Well, here I am in Mississippi, finally back in America.

I first realised I was here when I woke at five this morning to a cacophony of distantly familiar birds and the air sticky on my skin. It’s not hot and the sky is a solid white, but we’ve been working all day and haven’t been outside yet. My eyes are heavy with jetlag and I’m looking forward to some humid air and the taste from the warm smell of roast Mom’s cooking. Candied yams this evening. And I’m back!

I’m having one of those days today, one of those very unintelligent days where my head hurts with thinking. I want to sit and eat a funnel cake beside Cinderella’s Castle, ride Splash Mountain over and over again, walk down Main Street, ride Rockin’ Rollercoaster, and just generally get lost in childish magic.

I’ve been working on my portfolio for Writing from Life—that final assignment that has to be finished in under a fortnight—and it’s made me think about childhood and the ways we perceive the world. As I drove to campus today I thought about little Josh and Beth and how strange it is to be telling them stories about Santa that we know to be untrue. They are both getting to that age where they can share the belief together and where Phil and CJ will get to enjoy watching that belief at work. What a strange thing childhood is. Part of me rebels against lying to my niece and nephew, while most of me wants them to share in the magic of the lies. Perhaps “lie” is the wrong word. I can’t figure it out.

As children we accept our parents’ stories as truth unquestioned, naively looking at the world through their lenses until deception is revealed. Maybe that’s a cynical view of childhood, but I’ve been thinking about my parents’ stories about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and wondering why our society condones, even promotes, lying to our children, telling them tales only to break the spell and plunge them even further into that moment of realisation that your parents aren’t always right: that separation from parental protection, from a place of safety and comfort.

But I say that and I know that it’s not what I believe. My childhood was made up of fictions: the stories my Nanna told me about her past; Fairy Lightfoot in the lilac tree; the phone call from Santa at school when I won the ‘design a sleigh’ competition and leaving my ‘sleigh certificate’ out at Christmas so Santa would recognise me; the half-eaten carrot and pastry crumbs on Christmas morning, soot on the carpet; the belief that my cuddly toys had conversations while I, sleeping, drifted away on a ship-bed from an R. L .Stevenson poem (from A Children’s Garden of Verses). These are good memories. The truth doesn’t hurt your pride because of the deception; it hurts because it marks the end of the myth. I was so scared that all the things I believed in were false when one truth was revealed, afraid that the God I had talked to at night was a myth just like the Santa Claus I had written letters to every year. Perhaps I had conflated the two. Perhaps the stories are dangerous that way. You can’t carry on believing when the truth is revealed.

Or can you? My parents still tell the same stories to their grandchildren, and in my Dad’s conviction at hearing Santa’s sleigh bells as a child I read a tinge of belief, not because he hangs onto that original naïve moment, but because of years of telling a convincing tale. I called my mother a few weeks ago to ask her a few questions about Fairy Lightfoot for a piece I was writing for the Writing from Life seminar, and after re-telling the old stories she automatically finished with: “I don’t know exactly which tree she lives in now”. What is more true – the fiction that makes you feel alive, or the truth which ruins the fun? Perhaps that’s why I love Disney World: what’s better than a world full of children who believe in the magic and adults who believe in the children’s beliefs to such an extent that their pretence rubs off on that tiny place that wants to believe in it all.

I’m going to MS in two weeks and will have to resist the urge to drive down to FL. I can’t afford Disney tickets or a hotel :-( How about this for a plan: finish Master’s degree, get job at Disney world, write children’s books about magic and fairies. A fairy tale (untruth) in itself, of course.

Today is officially, for us, the last day of seminars. It seems so final, like it prefigures the end of something. I went out last night with the creative writing people from both MA seminars and had a really good time. I sat between Carol and Shelley and across from Rachel, which made me feel quite lucky in placement. I really feel at home with this writing bunch, able to be me and able to identify with so many of the things they talk about. Half of me wishes I had taken more CW classes, particularly the Novella seminar from last term, taught by Philip Hensher, who sat opposite me at the restaurant and told stories about A.S. Byatt and about his own unorthodox teaching methods. I felt rather unnerved when Rachel insisted to Philip that I would have been great, and there I am thinking ‘I can’t believe he gets to read my writing in eleven days and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing yet’.

Listening to Rachel talk about her decision to take a creative writing PhD and her aim to become a published novelist, I thought to myself how it would be to have the strength of conviction to state that as your goal, to aim for it full throttle. Last night, for a moment, I felt a tinge of that excitement. It may have been a dangerous evening in its lack of realism…

Back to reality and the pressure to write essays, which is growing with each new day. Narrative and Subjectivity is this afternoon, and then we’re done. No celebrations though; just back home to work, and the freedom to really get stuck into it.

There are a bunch of electricians scuttling around on the stones outside the window and in the hallway, obviously working on the apartment next door. They are driving me crazy with their scrunch, scrunch, rattle, tap, bang, drill, ‘Yeah. Yeah’.

I’ve just realised I had no breakfast.

Camera Lucida wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. Granted, it was a little hard going at times, but it really made me begin to think more about the “idea” of photography—what the photograph itself represents. Barthes’s idea that the photograph always holds its referent (signifier) within itself is really fascinating. When I see a photograph of Notre Dame there is no way to separate that photograph from Notre Dame; not like language, where the word can be easily separated from meaning by referring to other things. A photograph wouldn’t be a photograph if it didn’t stubbornly possess its referent, like a window wouldn’t be a window if it didn’t allow you to see something through the glass. I love his description of posing for photographs, something Barthes sees as an almost unconscious process that we all go through when we are aware of the photographer’s presence: “…I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’ (10). It’s a bit like what Jenny Diski was saying about the effect of photography on travel: you already see the image in the future, sitting with your friends and family showing them this moment in 2D. But what Barthes gets at is the need we all have (a futile one, so he claims) to somehow ‘come across’ in a photograph: to transfer our ‘essence’, who we are, into the moment of visual capture.

Looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose

I love this. It’s so true. Looking at a photograph we imagine the capture of a still moment, motionless throughout all future time (until the photograph perishes, as Barthes notes). It is as if that action of the arm, that look, that breath, all motion was paused for that moment: the pose of the photograph. And yet the way I have always tried to look at photos is as action on pause, as if I could imagine the motion continuing at the moment the frame stops being frozen, somewhat like the childhood belief that your toys have an existence when you are asleep or not looking. The photo is at once inanimate and alive, a paused animated motion, still and moving at the same time. There is a photograph of me playing tennis (rather badly, as I recall): my arm is in motion, carrying that movement through to the racket, which rises to meet the ball. This is the paused moment of ultimate motion, posed but not posed. The immobility of a photograph is at once its essence and its plague, a plague in the very fact that its motionlessness makes it unreal. This moment happened – Barthes is amazed by this inherent fact within the photograph – but it was not a static moment, as the photograph would seem to suggest.

Barthes talks of his amazement as a child at seeing a photograph documenting the slave trade. He notes that the reality of the photograph – the very fact that this happened and that someone was there to witness it, to record it on film – makes history more immediate. There is no mediation, he says, of historian between history and himself. This made me wonder what the impact of history would have been if the photograph had been invented earlier. It had an incredible impact on perceptions of the holocaust, for example. What if we could look back through time to the beheading of Henry VIII’s wives, a story that has become almost mythical in its proportions? Would we view it differently: less mythical, more horrific? The hideousness of human nature has been made more real by the photograph.

What I found confusing, though, was what Barthes said about colour. He seems to believe that black and white photography is more real: “I always feel [that] color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me, color is an artifice”. I’m not sure what to make of this, particularly given his argument that there is no gap between photograph and referent. If we are unable to separate photograph from object photographed, then wouldn’t colour enhance this relationship, make it more real? Black and white means a gap between perception and object, like those black and white film reels that move too quickly: Charlie Chaplain waddling twice as fast as reality would have him move, so that it is difficult to see a direct connection between his actual movement and our perceptions. We are aware of the camera as a medium because it speeds up and distorts the reality. When there is colour in a photograph, when it captures something as we might see it, then we can perhaps become ignorant for a split second of the presence of the camera, of the flatness of the image, of the motionlessness.

And yet, as Barthes goes on to say, there is always a notion of likeness in looking at a photograph that shows a gap between reality and what is displayed. This doesn’t interfere with the idea of the photograph having no gap from the referent, since even if you can’t discern an exact likeness between a person in reality and a person photographed, you still can’t separate the photograph from the person (or object) photographed. But over and over again we find that photographs in some way lack that essence of a person in reality. People are said not to photograph well. It goes back to what Barthes was saying about trying to project your own personality or essence onto the photograph by your pose, conscious or unconscious. There is often a lack of likeness in a photograph which can go towards explaining the dissatisfaction we feel when looking at a photograph of a dead loved one, hoping to in some way recapture the essence of that person. What is lacking is movement, I think: this is a paused moment, real in image but not real, so that we almost expect the seeming-reality of the unreal two dimensional person to become real. It is an illusion, like a clone, but not as animated. Barthes says that photographs always inherently carry with them the notion of Death. This works on a number of levels, but basically the image speaks to the possible death of the subject – the subject can die and still be photographed, there, motionless. It reminds us, says Barthes, of our own mortality, since we ask ourselves ‘why am I still alive?’ But it is also a lack of living, because the photograph captures an unreal thing, something that is not alive, not in motion, not breathing, and yet suggestive of all those things, representative of life.

Still, there are photographs that, if they don’t have likeness to the real person, do in some way convey some quality of that person. Barthes finds a photograph of his mother as a child and suddenly finds ‘there she is’. There is something in that girl that is his mother. He identifies certain features of photographs that pinpoint reality, something transcendent, like the touch of a hand or a necklace or the necktie of a Russian man: elements of the photograph that weren’t necessarily intentional, but transcend the photograph in some way, going beyond the overall impression of the photo. What is it about that smile, for instance, that conveys something about the person smiling at a camera, dead in a moment, captured in paused motion, perhaps about to speak or laugh or sing? What makes one photograph hold the essence of someone, something, and others lack likeness to such an extent that we hardly recognise the reality of the person as he or she was at the moment the lens clicked? I don’t know, but these are fascinating questions. Photography is a window onto a world that in some way represents or duplicates ours, but is a fake copy, an unsatisfactory sign, inseparable from the referent, but not really like it either.

If we see our world through the lens of a camera, we will not experience reality—that’s perhaps what it all boils down to. When we travel, Jenny Diski tells us, we shouldn’t look at the world through a camera lens. Although, to some extent, we can’t help but do this. We are conditioned by the image-obsession of our society to have already seen the things we see in reality in others’ images. For example, when she sees an iceberg for the first time, she sees it in some way through the focus of others’ images of icebergs—television documentaries about iceberg formation, glossy magazine photographs of icebergs, National Geographic exposes—so that when she first encounters an iceberg she approaches it via these images. It’s a bit like armchair travel taken a step further, so that when we experience the world for ourselves and see with our own eyes, we are haunted by the images we have seen. How does the tourist, first looking at the Eiffel Tower, separate their experience from the hundreds of (un)real representations they have encountered in photographs and television of this beautiful structure? There is an awe involved specifically because it is an icon, but moreover there is that moment of unbelief: am I really here looking at this thing? Am I really seeing it for myself? How can I separate this from the view through a postcard or magazine photograph? Jenny Diski worries that if she takes photographs of what she sees and gives them to her daughter, her daughter will no longer feel the need to travel to Antarctica and see these things for herself, because she will have seen them, mediated through her mother. Do representations of place in some way reduce the real experience of place?

This is an issue I know Lori is working with in her dissertation. We were having an “Imaginineering Blue Sky Session” today, talking about my reading of Barthes and her readings of travel theory and how they conveniently intersected. We boiled it all down to the Mona Lisa, a cultural icon in its own right, represented again and again on posters, in books, on television, even on billboards. Each time you see it you are reminded of the real thing but removed from it one more step, so that it becomes a sign for a sign of itself, rather than a symbol for the referent: the real painting by da Vinci that hangs in the Louvre in Paris. When you do see it, there is that much-talked about moment of disappointment: it’s so small, you say to yourself, so unlike the “real thing” you had imagined. It’s as if the reality doesn’t quite match up to the grandeur you had conjured up from all these representations, blown up and enhanced over and over again, further and further removed from that moment, staring up at the real image, trying to convince yourself of the experience you are having with the painting, when in fact you are disappointed.

Lori pointed out that this disappointment has been so written about that it has almost become a sign in itself, so that when you do feel that disappointment you are able to identify with that ‘much talked about disappointment’. The fact that this identification with mis-identification happens testifies to the pervasiveness of a type of representation-syndrome in our visual society. Travel is an attempt to get away from the beaten path, but this has become so popular a notion that the ‘off the beaten path’ ideal itself has become colonized in some way: the un-beaten path is beaten because there you are, driving along a countryside lane in France somewhere, fitting this moment into the signs you have seen, over and over again, of “off the beaten path” France. “Oh, look how quaint and out of the way it is!” you say to yourself, amazed at your find, but at the same time fitting it in with the images you have seen, the books you have read, the television programmes you have watched about “off the beaten path” France, quaint because it is said to be quaint, beautiful because it is what is meant to be beautiful. This is a very cynical view, perhaps, but I think it’s true. There is such a danger of travel becoming a series of signs: checks on a tourist’s list: Eiffel Tower, check. Notre Dame, check. Tiny out-of-the-way park with leafy trees that isn’t usually seen by tourists (recommendation from a crumpled tourist guide), check. Man on bicycle with baguette, check. I’m summarizing our conversation here and stepping on Lori’s toes, but I’m sure she won’t mind. Besides, if I have to live with her while she writes her dissertation, I should at least get passionate about what she wants to write about!

I think I should stop writing now. This is getting far too long and it’s late.

I baked a cake today and licked the beaters clean.

The last few days have been heavy with work and headaches. I was in bed all day Saturday with one of those migraines that shatters your head in two and reaches right down into your stomach. Lying in a dark room, willing the pain to subside but ever-conscious of its all-consuming hold on you, there is an intermittent fight to overwhelm body with mind. It always fails, and all I can do is wait hopelessly for the sleep that refuses to come to my rescue. When you watch paint dry, nothing happens. You have to leave the room for the wet patches to fade. Waiting for sleep when I have a migraine is like staring at that wall of moisture, studying each bubble, waiting for colour to matt into opaqueness.

Today was better. I had a poster presentation to give in Postgraduate Research II on my dissertation, which I had initially thought would be a terrible waste of time but discovered to be a wonderful way to visually define ideas. Stepping back and looking at the finished product, I was quite surprised at how organised my thoughts had become as opposed to the jumbled mess they had seemed in my head and my notebooks. Perhaps I oversimplified a little; I suppose you have to pare things down a bit to make them visual to an audience that hasn’t had grandstand seating inside your head. But Ashley seemed to understand what I was trying to get at and gave me some really positive feedback. I read some of her articles on Ebsco tonight, just to get a feel for her research area, and have found some great correlations between my ideas and her research. I found myself reading with a dictionary, which could be a bad thing, pointing to my lexigraphic naiveté, or a good thing, since I was interested enough to look up the handful of words I wasn’t completely clear about. (Incidentally, lexigraphic gets a squiggly red line of confusion from Word). I got really excited about her thesis on Wollstonecraft and Austen, especially where her comments on Austen’s marriages linked so succinctly with my brother-sister paradigm. Anyway, I got up the courage this evening to e-mail her and ask (beg??) whether it is possible to request someone (her) to be your (my) adviser… I don’t know whether it is or not, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to try. There’s an advert playing on TV at the moment: a guy doing silly things like riding in an ice-cream truck and getting a piggy back from a rather startled heavy-set man. The slogan is something like ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. I decided to work on that theory.

I’m really exited to get stuck into dissertation research. I like the idea of focusing on a personal project rather than having to juggle three things at once (along with life). The pressure of essays is mounting up, so I suppose the freedom of setting my own deadlines for a while is looking more and more appealing. I will miss the creative writing side, though. It has given me a side-focus and taken the intense edge of the academic side of things.

Louise called the police the other night because she heard someone walking up and down outside and thought it was a bit suspicious. Apparently it wasn’t the first time she had heard someone walking on the stones, and she was alone this time, so scared. I wonder whether it was some guy from the next apartment block out having a cigarette at 2 a.m.

The most alarming thing that happens to us at night seems to be the sudden collapse of the blinds in the study. Why do they wait until 3 a.m.? We weren’t able to fix them back up this time, so I called the landlord and he brought around his friend to fix the fittings. I’m not really acting like much of a feminist, am I, calling the men in to do my DIY jobs? Or I could suggest that I’m getting the men in to do the jobs I just don’t have time for, since my days are spent on a higher intellectual plain. But that just sounds snobbish, and it's not at all true.

The other day, walking to meet Mum in Café Nero, I saw a pudgy, blond-haired boy with a Burger King drink stoop down to the speckled pavement to pick up a dusty red rubber band dropped by the postman earlier that morning. As he straightened back up, rubber band wrapped around three fingers, he took a satisfied slurp of sugary drink through his straw and stared intently at the red band.

I remembered seeing a snippet of Newsround, the news programme for children that comes on before Neighbours (oh, there’s an admission), about children who collect the Royal Mail’s red bands to make huge red balls of woven elastic.

The red was striking against the grey pavement. It lay there amongst splatters of pasty bird droppings. The boy and I spotted it at the same time, and he reached out purposefully and paused as I hurried on. The wind was blowing ferociously and I was late.

My parents think I’m uneducated because I can’t spell chiropodist. I told Mum I could spell hermeneutical phenomenology (look, no squiggly red line), but I don’t think that made much difference. I was looking up podiatrist. Is that American?

That reminds me of the West Wing episode where Bartlett is trying to make his scientist daughter laugh by confusing all the names of medical specialities. Podiatry? Pediatrics? Oncology?

We started to watch Something’s Gotta Give tonight, wanting something to take our minds off work while eating dinner (which was chicken breasts cooked on a medley of red onions, red pepper, mushrooms, baby plum tomatoes and bay leaves with sweet soy sauce and olive oil). I love that movie. It’s silly to start with, but I could watch the whole thing just for those scenes of Erica sitting in her room writing: the big bay window opening out onto the beach, the French music in the background, the muted eggshell greens and whites of the room, the bookshelves surrounding the house. So that’s where my Hamptons craze kicks off. And then there’s the crying scene, which is so painfully ridiculous in its mixture of sad and funny that it is almost beautiful. That house is the epitome of the idealised lifestyle: so ordered and white and clean and open. Lori suggested we’d have to get a whole library of French books to match the white décor or go to the extreme and organise our books in colour-order, which made me readjust my image of the perfect house just a tad.

Having said all that, if it came all with Jack Nicholson as the lover, I think I might have to give up even the Hamptons… Could I swap him for Johnny Depp?

Our Billy Collins book hasn’t arrived yet and I’m toying with the idea of buying The Portable Kristeva. Speaking of books, I have to go read Camera Lucida, which Margaretta described as a book we would hate her for assigning. I’m curious.

Today is the first time it has really felt like spring is on its way. I walked to a meeting this morning and the air smelled fresh and wet after the early rain. The sun was warm on my face, and the sky was bright with fluffy white clouds racing each other in the wind, which surged between the hills in heavy gusts, roaring against windows at the top of campus. As I walked up the hill to Queen’s, the smell of the curry herb Lia likes to rub against filled the air. I don’t know the name of the herb, but I recognise the smell of her cat fur in the summer, musty and spicy.

I drove home with the windows open and music turned up loud, delighting in the way my car responded to my movements. I get the sense, from time to time, that my car knows exactly where I’m going. It’s a dangerous notion, perhaps, and one that I shouldn’t take too literally. But there I sit, in this big blue bubble of a machine which whirs and roars beneath and in front of me, and its movements are fed by the slightest shift of my fingers or toes. Perhaps some movements are unconscious. I love driving. I love to drive over the train tracks and feel each ridge beneath me. I love the easy motion of turning slight bends in the road, the exhiliration of a motorway, the swift manoeuvres in traffic, the freedom of an empty road. Driving an automatic car in the States was easy, reliable, predictable, but there’s something about the feel of a clutch beneath your foot, that up-down, back-forward balance on a hill, where the car is completely in tune with your body, your breath, your focus. The danger of feeling that the car knows what you want it to do is too real in an automatic. With a manual, there is a satisfactory shift of the gears: that slide, slotting something in its correct place. Orderly, positive motion. When you are behind the wheel of a stick-shift, the car moves with you, changing gear like drawing breath, and you don’t notice a jerkiness. As a passenger, there are a series of nauseating jolts as you move into a comfortable speed, and I suffer from terrible car sickness. As soon as I’m behind the wheel, I have control, and my body is in sync with the machine.

The contours of my car make me smile. The blue hips, brows, backside and haunches curve around its body, and its bonnet grins at you as it approaches. Bug drivers all over the country acknowledge each other’s taste and style with a nod or a wave or, more appropriately, a wink of light. Whoever decided to add the vase was a genius.

As I drove home today, upbeat about my meeting with Margaretta and positive about the day ahead, a huge black cloud loomed over the hills behind Exwick. I realised that looking forward, all you could see was grey dullness, while behind me the sky was vivid blue and bright. Attitude to life could be determined by your direction, by which way you decide to look, a fitting metaphor. I opened the door, stepped out into the sunshine, went inside, and within five minutes rain was pelting the windows. The blinds gloomed with reflected grey. Fifteen minutes later the sun shone again, but in seminar late this afternoon the rain slanted sideways across the windows with the wind, which booed and hissed in the dimming light. A typical English day, I suppose. But the air smelled of spring.

I had an appointment with Margaretta today. I was so angry with myself this morning for forgetting what time I had scheduled the appointment. I knew it was this morning, not too early, but had forgotten to write it down. I knew I would have to drive to campus, pay to park, walk up the hill to the second (American third) floor of Queens just to look on a door and come back down again, go home, and wait for my appointment. It was a miracle that I arrived just as Margaretta was opening her office door, two minutes early for my appointment. I was shocked (and not a little relieved that I hadn’t waited a few minutes longer to leave the house). The meeting went well, and I feel a lot more positive about my portfolio now. Plus, I have spread the Julian Green joy, so that is one achievement for the day.

I have Faith Hill’s song, Paris, in my head. It has ridiculous lyrics: something about tearing up the Mona Lisa into little pieces, which would be all very well and good if the Mona Lisa was painted on canvas instead of wood.

Tomorrow my mother is coming to Exeter and meeting me for shopping and lunch in the town centre. I haven’t seen her for over a month, and it will be great to get out of the apartment and catch up. I’m looking forward to some allocated time off work. I always feel I am playing hooky when I’m not working. I cleaned the house today and felt guilty that I wasn’t working. Right now, writing this, I know I should be working. But when time off is allocated, set aside as separate from work time, then I can enjoy it. Tomorrow is set aside as mother-daughter time. I hope the weather’s good.

The house is all spick and span tonight. We had a cleaning session, ostensibly for Mum coming, but also because the mess was getting to me. I suppose it wasn’t really that messy; there was just a significant amount that wasn’t in the correct place, and the floor needed vacuuming. I often wonder why I can’t just manage to clear up in intervals: the living room today, the bathroom tomorrow, etc. When I clean I like to start from the very beginning and work my way through to pristine order. It’s a bit like organising my bookshelves. I can’t just sort out a shelf at a time… oh no. All the books come off before any order can be restored. I’m far too methodical about cleaning. I’ll begin with the intention to tidy up the kitchen and end up with my sleeves rolled up and my head inside the cooker, scrubbing away, before mopping the floors and tidying the cupboards. Today I vacuumed and then mopped the kitchen and bathroom. I feel like my head is more organised when my surroundings are tidy. The house smells of Ecover and ginger peach candles and S’il Suffisait is playing.

I have to decide where to take Mum for lunch tomorrow…

Another thought:

John, in my Writing From Life class, said he writes to make his life more justified in some way, as though it is only through writing about life that it has any importance. I’m not sure I would go that far. Although I’ve been writing a lot lately, I often go for days without writing because life gets in the way. But I do understand where he's coming from. Writing about life makes it seem more important. Rachel (also in the class) said some lovely things to me about how my writing makes my life sound, which made me wonder whether my writing for that class gives my life a false façade. She said I made her question how stressed her life had become lately, and I wanted to say: no, you don’t understand, I’m stressed, too!

Blog is such a ridiculous word. It makes me think of things like mud and stomping and gurgling sinks. It’s an onomatopoeic word without a sound referent.

We went out for a drink after class yesterday, and over my orange and passion fruit J2O I was told something like “an academic is a creative writer waiting to evolve.” Those weren’t the exact words, but it was the essence of what was meant. I think academic writing comes so naturally to me because it is a skill that can be learnt, with its right rules and rhythms. There is still a satisfactory linguistic element to academic writing, though. There is poetry in finding the perfect and precise word, that one that means exactly what it should. In creative writing, a thesaurus can be taboo; the right word is rarely a multisyllabic monster. But in academic writing, there is a moment of completeness at the Shift-F7, and the subsequent hunt for and revelation of that exact word. Before it’s found, you know it’s there, lurking in your subconscious dictionary, so when you find it there is a connection between unconscious and conscious self: a click, a fit between the hidden and the apparent, like the satisfaction of finding the jigsaw piece that fits. In academic writing, words can be jigsaw pieces: you know the general look of the finished picture, but you don’t have the image on the top of the box to guide you. Things just have to feel right. The click of finding the right word is the click of putting things back in their proper place when cleaning, or of shifting the stick and feeling the car reach its perfect gear, with the happy hum of the engine to move you on.

Showers are so often a chore. That is, until you are actually taking the shower, which can be a form of bliss, cleaning off the self that woke up and emerging a brand new person, towel-dried and fresh. I’m sitting here with my hair in a purple towel, typing. This morning I woke up with a dull, static headache and intense hunger. An attempt to eat breakfast had my head reeling, so I returned to bed with Skating to Antarctica and wallowed in pyjama-ed and duveted warmth in a world of penguins, icebergs and mental institutions.

It’s a beautiful book; a little strange, but I think that’s the attraction. She gets right deep down into the comforting blankness of depression and whiteness. Having taken a trip to Antarctica, she begins to question whether she will actually get off the boat and set foot on land. What would it mean to travel all this way and not actually be on Antarctica? It’s a question I had to get my head around, but I think that’s the point. The reader asks: how could you even contemplate this? But she answers: does it really matter? What difference will it make to my life? Will anyone back home ever find out? And no one does, since she never tells us. It’s about challenging expectations and our ways of looking at the world, and of travel, as a series of experiences to be mounted up as conquests. She takes no camera, no camcorder, suggesting that the other travelers are missing out on something by already seeing their journey in the past, sitting at home with their family and friends showing slides or jerky home movies. Although, to be critical, writing a book about the experience is hardly refusing to capture and display it; but what she displays are her own reactions to the landscape (along with her memories of childhood – a very disrupted one), rather than the still snapshots we have all seen a hundred times. It’s the essence of writing: the conveyance of personal reaction, so that each piece of autobiographical writing, or even all writing, in a sense, is about the author and how they perceive the world. When we say each book contains a world, we mean it is our world seen through someone else’s eyes, like trying on funky glasses to see how the tint changes our perspective. Jenny Diski’s glasses are white and ice-blue, and they look inwards and back, searching out a need for absence and nothingness that gives us some meaning in life. It could be a really depressing read, but, rather surprisingly, it isn’t. Any book that makes you look at life slightly differently is a positive thing.

So now I am showered and fresh and my headache has gone, and I want to sit in a white room and write.

I have a headache tonight, one of those persistent dull throbs that sometimes seems to disappear, but just when you think it’s gone it washes over you stronger than before. I suppose I went to bed last night a little too late, and I had to get up this morning for the postgraduate seminar. Two lecturers today: Bob Lawson-Peebles, who I had for Transatlantic Century last term, and Angelique Richardson, who teaches Lori’s other class this term. Bob told some wonderful stories about conversations in urinals and one-legged people (quote of the day: ‘it would be quite useful, wouldn’t it, to have a foot for an umbrella?).

All in all I was pretty grumpy today. Two of the books I needed have been recalled and I haven’t had a chance to fully read them yet, so I now have a £2 fine to pay tomorrow. I took USM library's “grace period” for granted. I could have added a couple of books to my collection at least for the amount I’ve had to pay in library fines this term. I worked some on my dissertation topic this afternoon – reading a book about the family and the French Revolution, which has some rather interesting illustrations from the Marquis de Sade. We made Cottage Pie for tea and watched Roman Holiday, which cheered us both up, and since then I have been reading Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, which I’m loving. Lori just made me a cup of tea, so things may be looking up.

How much tea do I drink a day?

Lori is sitting opposite me on her side of the desk making a schedule for tomorrow. This already means that tomorrow will be much more productive, since when she is positive about work it tends to rub off on me. I have so much to get accomplished and very little time to do it.

I'm tired and a little down tonight and could do with a little injection of faith.

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

I’m reeling heady from books and Parisian dreams tonight. Words. Their silky smoothness in the air and their shoulder-to-shoulder snugness on my bookshelf. Things are good tonight; I’m drinking tea and missing my family quietly, not intrusively, amid the whirr of the computer and the smell of laundry.

A conversation over tea and hot chocolate at the new Café Nero this afternoon, after an hour running fingers over spines on black shelves, has me thinking about possibilities and Apica notebooks. I want to travel the world with a bundle of blue and cream Apica notebooks, slotted cosily in a canvas bag (sandals hooked on finger, toes in sand, or perhaps the bag on the floor of Café Madeleine in Jackson Square). They need a thick but fast-drying ink pen, the kind we were made to use at school. I remember cartridges bursting in my rucksack and being taught to write an ‘f’ in two thin, fat bubbles.

There is a ritual to making tea. A dry spoon dipped into the cream pot of sugar – that wonderful noiseless sifting of white grains as they tumble over one another – and dropped from a certain height (not too high, or it splashes the tea, not too low, or the heat from the mug clings sugar to the metal) into Lori’s English Breakfast, before a quick thermometer shake and a dip in my Earl Grey. Stir, lift, deposit, stir, lift, deposit. Is it selfish of me to not want a drop of sweetness in my tea but to contaminate Lori’s English Breakfast with my Earl Grey? I try to analyse this in the same way I do when staring at two plates of food, freshly prepared, ready to place on the round mats on the round table. Giving thought to which one goes where is complex. Lori will reach for the smaller portion automatically. For me, there is a period of deliberation before handing her the larger portion. What does this say about me? The result is the same, but her altruism is automatic and mine is paused. Perhaps I remember days of fighting for the bigger slice with David when I was little or wrestling spoons over the scrapings of cake mix in the bowl (smell of sponge in the kitchen, my mother’s pre-bake charm, ‘Good Luck, Cake!’ shouted into the oven, a ridiculous practice still I cling to).

Speaking of Daviday, he signed for his first apartment today. I called Dad to get his parsnip recipe – he was in the middle of cooking Spaghetti Bolognese and singing that ridiculous song he made up when we were children (I suppose, if I’m honest, I tend to copy that one too – my parents’ cooking rituals are embedded deep). Recipe received, I was passed to Mum, who told me about Dave’s new flat. He gets the keys at the end of this month. It’s a tiny furnished one-bedroom place in a village called Whitney just outside Oxford, not far from the flight school. I was shocked to hear it costs pretty much the same per month as Lori and I pay together for this place. He will be excited to move in, but I wonder what he and Liz will do with her still at school in Devizes, studying for A-Levels, and him flying high in Oxford with only Sundays free. I’ll sidetrack the fact that my little brother is in a long-term relationship while I am still pitifully free and single. I’d like to say that is a choice I have made. It is, but it would be nice if I had opportunities to exercise that choice more often!

Grapefruit for breakfast this morning, an attempt at healthy eating ruined quickly with a piece of toast to calm the bitterness. Church, then home for lunch, lazy watching of American Idol on TV, and a trip out to Waterstone’s and Café Nero before coming home to do some work and cook. I made a mini boneless leg of lamb, roasties, parsnips (which didn’t turn out as good as Dad’s), roasted carrots with coriander and Yorkshire puddings, which don’t really go with lamb but satisfied an acute craving. On the phone to Dad I mixed up my words and told him we had a “legless lamb” (I meant a boneless leg), which elicited much laughter and jokes about drunk sheep. Mum is coming to see me on Friday – girly shopping is proposed. I might take her to Dart’s Farm.

Gazing out the upstairs window of the café today, I watched a bright blue balloon with a curly tail and ‘Café Nero’ written across the belly in black bob up and into the air. It must have made its way out of the door downstairs. It rose jerkily, a stream of blue against murky grey and white, and then, after it had disappeared from view, I watched its shadow chase it up the contours of the building opposite, morphing in shape with each window and crevice.

It was quite a coincidence, after my blog yesterday about comments in the margins, to find this wonderful poem by American poet laureate Billy Collins…

Perfect.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have manage to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page
-anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil
-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Most of my days have soundtracks. We put on Abraxas this morning to eat muffins. That’s a throwback to our Hattiesburg days listening to a CD of a string quartet we found playing in Covent Garden and had as a voice-level background at breakfast most mornings. Abraxas makes me think of the linoleum beneath my feet, the click-whirr of the air conditioner, the voice of the intercom at the drive-thru bank outside the kitchen window, the sound of lilting voices outside, and the smell of pine and heat.

Then I nipped out to buy a paper (The Calling in the car) and shuffled the iPod a little while reading The Times. My iPod has moods. Today it decided there was a surprising amount of Anna Nalick, Sarah McLachlan, and French café music on my music list, which is quite odd. I sometimes wonder why I started by putting every song I own on that little machine (it must have been Christmas novelty), and slowly I have erased them. There are still a few that made it through the cracks though. Case in point, the sideways glance Lori and I gave each other at a wayward Bee Gees song that started playing about 11:30.

I caught up on a few pages of world events before skipping to the Books section, browsed online for a while and sang aloud to a few favourites that started to play: 3 Doors Down’s Landing in London and Here By Me. Café Nero opens in Exeter tomorrow, incidentally. That’s one of the things I found out online this morning.

The music last night was Cuban, because apparently Louise is obsessed with a recent trip to Brazil (which also explains the Brazilian flag that spans the entire hallway wall). It was rather surreal being inside our apartment in reverse with completely different décor. They still have the same bay window in the lounge, and the room is a similar size, but they have so much more stuff in there. The only features of our living room are a small round table in the window, two rather large bookcases against the wall, a small couch, Ikea’s cheapest coffee table and the TV cabinet. Rob and Louise have a (wonderfully comfortable) wraparound couch that takes up half the room and a home entertainment centre that explains their house security system. The flat was cosy but I realise I need my space. I don’t do ornaments: a few plants and candles for ambience does it for me. I liked their pictures. I realise anyone walking into our apartment would think I was rather egotistical in my art choices, since all but one frame contains my own photos. This was partly inspiration from our travels, partly cost-effectiveness.

There are only three flats out of six in the block occupied at the moment. Rob and Louise live across the hall – she is a postgraduate law student and he does project work in Bristol. They have been together for a couple of years and decided to buy a place together to make a commitment this year. Upstairs are Bev and Cat, radiologists at Devon County Hospital, who share an upstairs flat with their two goldfish and a med student who pops in and out whenever he gets time off. He doesn’t actually live there, but I think he might be with Cat (that would explain the way she propped herself on his knee and became more friendly with each sip of rosé). We discussed the idiosyncrasies of our flats (the leaking baths, lack of storage space, lack of light outside the front door to find the keyhole) and Bev told an amusing tale about a dehumidifier and hasty refilling of an almost empty goldfish tank. All the while I made mental notes: they don’t have a glass door leading to the kitchen but their kitchen is bigger; I’m glad we have carpet in our living room; I’m glad I’m doing an MA and not working in a hospital; I’m glad we’re renting and didn’t buy. The soundtrack changed to Bob Marley and we didn’t leave until late.

Back to today: we kept the music on at lunch and ate a baguette with brie (Lori had goat's cheese, but it reminds me too much of the goat farm in Pontlevoy and I can’t dissociate the smell of the cheese from the smell of goat), tomato basil salad (tiny pomodoro tomatoes cut in half with a pinch of chopped basil, basil olive oil and a drop of balsamic vinegar) and German pepper salami. The soundtrack to Something’s Gotta Give played in the background and made me want to collect pebbles from a beach and live the life of a famous writer in the Hamptons. We drove to Dart’s Farm instead.

When I have my house in the Hamptons, incidentally, I will have to furnish it from Dart’s Farm. I want a cream coloured Aga with the kitchen island they have on show, Nigella Lawson kitchen ware with a huge KitchenAid mixer in baby blue or pink (the ones that donate to breast cancer) and lots of recipe books. We browsed for a while and bought some fruit, shallots for dinner, balsamic vinegar because we’d used the last for lunch, and we indulged on some Lime Daiquiri sorbet, which is heavenly. I wish we’d forked out for the Strawberry Daiquiri too, because the two would make a wonderful combination. That reminds me of “limone e fragola” in Venice.

One of my favourite possessions is a little cream teapot with red writing across the belly: i’m a little teapot. I’m reminded of this because Dart’s Farm sells them (for twice the price I paid, and even then I thought it was expensive. Tell me who would pay £30 for a teapot!? I love the thing, but that’s just too much). Anyway, back to the subject. My little teapot is part of a range of creamware with cute writing, for example a butter dish that says ‘butterfingers’ and a milk jug that says ‘no use crying over spilt milk’. Well, one milk jug proudly stated: ‘the cats got the cream’. No apostrophe. I’m turning into Lynne Truss.

So there is a newspaper article today related to my milk jug story. Apparently there is going to be a move towards preventing children getting above a C at GCSE if they can’t punctuate. This has caused an outcry from some teachers who say that’s not fair on bright pupils who just don’t know how to punctuate (studies show some A-grade pupils get punctuation wrong over 50% of the time). Employers, on the other hand, are saying they’d like it very much, please, if people who made it through an education knew how to spell and punctuate. I think I have to agree with the employers here. How can you give someone an A-grade if they can’t use an apostrophe at least most of the time? I’m not saying everything has to be perfect… I mean, I know I’m no punctuation angel. But… ‘the cats got the cream’??!

Incidentally, I notice I keep switching back and forth between American and British punctuation, which can’t be good. The Internet seems to be a no man’s land (there’s a feminist deep inside me who wants to correct that to ‘no woman’s land’, but that would be pedantic, so I won’t), somewhere between America and England, so I never can decide which to use.

Back to today, and I’m in the car on the way back home from Dart’s Farm, debating with Lori over whether to head to town to browse Waterstone’s or to go back home. We decide home because of the sorbet.

The soundtrack in the car was some shuffled songs, The Calling, a couple from the Garden State soundtrack, and, for a completely different sound, “Because of You”, which is surprisingly honest:

Because of you I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you I learned to play on the safe side so I won’t get hurt

Back home for a cup of tea and to find that ScreenSelect had sent a terrible movie, which confused me because I can’t figure out how it made its way onto our list. Probably something to do with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. Ladies in Lavender. It was very strange, but I liked the music. That’s about all I’ll say about that. At least we had West Wing to watch during dinner, which was balsamic (today’s theme?) pork with red wine, shallots, and a baked potato (scrolling back to see the last time we had that, which was probably less than a week ago – it’s so good. I think I might have even written a paragraph about it last week…!)

Tony Blair on Parkinson tonight. I was rather surprised at how human he appeared. Kevin Spacey sat beside him, which in itself must have been an interesting chemistry (not quite as interesting as Andrea Botticelli singing with Christina Aguilera!). When conversation turned to Bush, Spacey moved his chair across the stage. So I learned a couple of things, including the fact that Blair told the French prime minister that he desired him in a number of positions. A good reminder not to run before you can walk in a language.

The news came on afterwards and made a terrible spectacle over a broken marriage which it in a roundabout way claimed to have caused. “Poor things, they split up because that blasted media has been getting to them. Let’s show images of said media peering through the letter box [cut to family home] and get a couple of people to say how terrible the media have been to these poor people. Tessa just couldn’t cope with the media”. ITV, of course, denying its position in the food chain.

And then I heard that Salman Rushdie is calling for the abolition of religion in favour of everyone turning to “secular values”, which has such a lovely ring to it, don’t you think? Speaking of which, the advert that keeps playing for a new series of Dispatches is going to make me crazy. So, [cue sinister music], there’s this new breed of people called [sinister drums] evangelical Christians who are terrorizing our schools [show picture of school desks piled up like bonfire]. They’re teaching us all that homosexuality is evil, everyone is going to hell, the world was made by God, and, yes, we’re all going to hell. [Show apple sitting on top of Bible, a wonderful visual aid for the confused audience, in case they miss the zoom-out at the end where we see the desks actually form the most sinister shape of all: the cross]. What is the world going to come to with all these evil evangelical Christians about? I felt like throwing something at the television. Make a commercial about how Muslims are leading the world into evil (which, by the way, is certainly not my opinion) and you’d have an uproar. But say evangelical Christians are terrorizing our children, and, well, no problems. This idea of a bunch of homophobic, anti-science ignoramuses seems to be ever more popular. I try to understand the impetus behind all this, but it just gets frustrating. I have some extremely close gay friends, I don’t go around condemning people to hell, and I most certainly do not oppose science. Since when did belief in God become equated with the spreading of hate? So there’s my soapbox for the evening.

Oh, I lied earlier. I did open a book today… a couple actually. I still haven’t read half of Rereadings, Anne Fadiman’s new book. She edited rather than wrote this one, which means it no where near equals Ex Libris (one of those books that I would save first from a fire), but it reminds me how reading can change lives. She picked a collection of authors to write essays on re-reading their favourite books from childhood or early adulthood, giving their perspectives now as opposed to back then. Some of the books are quite obscure, although there are the obvious ones slipped in there (Pride and Prejudice, for example). One is a nature book identifying various flower species, and the author writes about her obsession with identifying nature. I love the image she creates of this well thumbed, referenced, post-it noted book with a broken spine and a continent full of pressed flowers between its pages. That’s when book turns to scrapbook. My favourite books are the ones where you have your own input as you read; the ones with mementoes of reading shoved in random pages or marking favourite spots. In Ex Libris, Fadiman writes of her love for books being quite the opposite to courtly love (the kind resulting in rapped knuckles for laying down a book open, pages down, spine to ceiling). She writes in the margins, dog ears, spills, and bends. I share with her a love of cookbooks splattered with first attempts and novels punctuated with those first reactions (often wonderfully eloquent: ‘Yeah!’ or ‘Grrr’ or ‘What?!’ More often with me it is smiley faces or frowns, but occasionally I fill up margins with miniature essays. The other day I picked up a theory book on Kristeva for my Narrative and Subjectivity essay. We bought the book for our Literary Theory course at USM, back when the name Kristeva meant nothing and Lacan’s mirrors would have sounded like an obscure store name. In the margin next to a paragraph about the chora and pre-linguistic communication I had written a very loud ‘What?!’, echoed at the top of the page with ‘No Sense!!’ The two exclamation marks had heavy anchors. Now I read it with ease, and part of me wants to erase my annotations in embarrassment at my ignorance, but I realize I can’t honestly do that. It would be erasing a process, a record of my learning.

Now the soundtrack is Je t’aime encore and I’m singing about girolles. Mushrooms. Absurd.

It’s late and I was planning to take a bath.

Today is an official day off. The sun is shining, we have music playing in the background, and we made muffins.

What do we do with a day off? We seem to face a dilemma of decision, here. But it’s a sunny day and I’m happy. The apartment smells of strawberry muffins and tea. I cleaned yesterday, so it’s tidy and bright.

And I’m not opening a book today.

Whenever I hear seagulls I think of salt and ice cream. I drove to Sainsbury’s today to pick up some food for this week, and the seagulls were in full voice, crying like they did over Lyme Regis when I was 12 years old, and I thought of fossil hunting with my Dad.

Inside Sainsbury’s every trolley wanted to get in my way and people were discussing chicken in loud voices across whole aisles. I had planned to nip in, get what I needed, and hurry home, but that never happens. Lori had to work today – she had a draft to hand in for her other class – and I had said I would be home in time to drive her to campus when it was done. I timed my drive back from Sainsbury’s perfectly with school collection time, and had to dodge children with rucksacks. We just made it, and I sat in the car on Queen’s Drive while she ran into Queen’s. I wound down the window and listened to the birds. The tree trunks on the grass slope down the hill look like giant knarled hands. We drove down to the Quay to celebrate the handing in of drafts. The sun was warm on our backs but the air was freezing, and we walked across the bridge with arms folded, laughing at the idiocy which made us leave coats in the car. We stopped for a cup of tea at Roger’s Tearoom on the Plaza Terracina, where Roger himself grins over the customers with a beer belly and a red-faced laugh. He reminds me of David Williams. They have the best scones this side of Gloucestershire, and give you a huge dollop of clotted cream. Best of all, the menus hang from the ceiling on elastic string, so you can pull them down to read between faces at the table and when you let go they dance and bob erratically above your head.

I bought a replacement bulb for the light, but it started to smell after a couple of minutes. I called Dad and asked him if he had any bright ideas for fixing the lamp, which I see now was rather childish of me, but I did get to hear about their trip to Oxford to day to find a flat for Dave. He’s found a couple that aren’t too far from the flight school, so hopefully that will work out. I asked Dad if he’d written a letter to The Times, since there was a reply to one in there yesterday talking about having to pay to get into Winchester Cathedral, one of my father’s soapbox topics. He didn’t write it, but played along as if he had for a while.

I have done nothing of importance today. Tomorrow was meant to be my day off, but I just never got around to doing any work today. I don’t know where all the time went… I didn’t go shopping until after lunch, but I got up relatively early. It’s as if my morning was just eaten away. I think I replied to a couple of emails, but that’s about it. Which reminds me: I got an email this afternoon from Matt Hinton, a friend from USM who was opinions and then sports editor for the Printz. It was great to hear from him; I had emailed after Katrina to make sure he was okay because I knew his parents lived on the coast, but I must have had an old email address. He’s now crime editor for The Vicksburg Post.

I miss everyone from back there so much. I can’t wait to go back (24 days now, which is quite scary because essays have to be done before then!) – I’m longing for some good American food: McAlister’s cheesecake, Krispy Kreme, Mom’s roasts. And the smell of pine trees. I'm wondering how much will have changed. Katrina went right through Hattiesburg, and I dread seeing my old apartment torn down or changed too much. I don’t think I could manage to see the coast – Biloxi and Gulfport – knowing there’s pretty much nothing left. I’m looking forward to New Orleans, though. At least the French Quarter wasn’t hit as bad as the rest. To be honest, just going back and knowing I don’t live there any more is going to be odd.

I can’t wait to see everyone. Lori said we might go up and see Rebecca, too, which would be great – I’ve never seen Memphis (the airport doesn’t count!) and I haven’t seen her new house yet. What had started out as a ‘research trip’ is fast turning into a vacation! More than anything, to me, it just feels like going home. I set off for America five years ago thinking I’d miss England too much to stay very long, but now I long for that first step on American soil, knowing I’m home.

Back to reality. We got a piece of paper pushed under our door yesterday inviting us for drinks at the apartment across the hall. I’ve often been intrigued to see inside – you get a glimpse through the blinds every now and then, but never enough – so I’m looking forward to taking a peek. I’ve met Rob and Louise out in the hall every now and then, but it’s usually only a comment on the weather or a polite ‘how are you?’ They’ve invited the people from upstairs, too, so we’re going to go hobnob with the neighbours now.

The bulb has gone again, the second overhead one in the living room. This, by the way, is the second death in the life of the other bulb, which either makes the one near the bookshelf - the one that’s gone again - a premature death, or either the first bulb – the one near the couch – a surprisingly healthy breed. I don’t know why it always has to be that one. I like to turn the one beside the bookshelf on, along with the little lamp beside the television, when I’m sitting on the couch with a cup of tea or watching television. It’s something to do with ambience. The one that’s still good is too stark to have on all the time like this. It feels a bit like the lights in the classroom in Queens where I have both seminars this semester – those bright clinical florescents that give too much light.

The lights were one of the first things I liked about this room, though. They have uplighters, which means the light shines in a sweeping hoop from the ceiling instead of from a suspended bulb. To be honest, what first struck me about the lights was the fact that the two light switches are the wrong way around. The switch on the left controls the light beside the bookcase, which is on the right side of the room, and vice versa. This idiosyncrasy reaches right down into that OCD place in my stomach that rebels against such idiocy. It’s the same thing that makes me cringe at the line of Margaret Forster books at eye-level in Waterstones while E.M. Forster is relegated to toe-level, the two separated by Fowles, Fry and Fuller. I wonder how much of this gut reaction to disorderliness is innate and how much is conditioned. Have I been taught to put the shampoo bottle back on the shelf with the label facing outwards or to shift the vertical blinds so that each one overlaps the same amount, or is this something I inherited from my parents? It’s quite possibly the latter; my parents are relatively orderly people. Everything has a place. Mind you, my obsessive behaviour tends to display itself far more on bookshelves, and I completely rebel against my mother’s bookshelf strategies. Who ever thought of putting all the white books together? If I did that my DK guides would be beside the Cordon Bleu cookbook and Lolita; Dickens and Shakespeare would be shoulder to shoulder with the Bible and W.H. Auden.

Since it’s World Book Day, perhaps I’ll dwell on this a little more, because, now that I think about it, organising a bookshelf has been one of my principle joys in life since I was a child. Periodically I would take all the books from my shelf, categorise, alphabetise, sort and stack, and carefully line them up together. Oversize were happily married, but otherwise there was a strict regime. Over the years, particularly the last few with all the moves (most of these moves involving a suitcase of books), I have honed the book-sorting strategy. Top shelf always begins with religion and philosophy. The Bible starts things off, followed by A World of Ideas, The History of Knowledge, and all those far-reaching guides to human thought (culminated in The Imagineering Way, the Disney guide to life, far more useful than any Seven Habits). Then come biographies and letters, essays, reference books, lit crit. and writing books, and then travel, the most colourful section, with guides a precursor to literature. History comes before fiction, which wraps onto the top of another shelf and slinks right down to the fifth. This is the most carefully considered shelf. Anne Fadiman has a wonderful essay about marrying libraries with her husband, in which she complains of their contention over whose system of categorisation would work best. Both separated American and British fiction, but she went a little further, parting centuries and genres. I identify with this on two levels. Firstly, when Lori and I pooled our book collections (involving suitcases, again) there was the inevitable odd mingling. While Anne Fadiman and her husband finally resorted to tossing out duplicates, this was obviously not going to happen with friends: our identical copies of Clarissa take up an eighth of a shelf and our Austen collection spans a quarter. But I do separate British from American, classics from modern. I can’t imagine putting Hemingway next to Hardy or McEwan beside du Maurier. So first come British classics, then American, then translations. Drama and poetry separate classics from modern fiction, which is a surprisingly small shelf, since most of the novels I have read are still on my shelf at my parents’ house. I think that’s because there’s little chance of me referring to modern fiction again, whereas I couldn’t leave George or T.S. in my old room. Cookery finishes things off on the oversize shelf, a well-thumbed and splattered collection.

There are times I just sit and stare at the bookshelves. "Billys," Ikea calls them. I remember putting them together with Dad after a trip to Ikea, getting a splinter in my thumb and drinking tea, laughing at how they covered a whole wall and there was no way I would fill them. I’m now thinking I may need another one.

I let my tea go cold, again.

I fully intended to go outside this morning.  It snowed last night and the pebbles outside my bedroom window were covered with frosting.  I wanted to hear the muffled crunch under my feet and run my finger along the outside of the window ledge, but the snow has melted under a clear blue sky and now the ground is dull and puddled.  Instead of playing in the snow (okay, so there was only a thin layer, but I could still have been playful) there was essay writing for Narrative and Subjectivity.  The draft has to be handed in today, so I’ve been finishing that up.  I wonder why, despite every good intention, I can never write an essay early.  I also wonder why I write essays.  What on earth is the point in the observation that Richardson’s Clarissa and Austen’s Northanger Abbey both deal with heroines who are unable to understand the gap of meaning between signifier and signified?  When I write essays I use a foreign language that I don’t believe in.  I listened to the comments in class last night about how it can ruin the magic of literature to analyze it, and I started wondering whether that was what was happening to me.

I’m feeling cynical today.  I might think I don’t believe in this theoretical jargon I use, but it’s like a drug.  I can’t read a book without a pencil in one hand.

Another thought: why is my desk always such a mess?  I wonder what you could tell about me from this desk.  Something about overabundance of stationary, printed sheets, books and pens and CDs and mugs of tea, a globe, bills, hand cream, scrap paper with addresses, an empty pen holder with its inhabitants scattered about.  Most of these pieces of paper belong on the cork board above the desk, but I never quite manage to pin them up. Instead, the most prominent item on the board is two adjacent pieces of paper, one blank, and the other one with an arrow and the phrase ‘A Blank Page’.  It was meant for inspiration, but it sometimes seems to embody that feeling of starting an essay and not knowing what to write.