Day 24, 31 Jan: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Whiteboards

Norfolk Terrace, Day 24. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Whiteboards

By the title of this entry, you may be inclined to think the two things related, namely HP and this whiteboard vault; unfortunately, that is not the case. And to be even more complex, the whiteboards come first, then Harry Potter. This prologue being finished, let me begin.

            The day started off as nothing remarkable. I was quite proud of myself for a consistently faster time for each of my three circuits around the 2-km lake [8:30, 7:05, 6:38—don’t think min/mile time, think min/(mile + .24 mile) time]. Morning runs continue to be successful.

            The 19^th Century Writing lecture blew me away—Robert Clark is an incredible lecturer. Even his white hair has attitude. I sat pretty close to the front, and apparently, as I found out later tonight, I was taken notice of (for laughing at Clark’s jokes and commentary) by this girl—shit, names are not my strongpoint; just know that she was wearing a Fawkes the Phoenix costume at Harry Potter later today and so for the purposes of this entry, she shall hereby be called “Phoenix girl”—and she agreed with me that Clark was quite the guy. She, Phoenix girl that is, is actually an employee for Clark, assisting with his ambitious feat of compiling an electronic resource entitled “The Literary Encyclopedia”.

            Back to Clark’s lecture, he took the basic Austen romance that is Emma and expanded upon it, mentioning the very necessity of free indirect speech to account for the transition of the novel out of its 18^th century epistolary form (oh, to explain: epistolary, or “letter”, form for a story was rather common before the 19^th century: look at Hannah Foster’s The Coquette or even Austen’s first drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice [btw, the words “pride” and “prejudice” were political terms, stemming from the rights of the aristocracy]). So, as the industrialization (Industrial Revolution) had finally become engrained into society to the point that self-control, routine, had essentially contributed to the atomization of society to the individual, not the clan or the parish, there arises this inescapable question of what is the implication of “self-control”? It’s a bit of a misnomer to say “self” when it’s really social control that defines a lot of an individual’s behavior and inclinations.

In Austen’s narration, lines such as “Harriet Smith, one whom she [Emma] could summon at any time”, blur the representation of Emma’s (or the author’s) thought from unquoted speech. The cool bottom line: as modern society is marked by a tension between one’s inherent subjectivity and his/her attempted objectivity (in representing reality), so free indirect speech is the quintessence of the schizophrenic voice(s?) of modernity. Phew, sorry if that was an ill attempt at compressing the lecture—needless to say, I was utterly captivated.

Finally, I come to the Chamber of the Whiteboards! After Clark’s lecture, I rushed over to Creative Writing class and realized we were all packing up to have class in the library. We were ushered to a basement level where there were a series of locked rooms and once the librarian’s key opened our room, I was utterly entranced by what I saw. Hexagonally shaped (6 walls), the room held five of the walls which were literally composed of just whiteboard material. The fifth wall was the doorway. There were four tables with four chairs and each seat held a plugged-in laptop. A projector screen animated the front of the room (opposite the doorway). As for the fun side of the room, there were toy guitars, a big snake doll, and a Lava Lamp that glittered silver. Talk about awesome.

It was poetry day: my three-person group had to describe a famous person (Marilyn Monroe) in terms of being a furniture piece, weather, type of car, etc. We wrote the poem, each of us had a line in each of the three stanzas, on one of the mighty whiteboards. The rest of the class was spent typing up poetry exercises on the laptops—and this was when I realized that UK keyboards are different from their American counterparts by an annoying feature: the shift bar is a lot smaller and a dash ( “/”) key is to the right of it. Every time I wanted to press shift to capitalize a letter, I would // and // all over the place.

Now: Harry Potter…party! After two coin tosses that Steff (Jenny’s boyfriend; side-note: Happy 5-year anniversary, Jen and Steff!) threw in the kitchen (both “tails”, or since it was a 10 pence coin, “lions”—which stood for Gryffindor and for me going), I was as yet still undecided. I took out a bottle of cider, Bulmer’s, and drank it to give me the answer, knowing what would happen completely—at a quarter ‘til midnight, I sauntered over to the LCR and partied it up with Stef and her friends. Harry Potter movies were shown on ginormous flat-screens above the dance floor, oddly showing HP 1 and 3 in one room and 4 in the other. I was unfortunately dressed merely as a triple-layered muggle (yes, a cop-out) while Stef was dressed as Hedwig (white and black make-up, white shawl and all) and James was the Fluffy (tied the laces of his dog-headed slippers together and placed it around his neck, while wearing black make-up—ingenuous!). The hovering sorting hat, deeming my muggle costume unworthy, placed me in Hufflepuff. Ugh. I should’ve dressed as Harry Potter and got into Gryffindor. Oh well. Great night, though.