Letter from Cambridge |
 |
Global Intrusions
Great Britain may be an island, a largish one, but one with a vast neural network of connections around the world. This past month has seen a range of international events that have caused the great web to shake and tremble in ways that even the smallest villages here cannot avoid. These momentous events even include cricket, of course.
The UK involuntarily got its own Iranian hostage crisis, thankfully resolved but not without drama and true anxiety all around. In general I was impressed with the government’s firm but non-bombastic response, and all seemed to end well until the returned hostages thought that selling their stories to the tabloids might be a good idea. The press itself merits some attention, in a moment.
Local elections occur around the nation as of today, and there has been the usual hand-wringing and finger pointing, shouting and rhetoric that traditionally accompany such tedious but necessary mechanisms for a free society. Everyone is furious at Tony Blair for one reason or another, but the major complaint seems to be the sense that he has been a sycophant in the Bush camp, particularly with respect to Iraq, where the toll on British lives, even if numerically lower than for the US, is nationally just as heart-wrenching. As a politically astute Londoner friend observed however, it would have been unthinkable for a British prime minister since WWII not to act as an ally to the United States, regardless of the circumstances. The Labour party will likely lose many seats and the rumbles of unhappiness have become irrational and reactionary.
The vast series of French national elections are also underway, and Britons examine quizzically and carefully both the unusual choices for president presented to the French people. What will their neighbor be like in a year or two? In the EU the fences are low between countries and everyone usually shares multiple borders, so backyard affairs have unusual resonance.
Virginia Tech has garnered huge public attention. I have been bombarded with questions as The Resident American as to what it all means and why my homeland cannot come to grips with weaponry, armed citizenry and so on, to which my responses are generally unsatisfying. Either people are getting to know me better or this sort of event breaks down the normal reserve when dealing with a visitor’s homeland that I have come to expect here. Both are quite likely.
The coach of Pakistan’s cricket team, after a tough loss in cricket’s version of the World Series (more accurately the playoffs leading up to it – World Cup level excitement) was apparently murdered in his hotel room in Jamaica. The unseemly side of sports betting and vicious national rivalries have surfaced and the murder, while being investigated, remains unsolved. Sports ugliness involving Britons reared its head again on the continent during football action as well. I hadn’t seen “sports” and “hooligans” in the same sentence in the press for awhile, but there was the confluence again.
Throw in the perennial issues of global warming, carbon footprints, royal family girlfriend troubles, and threatened work actions in various aggrieved and indignant labor arenas, and it has been a busy month. The press here is quite remarkable. Unlike the US, where the mainstream is so centrist that the New York Times can be branded a left-wing publication by some, here the papers wear their political colors proudly. I have sampled broadly, but prefer the Guardian, which has roots in Manchester as a workers’ paper. Now London based, it is a well written affair, with thoughtful editorials and confident, well researched reporting. I have come to enjoy several of its features. Each day they republish one article from the past, so you might read about a coal miner’s strike from 1933 or a divisive parliamentary debate from 1876. All this is helpful history for an ignorant backwoods American. The weekend edition has a good book review section, and on page three they always have a photo of some well known author’s work desk (strangely enough, they are never neat affairs, always piled high with books and metastasizing stacks of paper and clutter) while the author ruminates about his desk, tools, tricks of the trade, and writing process and why he has a picture of a malamute on the corner of his bookcase. The Guardian is also the only way to get my daily Doonesbury fix. For those who want a more succinct and amusing synopsis of British newspapers, I refer you to a summary done in the mid-eighties by a satirical political sitcom Yes, Prime Minister with a predictable swipe at one of the ubiquitous and uniformly wretched tabloids.
Librarian Items
I have joined the local Cambridge Library Group, and have met a good number of librarians employed either in the colleges or the university library. Each year they take a field trip and I signed up to go to York this April, farther north on the island than I have ever been. For many centuries York was city Number Two in England, so for example in the mid fifteenth century when London had 50,000 souls, York was second with 20,000.The duke was always a national player. We visited two different libraries, both affiliated with the University of York. The King’s Manor specializes in art history but also has a large medieval history reading room (the medievalist Francis Wormald left his collection there, for those who know the name.) York Minster is attached to the huge York cathedral, and is both the working collection for the cathedral and a public archive, although it is well concealed off the beaten path and suffers from lack of use.
The librarian was one of those delightful characters occasionally encountered in what, let’s face it, is not traditionally a hardhitting, dynamic, celebrity profession. Tickled to have a group of colleagues on his doorstep who might have a sincere interest in not only the collection but its means of operation, he built up a head of steam quickly and told stories about its history, famous manuscripts, and recent near dissolution. Apparently the cathedral wasn’t making much use of it and wanted to write off the whole operation to save some money, despite having been in existence for some 1000 years. A huge outcry ensued, and all sorts of complicating factors emerged: the librarian was being paid by the university of York, so they couldn’t actually fire him (although they did everyone else); he pointed out that there were archaic manuscripts donated in the 14th century and before to the cathedral that were given “in perpetuity”; and that the library had a public mission. Apparently at one public demonstration the friends of the library had assembled a panel to put questions to the bishop (or his spokesperson) and the cathedral official said something so outrageously false or ridiculous that the 80-some year old president of the Friends indignantly hit him over the head with her placard. Town and gown, usually opponents, united this once in protest. The library is preserved for the moment, but the mission of the staff now is to make sure that the collection gets used and is valuable, so as to justify its continued existence.
Old town York is a winding maze of narrow medieval streets with astonishingly diverse shops of every description. On Saturday the place was packed with shoppers, and a bagpipe band assembled on the market square for a rousing concert, if that is the right word. The remains of a once great wall that encircled the city are impressive, and the medieval townsfolk, once they saw the existing Roman wall just built their section on top, adding turrets and gates.
The librarian group had dinner out one night and we talked shop. We complained about catalogs and unfriendly library policies, low compensation and long hours, but also traded stories about the pleasures of working in our respective arenas. The local flagship beer from the York brewery is, I suppose, inevitably but unfortunately called the Yorkshire Terrier (picture of a bewildered dog on the bottle) but alas the brewery shop was closed on Sunday when I went by.
Peter Hoare, the series editor for the recently released (November 2006) three volume set Libraries in Britain and Ireland gave a talk to the Cambridge Library Group the other week at Wolfson College, which turned into a fascinating look at the process which created a monumental, and for me, indispensable, piece of scholarship. As editor he recounted anew the “herding cats” metaphor of working with brilliant if erratic academics who were contributors, and how he grappled with the vagaries of editors at Cambridge University Press. A central thesis for the first volume (which I will probably have to come to terms with in my own work), is the notion that there were no real “libraries” in a modern sense in England until the early 1600s, since there were no budgets and the collection development policy was purely and unreliably based on donorship. It was not until ongoing budgets and the regular purchasing of new items occurred that one could call these entities “libraries” and in support of this I note that Cambridge University did not have anyone they called a “librarian” until around 1577. Before that it was the chaplain who did the business of a librarian, which he had to combine with other duties.
Germany
My firstborn Gene, done with college, is living in Leipzig and teaching English in a secondary school in Plauen near the Czech border, so while I am here I had an imperative to pay him a visit. The city, once part of the DDR, was birthplace of Leibniz and a university founded in the 15th century. It is a nice scale, and easy to get around with a large greenbelt and efficient transit system. It is also the home of the church where Johannes Sebastian Bach lived, worked, and composed, and that was a must-see visit. Like most of the cities in the former East Germany which had been hard hit by WWII, a lot of building is new, and a great deal of construction work is still underway, cranes and heavy equipment everywhere. We watched a large university building downtown, formerly renamed the Karl-Marx-Universitat, being demolished to be rebuilt for newer university needs. The town is packed with students, bicycles and bookstores, libraries and beer gardens. A very handsome place it is.
We took a couple days and went to Berlin, probably Gene’s favorite place on earth. A gigantic, sprawling city of wide boulevards, with a tumultuous history and plethora of museums and cultural institutions, it feels like a young city with allure for young Germans hankering for activity of every sort. In our vast wanderings we passed by the Brandenburg gate, with a soviet war memorial still within sight of the gate (although oddly enough on the non-Soviet side of the former wall), the Bundesrat and various government buildings, and stopped in for delightful visits to a handful of museums. The Neue Nationalgalerie has an amazing collection of Picassos, works from Max Ernst, Dali, Otto Dix, and the dada and Bauhaus movements. The Pergamon museum has stunning material from Assyria and near Eastern antiquity.
One night for dinner Gene directed me to one of his favorite vegetarian restaurants in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, heavily populated with Turkish restaurants and halal shops. It was next door to a biker bar, and we watched German versions of Hells Angels, some of them with bleached, pre-Beatles era hairstyles, others tattooed within an inch of their lives, roar up, oily exhaust spraying everywhere, to sit down to a neighborly liter or two or three of beer. Some time ago when Gene had become a regular at the Vegetarische Bistro, he was approached to translate their menu into English. As an American he would surely do a good job, nicht wahr? The menu at our table was the fruit of his abilities, and the owner remained grateful enough that we were given a free meal. My Berlin treatment was exemplary.
The next afternoon we rendezvoused with a former San Francisco State colleague at a sunny sprawling beer garden in the handsome Prenzlauer area. She was here with her theoretical physicist companion, and doing doctoral work at Humboldt University. We had a grand time.
Finally off on the round of buses, planes, and trains that would take me back to England. On reaching customs, the official was unhappy, and gave me steely, accusatory looks. Was this my initial arrival to England, she asked, pointing to my visa, good for six months in the country. I assured her that was not the case, that I was returning from the continent.
My visa had never apparently been “activated” when I arrived in January. How this was supposed to be my fault I could not grasp, but she had to trot off to her supervisor before coming back. “Okay Mr. Fielden, your visa is now activated.” I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be grateful or not but made the mistake of a small jest. “Does this mean I can stay in the country longer?” I replied, and got a chuckle out of the morose air official who had lost twenty minutes of his life sheparding me from the plane through the Stansted maze of hidden and passcard secured elevators designed to keep the island from being blown up by wheelchair using terrorists. The customs official swiveled a malignant gaze in my direction, “It is best not to even joke about such matters, Mr. Fielden.” Welcome back to England, I guess. To be fair, this goes against most of my treatment here. However, all the delays stacked up and I missed the last train to Cambridge, and had to backtrack towards London until I could catch a connector train out. Home later than I planned, with a pocketful of Euro coins, and some nice memories of Germany.
Two nights after I got back I am going through town on my way to a pub and see a van parked between Trinity College and Gonville and Caius College. There aren’t many vans around with wheelchair ramps, and this one had its door open, ramp extended, obviously delivering or picking up someone. I can go a week or so without seeing another wheelchair user (excepting my living quarters, which is the university cripple ghetto of town – at least three of us here) so my antennae rotated for a better read. As I rolled by I glanced inside the van and there slumped over in his chair was Stephen Hawking, getting strapped in and not looking all that super. I had the urge to roll up, give him my card and say “Hey, Stevie! I am a big fan of yours. But that singularity thing in the black holes, my college buddy Lee Smolin says you’re wrong there. What do you say to that?” I resisted the impulse but am beginning to think that physics is going to follow me around this six month period in my life. Aside from libraries and librarians, my sought targets, the physicists seem to be everywhere.
I only have another couple plus months here, the time has flown.
Fondly from Cambridge,
Ned