Bar Graphs

W.H. Auden on Reading

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

-W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)

So who decides on the "ought"? Surely this statement implies that there is a single "correct" way of interpreting a text... You're letting the postmodern side down W.H., pull yourself together!


I find myself agreeing with the sentiment though.

Postmodernism is overrated.

Goals for the Week (or at least what's left of it)

Goals for this week:

• Be prepared for the chance of a lifetime (if it should happen in the next seven days!)
• See challenges as growing experiences.
• Persuade Gauss and Pascal to stop killing baby birds.
• Set my last exam for the year :) 
• Sing more.

Punting Down the Cam

[WARNING: this is a sentimental post about bygone days...*sniff*]

I believe I am actually a child of the 20s. Probably my favourite novel of all time is Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, set in beautiful Oxford in the stately interwar days when women had just been admitted to universities and everyone still wore academic dress to College dinners... And, of course, when the best Sunday afternoon activity was to take a leisurely punt down the river. Sigh.






When I was fortunate enough to be sponsered on a "literary tour" of the UK a few years back, one of my most favourite outings was when we went punting. It certainly made a nice change from yet another stately home... Though Blenheim et al are stupendously magnificent, they are also terribly hard on the feet.








Not that punting is an art for the lazy. For those of you that don't know, punting is the art of pushing a boat down the river by means of a long pole prodded repeatedly into the muddy river bed and used as a lever.

Apart from negotiating bridges which are mainly too low to get the pole (or yourself) through upright, one also has to cope with steering (mainly with the assistance of the ardent paddlers) and going upstream. Going upstream is mostly a case of one punt forward - two floats back.


 

And of course: very HOT work (unless you fall in, which I fortunately didn't!) ... By the end of the outing I was much thinner, mainly due to removing layers of clothing!

Nonetheless - oh to return to those stately days...