"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever."

Yes, please, that sounds nice. (Although Kingsley later changed it to "let who can be clever". Which is possibly still applicable to my situation.)

Unfortunately there are no degrees for being good. Off to the library.

"The first sentence is never told to anyone personally, but the second can be."

The word of the day is "saudade": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade

This article will also inform you of the existence of the Finnish tango. It is, you will find, "distinguished from other forms by its almost exclusive performance in minor keys and themes reflecting established conventions in Finnish folklore". You will wonder why Norway doesn't have any damn tango.

Formal was very good, though full of first-year girls in formal shorts (which are not so named because it would be an excellent idea to wear them at formal), and Vicky tried to convince all of our male friends except Tom the vet that they should be in her play. (This is another play, "Song", rather than the one I'm in; this one requires men, which turn out to be difficult to come by, at least in an acting capacity.) She didn't try to convince Tom the vet because she feels the role would involve "descending into squalor". "All my other male friends can descend into squalor," she said, "but if Tom descends into squalor, the world will spin off its axis." I see her point.

Since formal is an excellently compact way of going out, I had quite the evening and yet was in bed before midnight, which is a good thing considering I'm writing my essay on reading today. Ironically, in order to do this I will have to fake having read "Aurora Leigh". Ngh.

My mother reminds me that I actually have relatives in London and that it should be possible to work something out. Also Iona tells me that her sister may be out of town for the summer and Iona might be staying in her apartment and needing a flatmate. Maybe. So publishing internships are looking like a thrilling possibility. Possibly. Whee.

Semi-sunny Wednesday afternoon.

We were a tiny but amiable gathering at poetry, fifth week having apparently fried everyone's poetic circuits, and read our stuff over the clinks of someone playing snooker at the back of the bar. It always surprises me how much I like this (with the exception of the snooker players, whom we all wanted to kill), and how it actually works; it makes you want to write. One girl, who we hadn't seen before and who was very reminiscent of the Laura character in "Brick", sang two awesome self-penned songs in a strong, clear voice and then scarpered. And apparently she'd never sung in public before. Where stars are born!

Anyway, I read the stuff I haven't read before, and got probably the best response on "Overdetermination", which is sort of my favourite as well. Afterwards we went up to Vicky's room and talked about The Conflict Between Art And Happiness, which is worrying Vicky, who feels quite content but creatively dried up. I suppose the problem is that you have to be very conscious of things in order to write, but once you become conscious of being happy, you stop being happy and become poignantly aware of the fleeting nature of happiness, etc, instead. And then you can write. (But then having written something makes you happy again, and so the cycle goes.)

What makes me happy in a wholly non-poetic way, at the moment, is that Maggie Gyllenhaal is rumored to have taken over Katie Holmes's character for the next Batman film. YES THAT WILL BE AN IMPROVEMENT, I THINK. And also honey-oatmeal cookies, and going to formal tonight. What makes me less happy is that I do not have an apartment in central London from which I can take glamorous internship positions in publishing companies over the summer. And that all the summer jobs start on July 1st. I'd like to have more than one day of vacation.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Reading CV advice makes you really, really aware of yourself as a bundle of skills, qualifications and abilities.

"Negative traits: unable to turn head fully to the right, due to shoulders being too tense."

(Note: you would not put this on a real CV, where you are supposed to skim over your personal failings. You would put "able to turn head successfully and almost painlessly to the left".)

Note to parents: if all goes well, I am graduating on July 21st. The ceremony (here: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/degrees/ceremony) is quite cool, if you like that kind of thing. First the Regent House expresses its approval or disapproval of you by saying "Placet" ("it pleases") or "Non placet"; then the person presenting you says you are "suitable as much by character as by learning" to proceed to your degree (though they say it in Latin), then you kneel and the Vice Chancellor admits you to the degree. Then you get up and go and get your certificate, and the whole process is repeated for tons of other graduates. "After the last graduand has been admitted, one of the Esquire Bedells calls the Congregation to order with the word 'Magistri' (Masters)".

(This, for one thing, suddenly makes sense of the end of "Gaudy Night", where Peter proposes to Harriet:
"With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.
"'Placetne, magistra?'
"'Placet.'")

Matriculation was nowhere NEAR this formal. I don't remember any dress code, we were mostly extremely hungover, and some of us were still wearing traces of green face paint.

Poetry reading tonight. Time to take some ibuprofen, I think.

Last night.

"I have a plan, you know. It's pretty dastardly, you're not going to like it."
"Really."
"It'll take...an estimated fifteen years to complete."
"It had better be spectacular if it's going to take fifteen years."
"Fifteen years. You'll be thirty-six then."
"Your plan is to call me up and say 'ha ha, you're thirty-six', isn't it."
"'And I'm only thirty-five and eight months!'"

"Like a Roman Polanski film...only worse. Worse, so much worse."

So I am going to be in Vicky's play, "Quitter", which is by now a quite heavily reworked version of a tape-recorded conversation she had with two of our guy friends while one of them was trying to quit smoking. Due to a severe lack of male actors it's now become an all-female play, which does interesting things to the dynamic - the tone of it is sort of flippant with a strong undertone of aggression, and it becomes very different when it's three girls rather than two boys and a girl. The most extroverted and loud part will have to be played pretty carefully, but it might be better done by someone who doesn't know who it's based on. Or maybe anyone who doesn't know will just be utterly confused. We shall see; we're having a reading on Friday and they're assigning the parts then.

Have spent the afternoon essaying pleasantly and effectively (need to do as much as I can of the next Victorian essay so I can actually enjoy formal on Wednesday rather than having to rush home and write), and tonight I'm going to drop off the money for my May Ball ticket and go and see "The Science of Sleep" with divers like-minded people. The May Ball money plus the shoes I bought yesterday (from Topshop, sort of aquamarine round-toe pumps with little eyelets, a mary-jane strap, chunkyish wood heels) is making me feel unpleasantly spendthrifty. But they're both necessities in their own ways, I suppose.

The start of the weekend

Last night I auditioned for Vicky's and Reece's short plays, which are being put on at the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival at the end of term. The auditions were being held in Reece's room, and Vicky's room was the waiting room. By the time I arrived there were three or four strangers there, reading over speeches silently and filling out forms. I spend about 20% of my time in Vicky's room, and I needed to blow my nose, so I went and sat on her bed and took some of her tissues before starting to read. Everyone stared at me. I was the most fearless auditioner.

"At least you didn't go on my computer," Vicky said later.

Afterwards we went to the ent (or "dance party", as it may more comprehensibly and cheerfully be termed) in the Cellars, and had a much-needed awesome time. I was slightly feeling the lack of a male person to dance with, as neither Bethmo, Alex nor Andrew were there, but then Sam, who I hadn't seen for some days and who has in the interrim gotten his hair cut almost unrecognizably short (well, it's still chin-length), showed up. We went out behind the chapel and worried mutually about me leaving Cambridge at the end of the year. Finally I started shivering and went back inside to the hot, damp dance-floor in time for the final song. Walked home with the vets, feeling happy.

Justin, you are a little creepy to me now.

Much as I enjoy Justin Timberlake's new video featuring Scarlett Johansson (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFS7g5p6BFk) - I'm theoretically very much in favor of Justin's actorly crossovers, and also of Scarlett's musical crossovers, although she doesn't sing on this, sadly - I am a little concerned that apparently, if you cheat on Justin Timberlake, YOU GET KILLED IN A CAR CRASH.

It's also weird how the lyrics imply that Scarlett Johansson's character will be cheated on by her next boyfriend, and that the karmic cycle will thus be completed (until her boyfriend, in turn, gets cheated on by his next girlfriend, I suppose), but the video clearly implies that she actually gets killed. At least in "Cry Me A River" the girl was just kind of upset rather than DEAD.

Justin, you are a little creepy to me now.

But you're still probably doing well with the ladies.

Further Victoriana

A cold, wet, bleak day in Cambridge, which I spent reading up on female immurement in the UL (that is, I was in the UL reading up on female immurement rather than reading up on women being walled up in the UL, although in a sense I myself was an example of the latter, the irony of which was not lost on me, oh no). I only thought of this idea the day I had to write the essay, but fortunately my supervisor is very much an ideas woman - I apologized for my essay being kind of short, and she just said "oh, as long as there's a lot *in it*, it's fine", and then gave me enough new reading to furnish a dissertation. So I was stuck today with "Little Dorrit", which will be very useful - I can see why academics like Dickens, he fits into arguments so neatly - but is so depressing you could just cry, all horrible funereal houses and people being born among swarms of flies in debtors' prisons. Then I followed it up with a study about single women in Victorian England, which made me feel very sorry for women in Victorian England, single or otherwise. I went home and self-medicated with crumpets and raspberry jam.

But at least it's all interesting (well, to me). Oddly enough, becoming immersed (immured, possibly) in the Victorian period doesn't make me feel like I'm lucky to not be Victorian and to be able to blog and drink and own property - well, it does, but what I seem to see is not the contrast so much as the continuity. Much of it really isn't very foreign. And I wonder if this is because a century and a bit actually isn't that long, or whether I'd feel the same way if I was working with the Medieval period.

I will now go and read another book about Victorian women, called "Suffer and be Still". Wooooo!

In which we go out

Try listening to "Sympathy for the Devil" and focusing on the "whoo, whoo!" bits in the background, imagining that you are one of the people who have to sing them. It's actually making my throat and brain feel tired just thinking about it, like doing too many French pronunciation exercises involving the letter "r".

Then again, my brain might just be tired. I went to formal tonight not planning to make a night of it but rather to go home and get some work done on my essay once I'd eaten, and so far I've at least successfully accomplished the going home part. This is making me feel almost too mature. Although dinner was nice - they gave us profiteroles, which is the legendary formal dessert that you hardly ever get, although whispers of "profiteroles!" always circulate towards the end of the meal. We re-discovered that profiteroles are in fact just pastry shells full of cream, and that you can't have more than two without feeling sick. It's never good seeing legends up close.

Today was chiefly spent in dissecting last night's Blind Date, which in spite of what Hans suggests is a perfectly innocent event, and For Charity. Vicky's and Becky's dates did not work out brilliantly, but mine was surprisingly nice and a Very Good Date, which is quite a specific quality, I think. We even managed to get into Cindies without anyone getting punched. Once we were there, we barely knew what to do with ourselves and settled for mocking the Grease medley from the bar area. I got far too little sleep and barely managed to wake up and arrange lunch with Vicky before falling asleep again until said lunch. Becky and I ran into Bethmo, who told us that after he and his date had gotten amiably drunk in the Anchor she had decided to get back together with her ex-boyfriend. He took her to find him, and once they started making out he left quietly, rather pleased with his evening. The main effect of all this seeing new people seems to be to make you appreciate old people (old in acquaintance rather than age) more.

Aw yeah!

The RAG forms have arrived, in a shower of pink and blue. I got someone from Churchill. Cue bitter laughter. But he seems reasonable, by which I mean he is either madly confident, or kind of funny, or had someone else fill out his form for him. I'm hoping for a hybrid between the first two.

The prospect of going to Cindies, which is what people do on the Blind Date, is thrilling to me. Oh, Cindies, it's been too long since I was held in your smoky embrace, breathing the fug of bad music and worse decisions. I am not too cool for you!

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi

Tonight is a night for listening to the version of "I Want Candy" off the Marie Antoinette soundtrack, very loudly, while calmly considering the several essays in front of one.

The RAG blind date forms (the ones from our dates, that is) haven't arrived in the Colony yet. Everyone here is freakin' out. Though the people in Old Court, who do have theirs, don't seem much happier.

I was looking up a reference for my Prac Crit essay (having dropped the g in the word "freakin'", I now want to just drop it consistently: "lookin' up a reference") and found it in the last scene of Dr Faustus, in Faustus' final speech starting "Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, / And then thou must be damned perpetually". I like Marlowe only middlingly, but I sort of love this monologue:

"...Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.
O soul, be chang’d into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean—ne’er be found.
My God! my God! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books!—Ah Mephistophilis! [Exeunt DEVILS, with FAUSTUS.]"

(The reference, from a Tony Harrison poem, was "I'll burn my books". And now I must go and actually write on it.)

each to their very little own

I have, since yesterday, been listening to The Feeling. I know they make Belle and Sebastian sound deeply hardcore (well, Belle and Sebastian are a *little* hardcore), but whatever, I want to go around listening to them on my iPod in the lovely sunshine and humming "...got some sugar for your bowl, got some lemon for your soul". (I initially thought I was persistently mishearing "some loving for your soul" as "some lemon for your soul", but am now convinced that "lemon" is in fact right. AW BRITISH.)

It's sunny outside. I did my laundry. Dissertation is go, as is RAG Blind Date, even after we all swore up and down we'd never do it again. After dinner last night Alex and I procrastinated (well, I was just there; he was procrastinating) by hitting the random word button on OED.com as a method of divining how our dates would go (both him and his girlfriend are participating, separately, for reasons that are unclear to me). Alex got "repair". His girlfriend got "air guitar". Vicky got "auricle". I, most encouragingly, got "morris dancing". A little later, as I was leaving, I heard him cry out joyously that "bootylicious" was in the OED.

Now, if I only had plans for tonight, all would be perfect. Someone should take me to see "Black Book", seeing as how the trailer for it prominently features, as almost its only spoken line, the word "AUSGEZEICHNET". This means "excellent", and is one of the few things I can say in German, apart from such classics as "ich will keine möbel kaufen; ich bin Beelzebub" and "HALLO ICH BIN GOTT".