chicks and ducks and geese better scurry

Oddly emotionally honest conversation outside the electro club we couldn't get into last night:

"What animal would you be, if you were an animal?"

"Oh, I don't know. Let me think."

"I was thinking you'd be a swan."

Though considering how violent, noisy and unhygienic the swans on campus are, it might not even have been a compliment.

hour to hour, note to note

If you want to spend tomorrow the way I have spent today, aurally speaking (and I'm sure you do), this is what to listen to. Good for grey very-nearly-rainy afternoons and for hanging around the linguistics section of libraries.

Oh oh, I've now watched most of "Twilight" on the interwebs. I'm about an hour and a half in, and so far there is no plot, and it's clearly been filmed illegally in a cinema so the visual quality is really bad, meaning that when Edward is meant to be sparkling threateningly in the sunlight it just looks like he's standing around with an unnecessarily horrified expression. I can, however, absolutely tell that it would've worked on me as an impressionable twelve-year-old (not the sparkling so much as the notion that fir-tree climbing at high speeds and not being allowed to actually kiss your boyfriend constitute epic romance). It all makes me sort of glad that what I had as an impressionable twelve-year-old was "Titanic". I rewatched this with Maren a few months ago and was expecting to be far less impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio's character than I was when I first saw it (to be fair, it would've been hard for me to be any more impressed), but in fact he comes off as unpatronisingly thoughtful and competent, and it's quite a good relationship up until the floating-on-driftwood-in-the-ocean part. I'm not giving my pre-teen self credit for being a very discerning judge of character, it's more that I think some generations are more fortunate with their epic romances than others.

On the other hand "Titanic" doesn't have a single scene involving vampire baseball, so it all balances out.

non-academic blogging is not really happening

Sitting in the overheated King's Manor library writing my 18th-century Representations of Women essay, which for some reason is so far 500 words on Anna Laetitia Barbauld's stupid flower poetry rather than the awesome Foucauldian treatise on Anne Lister and Jane Austen I was envisioning. (I'm hoping to get to the awesome Foucauldian bit soon.) Anyway, the point is I want to quote some Shakespeare, literally for no other reason than that it clarifies a point I'm making (the line is "an art which does mend nature, change it rather, but the art itself is nature", from A Winter's Tale. I think I've quoted that before in the blog, which I expect is why it came to mind), and it's causing me no small frustration that, no longer being an undergraduate, I can't get away with that sort of thing. Back in the days when I wrote my essays from seven to nine the morning they were due, I used to put in every anachronistic thing that came into my semi-conscious head and think nothing of it.

It's going well, though, apart from that; I'm going to lull the marker from the history department into a sense of false security with historical documents and flower poetry and then hit them with a ton of narrative theory. Whee

I knew I was going to have to be in some kind of altered state in order to write my MA dissertation proposal (250 words of genius, due next Monday, and as of this morning I literally had no idea what I was going to do with it), but I thought it would be in the form of a violent caffeine high rather than a migraine. I was sitting in King's Manor staring at Bram Dijkstra's "Idols of Perversity" when I started getting an aura, and once I got home I had to keep getting up from my bed of pain to write stuff down. When the headache started to lift I had the proposal ready, and now it's written out. I might not submit it until tomorrow in case a more sober mood reveals it to be nonsensical, though. The topic is definitely very depressing, but considering how oddly life-affirming my Ph.D is looking I'm probably allowed. And the department has at least one expert in the very depressing who can supervise me.

Will write about non-academic matters as soon as any occur; lately even my non-working life has been pretty nerdy (going to the "Dracula Experience" in Whitby, talking about books in cafés, talking about books in pubs, University Challenge tryouts). Uncerebral times ahead tonight, I think.

:D

I got "Bad Property" back - the first properly assessed, counting-toward-my-degree essay of the year - with, seriously, the kindest comments I've received on a piece of work since...high school, probably. (As an undergraduate I counted "at least this essay has a conclusion" as a kind comment.) I'm happy not least because when I reread it after handing it in, it seemed incredibly dry and I couldn't see what my own argument was supposed to be. But apparently it is in fact "elegantly written, wide-ranging and scholarly". Also "hard-hitting and eloquent". And "the final paragraph about teacups and blasphemy is a masterstroke". (It turns out, though, that you're not supposed to end a paragraph with a parenthetical statement. The things you learn in grad school.)

Though gracious in defeat I am, as ever, extremely annoying in victory, and Sarah and I shouted and cheered and punched the air in the grad study room (she was also very pleased with her mark). Then I went to get some wine for Chettam's birthday party tonight and ended up with Chardonnay, which I don't particularly like, solely because it was the only one with a screw top. All class.

And finally, dialogue from last night, after I was socked right in the eye with a snowball:
"I just want to make sure you get to your room without passing out from concussion."
"Oh God, what if I am concussed? What if you've RUINED my head?"
"Well, what we can do is save your brain by removing it and putting into something else."
"Like a robot?"
"Well, anything you like. We could put it into a lizard of some kind."
"Can we put it into a great ground sloth?"
So at least I was able to go to bed secure that there was an emergency backup plan in place.

if you were the winter i know i'd be the snow

This is a day for:

- dancing to "All I Want Is You" in the kitchen, while making tea (the kitchen has huge glass doors facing the courtyard so this is a risky move)
- slowly regaining the balance in my injured foot
- finding that a brand-new vintage store has sprung up on Fossgate and trying on quite a lot of men's tweed coats (conclusion: I wish I could wear men's tweed coats, but cannot. I did get a brooch though.)
- getting an idea for my Poetry of Loss essay (quotation in elegy, which, not incidentally, will require me to excoriate "The Anxiety of Influence")
- reading things aloud
- looking forward to the weekend.

starter for ten

I made it through to the second round in the University Challenge tryouts! This in spite of being wrong on fairly basic stuff like who the king of Troy was during the Trojan war, because my mind went blank and I kept thinking about the film rather than the book. I suspect I might get knocked out in the buzzer round, though, because buzzers frighten me.

"Limerence" is the word of the day*

Ohhhhh. I don't want to read Sally Shuttleworth's opinions on Victorian psychology (no offense to them, but somehow I get freaked out every time I open that book; I think I'm afraid that one of the pages is going to read "HAHA YOUR RESEARCH IS IRRELEVANT" in 48-point type. It's that kind of similarity of ideas that isn't inspiring but just worrying). I don't want to come up with a 250-word MA dissertation proposal, or an idea for my 18th-Century Women procedural essay, or an idea for my Poetry of Loss essay. I don't want to walk anywhere in the snow. I don't want to not drink coffee for another two days (in a test of self-control I've cut out coffee for the week, which probably relates to why I don't want to do any of those other things).

I basically just want to dance all night and sleep all day, for about a week. And ideally I want it to be summer.

Dammit, I'm taking the night off, and then tomorrow I'll finish the proposal (for which I really don't need to read a single other book, it's just 500 words), make Fimo jewellery at CraftSoc like an oversized kindergarten child, and go to the University Challenge tryouts (Sarah is making me, even though I don't have enough general knowledge to get through a simple pub quiz). And then on Thursday I'm going to have the largest coffee known to man and everything will be shiny again.

*I'm kind of excited about this, because if it enters into general usage it's going to be so much easier to be a Norwegian-to-English translator. Now all we need is an English term for "hyggelig".

Angry literary criticism blogging

"The laurel and flute must symbolize not only Daphne and Syrinx but also the thwarted sexual impulse of the pursuers. As the texts suggest, that thwarting resembles a castration...Apollo's sign and Pan's new instrument are the pieces of their transformed loves and of their own transformed sexual powers, broken or cut, wreathed or sealed. Each is left grasping the sign of what he lacks...this castrative aspect should not be slighted, for it lies at the core of the work of mourning."

(From Peter M. Sacks's "Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning", in "The English Elegy".)

I swear if I had a pound for every time someone mentioned castration as "the core" of a fundamental human activity I wouldn't have to apply for funding next year. YOUR ANALYSIS FAILS TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT AN ENTIRE GENDER

(yes I know Freud has opinions on how castration is relevant to women too, that doesn't help, somehow.)

ETA: okay, Sacks then goes on to posit a counter-model for women - mostly along the lines of "I know Freud doesn't believe women have much of a superego, but I think they probably do", but he does support it with Emily Brontë, so we're cool. It's really the eliding of one gender that bothers me in theory, not the devaluing; the latter at least gives you something to argue with.

This has been your angry literary criticism blog post of the day; now I'm off through the snow to the Manor, where I will pick out the bits of "Middlemarch" that best serve my purposes. Whee!