The Bridge of Sighs, left unsinged...

The Oxford Bus Company driver roared away from the bus stop without unloading my bag, which contained all my dress clothes! Was I going to have to wear shorts and sandals to my presentation the next day? I spent the next 3 hours in search of my purloined carry-on bag, lugging my backpack around, being misdirected from one side of the town of Oxford to the other while on foot and without any local currency to engage a taxi after my 16-hour plane flight. And Oxford is pretty big, with over 160,000 inhabitants!

"Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone..." -- Joni Mitchell

I did lose my temper over the unwillingness of any bus company official to take responsibility, and return my bag. And, I was totally exhausted when I finally found myself reunited with my bag, but lost on a hot afternoon in the midst of Oxford University while trying to find my lodgings at the Corpus Christi College (students didn't even know where that college was!).

But, on turning a sharp corner on the narrow cobblestone street I was treading I suddenly blundered right into the Bridge of Sighs, and I realized that the baggage fiasco was all just part of the experience of traveling to a new and very different land (although our peoples both claim to speak the same language, it sure doesn't sound like it!). I was just beginning MY magical mystery tour!!!

It's hard to stay outraged when confronted with this beautiful architecture!

And now the Oxford workshop is over! My own presentation was too long, with too many slides to show in a mere 15 minutes, so I had to skip most of the fun stuff in order to emphasize the main academic point I needed to make. Instead of 3 case studies of billionaire employers (complete with pics of them with celebutants like Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfry), I only discussed one, but the intro, argument, and conclusion were intact. And during the Q&A that followed, when a questioner wanted to know what theories we used, I tried to replied humorously (oxymoronically?) that I was an unrepentant marxist/anarchist/free-spirit.

That's me!

In the past I would have been somehow surly at the unfairness of the limited time, and/or might have just given up trying to make my talk a complete (if truncated) whole when time was running out, but this time I made the best of a bad situation, and did what I could. A number of participants were kind enough to come up to me later to say that they had enjoyed my presentation, suggest that they had learned something from it, and made further queries about my methods. I was gracious and responsive, rather than sullen or defensive. One senior scholar said that he believed much as I did, but would not have admitted it for fear of alienating part of his audience; I replied without hesitation that this was because he is smarter than me, to which he backed off by saying "No, not at all!" I believe that this European bridge may have steamed a bit, but remains unburned!

Half of the Workshop room...

[Although I would have liked to have been better prepared, with the opiates and antibiotics coursing through my body to keep the "Eureka crud" (some kind of local bug that has been hitting the folks of Humboldt County for several years) in check, I think that I did as well as I could reasonably expect.

Yes, you read that right. After 4 years with nary a sniffle, and on a sustained health kick that includes loads of fresh fruits and veggies, on the eve of my plane flight I got a very sore throat, accompanied with fever, chills, aches, and pains. The doc found an ear infection (!?!) and advised me against a plane flight, which he thought would be painful, or worse damage my pus-filled inner ear due to changing air pressures going up and coming back down. I swallowed all of his meds, and jumped onto my 16-hour flight with only the mildest trepidations. I have come to believe, for reasons to be discussed in future posts, that something is looking out for yours truly...]

My plane was much larger, but equally full of people struggling to get to the tiny bathroom cubes down aisles that tossed and turned with the strong air currents that buffeted our flight. Thank the gods that I do not have air sickness to add to the Humboldt humbug that had a grip on my body and mind!

Everyone had received all the papers prior to the event, and were expected to read them. I was determined that my talk did not just regurgitate what I'd already written... While my paper focused on the benefits of using a particular method (social network analysis) to improve immigration research, my presentation illustrated that point by targeting one of the current "missing links" in immigration research, which is the wealthy (billionaire) employers that get so rich by using new immigrant workers at low pay in substandard working conditions.

A depiction of the deprivations of poverty; regardless of the parents possible shortcomings, how can we let the bulk of the poor -- innocent children -- go without the necessities of life, when a few have so much more than they need? How much more do they have? See the following photo and its caption!!!

"Bill Gates' 66,000-square-foot compound is built into a hillside on the edge of Lake Washington, near Seattle. Out-of-shape visitors can skip the 84-step hike to the ground floor and opt for an elevator ride instead. Among its enviable amenities: a 60-foot swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500-square-foot gym and a 1,000-square-foot dining room, which seats 24." 
[My added comments: Gate's Microsoft was successfully sued for firing hundreds of American software programmers, and importing on 3-year visas foreign programmers from Asia and the former Soviet Union at salaries that were two-thirds lower. The EU found his company guilty of a number of corporate crimes (like engaging in predatory monopolistic practices, and they were fined millions of Euros. Etc.]

There were about 40 scholars at the Oxford Workshop, mainly from European nations from Estonia to Italy, Portugal to Germany, Netherlands to Slovenia, and about 50/50 between women and men. Only a few were Americans. Indeed, on my panel I was "the token" old white male, surrounded by much younger and smarter women. That was a new and enjoyable experience! Later, 2 of those 3 women each told me separately that my 2005 article had help inspire them to do graduate studies! I was so flattered and amazed that my work had actually had such an affect on some that I was on the verge of tears, and both they and I actually blushed from the emotional connection briefly made.

The other half of the Workshop room.

Not only did I eat well, and mingle with very good scholars on a topic of burning interest to us all, but I loved my lodging in Corpus Christi College! It's very old, but has all the necessities, and is very lovely.

The plaza just inside the College gate; all the inscriptions on the pillar are in ancient Latin.

Many of these photos were taken at dawn, because our Workshop kept us too busy indoors from 8 am to 6 pm, with dinner thereafter...

A broader view of the quad at dawn, with the entry to my room on the right...

I had lovely conversations with senior scholars from across Europe, the US, and Australia, young go-getter academics from Georgetown, the Netherlands, and here at Oxford (which actually has 3 different and apparently largely non-cooperative "immigration studies" programs!) in this quad. I also encountered new PhD students, readying themselves to go out to the field to do a year's research before writing up their findings.

It brought up so many memories of my glory-daze as a "Fellow" on the inside career track while at UC San Diego's Center of US-Mexican Studies, and its sister institution, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies... In my early 30s already, I was then confident that a cushy research job at a prestigious institution was in my immediate future. I didn't realize then that my outsized and often abrasive ego could upend those opportunities...

My desk, and the open windows overlooking the plaza.

I wrote the first draft of this post from this desk, and found the space an inspiration rather than a distraction...

The view of the college, from my window, at dawn.

Oxford's beautiful buildings precede the advent of the English empire and the capitalists' industrial revolution. Instead, the wealthy elite were "blue-blood" titled aristocrats, and the labor that built these hallowed halls consisted of serfs, who were bound to their "lords" estates from one generation to the next. Karl Marx saw the horrors of unfettered capitalism as an improvement over the abject servitude of the feudal system, although he mistakenly thought that the mass of peoples would eventually overturn greedy capitalism for a more equitable socialism, in which the mantra would be "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs..." Perhaps this may still happen before the "creative destructions" of capitalism doom the planet (or at least our species) to a devastation akin to extinction; that's why an increasing number of our global youth are occupying Wall Streets around the world!

Marx said that religion was "the opiate of the masses," while a character in the great British movie "Oh Lucky Man" is found walking down a post-industrial nightmare of a manufacturing zone past graffiti sprayed on a wall stating, "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals." Perhaps this why almost everyone (rich or poor) is "on (some sort of) drugs!" We are all self-medicating to tolerate the fact that our contradictory dreams of either great wealth or communal equality are unlikely to occur.

The University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin; I had thought only Mexicans were so hung up on Mary!

So, I had a few hours after the Workshop concluded to look about this 800-year old "disneyland." It is so beautiful in that medieval way, and steeped in so much history (for example, the high walls around all the colleges were originally defensive works, built by the academic "gown-ies" (in their scholastic robes!) to protect them from the non-academic locals that resented the scholars' growing demands for precious land.

The pedestrian path between Corpus Cristi (Body of Christ!) and Merton colleges...

The buildings and gardens are so gorgeous...

I want to live here!!!

And the sidewalk cafes are so inviting...

Can you see the tables & coffee stand under the tree?

But, I rushed through a final heavy and delicious English breakfast...

Here toasting my hosts in the dining hall beside my Slovene colleague...

Jumped on a double-decker bus...

It was still early morning...

And headed back to London, to leap upon the luxurious Eurostar to Paris...

I ate my first real French meal (a delicious smoked salmon ravioli in a rich but not too creamy sauce while on the walk from Eurostar station to Tristan Plaza...

And walked through two neighborhoods and found my quite lovely hotel room/balcony, looking out over a very narrow one-way street aimed at the nearby Metro station in Pigalle Plaza. I went to sleep at dusk, awoke at 2 am (local time), wrote this, and hope to calm down enough to go back to sleep before a very warm sun arises in a non-fall-like Paris. More on that later!