We’ve just got back from the movies. It was a great film: In Her Shoes. I didn’t expect it to be that good.
I love the beginning of Christmas. We watched the lights turned on in Exeter last night. There’s something in the air at this time of the year, when autumn turns into Christmas (and it’s not just frost, although there’s plenty of that!)
Anyway, I don’t have anything to say and it’s too late now – I have to get some sleep ready for a whole day of work tomorrow.
to see the world the way I see it now
(Most Recent Entry)
introduction to poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
-- Billy Collins
Every tear you cry
Every doubt you have
All of these things will pass away
All of your big mistakes
Your little old heart would break
Wishing that i could take them back
Write down the things you don't want
Burn them in a glass
Write down the things you dream of
Make a paper plane that flies to Heaven
-- Jann Arden
Saturday, November 12, 2005
poor beetle
My poor Bug lost its mudguard today. Well, actually only half the mudguard, which we rescued and is now sitting on the backseat. The other half is dangling precariously underneath the car. Luckily it happened while we were at the local shop buying a newspaper (although wouldn’t you know they had run out of The Times?!), but we had to drive home at a snail’s pace with this terrible scraping noise emanating from beneath the car. Lori had just phoned up the church in Plymouth and arranged to meet someone there tomorrow, but since we can’t drive with the mudguard hanging down on the road we can’t go, so she had to call them back and cancel… It seems everything is against us going to church. We will try to prise the mudguard off in the morning and go to the local New Frontiers church, which isn’t too far from here… If not I guess I’ll have to pray there’s a VW garage somewhere nearby…!
It was sunny today for the first time in about a week, so we went out to take pictures of the city for Lori’s family. I love it down by the quay with the cobblestones and swans and antique shops tucked into archways. The wind was biting, but it was lovely to walk around town in the golden afternoon light. After living in Mississippi, I always feel slightly overawed by the amount of people in a city centre over here on a Saturday. Bodies ebb and flow and almost swarm, making it difficult to manoeuvre yourself between shops. We let our hands and eyes graze a few of the books in Waterstones before coming back home to get back to reading.
We both finished Little Dorrit today! It was quite a momentous occasion, but there was a tinge of an anti-climax, as if the loose ends were tied up to quickly for a story that had taken over 800 pages to tell. It was a relief to start Jane Eyre this evening – it’s a novel I know well, of course, and yet never tire of reading. Besides that we are finishing McEwan’s The Innocent and ploughing through Nabokov’s Lolita, which makes me shudder, as it was certainly designed to do. We've been reading a lot of our material aloud, since we're taking the same classes this term. It takes longer, but it spurs us on to keep going, and we are able to read a lot more in a longer stretch. Lolita, however, is one to read quietly. It's a strength of the novel that the perversity of it can get to you, but while I can admire the prose, themes, style, and construction, the subject makes me want to close the covers tight and shut in the words.
Tomorrow I must get back to thinking about essays. I have thoughts but I’m so frustrated by the transatlantic essay. I won’t go in to that right now, though. It’s too late to get thinking about that now.
It was sunny today for the first time in about a week, so we went out to take pictures of the city for Lori’s family. I love it down by the quay with the cobblestones and swans and antique shops tucked into archways. The wind was biting, but it was lovely to walk around town in the golden afternoon light. After living in Mississippi, I always feel slightly overawed by the amount of people in a city centre over here on a Saturday. Bodies ebb and flow and almost swarm, making it difficult to manoeuvre yourself between shops. We let our hands and eyes graze a few of the books in Waterstones before coming back home to get back to reading.
We both finished Little Dorrit today! It was quite a momentous occasion, but there was a tinge of an anti-climax, as if the loose ends were tied up to quickly for a story that had taken over 800 pages to tell. It was a relief to start Jane Eyre this evening – it’s a novel I know well, of course, and yet never tire of reading. Besides that we are finishing McEwan’s The Innocent and ploughing through Nabokov’s Lolita, which makes me shudder, as it was certainly designed to do. We've been reading a lot of our material aloud, since we're taking the same classes this term. It takes longer, but it spurs us on to keep going, and we are able to read a lot more in a longer stretch. Lolita, however, is one to read quietly. It's a strength of the novel that the perversity of it can get to you, but while I can admire the prose, themes, style, and construction, the subject makes me want to close the covers tight and shut in the words.
Tomorrow I must get back to thinking about essays. I have thoughts but I’m so frustrated by the transatlantic essay. I won’t go in to that right now, though. It’s too late to get thinking about that now.
Friday, November 11, 2005
objects and light
I like the warmth of the faint orange glow from the streetlight outside our window in the late afternoons, just after it has been turned on and the dusk is setting in. It reminds me of dim light cast sideways on a face, highlighting the shapes of cheekbones and nose. The angles of the wall around the bow window and the muted colours on the bookshelves stand out against the white of the furniture which, even though only a shadow of their real colour, oddly appear to be even more white in contrast with the dim orange glow of the windows. With the thick white vertical blinds closed the window is only four golden squares reflected and slightly skewed on a shadow screen. The beauty of the white blinds is that they amplify the daylight when closed, allowing us to create the illusion of a private world in here, invisible from the street. We can rotate them or open them like curtains. Sitting at the round pedestal table in the bow window we can turn the blinds so that the sunlight casts thin strips of yellow on the table and the carpet and yet still hide ourselves from the street view.
They only switched on the streetlight a couple of weeks ago. I was disappointed when I first noticed the installation, convinced it would intrude too much with that stark burnt yellow glare characteristic of most streetlights. But now at night when I walk through to get a drink from the kitchen light highlights the space and warmth of the room. When the sky is dark with rain the vertical blinds are zigzagged with the shadows of writhing raindrops.
There is a picture of the centre of a white rose on the wall, a faux-canvas I bought from Ikea, with its petals peeling back towards the centre. Staring at it reminds me of the rapid motion of those sped-up movie clips on the early versions of Encarta that showed the blossoming of a flower or the skyline of a city at dawn. I love the rich shadows and the crisp outline of the petals. The creams and yellows highlight the colours in the room. On the pedestal dining table there are three candles—cream, yellow, and dark red—on a square cream porcelain plate filled with grey shiny pebbles. A shallow round hand-made dish on the white coffee table holds another handful of the pebbles, and at the corners of the table sit two coasters—American flags—I won at a Dirty Santa game in the States last Christmas. The shelf beneath the coffee table is full of books and papers we are currently reading.
In the left hand corner of the room, opposite the white three-seat sofa, is a teak television cabinet shaped like a stretched hexagon with French glass doors opened onto two shelves: one for the video player and one for the DVD player. Our 14” Sony TV I got for my 15th birthday sits on the top, and beside it a small striped lamp with a thin black iron stand. There are two overhead lights, both fitted with uplighter shades which cast light in huge circular beams on the ceiling, dispersing a bright warm glow throughout the room. We bought a cheap silver reading light that sits beside the couch. I always sit on the left, Lori on the right.
We’ve put a few pictures on the walls now, but still not many. There are two pictures I took—one of the steps at Montmartre in Paris and one of a village in the south of France—on the wall beside the bookshelves. Four more of my pictures are in oak frames leaning against the wall below the window waiting to be put up. We bought large sheets of wrapping paper from Stanfords (travel bookshop) in Covent Garden which are actually large maps—one of Paris and one of the world—which I've put up on the walls in the study for inspiration beside the cork board (and the white board that is still leaning against the wall waiting to go up.) I will get around to putting up the pictures, but for now I think I like the pure cream walls and the space they create. All the same, I miss the pictures from our walls in Hattiesburg. Each one was like a captured moment in time: most of them were ones I had taken (saves money on posters!) and others were of places we had visited. There was even a poster in Lori’s room of a tiny restaurant called Le Monde des Chimieres (the world of wishful thinking) on the Ile St Louis in Paris which we subsequently went in search of on our next trip. We found it and photographed it just in time; when we went back it had been converted into a dark and modern establishment with stencilled writing and white lights.
The kitchen is tiny and beautiful. I love to sit on the sofa and glance over at the closed French door with the lights shining inside. It’s the perfect size for two people to prepare and cook meals, which we have been doing with delight. Having a dishwasher significantly affects our eating habits. We're both more adventurous in the kitchen, trying new things and experimenting more, since we can easily sweep all the pots and pans into the dishwasher. We’ve experimented with a new dish – a lime chicken – which involves marinating the chicken in lime juice for a few hours, something we relish because it makes the whole apartment smell green and citrusy. Roasted asparagus with lemon, a dash of balsamic vinegar, and a few shavings of parmesan is a new favourite, as are carrots quartered lengthways and roasted with olive oil, coriander, and thyme. We bought some lamb chops with mint and mango to try this week, and last week we made a tiny herbed roast turkey breast with balsamic onion gravy in addition to the apple and balsamic pork I mentioned before (which we have to do again – it was delicious) and chicken marsala (chicken with mushrooms, shallots, marsala, and cream with tagliatelle).
With all this cooking, eating out has to be all about the experience rather than the food. We went out to Starz tonight as a reward for a day of hard work (which I am purposefully not mentioning because it was so tedious). An American restaurant in Exeter under the iron bridge, Starz claims Tex-Mex American and was top of our list to try next. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of space and we had to sit in the bar. The food was good—I had something called a North & South Starz: barbeque chicken and a half rack of ribs with fries and coleslaw. Unfortunately I’m a little prejudiced by my experiences at “real” American restaurants, and the ribs were no where near as good as the ones at TGI Fridays in Bristol, the closest you can get to an authetic American meal around here (we’ve been there twice already since the beginning of term, and it’s over an hour away!).
We decided to spread the "evening out" between tonight and tomorrow night, so we’re eating in tomorrow and going out to the movies afterwards, possibly to see Elizabethtown, which came out last weekend. I want to see The Constant Gardener too, but I’m not sure if that’s out yet. Since it will be Saturday night I’m expecting it to be pretty crowded at the Odeon, but we’ll get there early. I’m looking forward to a night out. We’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow before then, though…!
C’est tout.
They only switched on the streetlight a couple of weeks ago. I was disappointed when I first noticed the installation, convinced it would intrude too much with that stark burnt yellow glare characteristic of most streetlights. But now at night when I walk through to get a drink from the kitchen light highlights the space and warmth of the room. When the sky is dark with rain the vertical blinds are zigzagged with the shadows of writhing raindrops.
There is a picture of the centre of a white rose on the wall, a faux-canvas I bought from Ikea, with its petals peeling back towards the centre. Staring at it reminds me of the rapid motion of those sped-up movie clips on the early versions of Encarta that showed the blossoming of a flower or the skyline of a city at dawn. I love the rich shadows and the crisp outline of the petals. The creams and yellows highlight the colours in the room. On the pedestal dining table there are three candles—cream, yellow, and dark red—on a square cream porcelain plate filled with grey shiny pebbles. A shallow round hand-made dish on the white coffee table holds another handful of the pebbles, and at the corners of the table sit two coasters—American flags—I won at a Dirty Santa game in the States last Christmas. The shelf beneath the coffee table is full of books and papers we are currently reading.
In the left hand corner of the room, opposite the white three-seat sofa, is a teak television cabinet shaped like a stretched hexagon with French glass doors opened onto two shelves: one for the video player and one for the DVD player. Our 14” Sony TV I got for my 15th birthday sits on the top, and beside it a small striped lamp with a thin black iron stand. There are two overhead lights, both fitted with uplighter shades which cast light in huge circular beams on the ceiling, dispersing a bright warm glow throughout the room. We bought a cheap silver reading light that sits beside the couch. I always sit on the left, Lori on the right.
We’ve put a few pictures on the walls now, but still not many. There are two pictures I took—one of the steps at Montmartre in Paris and one of a village in the south of France—on the wall beside the bookshelves. Four more of my pictures are in oak frames leaning against the wall below the window waiting to be put up. We bought large sheets of wrapping paper from Stanfords (travel bookshop) in Covent Garden which are actually large maps—one of Paris and one of the world—which I've put up on the walls in the study for inspiration beside the cork board (and the white board that is still leaning against the wall waiting to go up.) I will get around to putting up the pictures, but for now I think I like the pure cream walls and the space they create. All the same, I miss the pictures from our walls in Hattiesburg. Each one was like a captured moment in time: most of them were ones I had taken (saves money on posters!) and others were of places we had visited. There was even a poster in Lori’s room of a tiny restaurant called Le Monde des Chimieres (the world of wishful thinking) on the Ile St Louis in Paris which we subsequently went in search of on our next trip. We found it and photographed it just in time; when we went back it had been converted into a dark and modern establishment with stencilled writing and white lights.
The kitchen is tiny and beautiful. I love to sit on the sofa and glance over at the closed French door with the lights shining inside. It’s the perfect size for two people to prepare and cook meals, which we have been doing with delight. Having a dishwasher significantly affects our eating habits. We're both more adventurous in the kitchen, trying new things and experimenting more, since we can easily sweep all the pots and pans into the dishwasher. We’ve experimented with a new dish – a lime chicken – which involves marinating the chicken in lime juice for a few hours, something we relish because it makes the whole apartment smell green and citrusy. Roasted asparagus with lemon, a dash of balsamic vinegar, and a few shavings of parmesan is a new favourite, as are carrots quartered lengthways and roasted with olive oil, coriander, and thyme. We bought some lamb chops with mint and mango to try this week, and last week we made a tiny herbed roast turkey breast with balsamic onion gravy in addition to the apple and balsamic pork I mentioned before (which we have to do again – it was delicious) and chicken marsala (chicken with mushrooms, shallots, marsala, and cream with tagliatelle).
With all this cooking, eating out has to be all about the experience rather than the food. We went out to Starz tonight as a reward for a day of hard work (which I am purposefully not mentioning because it was so tedious). An American restaurant in Exeter under the iron bridge, Starz claims Tex-Mex American and was top of our list to try next. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of space and we had to sit in the bar. The food was good—I had something called a North & South Starz: barbeque chicken and a half rack of ribs with fries and coleslaw. Unfortunately I’m a little prejudiced by my experiences at “real” American restaurants, and the ribs were no where near as good as the ones at TGI Fridays in Bristol, the closest you can get to an authetic American meal around here (we’ve been there twice already since the beginning of term, and it’s over an hour away!).
We decided to spread the "evening out" between tonight and tomorrow night, so we’re eating in tomorrow and going out to the movies afterwards, possibly to see Elizabethtown, which came out last weekend. I want to see The Constant Gardener too, but I’m not sure if that’s out yet. Since it will be Saturday night I’m expecting it to be pretty crowded at the Odeon, but we’ll get there early. I’m looking forward to a night out. We’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow before then, though…!
C’est tout.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
good intentions
It is quite amusing to me to see how many blogs (yes, I’ve been blog surfing again) consist of just one post – supposedly the first of many, but perhaps lying forgotten in the world wide abyss – laying out the writer’s personal rules and in some way attempting to excuse the very action of blogging the first place.
More often than not it goes like this: (text [subtext])
Here I am, (name), writing my first blog [isn’t this exiting]. There’s not really any reason for it and no one is ever going to read this thing, but I have musings each day and I want to send them out into the Internet void [I have a narcissistic tendency, just like everyone else writing a blog, and hope that perhaps someone might stumble across my ramblings and appreciate them, which will be good for my ego, and if not I might read over a post or two in a couple of years and achieve the same result.] I’m not going to write about my family or my work or my love life or my political views [I’m really going to talk about all those things, especially my political views and how much my family hate me] but instead I see this blog as a way of expressing myself creatively [I see this blog as a means of further justifying my existence]. Well, were in the twenty-first century so I figure I need to move on up the technical ladder and so here I am [I’ve really wanted to start a blog for ages now but couldn’t figure out what to write about]. So watch this space for news about me [who am I talking to?]
It reminds me of starting a new diary when I was little. I don’t think I ever got more than half way through a diary. Invariably I’d write religiously for a couple of weeks, forget about it for two months, write a bit more, fade out and let it sit in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps a few months later I’d decide to keep a diary again but—as you do when you are quickly maturing into adulthood (or at least teenagehood)—you can’t believe how immature you were back then and you like the idea of starting afresh, so off you go to WHSmith to buy yourself a brand new diary, full of endless possibilities of blank pages entreatingly enclosed in a very secure locked clasp (which, of course, can be opened with any number of those tiny paper-thin keys attached to girl’s diaries). Back to the point: there was always that tendency on the very first page to begin with a statement of purpose. My name is. The purpose of this diary is. I intend to write ____ in here because ____. Full of intention, of course.
I could make a depressing leap here and say that life is often full of those first-page diary statements – full of good intentions to start afresh and live like you intend, and which you might stick to religiously for a while, but which gradually blow away on the wind.
I keep saying I won’t do that this year. But there are still intentions I have and I’m still not finding time for everything.
Do we ever find time for everything, though? What would happen if we did? What blank would ensue if we ran out of intentions?
Well didn’t I end up on a sunny note!?
Time for bed.
More often than not it goes like this: (text [subtext])
Here I am, (name), writing my first blog [isn’t this exiting]. There’s not really any reason for it and no one is ever going to read this thing, but I have musings each day and I want to send them out into the Internet void [I have a narcissistic tendency, just like everyone else writing a blog, and hope that perhaps someone might stumble across my ramblings and appreciate them, which will be good for my ego, and if not I might read over a post or two in a couple of years and achieve the same result.] I’m not going to write about my family or my work or my love life or my political views [I’m really going to talk about all those things, especially my political views and how much my family hate me] but instead I see this blog as a way of expressing myself creatively [I see this blog as a means of further justifying my existence]. Well, were in the twenty-first century so I figure I need to move on up the technical ladder and so here I am [I’ve really wanted to start a blog for ages now but couldn’t figure out what to write about]. So watch this space for news about me [who am I talking to?]
It reminds me of starting a new diary when I was little. I don’t think I ever got more than half way through a diary. Invariably I’d write religiously for a couple of weeks, forget about it for two months, write a bit more, fade out and let it sit in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps a few months later I’d decide to keep a diary again but—as you do when you are quickly maturing into adulthood (or at least teenagehood)—you can’t believe how immature you were back then and you like the idea of starting afresh, so off you go to WHSmith to buy yourself a brand new diary, full of endless possibilities of blank pages entreatingly enclosed in a very secure locked clasp (which, of course, can be opened with any number of those tiny paper-thin keys attached to girl’s diaries). Back to the point: there was always that tendency on the very first page to begin with a statement of purpose. My name is. The purpose of this diary is. I intend to write ____ in here because ____. Full of intention, of course.
I could make a depressing leap here and say that life is often full of those first-page diary statements – full of good intentions to start afresh and live like you intend, and which you might stick to religiously for a while, but which gradually blow away on the wind.
I keep saying I won’t do that this year. But there are still intentions I have and I’m still not finding time for everything.
Do we ever find time for everything, though? What would happen if we did? What blank would ensue if we ran out of intentions?
Well didn’t I end up on a sunny note!?
Time for bed.
being studious
I started to read over last night’s blog and realized how pathetically boring it is. Unfortunately, though, I have nothing more exciting to say today. It’s been a day full of work again. I got through 85 pages of Little Dorrit today (I’m on 578! Only 200 to go… *sigh* Dickens was paid by the word…), and we both read our regular shorter quota of McEwan’s The Innocent. The reading was in addition to the regular Victorian seminar this morning (which ran over) and two hours in the library watching a film noir movie, The Naked City. That’s the second film noir this week (for the Transatlantic module), and let’s just say I’m not so much a fan….
I suppose it’s hard to write much that doesn’t have to do with work at the moment, since all I’m thinking about is reading and essays… pathetic.
But life is good, really. I like feeling like I’m getting a lot accomplished in a day. We’re planning a movie night for some time this week (perhaps Friday) to give ourselves some time off from all this working. We might even go out for dinner too, since I’m feeling all virtuous about driving to Tescos instead of shopping at the much closer (and much more civilized) Sainsburys because of the £10 off coupons we got in the mail.
So now I really sound pathetic.
It’s cold here. Really cold. I laugh at Lori when she complains, but I know it must be quite a shock for her – she’s been here before in the winter but only for a few days, and now she’s complaining of the cold “getting to her bones." To be honest, I'm really I’m feeling the shock of it too. I miss the sunshine. Although, saying that, it was one of those blue-sky days today where you peek through the blinds in the morning only to be completely deceived by the sunshine and have to run back inside to grab a scarf and thicker coat when you leave the house. I wonder how much the sunshine and clear skies contribute to the mood of a given population. It always struck me that people in Mississippi were so much more “sunny” and friendly, and now that I’m back here that has only been reinforced. I wonder to what extent the weather contributes to our stereotypical Britishness. I also tend to wonder to what extent I display this Britishness that I find myself criticizing so often lately. Perhaps I’m seeing it through an American’s eyes. Or is it that my own viewpoint has changed so much that I’m really seeing it from my own changed perspective? Perhaps America has spoiled me…
I know American television certainly has.
Lost was great tonight. Rob said he wished he was able to catch the live West Wing episode they’re doing this week and that he “missed those guys,” to which I pathetically replied, “me too!” We’ve been watching Mad About You reruns on DVD during dinnertimes.
I suppose it’s hard to write much that doesn’t have to do with work at the moment, since all I’m thinking about is reading and essays… pathetic.
But life is good, really. I like feeling like I’m getting a lot accomplished in a day. We’re planning a movie night for some time this week (perhaps Friday) to give ourselves some time off from all this working. We might even go out for dinner too, since I’m feeling all virtuous about driving to Tescos instead of shopping at the much closer (and much more civilized) Sainsburys because of the £10 off coupons we got in the mail.
So now I really sound pathetic.
It’s cold here. Really cold. I laugh at Lori when she complains, but I know it must be quite a shock for her – she’s been here before in the winter but only for a few days, and now she’s complaining of the cold “getting to her bones." To be honest, I'm really I’m feeling the shock of it too. I miss the sunshine. Although, saying that, it was one of those blue-sky days today where you peek through the blinds in the morning only to be completely deceived by the sunshine and have to run back inside to grab a scarf and thicker coat when you leave the house. I wonder how much the sunshine and clear skies contribute to the mood of a given population. It always struck me that people in Mississippi were so much more “sunny” and friendly, and now that I’m back here that has only been reinforced. I wonder to what extent the weather contributes to our stereotypical Britishness. I also tend to wonder to what extent I display this Britishness that I find myself criticizing so often lately. Perhaps I’m seeing it through an American’s eyes. Or is it that my own viewpoint has changed so much that I’m really seeing it from my own changed perspective? Perhaps America has spoiled me…
I know American television certainly has.
Lost was great tonight. Rob said he wished he was able to catch the live West Wing episode they’re doing this week and that he “missed those guys,” to which I pathetically replied, “me too!” We’ve been watching Mad About You reruns on DVD during dinnertimes.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
essays essays essays
I can’t believe it’s time to start working on essays. I’m not used to these short terms, and Christmas is creeping closer all too soon. The Making Progress essay is much easier because I’m so much more familiar with the period. I’m thinking of working on the image of Roman Charity in fiction of the period and using that to investigate the father-daughter relationships in Victorian literature. There seems to be a thread running through a number of the novels we’ve looked at (and some I’ve read previously) that links devoted daughters with inadequate fathers. I might be able to work at a contrast between this and the earlier Romantic images of the mutually devoted paternal relationship (e.g. Edgeworth’s fiction) to illustrate a breakdown in patriarchal authority (or even, perhaps, in religious devotion, since Little Dorrit’s adoration of and devotion to her father assumes almost a sacred colour). Alternatively I might do something about the web nature or interrelatedness of Victorian society, but I’m leaning towards the former (which might be obvious!)
But the transatlantic class is much more challenging because the seminars seem to only touch on the surface of issues and the course materials seems so diverse and eclectic. I have little background in this study and I’m a little anxious about where to go. I might be safer focusing on one novel, but as it’s a 5000-word essay (about 16-20 pages), I don’t want to limit myself too much. I have a vague idea that I might be able to work on something to do with the Lost Generation of expatriate writers (mainly those in Paris) in the 1920s, and how they came to the European city searching for literary freedom and a cosmopolitan release from the stifling capital materialism of post-war America, in the process developing an American voice. Why did they have to leave America to find that voice? How did they contribute to the emergence of American culture (perhaps I could include the development of jazz in Paris by American musicians) and how did their absence from America allow them to define or at least reflect their nation? The problem with this is that it all seems to be theory and I’m not incredibly well read in expatriate writers. I’ve read a couple of Hemingway novels, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Ford’s The Good Soldier, and some secondary literature on Paris, including Shakespeare & Co. and Hemingway’s Paris biography, but I still don’t feel very familiar with the period.
There’s also the option of working on something about the relationship between Americanness and modernism – do they mean the same thing in the twentieth century or are they distinct? Here the problem might be too much breadth of material… Perhaps I could link the two ideas together: the Lost Generation are frequently viewed as one of the defining aspects of modernism. Was this modernism Americanism or a universal movement? Then we move into tricky territory of defining modernism, which is not a route I think I want to go down!
Perhaps I’ll look more into this Americanness issue… perhaps something about the imagery or the vocabulary of Americanness. But for now I’m going to stop rambling, since no one is even going to read this (and if they started, they certainly wouldn't have made it this far)…
Lori made an incredible meal tonight. The whole house smells fantastic. Pork in a balsamic sauce with apple and shallots. We had baked potatoes and I roasted some asparagus. Hey, we may work like students, but we certainly aren’t eating like students (no baked beans in our cupboards!)
I’m going to watch the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch. Even our entertainment is literary...
But the transatlantic class is much more challenging because the seminars seem to only touch on the surface of issues and the course materials seems so diverse and eclectic. I have little background in this study and I’m a little anxious about where to go. I might be safer focusing on one novel, but as it’s a 5000-word essay (about 16-20 pages), I don’t want to limit myself too much. I have a vague idea that I might be able to work on something to do with the Lost Generation of expatriate writers (mainly those in Paris) in the 1920s, and how they came to the European city searching for literary freedom and a cosmopolitan release from the stifling capital materialism of post-war America, in the process developing an American voice. Why did they have to leave America to find that voice? How did they contribute to the emergence of American culture (perhaps I could include the development of jazz in Paris by American musicians) and how did their absence from America allow them to define or at least reflect their nation? The problem with this is that it all seems to be theory and I’m not incredibly well read in expatriate writers. I’ve read a couple of Hemingway novels, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Ford’s The Good Soldier, and some secondary literature on Paris, including Shakespeare & Co. and Hemingway’s Paris biography, but I still don’t feel very familiar with the period.
There’s also the option of working on something about the relationship between Americanness and modernism – do they mean the same thing in the twentieth century or are they distinct? Here the problem might be too much breadth of material… Perhaps I could link the two ideas together: the Lost Generation are frequently viewed as one of the defining aspects of modernism. Was this modernism Americanism or a universal movement? Then we move into tricky territory of defining modernism, which is not a route I think I want to go down!
Perhaps I’ll look more into this Americanness issue… perhaps something about the imagery or the vocabulary of Americanness. But for now I’m going to stop rambling, since no one is even going to read this (and if they started, they certainly wouldn't have made it this far)…
Lori made an incredible meal tonight. The whole house smells fantastic. Pork in a balsamic sauce with apple and shallots. We had baked potatoes and I roasted some asparagus. Hey, we may work like students, but we certainly aren’t eating like students (no baked beans in our cupboards!)
I’m going to watch the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch. Even our entertainment is literary...
Monday, November 07, 2005
fame
I’m still on a bit of a high after meeting Rob Lowe on Friday. Meeting someone famous is such a surreal experience (I can hear my Dad saying, “but nice”!). You get this odd feeling of lowliness, standing in front of another human being, and yet there is also a reminder of common humanity: here you are, standing face to face with this person you have stared at for hours in pixels fed through wires and all of a sudden they are flesh and blood and they have an arm around you while you stare into a camera (or, in my case, close your eyes while a camera flashes).
I’ve met a handful of famous people (the most notable three being, of course, Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and Rob Lowe. John Hannah and Metallica were really quite accidental). I remember being my younger self, standing beside Celine, posing for innumerable photos, her arm around me and my hand on her shoulder. The smell of her perfume was the strangest thing. Perhaps it was because I knew her voice and her image was a constant in my life at that point, but to be suddenly standing beside her with her hair under my hand and her perfume in the air was a reminder of the reality that was ironically even more surreal than the distance had ever been.
And why is it I always turn into such an idiot in these situations? Famous people probably can be excused for thinking their fans are a bunch of silly, nervous adolescents if everyone gets as weak kneed as I do when I meet someone famous.
“I’m fine. How are you?” “The show was great” “How are you doing?”
Isn’t there anything more interesting to say??
Fame is such a strange phenomenon. To be a fan is really just a socially acceptable form of obsession. It’s one of those artificial products of technology and mass media – a bit like online relationships – where you can make believe you know someone without ever having met them. Take the scene in Notting Hill, for instance, where Honey meets Anna at her birthday party and makes a fool of herself while gushing about how she has always imagined that they’d be perfect best friends. We are meant to laugh, but doesn’t it hit home? (Although perhaps most of us wouldn’t go quite so far as to follow the movie star into the bathroom!) Of course, there's a shameful element to fanship, too: the bit where you have to admit to going to a Boyzone concert when you were younger (less embarrassing, since I was very young), or to stalking Celine Dion in London (I was still much younger, but it still sounds a bit odd). Tastes certainly change, but these are experiences that stay with you -- make you who you are.
Anna Nalick has a song called In My Head about the way we project ideal illusions onto the famous people we idolize:
Under the weight of your wings
You are a god and whatever I want you to be
And I wonder if truly you are
Nearly as beautiful as I believe
In my head
Your voice
You've got all that I need
And this make believe will get me through
Another lonely night
Under the weight of your wings
Should ever we meet on your side of your stereo
I will pretend I know not of your thoughts
And even the way that they mirror my own
I'll take you away in the way that you take me and go where I go
But, of course, all that said and done, this particular actor was certainly quite beautiful up close (beautiful is by far the appropriate word). We had third row seats at the theatre (without an orchestra, so we were within spitting distance… quite literally...) The play was actually excellent. Rob’s sons were in the audience too. They’re such beautiful little boys (figures). After the show, we saw someone giving one of the boys a birthday present. He’s probably only about eight or nine, and he was so incredibly polite and polished in his acceptance.
Going to a show and getting caught up in the excitement and electricity of it all always involves a little bit of a melancholy aftermath. I wonder why, and I wonder whether famous people ever feel that way. You imagine that they never would: they have everything. But it’s all just illusions, really. You just have to read Jann Arden's journal to realise this...
Anyway, this blog serves the perfect purpose of being a blank wall for me to gloat to about having met Rob Lowe, since I don’t have anyone to gloat to, really. Lori had fun telling Rebecca. But none of my family really know who he is, and besides, Mum & Dad are busy living it up in California right now (lucky for some!)
For more photos of meeting Rob, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluelikethat/sets/1318251/
I’ve met a handful of famous people (the most notable three being, of course, Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and Rob Lowe. John Hannah and Metallica were really quite accidental). I remember being my younger self, standing beside Celine, posing for innumerable photos, her arm around me and my hand on her shoulder. The smell of her perfume was the strangest thing. Perhaps it was because I knew her voice and her image was a constant in my life at that point, but to be suddenly standing beside her with her hair under my hand and her perfume in the air was a reminder of the reality that was ironically even more surreal than the distance had ever been.
And why is it I always turn into such an idiot in these situations? Famous people probably can be excused for thinking their fans are a bunch of silly, nervous adolescents if everyone gets as weak kneed as I do when I meet someone famous.
“I’m fine. How are you?” “The show was great” “How are you doing?”
Isn’t there anything more interesting to say??
Fame is such a strange phenomenon. To be a fan is really just a socially acceptable form of obsession. It’s one of those artificial products of technology and mass media – a bit like online relationships – where you can make believe you know someone without ever having met them. Take the scene in Notting Hill, for instance, where Honey meets Anna at her birthday party and makes a fool of herself while gushing about how she has always imagined that they’d be perfect best friends. We are meant to laugh, but doesn’t it hit home? (Although perhaps most of us wouldn’t go quite so far as to follow the movie star into the bathroom!) Of course, there's a shameful element to fanship, too: the bit where you have to admit to going to a Boyzone concert when you were younger (less embarrassing, since I was very young), or to stalking Celine Dion in London (I was still much younger, but it still sounds a bit odd). Tastes certainly change, but these are experiences that stay with you -- make you who you are.
Anna Nalick has a song called In My Head about the way we project ideal illusions onto the famous people we idolize:
Under the weight of your wings
You are a god and whatever I want you to be
And I wonder if truly you are
Nearly as beautiful as I believe
In my head
Your voice
You've got all that I need
And this make believe will get me through
Another lonely night
Under the weight of your wings
Should ever we meet on your side of your stereo
I will pretend I know not of your thoughts
And even the way that they mirror my own
I'll take you away in the way that you take me and go where I go
But, of course, all that said and done, this particular actor was certainly quite beautiful up close (beautiful is by far the appropriate word). We had third row seats at the theatre (without an orchestra, so we were within spitting distance… quite literally...) The play was actually excellent. Rob’s sons were in the audience too. They’re such beautiful little boys (figures). After the show, we saw someone giving one of the boys a birthday present. He’s probably only about eight or nine, and he was so incredibly polite and polished in his acceptance.
Going to a show and getting caught up in the excitement and electricity of it all always involves a little bit of a melancholy aftermath. I wonder why, and I wonder whether famous people ever feel that way. You imagine that they never would: they have everything. But it’s all just illusions, really. You just have to read Jann Arden's journal to realise this...
Anyway, this blog serves the perfect purpose of being a blank wall for me to gloat to about having met Rob Lowe, since I don’t have anyone to gloat to, really. Lori had fun telling Rebecca. But none of my family really know who he is, and besides, Mum & Dad are busy living it up in California right now (lucky for some!)
For more photos of meeting Rob, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluelikethat/sets/1318251/
meeting rob lowe
So while I was in the city on Friday, I just thought I'd swing by and say hi to my friend Rob (!)A very beautiful man, if a little chiseled. I'm actually in this picture (right) but it's such a terrible photo of me that I chopped myself off.
Enjoy....! (I know I did)
(yep, that's my head!!)