perestroika

[raven]

It is very cold outside, and I am feeling strange and restless. I am out and about at midnight, walking, because I'm not sure what else to do, and because I love that, walking in and between the sounds and lights of a city. Where I live up north, the presence that presses through the night is the sea: the sound of it, and the way the wind in the pines sounds like it, so they're one thing, deep, and not at all human. It isn't safe to go walking in the middle of the night. I get woken up, sometimes, by helicopters - someone is out there, lost. Here, it's different, and sometimes I come out here just because I need a book or to print something or I need chocolate and Sainsbury's are still open at 10.55.

But there are other times, when I'm tired and I can't sleep and I'm tired of myself and of other things, and it's hard, here, to be in a place where no one knows your name. You can't get from one place to another without meeting someone you know; Claire caught me on the way here and didn't ask where I was going but gave me her gloves. I always find Michaelmas like this; everything closes in, first the nights and then the world, because you see everything shaped by time - essays, deadlines, weeks until Christmas - and space: the pools marked out by streetlights, every destination marked out by the distance that you can walk, into the cold and the twilight, from home. But, well, this is my home. I'm happy here, now, in this place. It has been fifth week for half an hour, so this is subject to change.

I have read five articles on What is Art?, and today was a good day. Last night I ended up drinking far more than is good for me and at some ungodly hour James and Maria and chiasmata and I were draped about the kitchen eating purple pancakes and singing along, with some gusto, to the national anthem of the Soviet Union. ("It's very inspiring," I said. It was - lots of bass-voiced Russians singing to the glory of the mother country, but leaving out the verse about Stalin, or so Maria told me. "It makes me really want to do something, I don't know what. How long does it take to drive from Moscow to Vladivostok?"

"Years," Maria said.) Gin. Yeah. Lots of that. With sloes in, and wonderfully purple in the jar. The pancakes were purple because we were out of sugar, so we used blackcurrant jam instead. They tasted just fine, although that may have been the gin. And vodka, too. I was punch-drunk anyway, for some reason; not much sleep, and being around people after three days closeted with the Cold War, and I was stupidly giggly and weirdly insistent about being made of fail. (Which, in itself, is made of fail, watch me be recursive.) And I got over that after a bit, but I was behaving quite oddly, which prompted someone to ask me if I were feeling Dionysian (I wasn't happy about that - "I'm down, and you hit me with Nietzsche? Is that what you do to people?") but that was actually it: I was feeling stupidly, studently at one with everything, and happy with it. I still have bits of that feeling, mostly because I didn't get much sleep last night either.

Er, yes. The reason I was doing this, and the reason I am so tired and stupid now, is that last night I went to the Union production of Angels In America, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I'm not sure about the actual production - it was good in parts and not in others, as student things tend to be: the lighting was weird, the girl playing Harper was depressingly one-note, no-one's accent slipped into British at any point, which was good, they all had marvellous chemistry, the guy playing Prior was both a very good actor and ridiculously, ridiculously attractive, etc. - but the material is what I was thinking about. Somehow or other it's passed me by until now - I picked up a copy of someone's bookshelf a couple of weeks ago and read a fair chunk of it, and oddly enough, my hawkfromhandsaw story took a quote from it as a prompt: "Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions."

But I'd never properly seen or read it until last night, and, well, yes. I've always thought, more since I started doing this aesthetics paper (what is art? shockingly, I still don't know!), that I am a literary Philistine. I'm not an artist or a critic; I've never read a book published before 1900, I've never said a single intelligent thing about literature. So, I don't know, things that appeal to me on a deep visceral level are rare, and this was one of them: something about the frenetic pace of it, the self-conscious stumbling for profundity, the way the word Zeitgeist is used exactly once, but it's appropriate when it is. I loved it and I'm not exactly sure why.

I woke up this morning still thinking about it vaguely, and read about art as function, as form, as expression, as truth, as beauty divorced from function, as a cluster of word usages, as the kitchen sink, and went with Claire to see Stardust. It was lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. The deft touches - the sarcastic star, the wonderful epic landscapes, the peanut gallery of dead numbered princes! - and oh, oh, the QUEER SKY PIRATES, and oh, such a lovely fairy tale. So predictable, ish, so perfectly executed, and the bits of the macabre. It's very slow to start and get going, but once it does, it's a delight.

And now I'm hopefully so sleepy I will go home and fall straight asleep and stop boring you all with my head's oddnesses. Tomorrow, sunshine and coffee and 1500 words on one of the greatest philosophical problems of all time. And much less gin.

Comments

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

Dude, seriously, no books before 1900?

I cannot cope with this. Plz to let me make you a LIST. Oh god, how exciting not to have read any books before 1900, you ARE lucky, you have ALL THESE BOOKS to read.

[lizziwig.livejournal.com]

I second this. WTF. I'm a literary philistine as well, but still. I cannot cope eith the tohought you have never read Wuthering Heights, or Middlemarch.

If you want to have a binge at one point, I have the HBO miniseries of Angels in America on DVD.

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

Iona, plz make us happy by letting us give you books.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I have tried to read Wuthering Heights. Alas, it was not a success, because I am a Philistine.

(Spotted it for £5 on Amazon and got it! Watch it with me?)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Have read books - Shakespeare, of course, and Descartes and Locke and Berkeley et al, and Plato and Virgil and Pliny and them lot - but no novels. Have tried, but never really enjoyed very much.

[icepixie]

*insert shock and awe at not having read a book from before 1900--how did you manage to get through school without doing that?*

If you haven't read Stardust, do. The movie was good, but the book is really much better.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

School reading is less broad than it seems, in retrospect. From memory, if you discount the obligatory Shakespeare-a-year, I think there was only one pre-1900 work we were ever actually made to read (Oliver Twist, I think, in about S2). Lots of stuff from the early half of the century, but not much older...

[icepixie]

Interesting. It was very different for me; in addition to about seven or eight Shakespeare plays, almost half of my high school reading assignments involved works written prior to 1900. A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Walden are ones I remember off the top of my head, not to mention poetry from Donne, Marvell, Emerson, Dickinson, etc. etc. etc. (Admittedly, some of the novels were ones I chose from lists that probably had some post-1900 works on them. I think the ones we read as a class probably did tend to be more modern.)

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

It's surprisingly hard, at this distance, to remember what was and wasn't on a syllabus. I'm skipping over the poetry - I know we certainly did some Dickinson, because I ended up doing a long essay on it and had a real annoyance over the lack of names for the poems - because the only poet we studied as a comprehensive body of work was, I think, Larkin; everything else was individual, one or two pieces.

My brother certainly studied Frankenstein and possibly Dracula, but I never did. I think Huck Finn may have briefly appeared at some point, but I couldn't bet on it. Certainly not Austen or Bronte.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I got through school reading a lot of Shakespeare, which I love, GCSE was To Kill a Mockingbird, and my A-level texts were Brave New World and More's Utopia (which is not a novel, and makes my head hurt because it's so WRONG about everything).

I keep meaning to read Stardust! I should get on that.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Dude, you have SO read a book before 1900. You've read Hamlet now, right?

Unless we're talking more narrowly about "books" as "novels," which is fair; the last time I went into a bookstore with my sister she looked at The Merchant of Venice and said, "I hated that book," and in the middle of a big bustling Barnes and Noble I cried, "It's not a book! It's a play! IN WRITTEN FORM IT'S 'A TEXT'!!!"

All that aside, yes: Angels in America is uneven, I think--this is true of most Kushner--but deeply, mesmerizingly moving when it's good. Have you seen the HBO miniseries version? It's quite a good adaptation, and if you want to see it done with stellar performances all across the board, it's definitely something to check out. I would send you my copy of the DVDs if I trusted the postal system a little more.

I am going to stop this comment now because I am PROFOUNDLY drunk, and have been so since about 7:00 this evening. I have no idea what I'm typing. But I'm glad you had a good night.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was counting it as a piece of drama, because I have also read Twelfth Night, Othello, a handful of others when I was younger I'm sure, and Macbeth and AMND, of course. Actually, I haven't finished Hamlet yet - it's slow going when you only read over breakfast! Am halfway throught Act III.

Angels really grabbed me. Have got the miniseries off Amazon, because I am a sheep. Shall let you know what I think!

You being profoundly drunk is charming, for the record. I have personal experience, remember. *g*

...

[hips-lips-tits.livejournal.com]

you cannot have any idea how badly i wish that i was there.

ugh.

my heart hurts right now.

because i think that i would have the time of my life, and that it would be the loveliest time ever.

someday soon, hopefully. i've been wanting this for years, as you know.

someday!

Re: ...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

This is a beautiful place at a beautiful time. I would dearly love to show you around.

[foulds.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Also, the sea. I miss the sea. There's no part of my year that has the sea, so the sea's always just been this hugely romantic thing that only exists in Greece (obviously). Yes, not sure where I'm going. Maybe I have sea-envy.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

The sea is glorious and romantic everywhere, I think. I can't imagine spending too much time away from it.

Thank you for tonight, it was lovely. Although there is a man on a bike in East Oxford who clearly thinks you are some sort of curly-haired lunatic.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Jan Morris wrote once, if memory serves, that the only thing which could make Oxford a fundamentally better place would be if Osney was a deep-sea port... The Thames is a bit of a substitute, I guess. But it just isn't enough.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I submit that queer sky pirates are the greatest form of art.

[hips-lips-tits.livejournal.com]

yes, also.

stardust was fantastic.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heeee! Sounds true enough to me.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

What is art? Art is queer sky pirates. Good art is what makes you smile. And great art can also be used to defend yourself from burglars (GNeil says so).

[marymac.livejournal.com]

So, you haven't seen the HBO Angels in America?
Go. Find. Watch. Is fabulous.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Have got it off Amazon! Am waiting for it to arrive!

[me-ves-y-sufres.livejournal.com]

Can loan you the HBO miniseries of Angels in America if required. Is wonderful. Even Harper is great.

At my interview it came up that the only novels I'd ever read written before 1900 were the uber-depressing Russians I went through a splurge of age about 17. My first Michelmas was a shock, when I was confronted with three Victorian novels a week... (But, ok, on the subject of old novels, sometime I need to babble about The Beetle to you.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Got it off Amazon for a fiver. You and Lizzie should come watch it with me, once Loki is fixed. There can be more pancakes!

Do babble to me about anything you like! In fact, I haven't seen you in aaaaages, barring Angels. Why is this?

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

I've never read a book published before 1900, I've never said a single intelligent thing about literature.

You're cute when you're being hyperbolic.

Angels is strange... At first I wondered what the hype was about, but by the end, couldn't stop watching.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*sticks tongue out at you* I loved it. So much. Am looking forward very much to seeing the miniseries.