Oxford Adventures: Day Four.

This morning we slept in a bit and got breakfast at a little coffee shop on our way to St. Aldate's. I could just taste that the eggs on my breakfast baguette were free-range, even through the saltiness of the bacon. Oh British cooking.

This morning's meditation was led by a man named Gil Bailie, yet another aclaimed author and lecturer! I was surprised when he went up to speak - I had chatted with him at dinner sometime this week, not knowing who he was. I think it's pretty cool that such a brilliant philosphy lecturer could just chat it up with me about life and school.
His talk was really good - he talked about how God created us for communion and that has a biological dimension (human to human) and a "neurological" dimension: God created us to imitate Him.
Human nature is to imitate - despite what postmodern thinkers may like to believe, man will always be imitating. There's no such thing as "indiviuality". He elaborated on it very clearly and concisely... unfortunately I can't do the same, as it's 12:30 AM here.
His conclusion was that in order to attain true peace (goal of postmodernism) we have to imitate Christ.

The speaker at the first session was a real Oxford professor, Richard Swinburne. The man fit so well the typical image of an English professor, it was hilarious. He had the proper accent and everything! And he kept stopping and saying "Right!" So good.
But... his talk was uhm... well. My brain blew a few fuses. It was a philosophical rationalization of how Humans are Made of Two Parts: Body and Soul. Now... attempting to rationalize something that isn't rational is quite the feat... and have you ever read anything written by a philosopher? Long, run-on, confusing sentences.... That's how he spoke. Granted, there were many brilliant people in the crowd who understood and enjoyed his talk, but the majority of us artistic ones were completely and utterly without hope. I attempted to quote him in my notes: "If I were just a physical property, my mental survival would consist of several variables of physical parts, mental properties and pure mental events, which of course would all depend on other variables, including..." And then he lost me.

So yeah. I was mentally exhausted that, the longest 90 minutes of my life - so to my room I returned to sleep, which I happily did until after noon.

Our concluding film class was today. So sad. I enjoyed it thoroughly! Today we talked a lot about editing and frame sequence and stuff, but also about the industry, which was very interesting. We talked about independant films in relation to big budget and all the politics behind the corporation and what not. At break a lot of us talked which was nice - there's so many awesome people there! And at the end of the class we had a discussion about Heath Ledger, which started with some questions I asked Prof. Romanowski about the stats behind Brokeback Mountain's success and yeah. That led to me asking his opinion about his portrayal of the Joker and then we all started talking about our favourite films of his and making speculations about his death and stuff. It was interesting!

At dinner, I sat across from another student named Nelly, who I knew from earlier in the week, and an American professor of architechture named Marc. We talked for ages about all sorts of stuff, but eventually our discussion was focussed on demographic stuff - talking about the effect of big development in a downtown area (I had asked him about that huge building plan in downtown Hamilton) which led to us talking about street involved people and how it would affect them and yeah. It was so interesting!

After dinner I went for another photo-op stroll (I'll conclude the post with the evidence).

At the University Church they put on a music and poetry evening which was beautiful! Kate Butler (a famous mezzosoprano) sang some English poetry put to song, which was nice, but opera has never been my thing...
But! Dana Gioia, one of the speakers here and a poet, read some English poetry, but also a few of his own unpublished pieces, which were amaaaaazing. He is incredible, and when he does someday publish those poems, I will delight in buying them.
Paul Barnes played the piano again :) He played a beautiful Phillip Glass piece and a craaazy contemporary piece by Joan Tower (just another one if his Grammy winning friends) and he finished with Chanson d'Amour by Liszt... he had me in tears. He is a spectacular pianist, and I think he was made to play Liszt cause he did so immaculately.


Here are some of my photos from my stroll - these are all from Ship Street, probably my favourite of all the little side streets; it's very quiet and charming.









A door in the wall. A very beautiful and tiny door in the very ancient wall.














A view down the street.
Charming, n'est pas?
























Street corner [this is the corner of a couple small side streets - see how quiet they are? The main streets are just jam packed with pedestrians, but these little streets are just delightfully calm and quaint.]
















Ship Street's finest doorway, complete with a crooked awning and news on every event happening in town for the next year.













Unicorn, a most intriguing little shop! I have yet to go in there, but I'm planning on it tomorrow. Look at the trenchcoated man walking along. He sort of scared me.
















Look at all the stuff packed in there! It's all old, sort of antiquey/second handish I guess. I can't wait to check it out.
















That's all for today. Sorry for the brevity in postness - I was a little skimpy on the details. But I'm exhausted! So now I shall happily sleep.

Cheers!

-CH