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May 28, 2004
Oxford Americans
Last Sunday I finally had some time to explore Oxford a bit more....after walking around town and stopping in a few shops and cafes, I made my way to Modern Art Oxford, currently the site of Mike Nelson's piece Triple Bluff Canyon. Wow. I was bummed about missing the Loom3 exhibition going on in NC right now, but seeing this multi-room installation helped make up for it. Walking through the various parts of Triple Bluff Canyon was sort of like viewing a Robert Smithson land-art piece through the lens of multiple movie cameras or maybe the prism of a choose-your-own-adventure mystery. I eagerly opted for repeated and increasingly revealing viewings before returning to the Rewley House to do some much-needed laundry.
Oxford is quite the 'learn-ed' town, of course, and there actually seem to be pub quizzes on most every night of the week. Sunday night is trivia night at The Gardener's Arms, a small North Oxford pub supposedly frequented by a young Bill Clinton during his 1968-1970 stint as a Rhodes Scholar. Clinton's Oxford address (46 Leckford Road) is right around the corner from the pub, so it was probably his regular bar. The Bueno Love Ballers UK made a valiant pub trivia effort but came in 4th, just short of the prize money. More rewarding than victory, however, was getting to joke around and talk British and American politics with the team of gregarious young Brits sitting next to us. After the trivia was over, one of them politely inquired if we would be voting for John Kerry in the fall. Several resounding answers of 'Yes' and perhaps one small step towards repairing international relations.
On Tuesday night, BLB-UK returned to the Turf in hopes of repeating last week's success. This time we managed to win the special Landlord's Question (prize: one gallon of ale, joyously consumed last night) and finish in a very close second place overall (prize: 15 pounds). Several of us were convinced that we would have come in first were it not for some questionable late-round score-calculating and an unfair Britishized trivia answer (the moon landing date supposedly being July 21st instead of July 20th because it was after midnight in the UK). I'm sure Mark D. will be relieved to know that when it comes to trivia, I'm capable of crying foul on both sides of the Atlantic and not just in Hell.
Wednesday night we skipped another shot at the lame pub quiz at Jude the Obscure and went to drink at The Bear instead. First opened in 1242, this cozy little pub is the oldest in Oxford and it has thousands of cut-off ties (male neckwear) adorning its walls and ceilings. Quite a sight, and a fun place to have some ale. Which reminds me, my other favorite pub-where-we-didn't-play-trivia would have to be Freud (Frevd), a cavernous church that has been converted into a cafe/bar! Surprisingly, there are no beers on tap at Freud but they do make all sorts of tasty variations of the Long Island Iced Tea.
Lest anyone think otherwise, Oxford hasn't been a constant pub crawl or anything. This week we got to tour several more of the historic Oxford colleges and yesterday we finally got to visit Oxford University Press. Going to OUP (yeah you know me!) was really great, we got to see little tiny metal blocks of (the original) movable type, an early printing press, and some of the many slips of paper used by James Murray and his family to trace the meanings and usage of words while compiling the first edition of the massive Oxford English Dictionary over a period of decades. An impressive finale to our Oxford sightseeing. Today is the last day of the seminar, so I'm about to go out and do a little more Oxford shopping/wandering before we take off for London tomorrow. This will probably be the last of my overseas blog entries, so cheers to any of you who enjoyed my sporadic travelogue!
Posted by Tim at May 28, 2004 09:52 AM
Comments
all the loom3 action that's fit to print:
http://www.unc.edu/~jwatt/blog/2004/05/was-i-fated-to-visit-loom3.html
(at least my personal take...)
Posted by: justin at May 28, 2004 04:14 PM