The Week I Conquered My Fear of Special Collections

Hello again, devoted followers. It's time for another foray into my oh-so exciting life in Oxford. It's week 5 here which basically means it's go time in terms of coursework. Next week our classes end and our essay titles are due, after which we can't talk to our professors about our papers anymore, so everything has to be ready to roll for the next three-ish weeks. Accordingly, the last week for me has been full of research, presentations, and paper topics. Let me walk you though it.

So not only were topics and titles for the B-essay due to our professors last Friday, but I also had to give a presentation on Tuesday about my topic. Unfortunately, at the time of my writing last week, I still had no topic to speak of. Needless to say, I spent Thursday and Friday in a mad hunt for a research project/prestation to give.

Radcliffe Science Library - the SRR is in the basement :(

Thus it was that on Thursday, unable to avoid it any longer, I finally worked up the courage to go down to the Special Collections Reading Room and order up a manuscript. Some of you might remember hearing about the Special Collections in this post when I had my introductory tour in Michaelmas term - yeah, and I haven't been back since, because it was way too terrifying. The Special Collections works on a different system than the rest of the Bodleian Library because it deals with manuscripts. First of all, none of the catalogues are digitized, so if you want to find something you have to physically go look through these big volumes called the Summary Catalogue to find your manuscript. Then to order up your MS you have to physically fill out a slip of paper and hand it to the librarians, at which time they will put in the request and you have to wait a few hours or overnight for it to be brought up. Basically it's a difficult system to navigate. Then once you get your MS it is even more scary because you're handling pieces of writing that are literally hundreds of years old. On the other hand, oddly enough, you can order up early printed books from the 16th century through SOLO (our online catalogue) just like you would a book printed yesterday; the only difference is that you can only order it to special reading rooms like the SCRR.

MS Rawl. poet. 120

Anyway. Early on Thursday I was reading an article about the attribution of Francis Beaumont's poem Salmacis and Hermaphroditus that referred to a MS copy of the poem in the Bodleian, and decided I had no excuse not to call it up and look at it myself. Newly inspired, I marched down to the Radcliffe Science Library (where the SCRR is right now thanks to renovations) and threw myself upon the mercy of the librarians there. With their help, I managed to find the MS I was looking for - MS Rawl poet 120, if you were wondering - and ordered it up for the next day.

Thus, I spent most of my Friday in the SCRR looking at a 17th century MS copy of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in addition to a printed copy of the poem from 1640 and a related book, The Metamorphosis of Tabacco, printed in 1602. The MS was really cool to look at, but unfortunately did not inspire a paper topic. The Metamorphosis of Tabacco, on the other hand, did, which was great, since Friday was the day I needed to declare my paper topic. I spent the rest of the weekend working on the presentation I had to give on Tuesday on my newfound topic, and even got to take some pictures of the books I was working with:

Title of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus  in MS Rawl. poet. 120

Title page of The Metamorphosis of Tabacco.

I won't go into too much detail about my topic/presentation since I'm pretty sure none of my readers care that much about the finer points of early modern literary scholarship, but here's a basic overview of the stuff I'm working on: Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and The Metamorphosis of Tabacco are both Ovidian narrative poems published anonymously in 1602. Since then, scholarship has attributed the poems to Francis and John Beaumont, respectively, using various verbal echoes, MS attributions, and external evidence based on the dedicatory and commendatory poems in both editions. My plan is to examine the problems of attribution involved with these two poems, and perhaps try to establish a coterie or network of poets to which the Beaumonts belonged using the clues in the frontmatter of the books. Neat, right?

Actually this was really a week full of paper topics, since earlier today I met with my professor and settled on a topic for my C-essay. That one is going to be on characterization and persona in Drayton's Idea's Mirror, which I talked about last week. I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about this topic since it means I might finally get to do some close-reading, which I happen to be bomb at. Oxford tends to lean generally toward more historicist scholarship, a perspective that I've been trying to get the hang of for the last term and a half, but I think in this essay I can play to my American-trained strengths a little more.

The best part of picking this topic today though, actually, was that it required me to go fetch a book that I will be basing my argument on. It so happened that the EFL's copy was checked out and the only library that had the book was the Taylorian, which I'd never been to before. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and discovered that this library is gorgeous:

Don't worry, I found this picture online. Taking pictures in the library is not allowed!

Right? I can't believe I'd never been there before. This may be my new study space, although it's a little ways to walk from my place.

So that was basically the last week for me. Sorry this post was academia-heavy, but basically the only thing I've been doing for fun is rewatching Code Geass with Meagan while we take breaks from studying. I know, the exciting life of a grad student. Until next week then; I'll try to spice things up a little next time!

KQ

My week can always use more Lelouch. 

London and the ESTC

As I promised, this week I will write about Oxford again instead of French novels. Well, sort of, since I also went to London this weekend. Anyway, let's just get to it.

Sweet ruff, Drayton.

So I spent the rest of last week reading stuff, like I mostly do. This week in my C-Course we were reading Drayton and Herrick, which are not my favorite sonnet sequences, but I guess they're kind of interesting because of their flaws. Drayton's Idea's Mirror is pretty uninspired...lots of the sonnets are pretty much a ripoff of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, except not as good. Actually the most interesting thing about Idea's Mirror is Drayton's persistence with it - basically when it came out in 1594 no one really liked it; the whole concept of it, which is writing Petrarchan-style love sonnets to "idea" as a personified entity, is perversely abstract. This, however, did not stop him from revising and reprinting the sonnets like four more times in different volumes of his other poetry. Perseverance is apparently the key to sonnet sequences. 

Too many poems, Herrick.

Herrick is a different story; after I finished reading the sonnets in his Hesperides (1648) and skimming through the rest of the 300 pages of short poems in that work I felt like I was losing my mind. His poems range from 2 lines to 100, and the collection has really no discernible ordering principles - it skips from topic to topic without any real cohesion or narrative thread. Most of the poems are written alternately to real noble personages and fictional imaginary mistresses with various colorful names; some of them are to himself, others to his book, others to readers, some about nothing. This one was one of my favorites:

Not every day fit for Verse. 

'Tis not ev'ry day that I
Fitted am to prophesy:
No, but when the spirit fills
The fantastic pannicles,
Full of fire, then I write
As the Godhead doth indite.
Thus enraged, my lines are hurl'd,
Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
Look how next the holy fire
Either slakes, or doth retire;
So the fancy cools:--till when
That brave spirit comes again. 

First of all: "not every day fit for verse"? Then DON'T FRICKIN WRITE. Jesus. Hesperides has 1,400 poems in it. Maybe you should take a break once in a while, Herrick. Secondly: full of yourself much? "'Tis not ev'ry day that I / Fitted an to prophesie" - uh-huh, sure. "Prophesying" is what you're doing, 'cause your poems are just that amazing. What an egotistical twat.

Someday I will have time to read this.

Man, that felt good. So moving on, as I said, I spent Saturday in London. What was I doing in London, you ask? Well the answer is being a BIG GEEK with the Anime Soc. Unfortunately Meagan couldn't make it because she was visiting family in East Sussex, so it was just me and the (other) otaku. We left early in the morning and took the bus and then the tube to right by the British Museum, where there's this cute litte comic store that I never knew existed, even though I've been to the BM like 8 times and stayed around that area for two week in 2008 - yeah, who knew? They actually had a crap manga selection but I had to try really hard to keep myself from buying The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, which I've been meaning to read since I got on my Neil Gaiman streak like 6 months ago. I've got it on my iPad but it's so nice to physically have the book. But then I have to fly home with it and attempt to make the weight limit. Sigh. 

Can't wait for the new season!

Anyway, we had lunch and moved on to Forbidden Planet, this rad store sort of by Covent Garden that, again, I never knew existed even though I've probably walked by it a bunch before. They're self-described as a "Cult Entertainment Megastore," or as I like to think of it, Geek Heaven. They had seriously everything geek: Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Star Wars, comics, collectibles, anime, manga, DVDs, books, etc, etc. I got a little 11th Doctor's sonic screwdriver since I obviously couldn't resist, and a copy of Newtype (the Japanese version) that came with sweet Star Driver pullouts since I obviously couldn't resist. Oh yeah, and I cried because they had a bunch super awesome, super cheap DVDs that I couldn't buy because of stupid region locking. Media distributors, why do you make it hard for me to give you my money? 

The last place we went was TokyoToys, which is around Leicester Square and was kind of a bust. They had collectibles and character goods but the selection was tragically limited and hardly any of it was actually imported. Mostly it just made me want to go back to Ikebukuro....boohoo. 

One of the cooler things I did in London was walk through Chinatown - since it was just Chinese New Year everything was festive...they even had a dragon dance going on down the main street. I also successfully dragged all the people I was with into a Chinese bakery so I could buy dan ta, my favorite chinese treat that you obviously can't get anywhere in Oxford. It's like a little egg custard tart that's incredibly delicious. I really ought to learn to make them myself actually; maybe it'll be my next culinary adventure! 

So that was pretty much the excitement of the weekend, and since yesterday I've been mostly just working on my new research project for my B-Course, which has so far involved spending hours on EEBO (Early English Books Online) and the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) searching for names of printers of various narrative poems printed in the 1590s, which is a lot more troublesome than it might sound, actually. The problem is that on some title pages the printer will spell his name Richard Jones, on others R Jhones, or R. I., or Richard Iones, and the ESTC doesn't search for variations, so you have to do a bunch of searches spelling it as many ways as you can think of to get a comprehensive list, which looks something like this: 

Yesterday I was pretty excited because I thought I was on a new track with this project, but after spending all that time on the ESTC today with little to show for it I'm feeling kind of discouraged about it all. There are definitely some interesting relationships between the printers in this period, but I'm not sure if there's anything there to write about really. Hmph. Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Bod and rifle through some more catalogues to see if I can't kick up anything interesting on this topic. I'm supposed to email my professors with a tentative topic/title by Friday, and give a presentation on this next Tuesday,  so hopefully I will have something a little more concrete to go on by the end of the week at least. 

Well it's getting late here so I better wrap up this post. Next week might be kind of hectic since it's getting into the second half of the term and things are getting intense. Don't worry, though, devoted subscribers, I will still make some time for the ol' blog. 

TTFN,

KQ

Let your galaxy shine!

P.S. In my post last week I referred to GONZO as a studio that was dead and gone, which I thought they were since they went bankrupt like 2 years ago and pretty much disappeared. Well apparently the universe was determined to prove me wrong, because not three days after I wrote that they apparently rose from the dead and announced that they're working on a second season of Last Exile. Go figure.