Introduction

A problem I have with introductions to books is that these days most of them don’t include even one invitation to a massive battle royale. While such introductions can certainly be enjoyable (just look to the introduction to the Penguin edition to the Njal's Saga for such an example), they lack a certain something. They lack a literal call to arms. They are missing a request to come to 50° 44’ 4.66” north and 3° 31’ 34.73” south and have a fucking brawl, to be exact. So perhaps in reading this first paragraph, dear reader, you are worried that this will be of that type of introduction. Do not worry. It isn’t.

Now, I know there will be a lot of Anglo-Saxons reading this book wondering why a group of Kenyon students would be so bold as to make themselves an Exeter book when the original Exeter book is held in such high esteem, is kept in a special library, and is regarded as one of the most important pieces of literature in British history. Well, Anglo-Saxons, that’s because we in the 2017-2018 Kenyon Exeter program are tired of your condescending attitude, Anglo-Saxons, and we’re not going to let you go around thinking that you’re better than us just because you happen to have a dusty old book sitting around somewhere. How do you like that, Anglo-Saxons?

I hear you Anglo-Saxons like riddles. Here’s one: how many Kenyon Exeter students does it take to knock the block off of each and every Anglo-Saxon? Fifteen. Two to knock your collective block off (Lee and Claire) and thirteen to write crux busters analyzing the literary significance of the block-knocking.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s you I’m calling out, Anglo-Saxons. I’m inviting all of you Anglo-Saxons to put down your kennings and your line breakless poetry and come to 50° 44’ 4.66” north and 3° 31’ 34.73” to have a battle royale. No holds barred. And if you don’t come to us, we’ll go to you and beat you worse than William did at Hastings.

For those of you who aren’t Anglo-Saxons, please disregard the previous passages and just enjoy this book.

Sincerely,

- Daniel Olivieri

An Unfamiliar Home

About halfway to Exeter from my aunt’s farmhouse we turned onto a one-lane road with high roadside hedges. Near her place, these separate the road from pastures and create seams in the patchwork English countryside. Here, dips in the road and trees on either side meant we often dove into periods of near darkness when leafy branches met in the middle. One of these otherwise otherworldly moments was interrupted by a nondescript sign, and based on it we turned onto onto the grounds of Barrington Court.

The drive up took us through a grove of apple trees that we wandered through before entering a series of walled gardens and the mansion. Today this building stands nearly empty, aside from signs. These mark every new space and feature in these areas, describing their past and sometimes displaying pictures commissioned by Colonel Abram Arthur Lyle.

Barrington Court was built in the sixteenth century. Sometime in the next few centuries it fell into ruin and became the first house owned by the National Trust, but its upkeep was pricey and they leased it to Lyle. He’d salvaged ornate wood panels from a number of homes like this one, and hoped to restore the house to its former majesty with this collection. The cost of the restoration was astronomical, but from the shell of a house and more antique wood than a termite could dream of he created something beautiful. For a time it was his family’s country estate. They threw parties that drew every car in the region, and decorated the old kitchen with lion pelt carpets. In what was once a grand stable and is now a cafe they housed their many visitors.

The signs describe the twentieth century transformation, how a butter room became a small dining space or how Lyle’s children would ride bikes on the third floor after owls were evicted, but there was no mention of its original builders or any previous inhabitants (excluding the owls). While on Wikipedia later looking for some quick answers, I found that the estate had been first occupied in the eleventh century. The original builder, the Earl of Bridgewater, went bankrupt before construction could be finished, and left no children to carry on the project or his legacy. The estate passed through the hands of many on their way to ruin before eventual glory, glory of course referring to its stint as a film set for Wolf Hall.

My understanding of England is something like my understanding of a place like this informed mostly by cheerful signage. I know what it looked like in the past, filled with enormous dresses and firsthand experience of feudalism. The middle is shaky, and the end of the British empire doesn’t have an exact parallel with an old house becoming a farm and then a ruin. My knowledge of this country was established with bits and chunks of information from various sources, as Lyle built the walls of the manor. Most of all, it’s a romantic image and some general knowledge without personal experience. I owe much of my understanding from family, like my aunt who listened to the creak of the house as we walked through and discussed its present, future, and soul afterwards in the cafe.

When I decided to come to Kenyon, I was already hoping to go to Exeter. As much as I know about the literature and culture of England, I still need to wander around some old houses to center myself in this place that is an unfamiliar home.

by Isabella Blofeld

Genius Loci

When I was searching for colleges in highschool, I had two rules which guided my choice. The college I attended had to 1) not be in Ohio and 2) be in a city. Safe to say my rules fell to the wayside. As I reflected on my choice of Kenyon over the last two years, many of the reasons why I chose Kenyon can be seen in the way the college has branded itself. To quote the Kenyon website: “If we had to define Kenyon's genius loci - the spirit of the place - one thing we'd note is the way modern fits with traditional.” The notion of the “way modern fits with traditional” has a romantic allure to it, and in many ways, that allure is what brought me to Exeter as well. I’m captivated by the apparent tension between a place with an ancient cathedral surrounded by a modern shopping center, or a place with a modern university dividing sheep fields from the city. It’s incredibly easy to be drawn into the illusion of a place with “history,” but I think what makes England unique is the opportunity to unpack how a much longer path of history affects our day to day lives. Not only does the ancient history of Britain offer clues into how nationalism formed and morphed across the English speaking world, but also how modernity has been shaped and redirected by the English.

Maybe that’s all too academic for this assignment, but I think there’s a lot to unpack when we discuss matters like the “history” of a place. It’s easy to overlook Ohio’s 15,000 years of human history, and it’s easy to say “everything is so new back home,” but I keep finding myself come back to the question of why British history is worth investing my focus in. What assumptions do I bring to the table when I fetishize Stonehenge but forget Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound? Why do we choose to imbue Britain with a history of romance? How can we unpack the genius loci Americans have chosen to imbue the place with?

by Noah Dversdall

Long Before Mine

My adoration of the British isles began with a simple story read aloud to me by my father. Yes, like most millennial Americans, I grew up charmed by the magic of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books. From these stories, I developed an impression that England itself was a place seeped in magic.

Now, arriving in the English countryside more than a decade and half later, I still find myself preoccupied with wondrous and fantastical thoughts of England. Settling into Exeter, however, I find myself enchanted not just by prolonged childhood fantasies of English magic, but by the true magic of England: it’s history.

Here, in Exeter, thousands of years of history are carved into the pavement. A medieval cathedral towers above Topshop. Urban outfitters is tucked into a tudor building. The blend of modern and ancient brings a spirit to the city, to the Isles, that cannot be so easily found in the United States.

In Colorado, where I’m from, old means 1930s. Before that, we were a state of disposable mining towns and empty space. Coming to Exeter, I can feel myself connecting with our pre-modern texts far more easily than I could at home where the modernity of life is present in every thing I do. As I further my studies in English literature, I find myself struggling for perspective. Sure, I can read a text, but can I fully inhabit it across the world at a Starbucks in a complex built less than two years prior?

It’s not only pre-modern literature I find myself better able to grasp here in England. Over the summer, I revisited Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In the story, the characters note the modernity of their family house and how it sits out of place in the English countryside. This detail has often slipped my mind in prior readings, yet now, writing this at a cafe with a view of a cathedral built in the 1400s, I appreciate the importance of this temporal detail. In a place so rich with history that it can be seen in pavements and city streets, the modernity of the house underscores the recurring struggle each character faces to define themselves. Briony, Cecilia, Robbie are all characters who struggle with identity and in a country so drenched in and characterized by its history, the architecture of the house, its own lack of history or definition, serves to accent this struggle.

Though I am now settling into life at Exeter, I have yet to stop gawking every time I see the cathedral rise above high street or running my fingers along worn bricks, wondering how long they have been there. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling amazed by a place so saturated in history, in the proof of other lives and worlds that came long before mine.

by Hope Giometti

A Place for Exploring

All my life, I have lived in the Midwest. Cornfields as far as the eye can see, maybe some soy bean plants thrown in there as well. Rolling hills gently drifting off into the horizon, green grass swaying in the breeze, blue sky above. Hidden gems found in the state or regional parks: ravines carved through the hills by the rain, short bluffs overlooking lakes (which are, for the most part, brown).

Iowa is not a place where adventure stories are set.

Here, in Exeter, thousands of years of history are carved into the pavement. A medieval cathedral towers above Topshop. Urban outfitters is tucked into a tudor building. The blend of modern and ancient brings a spirit to the city, to the Isles, that cannot be so easily found in the United States.

Sure, parts of it way out in the boonies look a little like the Shire, but it’s not long at all before you once again come across the flat, lifeless, cultivated plains where the food for our cattle is grown. There is no history there. No mystery either. There are no hidden groves, no deep ancient forests to get lost in, no rivers, clear and blue, to dip your feet in and let yourself get whisked away by the current. Mostly we have damaged forests trying to survive on what was once farmland and brown rivers too mucked up with agricultural run off to do any sort babbling.

It’s not only pre-modern literature I find myself better able to grasp here in England. Over the summer, I revisited Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In the story, the characters note the modernity of their family house and how it sits out of place in the English countryside. This detail has often slipped my mind in prior readings, yet now, writing this at a cafe with a view of a cathedral built in the 1400s, I appreciate the importance of this temporal detail. In a place so rich with history that it can be seen in pavements and city streets, the modernity of the house underscores the recurring struggle each character faces to define themselves. Briony, Cecilia, Robbie are all characters who struggle with identity and in a country so drenched in and characterized by its history, the architecture of the house, its own lack of history or definition, serves to accent this struggle.

England, though, England is different. England has history. England has mystery. England has adventure - at least, in my head it does. To me, England is a place where great epics could be set. The hills here feel different than the hills at home. They look greener and softer, and less pounded into submission by farmers wanting to plant their crops. This feels like a place where one could stumble on a fairy ring deep within the forest or cross a creek into another land.

Today, I went exploring around campus. I jumped over a stone railing and into the wooded area and write away I found a tombstone from 1882 (not totally sure if it’s real or not), narrowing, winding paths through the trees, lots of thorns (it’s not a proper bushwhacking adventure if you don’t have to push through some thorns), and a tree that looks like an octopus, all in the space of a couple of minutes.

Iowa is a place that has gone stale to me. After living there for 20 years, it doesn’t feel like there is anything left to explore. England, on the other hand, is a whole new place to me with who knows how many hidden secrets and grottos waiting to be explored.

by Lee Hartley

Relationship to Place

When choosing where to attend college, place was not a factor I considered. Of course I wanted to know how far away from home I would be, but beyond that it didn’t matter. I didn’t think about what it would be like to study English in Ohio versus Boston. And even now, I don’t think it would have made too much of a difference to me. It wasn’t until I considered studying abroad that I began to wonder what it would be like to view literature from another nation’s perspective. One thing that stands out to me the most about the UK is the sheer amount of history contained within it. England is old. Like, old old. And they are conquerors, in the old sense of the word. In Exeter there is not only the history of English people in the land, but also the Romans.

A Dying Fall was interesting to read because while English can be studied most places in the world, archeology requires that land has a history. The theme of white nationalism in the novel also stood out to me. White nationalism theoretically requires a history, a culture to be proud of, usually Nordic. Yet, white nationalism is rampant in America today, where there is no great history of Nordic or Aryan people. I wonder how England’s history encourages white nationalism. One would expect that white nationalism and nazism would be more prevalent in European cultures where the myths of these people come from, but we are seeing it prominently in America today. I would be interested to think about white nationalism and its relationship to place.

by Madeline Hightower

An Outside Perspective

During one of the few short breaks I had during the chaotic bustle of Fresher’s Week, I logged onto Facebook and began poking around. This generally provides a mindless release from the stress of school, but to my surprise I found the layout of the page to be slightly different. The one aspect that I found particularly striking, albeit quite small, was the globe icon in the corner that notifies users of recent updates and events. The world icon in this case was turned several degrees, showing the globe that highlighted the U.K. and viewing the world from a British perspective. This small but noteworthy detail was yet another thing in the long stream of changes that forced me contemplate the nature of the year upon which we are embarking as a class; assimilating to a place different than our home in both subtle and significant ways.

At the time I had pulled up this page on my laptop, Annelise and I were sitting in The Grove Diner on campus, a pseudo-American diner that serves milkshakes, fries, burgers, and other traditional fare. The walls were scattered with old-timey posters and license plates, with the accent wall featuring two framed black and white photos depicting the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State building. The diner was playing their idea of stereotypical American pop music, most of which is rarely listened to on a daily basis (although we were amused to hear a song or two by Walk the Moon). It was fascinating to see how this establishment embodied the British idea of American stereotypes, while we are spending our time in England challenging our notions of British stereotypes.

Throughout this year, I will learn to look at the world from a perspective other than the fairly ethnocentric American view. My focus will be shifted from examining other countries from an American context to seeing these locales from a more global and integrated perspective. Instead of examining “other,” I have become the “other.” This gives me an advantage to view British customs through a critical lens, but also presents challenges in regards to having limited understanding of how to assimilate to these norms.

In addition to examining my surroundings through a more critical lens than UK natives, I am excited to see what opportunities this year will bring me in regards to Exeter as a city surrounded by country villages. I have traveled frequently but have spent the majority of my time in major cities, if not capitals (fun fact: I’ve been to nine world capitals). The University of Exeter is the combination of a small city that is surrounded by small villages we will be visiting. As a resident of a small Pennsylvania town and rural Gambier, Ohio, I have never lived in a city. Even as a small city, Exeter will be the largest town I’ve ever been a resident of. The fact that I will be within walking distance of an actual shopping street will be a welcome change. Having numerous available cuisines nearby will be incredible, as will having tourist attractions other than the local tattoo studio and witch stores (New Hope, Pennsylvania is a strange place). I’ve been looking forward to the opportunity to make a city my home as it will force me to grow up. Living in Exeter is a first taste of living in a city after graduation - cooking for myself, residing in an apartment, growing up in a way that Kenyon does not allow.

Another reason I chose this program is because it allows me to travel around England and explore the countryside. Living in Devon, albeit in a city, allows for the opportunity to explore English villages. Throughout all my travels, I have rarely spent time in the more rural areas of a country. The focus of this trip will not be solely on the landmark-crammed capital, but on the smaller, historic villages we will visit during our travels. I believe that seeing these smaller towns will be helpful in understanding and examining British culture, as they represents pockets of English history that cannot always be seen in the more cosmopolitan cities we will be visiting. Overall, the combination of Exeter as a city surrounded by country towns provides a unique opportunity for me to examine a country in a way I am not accustomed to, which will help me study the cultural norms of England from an outside perspective.

by Xan Kanovsky

The Underlying Spirit of the Country

I’ve been fascinated with British pop culture for most of my life. As a young child, I considered England a distant, mystical place where my most beloved books, songs, and TV shows originated. It was a country that produced stories like Harry Potter and A Tale of Two Cities, witty television like Doctor Who and Sherlock, bands like The Beatles and authors like Neil Gaiman, and so it seemed to me that Britain was culturally richer and more “sophisticated” than my home country. I didn’t know much about the United Kingdom at the time, but in my bookish, childish heart, I grew to love the sound of the British accent on Daniel Radcliffe’s lips and the spelling of words like “colour” and “humour” in the pages of my books. A country that added extra letters and drove on the wrong side of the road had to be so much more interesting than my own! I loved Britain simply because it was different than America, and yet similar enough to America that I could still feel at home there. I was convinced — as a little girl that loved hot tea on cold, rainy days — that I was born in the wrong place.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve retained my love of British literature and pop culture, but I’m mature enough now to know that England won’t exactly live up to my romanticized ideal — an ideal I’ve constructed from books and movies and other fragments of British culture — but I’m hopeful that exploring the country in the flesh, warming myself in its pubs and conversing with its people and discovering its historical monuments, will reveal the real thing to be more nuanced, layered, and beautiful than my childhood self could ever have imagined. I am studying abroad here because I don’t want England to be distant and mystical anymore. I want to learn the underlying spirit of the country, a Britain that is perhaps more raw and genuine than the Britain that is televised, marketed, bought and sold in stores on a Union Jack t-shirt.

by Natalie Keller

A Different Version of Ourselves

The British Isles don’t enchant me the way that Jerusalem and Ethiopia enchanted the minds of medievals. Britain draws me in as a geography that wears its history into the present. City walls form anthropological sedimentary layers: Roman bricks at the bottom, followed by ruddy Norman sandstone, Tudor masonry, and so on.

As with many old cultures, the British are born into an evolving edifice whose tangled branches lose their given meanings, but gain new functions as life carries on.

One physical edifice: in Cardiff, a Roman ruin is rebuilt as a Norman castle, converted into a pleasure palace in the 18th century, and then re-fitted as a bomb shelter in World War II.

And one cultural edifice: the pagan legend Beowulf is sublated into Christian literature, going from Nordic strong-man to saintly champion of God.

Such fundamental changes in British structures demonstrate the self-transformative power of the life at work in Britain. Reason does not dictate such changes: the force of being does.

In Britain, structures come first. Streets are not built to encourage consumption; public spaces are indelibly hewn into the landscape. The past at work in the living British architecture is resilient in the face of the present, even as the implementation of those structures transforms.

And though I am separated from the stories of this past, Britain is still the home of my history as an English speaker. It is the cradle not only of my language, stories, myths, and idioms. You can better understand where you are going if you know how you arrived at where you are. Yet the inferential lens of history is joined with the spatial dimension of the present when we explore a space like Britain or Exeter. Just as we have changed after leaving our homeland—our culture, language, customs—our homeland continues to change. In this sense, Britain is not only our progenitor, but also our sibling from who we can learn.

While the future may be a foreign country, we in the present are immigrants. When we return to the old country, we do not always recognize it as our own. We see parts of ourselves that could have changed in ways that we did not. We find that some of our words have fallen out of use, and that new ones have sprung into existence. We see a different version of ourselves, we and wonder if there can ever be such a thing as a return.

In Britain, structures come first. Streets are not built to encourage consumption; public spaces are indelibly hewn into the landscape. The past at work in the living British architecture is resilient in the face of the present, even as the implementation of those structures transforms.

by Armaan Maharaj

Found Your Place

I have spent the majority of my life questioning my place: my place in a social group, my place in school, and as a Pakistani American, my place in America. I have always somewhat felt out of place. I never felt the smartest, the prettiest, the most “in place.” To this day, I find myself questioning what it means to be as such. Oddly enough, I feel most in place when I am nearly invisible--foreign places, traveling, big cities, being in an entirely new environment. That is why, right now, as I am sitting in a new dorm after moving to a new country, sitting around new people with new accents, I feel oddly in place.

I feel place will be relatively different to everyone who inhabits it--what someone internalizes and how they perceive the place around them will, in turn, affect their perception on the space they are inhabiting. For instance, I honestly did not have the best time at Kenyon. I have memories that have tainted my experience at Kenyon, and therefore, I constantly feel misplaced. While I know a lot of my friends could not have found a better fit than Kenyon, I have been wanting a change in scenery for a while.

I studied Shakespeare in England in tenth grade, and ever since, I’ve always dreamt of studying in England again. There is something about the proximity to different cultures here that makes me feel more at home than in America, where culture is often very segregated. At Kenyon, the isolation of the campus, combined with it being surrounded by very conservative areas, I felt like I could never escape to a place where I could look like I belong; whereas, if I walk around the streets of Exeter or London, I see many different types of people, adorning different religious headdresses, all of different skin colors, and none of them look out of place. While racial tensions might be high in England as well, I feel as though people of different races here walk around with an air of belonging. In America, a point has always been made to tell me I don’t really belong.

With all the adventure and history and epics that have been set in England, I feel like there is enough newness to make little me seem invisible: a place in which I feel comfortable in. This is the first time in my 20 years of life that I have felt in place. I’m excited to see what life can bring when you have found your place.

by Hinnah Mian

Not So Quaintly Historical

California is state saturated by newness—our economy thrives on the creation of the newest gadgets, software, movies, and music. Our Missions, considered by many a fourth grade student to be the oldest and “most historical” sites in the state, are predated by many of the beer varieties available on British shelves. Even our mountains are new: a paltry 40 million years old compared to the Appalachian range, which is vastly older at 400 million. The systematic seizure of American Indian lands by the Missions combined with the disease epidemics that swept through the state after Spanish (and later American) occupation insured that by the end of the 19th century, fewer than 15,000 American Indians were left in the state. This means that what little ancient material heritage we have passed down to us—villages, petroglyphs, and cave art—are seen as entirely separate from our historic and cultural landscape.

Aside from the relocated and significantly refurbished pioneer fort which every Sacramentan is expected to visit in elementary school, it’s difficult for many Californians to not feel largely divorced from their own material pasts. The concept of drinking under the eaves of a 1000 year old cathedral as a teenager is something not uncommon to Exeter teens (so I’ve heard), but a night of carousing near an Indian heritage site is an easy way to wind up in a park ranger’s jail cell. I think this difference in historical upbringing prepared me to be excited to be in a place “with history.” I wanted to travel and see all these places I perceived to be much older than my own country and forge a relationship to the past that I was denied at home. Yet I have to wonder if the fetishization of the historical is not missing the forest for a few particularly old trees. As a person who loves history and old literature, there is undeniable magic in getting to see places I’ve read about come to life. But the more time I spend here, the more I’m confronted with the fact that the true challenge of studying a place and its history isn’t just paying attention to what went on 800 years ago, it’s examining how those events echo to the present and continue to create a living, breathing historical landscape. This is an aspect of British culture I feel is often ignored by students going abroad, who often mistake well preserved history for an uncomplicated, quaintly historical country.

by Grant Miner

This Essay is Not About Kenyon

I visited 19 colleges before I chose Kenyon, but considered exactly zero other study abroad programs before choosing Exeter. I say this not as an example of how unprepared I was to enter Exeter University, but to illustrate how unprepared I was to enter Kenyon College. By the time you go on 19 college tours across 6 states and have held your 12th session with you College Admissions Advisor, you think you have found the perfect school.

But, this essay isn’t about Kenyon, so I’m going to gloss over the six weeks of calling my mom crying every day and forgetting to eat and going to the counseling center and googling how to transfer and sleeping all day. The point is this: I thought I was prepared; I wasn’t. I thought I was just going to step right into a photograph in the Kenyon brochures with a laughing group of friends sitting under the golden autumn leaves.

And although I thought I would never find my place; I eventually did. So, after going through the most devastating and at times humiliating 6 weeks of my life, why did I choose to potentially do it all again?

What I find so fascinating is the fact that the reason I feel out of place right now is not because I am in a different country but because I am realizing how much my mindset has changed in the past two years. I have finally learned to accept three truths that I hold: One is that not everything can be perfect all the time. Two is that sometimes I need to act a little bit weird to make things as perfect as possible, and that’s okay. And three is that even when things suck, they tend to work out eventually.

These truths are very new to me, and they are still trying to find a place in my life, but I’m learning to get over myself and reposition my place away from the center of the universe. The world will not end because something bad happens to me.

I learned in a DVD commentary somewhere that the London skyline in the opening of Mary Poppins was created with paint on plexiglass. It exemplifies the famous London fog and foreshadows the characters’ journeys into chalk drawings that take place later in the film.

As I walked along the streets of Exeter in a jet-lag daze, I admired the greenery of the scenery and the mountains in the distance. Mary Poppins was one of my favorite films growing up, so I felt comforted by what I saw before me; but in many ways, I felt as if I had just stepped in to one of Burt’s drawings. It was a world like my own, but everything was different enough to point to the fact that I didn’t exactly belong here.

Standing still, I look like I fit into the image presented, but my voice gives me away. The streets look enough like Boston, but the signs are white instead of green and cars come whipping past on the wrong side of the road. Something is off with the painting. Some of the styles don’t match. I may not be coming from a stock photo, but I have not quite melted into the oil painting.

Still the strangest thing is that I am okay with the fact that I am out of place in this new environment. Sometimes I still feel out of place in my new universal position, and thrusting myself into a new physical environment certainly challenges me to grow and learn as a person.

by Devon Musgrave-Johnson

Phenomenal and Disturbing

In the process of selecting Kenyon as my place for undergraduate study, I visited four times and stayed overnight twice. I was fortunate enough to have a close friend attending Kenyon while I was a prospective student who let me sleep in her dorm and sit in on a few of her classes. I ate at Peirce, walked the campus, spoke with current students, and occupied space in the school as if I were attending— in short, I had the privilege to be able to become quite familiar with Kenyon as a place before I began attending it as an enrolled student. This is obviously incredibly different from accepting a year-long enrollment at Exeter while having only been able to tour its rooms and campus through a screen. However, even though I’ve only sifted through a pixelated version of the university, it does, in many ways, feel to me as though I am becoming a freshman again, just as I was at Kenyon in 2015.

Entering into this unfamiliar space is daunting and exhilarating in ways which I hope can be funneled into renewing interests and growing determination. In choosing Exeter, I knew I was consciously choosing to embrace some element of the unknown, and in that way, I was opting into a breed of “placelessness,” accepting an unfamiliarity that I did not have nearly as much of when entering Kenyon.

Though a lot less is certain about Exeter, a lot more is able to fit into possible desire and hope surrounding the year. I’ve been to England once before to visit an uncle and enjoyed the time there and the intimacy of certain spaces (his small apartment, tiny and individually owned grocery stores, etc.), the engagement with history and the longevity of certain landmarks and buildings, and the accessibility of public transport. One striking realization I experienced in person there (which I believe may be relevant to our upcoming discussion of white nationalism) was felt upon my entrance to the British Museum of Art. The museum is large and well-stocked with what is primarily not native-British art. Greek pottery, Easter Island heads, and many other arguably stolen artifacts are on display, gesturing back to England’s history as a colonial and appropriating nation. While it was incredibly fascinating to be able to see so much of the world in one building, it’s clear that the history of white nationalism in England’s own culture and practices fueled its ability to obtain much of its wealth, status, and art.

With this past experience in mind, and given the fact that selecting Exeter involves a willingness to enter into an institution that has benefited from this culture and exists inside this culture, and given the fact that I am entering into Exeter with less understanding of it as a physical space than I had of Kenyon, I largely chose Exeter and England because I knew they were both rich in opportunity and intensely complicated and problematic spaces. This is not to say Kenyon nor America is less problematic (they aren’t) or that the United States in some way possesses a more forgivable empirical past (it doesn’t) rather, it’s simply that I want to acknowledge that England and Exeter are not unproblematic places and that by selecting them, I am hoping to engage with what is both phenomenal and disturbing, what history is both enriching and damaging, and what is being done and written in these places to both move it forward and root it in the past.

by Claire Oleson

Everything I Know About England (Abridged)

Somewhere in the filing cabinets of my mind, I have a thick folder labelled England. It contains rough sketches of the geography, a list of English people, a long section on Robin Hood, a strong recommendation for the London restaurant Thaitanic and hundreds of other miscellany. I began creating this file long before I knew what I was talking about. For example, when I was seven I wasn’t quite sure on the difference between London and England. I had a sneaking suspicion, however, that England was a prominent city in the great nation of London. A cartographer I was not. Since then, my dossier on Great Britain has expanded. I hope it’s at least a bit more accurate now.

History

King Rollo and the Vacuum Cleaner

Visiting the tower of London with my cousins a few years ago, I saw a little red vacuum cleaner with a face on it. It had big eyes and a suction hose for a nose. As adorable as the vacuum cleaner looked, I was surprised to see such a modern invention sitting in such a Medieval place. I guess even castles need to be vacuumed now and again.

A year or two later I deduced that I would never have seen that adorable vacuum cleaner if the viking king Rollo hadn’t built a wall out of cow corpses in the year 911. I know that’s a big mental jump to make, but bear with me. I think it makes sense once we connect the historical dots. Also, feel free to skip this part if you don’t feel like being grossed out.

In 911, Rollo and his viking army were being chased by a garrison of Frankish soldiers. With the ingenuity and brutality the vikings were known for, Rollo ordered all nearby cattle to be slaughtered and piled into a makeshift wall. When the Frankish army tried to attack, their horses refused to charge. The stench of the dead cows was too much for them. Due largely to this grisly tactic, the vikings managed to fight the Franks to a standstill. After the battle, the Frankish king Charles the Simple made Rollo a continent-shaping offer. If Rollo would convert to Christianity and stop raiding Frankish territory, Charles would make him a duke. Rollo accepted. The duchy of Normandy had begun (The name “Normandy” meant “land of the northmen”).

Rollo was, if I counted right, the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. If Rollo hadn’t accepted the role of duke, William would likely never been able to conquer England. If William had never conquered England, he never would have built the tower of London. If it weren’t for the tower of London, I would never have gotten to see that cute vacuum cleaner.

I think this spurious little connection between myself and Rollo highlights a reason I like historical places in general and England in particular. They place me into the long chain of history. They allow me to feel that I’m part of a chain of causes and effects that began with people in chainmail and has carried on to me right now, in my t-shirt and converse sneakers.

Music

Los Campesinos

Much of how I imagine England’s current youthful generation comes from the band Los Campesinos!. Their lyrics paint the UK as a place full of concerts, fun, and doomed romance. Better yet, the frequent allusions to history and literature suggest that this is a place where people constantly go out to get drunk, but also know who Samuel Beckett was. We can see all of this in the outro of “You! Me! Dancing!” where the speaker describes going home from a night at a disco,

“And I always get confused, because in supermarkets they turn the lights off when they want you to leave, but in discos they turn them on. And it's always sad to go, but it's never that sad, Because there's only so many places you're guaranteed of getting a hug when you leave. And then on the way home, it always seems like a good idea to go paddling in the fountain, and that's because it IS a good idea. And we’re just like how Rousseau depicts man in the state of nature: we're undeveloped, we're ignorant, we're stupid, but we're happy.”

While I doubt I’ll have too many moments that could match those in Los Campesinos songs, being in a British city gives me the chance to become a part, at least temporarily, of the youth in the UK. So far, I’ve found that young people in the UK are a bit more understated and self-deprecating than Americans.

Writers

Neil Gaiman

For a Briton, he wrote an awfully good book about America. Following the tried and true Tocqueville method, he took a tour through the US in order to get material for a book. His novel American Gods is one of my favorites. It’s what the Percy Jackson series would be if Percy Jackson were a six foot tall ex-convict who interacted with all sorts of gods rather than just Greco-Roman ones. For me, Neil Gaiman’s writing displays the epitome of British wit. Something about his humor feels quintessentially British. For example, in Stardust one chapter is titled, “In Which we Meet New Characters, Many of them Alive.” Coming to Britain, I’d hoped that just about everyone would know and appreciate him. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve found a single British person who reads Neil Gaiman.

by Daniel Olivieri

(Accidentally) Partying in the U.K.: Thoughts on Place

Within the first few days of my stay at Exeter, I have already noticed the different cultural dissonances between different spaces on Exeter’s campus. My flat in the university’s designated quiet building is full of sociable people who take no interest in party culture. Students in flats near me, however, love to go clubbing. This distinction isn’t particularly regional, as the same nightlife divides exist at Kenyon, along with all other American universities. However, there are some intriguing unspoken social rules in Exeter’s many social spaces, and in clubs in particular, that pertain to place.

Xan and I accidentally accompanied English Society to a popular club during Fresher’s Week because I misunderstood the definition of a “walking bus.” When we arrived for what we thought would be a pub-like atmosphere, we saw the very crowded Unit 1, a popular club downtown. The thirty people with whom we walked in the previously mentioned (and misunderstood) walking bus immediately dispersed, leaving us two Americans to fend for ourselves in a crowd of unfamiliar, drunken Brits. Caught of guard, and quite honestly, too sober to look at ease, we walked around trying to find fellow Fresher’s from the English Society who also sought a few more friends. We approached a few small groups from the social and tried to strike some small sense of comradery, but no one was remotely interested in mingling. Clearly, our experience with American party culture--where people meet, chat, and dance all night despite not knowing each other--was unwelcome. This awkward experience was the result of what I did not know about British nightlife: partying here means going to a club with a specific group of friends and sticking with them. Partying is not for socialization; rather, it is for getting drinks and lightly bobbing one’s head for three or four hours.

I spent the next morning asking my British flatmates about how young people make friends in the U.K., because although I found it easy to get along with my flatmates, I was finding it difficult to connect with people in other spaces. They confirmed that young people here will not go out of their way to make others comfortable; people stick to what they know. This sentiment is worrisome when it comes to making friends, but it harbors important notions about place that we will study academically and experience socially throughout the year. Kenyon continues to teach me (even at Exeter) that all knowledge is relative, and this relativity is partially the result of place. The British youth understands what the wear, how to act, and how to dance at a British party, and because these norms are relative, an American will feel out of place.

Although these observations aren’t new and the environment in which they were conceived is decidedly not academic, I find that inserting myself into a new environment means developing a dual perspective. I arrive at Exeter with some serious American baggage such as my approach to meeting new people; clearly the toothy-smiled, over-the-top American welcome is very region specific, especially in specific places like clubs. Ultimately, these cultural dissonances trickles down to much more unimportant but curious phenomena, such as a more relaxed view on sweatpants and a love for peanut butter. As a foreigner, I can explicate a space (such as a club) and extrapolate what that space tells me about a larger place, such as Devon or England. Every fish-out-of-water experience is a starting point for a small sociological exercise of how and why American and British culture diverge, and how the factor of place affects this divergence.

by Annelise Royles

Frog Shamming and Hello Kitty

My high school English teacher had two spoken rules and one unspoken one. Her first rule was that Margaret Thatcher’s name should never be uttered aloud. She explained to us that “Mad Maggie” was the reason she had fled England to come to Strasbourg and that she was essentially in state of exile. Her second spoken rule was there was to be no French in the classroom and although this seemed reasonable to us at first, we quickly realized that the ban on French came with another unspoken rule, which we called the rule of “Frog shamming.” Whenever someone made a grammatical mistake or if a student was whispering to their neighbor, our teacher would say something along the line of, “That was a Frog mistake sweetie” “None of that Frog language please!” “You’re going Frog on me”

The “Frog shamming” didn’t bother us much as most of us weren’t even French and had very little idea where this word was coming from but when thinking about my baggage and relationship to the British Ilse as a place, I think it should start with this English teacher and her unspoken rule. During my three years under her we studied post-colonial literature such as Mr. Pip, A Passage to India, Selected Poems by Derek Walcott, and for better or for worse we approached these works through our teacher’s personal lens, a lens of someone who was deeply proud to be British and had an intense relationship to the literature but who also felt betrayed by it and seemed unable to find a middle ground. The Frog shamming was an extension of that insecurity, so my first real exposure to British literature, British education and the British mindset was greatly influenced by her own mix of expatriate fever and internal anger. This was an especially interesting dynamic since we were dealing with post-colonial and in the texts, themselves the authors and poets are constantly grappling with this notion of shame towards British culture but love of the English language and recognition that two contrary selves can exist in a single person. My high school baggage however, didn’t end there as we had not one but two different literature teachers.

My other English teacher was the polar-opposite. She was Canadian and proud to be it. Her only rule was that no one should poke fun at Hello Kitty. She loved Nine Inch nails, had an on and off boyfriend who we constantly heard stories about, and had a small stuffed unicorn in the back of the classroom who she used to act out all the Shakespeare scenes that we were reading. In her class, The Homecoming, King Lear, and The Rape of the Lock where given larger than life status and felt very far away. In the same way that we inherited baggage from our Frog shamming teacher we also found ourselves with a small carryon after these classes as there was a sense that for her Shakespeare and Alexander Pope where mythical figures that didn’t really have any grounding in our everyday. On the one hand, it was frustrating to feel so apart from the stories but it also gave us a perspective from the outside and made the texts feel less suffocating as it did with our Frog shamming teacher.

Therefore, coming here to Exeter, I might have arrived without bedding but as far as baggage it does seem that I have arrived with very mixed relationship to British literature and part of the reason I chose this program was to find out for myself where I really stood in terms of what I had read and learnt in class. I expect the answer is something that I probably didn’t even think about and I am excited and anxious for it all to play out.

by Henri Seguin