Fool's Errand

This is where I live, more or less. Park Village consists of a number of these adjoining brick blocks. Not exactly friendly architecture, but when you get them at the right angle, and when the sun happens to be out, as it was this morning, they look pretty homey.

So! First class meeting yesterday. We have a whopping seven students, of which four of us represent four different UC campuses: Irvine, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Berkley. The other three are from Washington University in St. Louis, MO and SUNY Binghamton. How do I know this? Tutor Therie Hendrey-Seabrook had us play a little icebreaker "game." It was "heaps" of fun. You should try it at your next party or get-together.

It works like this. Everyone sits in a circle, right, and the first person gives some personal information, such as name, educational background, and an interest, and then the next person does the same thing but also rattles off the first person's information! Oh, the fun we had! What a British "game." I'm sorry, but that's the dullest icebreaker I've played, and let me tell you I've played a few. Don't get me wrong, I really like Therie, but this is the same kind of thinking that calls a TV show about building wacky machines out of junk and spare parts "Scrapheap Challenge." You may know this show as "Junkyard Wars," the title it acquired upon hitting U.S. shores. It's rare that I'll tout something American over something British, especially where TV is concerned, so mark the date.

(For the record, the girl from UC Riverside cheated by writing down everyone's details. Draw what conclusions you will from that.)

At any rate, the class is called "Victorians and Visual Culture," and the reading list includes Peter Pan, Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Henry James' What Maisie Knew, and many, many more. I just want to emphasize that this is for a four-week class, and Our Mutual Friend alone is nearly 800 pages of small print (my edition is, anyway, but more on that later). The coursework consists of two papers and a 10-minute presentation, for which I feel more than adequately prepared by my experiences at UCI so far (and I'm not just saying that because one or two UCI professors may be reading this). It all looks very interesting, but I will be (and have been) spending most of my waking hours reading as much as possible.

Oh, also, the bookstore doesn't necessarily carry the books we'll need. That's just a given, apparently. It's SOP to run out into town and look for books on your own, I guess, because Therie didn't seem perturbed by it in the least. Compare that to UCI, where if a book isn't in the bookstore on the first day of classes the professor apologizes profusely to the class for the delay.

Anyway, she gave a little lecture on Queen Victoria and the "long" 19th century, a term with which I wasn't previously familiar, and then it was back out into the rain. I was pretty preoccupied with getting home and getting back to my reading, just because there's so much of it to do, and thanks to my propensity for staying up too late and the fact that I still haven't completely adjusted to the time difference, I slept and woke at odd times.

Today, then, was all about getting some books on the cheap, if I could. I located a handful of bookstores in Brighton (besides Borders and WH Smith's), hopped on the 25, and was off. I shouldn't say "hopped," really. It's a 10 or 15 minute walk to the bus stop; it's not like it's just down the block or something. But that's neither here nor there. Literally!

It's about 30 minutes to the city center, and on the way we pass a couple spots where I wish we could stop long enough for me to get some pictures. One of them is Brighton University, with whom I can only assume we are bitter rivals. Their signage, unfortunately, includes a lot of white space, which made it all too easy for someone to write "is gay" beneath "Brighton University." Surely this was accomplished by someone from Sussex U. Go Badgers! Also, we pass a genuine gypsy encampment: a semicircle of trailers and RVs in an open field beside the road. Well... "travellers," I should say, not gypsies. That's the correct term, as far as I can tell. The travellers are a serious concern for many Brits, at least according to the TV, and I can understand why. I don't think I'd want a half-dozen trailers appearing overnight in my backyard, either. Of course, we've dealt with this problem in advance in Irvine by nearly abolishing open fields altogether, and those who have backyards barely have room for a hibachi, let alone a gaggle of roving squatters. Hopefully I can get a picture of the travellers at some point, because I have a great Borat reference to make. I can hardly wait! You're going to love it! Stay tuned!

But I digress. Having already been lost once in Brighton, I arrived in the city center with a something approaching a sense of direction. I got off at the Old Steine, a large square with a fountain, a park, and a bunch of people relaxing in the middle of a Tuesday. I don't know if it's "Old Steine" or "the Old Steine," but throwing a "the" in there gives it some Old World charm.

It's also right next to the sprawling Royal Pavilion, which comprises a museum, a theatre, and... well, I'm sure there's a lot more, because it basically takes up an entire city block. It's all under some serious renovation. Apparently it just sat around rotting for a hundred years until 1982, when someone had the bright idea to fix it up. As I recall, 1982 was also around the height of Bob Vila's popularity, which I think is no coincidence.

The theater is called the Brighton Dome, although I can't see anything particularly dome-y about it. Maybe it's a metaphor. There are really quite a few theatres around here. It's like how Westwood is with movies. If you don't know Westwood, then... I dunno... guess.

The big event at the Dome right now is "Jerry Springer: The Opera." I don't know why, but Jerry Springer seems to be of particular interest here. When they gave us advice in one of our EAP orientations on how to answer the question "Are all Americans like the ones on Jerry Springer?" I didn't take them seriously (my short answer: "Yes"), but I can see now why they covered it. It opened in London a few years ago and played to nearly half a million people. The BBC even broadcast it last year and drew close to two million viewers (and almost a thousand complaints). I haven't the heart to tell people here that I and everyone I know avoid Springer like the plague, especially after that one episode where the guy's mother was sleeping with his stepson, and then it turns out she was also sleeping with his wife, who was the stepson's sister-- you saw that one, right? After that, I stopped TiVoing it.

The Dome and the Pavilion proper (which houses the museum and event facilities) make kind of an "L" shape, and nestled inside is another huge park, once again full of people who must be on the dole. Seriously, it's a Tuesday afternoon. Quick history lesson: The Royal Pavilion was built by George IV after he visited Brighton to "take the waters." At some point in the 18th century, qualified scientitians discovered that drinking sea water was good for you. With their limited understanding of science, however, they didn't know why it was good for you. Today, of course, with our modern advances in physiology and anatomy, we know that salt water aids in digestion because it is poisonous to the evil trolls that live in your stomach.

I went wandering through the Lanes after that, looking for the bookstores I'd Googled earlier. The Lanes are a series of tangled, narrow streets barely wide enough for four people to walk abreast, let alone for a car to fit through (i.e., they're like most of the other streets), lined with shops and restaurants, all of them packed to the gills. Brighton's kind of a funky town, somewhat reminiscent of Vancouver in that there are some rather upscale areas right next to "alternahoods" where shoes are hung from wires overhead for no apparent reason.

By sheer coincidence, I ran across a Games Workshop. If you're a geek in England, you have to go to a GW at least once. 40K is the football of British geeks. Later, by even sheerer coincidence, I found a really good comic store. Seriously! It was just called Dave's Books on the Web. I had no idea it'd be a comic store. I went into a few other second-hand bookstores too, convinced that I'd find what I was looking for without trouble. What self-respecting bookstore in England wouldn't have a ton of Dickens? Or Conan Doyle? Or Henry James? Answer: all of them. I wandered around like this for quite a while until, frustrated, I resigned myself to looking for my books at the bookstore on campus or at a chain store.

By this time I'd started panicking about wasted time, so I tried combining sightseeing with schoolwork and walked back to the Brighton Pier. I figured it'd be a good place to read.

I was immediately distracted, however, by the pier itself, starting with these "American style" donuts (you can sort of see one of the donut stalls on the right-hand side of the picture above). First "American style" peanut butter, and now this. It can't be higher sugar content. Donuts are inherently high in sugar, no matter the nationality. So what's the difference? Maybe other donuts give aid and comfort to our enemies.

Like most coastal cities, Brighton offers a lot of seafood, frequently in the form of fish and chips. Unlike fish and chips in the States, here you routinely have a choice of what kind of fish you want: cod, halibut, etc. I was getting pretty hungry by this point, but I wanted to save my money for the market and get some real food instead of blowing £4 on a single meal. Besides, I wasn't hungry for long.

The pier has a couple of arcades, a skating rink, and the usual carnival accoutrements, like a "fun" house, unwinnable games, and some rides. All the rides looked pretty lame and tame, but I think I've been spoiled by the likes of Magic Mountain and Disneyland (and hell, even Knott's) so don't take that assessment too seriously. One of the rides was playing dance versions of '80s Brit Pop though, which was a mitigating factor. Riding a dinky roller coaster on the edge of a wooden pier is one thing, but combined with a Pet Shop Boys remix? That's a kind of twisted poetry.

One thing I found kind of funny was a string of three food stalls, one selling fish and chips staffed by two white British guys, the next selling Chinese food staffed by two Asian guys, and the third selling Indian food staffed by two Indian girls. Wow, it must be authentic British/Asian/Indian food if they hired authentic Brits/Asians/Indians to sell it! That was far from the weirdest thing on the pier, though.

After some walking around I settled into a deck chair to read Peter Pan. The sun was out, but it couldn't have been more than 60 with the wind. Still, it was a nice view. A little like Huntington Beach, actually, with its broad beaches and waterfront properties.

While I was reading, a whole troop of public school kids came trotting by in handheld clumps. A few of them were very interested in a guy on a Sea-Doo who was zipping around in the water below, and they ran from one side of the pier to the other to track his movements. "Oh, he's just playing about," said one little girl, apparently disappointed. I don't know what else she thought he'd be doing, but it was all cute anyway. They even waved to the guy. Some other kids came by and one of them read the cover of my book aloud: "Peter... Pan." It must have been a mystery to her why an adult was sitting on the pier reading a kid's book. They were all dressed in traditional British public school uniforms. I love it when harmless stereotypes turn out to be accurate.

Soon it got so chilly out there that seaside reading was no longer pleasant, so I packed it in and went back to the Old Steine to catch a bus to Churchill Square, a big mall. I'm willing to admit that maybe WH Smith's wasn't the best bookstore to go to, since they devote more shelf space to magazines, DVDs, CDs, software, greeting cards, and candy than to their books, but I still expected them to come through on the Dickens and Conan Doyle. They had one end unit display labeled "Classics" that had about six short shelves of books, and that was it. Everything else was Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Nick Hornby. The only one of my list of books they had was Our Mutual Friend, so I snapped that up, but I'm disappointed in the lack of variety. Grr. I guess I'll try Borders later in the week. Buying it new also meant that it cost more than I'd anticipated, which meant that stopping at the Sainbury's on the way home wouldn't have been as effective as it should've been, so I skipped it and went straight back to US instead. I can get to Sainsbury's or Asda later.

So it was back here for more reading. I don't meant to complain about reading Peter Pan, but the threat of Our Mutual Friend looms ominously on the horizon. The next time you're in a bookstore, find a copy and you'll see what I mean. I have the Penguin edition. You could knock a guy unconscious with it.