At EXETER (channeling J.K Rowling!)



ME in front of the EXETER campus fountain near Holland Hall Dormitory

 



ME at the foot of a "weeping" tree on the EXETER UNI campus



ME sitting upon the arch of another massive tree on the EXETER UNI campus





ME channeling J.K Rowling (except Italian!) at the foot of the tree on the EXERTER UNI campus





KIMBERLY and ME posing under the "weeping" branches of the tree.  Kimberly set the camera to take the picture in 10 seconds, but on the 9th second, the camera fell over and initally took a picture of the blue sky which Kimberly posted on her Facebook profile.  We had such a laugh taking these photos :)






The second shot of KIMBERLY and ME posing under the "weeping" branches of the tree.  When we place this photo side by side with the first one, it actually retains the effect that the branch above Kimberly moves to conform to our body poses in each photo!  First, the camera, then the branch...Harry Potter magic?

An Education in OXFORD (more or less!)

DAY TRIP ONE: OXFORD!! We didn't get a tour of the University, but Kimberly and I did experience what we like to term the "human zoo" of the central shopping market (the crowds of people were at times overwhelming) and the contrasting serenity of the Church commons.  We also had a bit of "an education" ** (See Below!!) regarding outlandish fascinators in a quaint charity shop :)  More photos and mobile video of the day will be added in the coming weeks, once they are sorted!

Until then...

Day 8 (Saturday, July 23): Christ's Church, Oxford Charity Shop, and Pembroke Street


ME in front of CHRIST CHURCH and its war memorial garden.



ME in an OXFORD charity shop trying on an gray bow headband/fascinator!



KIMBERLY DeROSA and ME in an OXFORD charity shop posing for a photo with our outlandish bow headbands/fascinators.  We died laughing while shooting this photo with Kimberly's digital camera :)

ME in front of the PEMBROKE STREET sign, an subtle omage to Bryn Mawr (my aluma mater) since one of its dorms is named Pembroke.  The Pembroke dorm at Bryn Mawr has an East and West side.  Jennie and I lived in Rockefeller Dorm (Room 118) all four years, but we walked through the Pembroke Arch (linking the East and West sides) regularly!

**The phrase "An Education" as the title for this post is taken from Lone Scherfig's 2009 film of the same name starring Carey Mulligan as a bright 16 year old girl (Jenny) who faces the choice of studying for a place at Oxford University, or of getting married to a much older man in the 1960's, as shown in the trailer below: 

Fancy That, LONDON!

For Everyone Stateside, here's a small WINDOW (courtesy of photos uploaded from the mobile phone) into my first few days in LONDON.  FANCY THAT!!!  More to come soon, I promise :)

DAY 1 (Saturday, July 16th): The London Eye and The Royal Courts





A view of the LONDON EYE from across the Thames River at dusk

   




The VICTORIA EMBANKMENT at the Thames River where we viewed the London Eye

 






The ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE down the street from our hotel in Central London

  




ME in front of the ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE on the way back from the Victoria Embankment

  

Day 4 (Tuesday, July  19) The Holborn Building and The Fancy That of London Shop





HOBORN TOWN BUILDING (near our hotel) on another rainy day in London

  




The FANCY THAT OF LONDON SHOP near the British Museum

 

Day 5 (Wednesday, July 20): On the Bus from LONDON to EXETER...




ME on the bus leaving LONDON for EXETER. Note the telefone booth in the Window behind me! (Thanks Kimberly!!)

 





KIMBERLY DeROSA and ME on the bus to from LONDON to EXETER looking happily "knackered"!

  

The Artist's Perspective: On the Inside Looking Out...

I owe a debt of gratitude to Sharon for the comment she contributed to my previous post describing the New York Metropolitan's exhibition of 19th century European artists who discovered a new perspective of looking through the romantic motif of the Open Window to see beyond.  As the CBS video on the exhibition explains, these artists created the perspective of seeing beyond the "threshold" windows captured by the earlier painter Johannes Vermeer, and of depicting not only a room -- but a room with a view.  This new perspective allowed the artists to create "a picture within a picture" through their paintings where, for the viewer, "everything at a distance becomes romantic...distant people, events, landscapes.  'Romantic' for these artists and their contempories meant impossible dreams, unrequited love, yearning, longing -- what better prop than the window...because a window frames a question -- What does it mean, how does it feel, to be on the inside looking out?"  Sharon included the link to the video in her comment, but it is worth a reposting for the record: 

Window Treatments: Rooms with a View (CBS News Video)
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7366106n&tag=mncol;lst;1

Sharon also posted in her comment the link to the Website for the Met. Exhibition itself:

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century (The Met. Special Exhibitions)
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/open_window/images.asp

Here are a few of my favorites from the site:

















The final black and white painting pasted above coincidentally connects to the vital role of the Open Window for women (and particularly for women writers) during that time period, as shown with Emily Dickinson's poem #579 copied in the previous post.  Kate Chopin also featured the window prominently in her 1894 work "The Story of an Hour."  She depicts the window much as the 19th century European painters do -- as a threshold to another world beyond the confines of the tiny room the main character, Mrs. Mallard, inhabits:

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair.  Into this she (Mrs. Mallard) sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.  She could see in the open square before her house the tops of tress that were all aquiver with the new spring life.  The delicious breath of rain was in the air.  In the street below, a peddler was crying is wares.  The notes a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.  There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

This passage gives the sense that Mrs. Mallard has newly discovered the "distant people, events, and landscapes" that she had previously found impossible to imagine or realize. 

The Met Exhibition and the CBS video also brings out the fact that the figures in the 19th century paintings becoming mere faceless "window dressings," often with their backs to the viewer, as depicted in the final black and white painting pasted above.  This was most decidely not the case with Johannes Vermeer's earlier paintings.  Although Vermeer did not capture what was happening beyond/outside the windows as these later artists did, he was nevertheless brilliant in experimenting with light and position to capture the essence of the figures themselves, often focusing on re-creating a specific moment -- as in a still life photograph today.  This is poignantly evident in his most famous work, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which notably provided inspiration for a contemporary novel by Tracy Chevalier, and its 2003 film adaptation starring Scarlet Johannson.

 

I was introduced to this painting through the Chevalier novel and its film adaptation during my freshman or sophomore year at Bryn Mawr, and, about a year later, while on vacation in Rome with my family, saw in person another gorgeous painting by the 15th century Italian painter Guido Reni that is eerily similar.  It is a still life of the teenage Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci (a relative of Ginvera Cenci -- the subject of a well-known Leonardo Da Vinci painting done some decades earlier) who was tragically abused by her father, plotted his murder along with her family, and was beheaded after a riveting trial.  I was so ennamored with her portrait that I wrote a short story called "The Daughters of Reni" inspired by the painting for my graduate writing program. 

While neither of these paintings depict windows or the view beyond, they capture the powerful enigmatic glances of two young women who are "on the inside looking out" with the unmistakable romantic yearning and longing for "impossible dreams..." 

A yearning and longing Charles Dickens carried into his own portrait of 21 year old Amy Dorrit, a seamstress born into a debtors' prison who sacrificially endures years of parental abuse and unrequited love in his novel Little Dorrit -- made into a gorgeous BBC T.V series in 2008 (ADORE IT!):

When Everything is Out, You Gotta Take it In...

The thematic concept for the blog title "Outside Windows" originates from the second and fifth verses of Emily Dickinson's poem #579, which reads in full:

I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

'T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,
'T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature's dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.

 In the poem, the speaker describes the desolate feeling of "looking in windows,/for the wealth (she) could not hope to own."  She is hopeless to satisfy her "hunger" or desire for life's riches, but miraculously "when (her) noon comes to dine" -- when she is finally able to partake of life's "plenty" -- she feels "ill and odd" or "transplanted" unnaturally. She finds that desire is the fuel of life, thus true happiness or satisfaction is found in the doing, not in the getting what she wants -- so it is better that she remain a "person outside windows" since "the entering takes away." 

I first read this Dickinson poem near the end of a two month hospitalization when I was 17.  I immediately related to the superficial idea of "hunger" or "being hungry all the years" since I literally could not hold food or liquid down during that time, had lost nearly 15 Ibs. (which on my tiny frame might as well be 30!) and I imagined it would take years for me to be able to eat normal meals as others could.  But, food was not all that I desired.  I remember, even through the delirium of my illness, watching Ellen Degeneres or Oprah Winfrey in the afternoons and being so envious of their distinguished, often beautiful and vibrant guests who seemed to live full, satisfying lives.  From the isolated hospital room (which had no accessible windows), I thought it impossible that I'd ever be able to simply have a "normal" life as they experienced in a heightened form.  So, I felt akin to the poem's speaker as "a person outside windows...looking in (windows) for the wealth I could not hope to own."  While it took me several months to recover following my release from the hospital, the "normal life" that I yearned for during my convalescence so rapidly developed that I often felt disorientated "as a berry of a mountain bush transplated to a road," and strangely longed for the safe confines of the hospital room where I could simply observe the lives others were blessed to live. 

When I visited Emily Dickinson's Homestead during a writing retreat in Amherst, Massachussetts two years ago (Denia, you remember our visit, don't you?), I learned about the significance of poem #579 in the poet's own life.  Dickinson spent most of the days of her brief life in her room on the second floor, composing her poetry at a tiny wood desk with a carousene lamp facing the room's only window looking out to a woodland that separated her homestead from her brother's house next door, as this NPR story explains:

A Flowering Tribute to Emily Dickinson:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127140791

The NPR story also describes how Dickinson would take her 2 year old niece, Mattie, up to her room, close the door, lock it and -- taking Mattie to the window -- declare that "This is freedom!".  The story goes on to explain, however, that Dickinson, a gardener as well as a poet, loved nature, "was always attached to mud," and wrote in another poem, "Some keep the sabbath going to church,/I keep it staying at home/with a bobolink for a chorister/and an orchard for a dome." 

So, the aesthetics of the blog pay homage to both the image of the window and the image of nature with the lush green leaves/bushes around the border that give way to an "outside window" that looks into the white open space where the text is written. 

Finally, even the One Republic music video for "Good Life" included in the first post coincidentally pays homage to poem #579's notion of "Open Windows," visually representing them with the transparent screens held by young people which show the band in an open field (nature) and lamenting in one verse, "Hopelessly, I feel like there might be something that I've missed/Hopelessly, I feel like the window closes up so quick... but declaring in another verse that "...When Everything is Out, You Gotta Take it In." 

...which is what I hope this blog helps me do during my time in England!

In with the New...

It all started with a new doctor (she's wonderful!)...then, a new mobile phone (with a purple cover and international calling capabilities)...and now -- VOILA -- here is my new blog!!

After this week, what's next?  Oh, right...I will be waking up in London a week from today :)
Just like One Republic's new song...

I'm so in with the New!!!