High Table and Awards

Hot and Sweaty at High Table

An event unique to the Oxford Bread Loaf campus is High Table. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we eat in the Lincoln College dining hall, which looks like a smaller version of the dining hall in the Harry Potter movies (those scenes were filmed at Christchurch College, which is just across the street from us): long wooden tables with benches, high cathedral ceilings and windows, long hall adorned with oil portraits of past students or deans. One table is raised on a dais turned perpendicular to the rest where the professors and VIPs sit - hence, High Table.

On High Table nights, we are treated to a lecture from a distinguished scholar. The last two were Christopher Ricks, Warren professor at Boston University and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and Harriet Walter, who played Cleopatra in the Royal Shakespeare Company production we saw; you may have seen her as Fanny Dashwood in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility. Dad asked what Ricks discussed, so here goes: Ricks, who is a noted scholar on everything from Milton and Keats to Bob Dylan, talked about the difficulties facing an editor of a writer's works, particularly if the only copy of a work is in poor handwriting and partially damaged. He has a knack for figuring out what the author probably meant and being able to make it seem obvious. He then proceeded to share with us a number of mistakes that were published in scholarly editions of authors' works, particularly Samuel Beckett, Samuel Johnson, and Tennyson. Some were hilarious. He was a bit like listening to a brilliant, British scholarly version of Bob Dylan, if you can imagine that.

This evening was not High Table, exactly, but was a special event honoring the visit of Jim Maddox, Bread Loaf's Director. Madrigals (including yours truly) sang, and then he presented this year's academic achievment awards. I was under the impression that the awards were only for the senior class (I'm a sophomore), but apparently there were a few exceptions, because, as I was sitting there sweating and twirling my spoon, my name was announced! Don't ask me what particular award it was, because I have no idea! I'm stunned!

Before each award is announced, a brief evaluation/commendation is read about the (still anonymous) student, so that everyone is looking around wondering who could possibly fit that glowing report. I hope they send me a copy, because I wasn't really paying attention until my name was announced - oh yes, they just posted it on our website. “[She was] one of the intellectual stars of my classes at Bread Loaf this summer. She places a great deal of pressure on herself to excel, and excel she does. . . . [Her] writing can be quite lyrical at the same time that it is precise and incisive.” Not too shabby, eh? Since I was only in this program for one summer previously, only one of two teachers could have written that, and I know who: Heather James, who taught the toughest class I've ever taken - Vergil, Ovid, and Shakespeare - the one for whom I was writing a 15 page paper while apartment hunting in Tucson and creating syllabi. Wow, am I glad those days are just a memory.