nearly a good-enough photo. It looks quite low and uninteresting here. More pictures to come.
Back in the city, we visited galleries, museums, old buildings, new sights, and more, winding up at the end at the Guinness Storehouse (as one does in Dublin). We spent evenings in pubs, watching the football, and had a great time.
A week later we moved on to Glasgow, where we stayed with very kind friends, and spent a few days tooling around Glasgow and Edinburgh – two very different but very interesting cities. We saw the Queen’s Scottish home and some underground streets and the fabulous cathedral in Glasgow, above which towers, perhaps ironically, a statue of John Knox:
John Knox atop the necropolis behind the cathedral in Glasgow, the only one to survive the Reformation in the country. Irony?
England was last: first Bristol, where we stayed with the marvelously longsuffering and generous Beldmans, and visited both beautiful Bristol and the best place in the world – Bath – where we went to the contemporary hot baths and soaked in a warm pool on the roof overlooking the Georgian town, and visited Jamie’s Italian twice in one day; then London for two nights, where we went on the London Eye, ate Indian food, and spent a day in the Tower of London, which is enormous and fascinating.
We got home Saturday and have been running around madly since – Tom to D.C. to see his grandpa, me unpacking and cleaning and sneaking in the World Cup finals yesterday in a Hell’s Kitchen bar full of yelling Americans, who, after all, were a bit more enthusiastic than any pub crowd we ran into in the British Isles – go figure.
So here we are – back home. Three weeks and I head to the Glen in Santa Fe. Tom’s working on an action flick in Manhattan beginning today. I’m finishing out my tenure at IAM this month and getting my syllabi put together for my three classes this fall at King’s. We’re attending a dear friend’s wedding at the Botanical Gardens on Sunday. And hopefully squeezing in the Philharmonic’s performances in the parks this week.
Traveling, we find, always reminds us why we’re happy to live in New York, a place where people are friendly when they need to be, where they walk quickly on the sidewalks, where it’s easy to carve out a small corner in a big city if you want it enough, where you can get food or really anything you want past 6pm, and where the subways are VERY cheap (1/4 the price of the Tube!). We’re grateful that we have such a wonderful town to come back to, filled with wonderful people.
Be it ever so humble – or maybe not so humble! – there’s really no place like home.
