for one crowded hour you were the only one in the room

[raven]

Ever since I stopped taking my pills, I've had an incredibly weird symptom that I can only describe as a momentary brain holiday. It's like my frontal lobes grow wings, flutter around the room, send me a couple of postcards and return, within the space of a few seconds. It's quite... interesting. I was pondering it this morning, having grabbed a mug out of the cupboad for my coffee, and noticed all at once that it was actually a Prozac mug, with the chemical details of fluoxetine on the side, courtesy of Eli Lilly. It amused me.

The meme says you should post eight things that make you happy, day by day. I'm too impatient for that. So I give you seven things, disparate and random, that have made me happy recently.

1. The latter end of the week in general, and Thursday in particular. In the afternoon, I wrote the following. Happiness is: a cafe, replete with fairy lights, discarded Guardians and very good chai, almost close enough to home to see your own wireless network, sitting with contract law feeling very grown-up and postgraduate, with your beloved, who has just bought you a fruitcake. Having discovered what happiness is, and next term being the one where I ought to start with the writing of the baby-dissertation, I think I shall bear this in mind.

2. I am home, up north with my parents. The one thing that never changes is how much I love this house; last night, I couldn't sleep, and was curled up nicely under my covers listening to the rain beating against the eaves, and was reminded anew of how much I do love this place. This house, which is eleven years old (and my family have lived in it for ten of those), is not charming. It's not elegant, or rustic, or old. It's all open space and white and glass, and, mostly, minimalist. With the notable exception of my - well, I say mine, no one uses it but me - bathroom, which is a relic of the somewhat nutty (okay, seriously nutty) previous owner, whose taste was... questionable. As a result, I have spent a decade nursing a passion for baths in a bathroom which resembles a gothic boudoir circa 1890. It's extravagantly maroon and gold, has a sunken bathtub and looks out onto a forest of swaying conifers. (My room has the same view, but is a much more sensible white and red.) I'd call it a monstrosity, but I kind of love it. I've been taking lots of baths. They make me happy.

3. I am undoubtedly going to be scribbling my yuletide right until the deadline, but at least it's no longer a blank page. 300 600 1495 words for the win. (In fact! If anyone feels like looking it over in the next couple of days, I would appreciate it. Not even a proper beta - just someone who knows my style telling me when I've been an eejit would be good.)

4. Books. I have started reading, as though I've just learned how, and it's astonishing, how great it is. Yesterday I even bought a book. I can't actually put this one in words, but during my degree I did not read, and didn't particularly want to. But I keep reading and reading - I finished off the books about yetis-in-Kathmandu, and the chick-lit-in-style-of-Unity-Mitford (The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets - it turned out to be a lot better than expected), and am halfway through Kitchen, and keep dipping into Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman, getting annoyed and putting it down again. And it's great. I'm not sure what to make of this, actually. I still don't like English literature (and the study thereof), and I think I am finally at the age where I will not grow into it, I can just tell everyone I loathe Jane Eyre and Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice and other books about dead white people and read what I want. It's enormously liberating. (This week: probably Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, which I have read before, but do rather love. And Neuromancer, which bizarrely I have never read, and ought to find a copy of.)

5. Einstein and Eddington. I showed this to my father last night - predictably, he loved it - and I sort of fell in love with it some more. It's so gorgeous, so beautifully filmed and so very human. I do love it. And David Tennant, and his poignant, queer, sad little love story, is a joy. (My only complaint about it is that it aired after yuletide sign-ups closed.)

6. Racism is over. I love this - my favourite so far is "Holidays", closely followed by "Dating".

(The other thing I've seen people talking about is Stuff Desis(/Brown People) Like, which I have to say is funny and occasionally deadly accurate. But... I'm not sure that I quite like it. I'm not sure why. I think it might just be the thought that, well, I'm allowed to make those jokes, so are other people of a desi/brown persuasion, but I don't want them linked around the primarily-white blogosphere. Does that make sense? I have no idea.)

7. Waffles. With maple syrup. And gin, but not together.

Now, maybe doing some work. And defrosting my fingers under the hot tap.

Comments

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

If you think Pride and Prejudice was bad, try reading The Mill On The Floss. I nearly died. Couldn't get past the first few chapters. I love Jane Eyre though, but then again I seem attracted to texts depicting mad women.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Never read that one, I must say. And, oh, it's past midnight: happy birthday!

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

Heh, sorry to bust in here - I JUST watched the 2008 Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Jane Eyre, and it was wonderful. Did you get a chance to see it?

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

If you remind me, Neuromancer is on the shelf here.

[leiascully.livejournal.com]

I will cheerfully read your Yuletide!

I love Pride and Prejudice, but I could take or leave the rest. As for the blogs, I can understand, I think; it doesn't help that this blog was clearly established after the other one, and that it has to explain things more, which makes it less funny. I know I can't really talk about race because I'm white (I have guilt! I have plenty of guilt about that!), but those are my thoughts: there's a possibility for condescension that is rather unfortunate.

[janne.livejournal.com]

I know I can't really talk about race because I'm white

Must admit, I'm stumped on that. Aren't white people supposedly*) the ones who are racist in the first place, and thus should be the first ones to do something about it, including talking about it? Sort of like expecting progress on women's lib if only women are entitled to hold an opinion on equality of the sexes...

*) I had a moment of enlightenment watching a japanese movie once that had some very racist depictions of indians... Oh, look, non-white racists! They exist!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hurrah, Yuletide! I am currently slaving. And praying I get it done in time.

(Word on the less funny aspect, but it does have some high notes. I particularly liked "sharing".)

[sir-rosealot.livejournal.com]

To be honest. reading that Stuff Desis(/Brown People) Like blog makes me feel really uncomfortable... I guess I have an ingrained distasteful response to things that categorise "what x people (are) like" lists.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

It's something about the tone of the humour, isn't it? I'm a fan of Stuff White People Like, because it's very much a tongue-in-cheek extended joke about the majority group, but the other versions get to me a bit.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

I read a little bit of that blog you linked to. . . and the ones I read made me smile (well, except for one...), but then, I like people (in general, not the specific ones that are in my face annoying me), and so I like reading anthropological stuff like that.

Right up until it hits the buttons in my brain and I start shrieking about stereotyping and the like. Which it did, as things do.

I can understand how it would be uncomfortable seeing that coming at you from outside the culture group. O_o

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That's the thing about that blog, I think - it is affectionate, and so it's hard to put your finger on what about it is problematic.

[absinthe-shadow.livejournal.com]

Unsurprisingly, I really, really, really disagree with you on the subject of English literature and the study thereof.

I also think it's a mistake simply to dismiss the books you've listed because they're by/about "dead white people". I don't mean to say that you Have To Like any given book that you don't happen to like, but even if you don't "like" them, there's a lot in those books. They are all by women. They all deal very sympathetically with women and they represent a period when women broke into the male literary establishment very impressively. You may well be thinking, "That's not my feminism" - and it may not be, and of course that's fine - not that you need me to tell you that, but I want to be clear that I don't for a minute think we have to share the same heroines and feminist backgrounds. But the great women novelists are a very central part of my feminism, and a lot of other people's, and I have spent quite a lot of time reading those books and many others like them. They - especially Jane Eyre - are incredibly important to me, and it makes me sad to see them dismissed like this.

I'm reminded a bit of how I feel about Ulysses. I really don't like it. Really, not at all. I didn't enjoy reading it; I felt it had very little to say to me. But I do still recognise that it is a) a very impressive artistic achievement and b) linked to all sorts of things that DO matter to me, and that I DO care about. All of which modifies my attitude and stops me from chucking my copy away, either literally or metaphorically.

Lastly (sorry, I'm afraid this comment is a bit long and pontificatory), I find it surprising that you can be so scathing, on political grounds, about the books you've listed and yet count yourself a great fan of S&A - surely Shakespeare is the original Dead White Guy? It seems to me that you're offering political arguments to explain what is really just a matter of personal taste - which of course you can do, given that It Is Your Journal, but it makes rather painful reading if one happens to count Austen, Eliot and the Brontes among one's Great Personal Heroines.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

If I sound dismissive, then I apologise. But I have read those books. I have. I don't have degree-level English, but I did study it until I was eighteen, I have given it my time and my energy. And there comes a point where the only books you have ever been told that matter are not the books of your people and culture, the only books that you are allowed to think of as "classics" are the books that were written by people who historically were "better" than you (I wonder how many literary critics count the Ramayana as a classic, for example, or Tagore, or Malgudi Days), and you have to say, well, there's something wrong with the definition of literature, isn't there? Otherwise, why are you always the exotic love interest or the skivvy? So, again, I apologise if I made it sound like there is nothing of value in those texts (not the intention: I have read them, for just that reason - so I can get value out of them) but I am tired of them. Yeah, I don't like literature much, you're absolutely right. But I have less reason than most people to sit down and try and like it, and I have tried to do that. And of course I wouldn't literally, or metaphorically, throw a book away; books have intrinsic value regardless of anything.

I am quite fond of Shakespeare, it must be said. More of a fan of S&A than I am of Shakespeare - perhaps awful, but true. But I can easily get tired of him too, for all the same reasons. (He comes up less in my reading simply because I don't really like reading plays at all, I much prefer to hang on and wait until I can see them.) I guess, when I read now, I just read trash.

[magic-doors.livejournal.com]

Hunter S. Thompson - that well know living, non-white guy, writing in Italian!

I'm really quite baffled how you can dismiss several centuries worth of literature so glibly. Sure, you might not like what you've read, but 'English literature' is hardly some homogeneous block. The three examples you've picked out, you may not have liked, but they were all hugely atypical, and while I have spent many an hour amusing myself by bashing the prominence given to dead white guys and making Chloe and Sophie shriek, I find it quite weird that in order to make your point, you picked three books by women who challenged the culture of their day.

SUre, the canon of English literature doesn't need you to like it. But, seriously, saying you loathe all books about dead white people is cutting out a HELL of a lot of books. It's easy (and fun!) to attack the canon without chucking out the baby with the bathwater. Would you make a comment like that on, say, Russian or French literature?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hunter S. Thompson - that well-known American guy. I said English literature, and I did mean that literally. I wouldn't say what I've said about Russian and French literature (haven't read much of the latter, not qualified to speak, quite like the former as far as M.'s recommendations go).

And, look, I apologise for sounding glib, but I really didn't say I loathe all books by dead white people. I said I loathe a lot of books that other people consider classics, and a lot of them are by dead white people. I've written elsewhere about why I feel short-changed about how literature is taught, and how it's tended to put me off solo inquiry. I really am aware of the existence of postcolonialism - my point is that I don't feel like making the effort, you see? Entirely my own problem, of course, and not something my friends can fix for me, and something I ought to redress in the future: but if I'm going to enjoy reading again, I'm going to stick with the faintly rubbish stuff I read currently.

[soupytwist.livejournal.com]

Racism Is Over is FUCKING HILARIOUS. Genius! The other blog you linked also made me think that Stuff White People Like worked better, if only because jokes against the powerful are pretty much always funnier than jokes that could be turned against people who already have enough to deal with.

And while I think you'd like uni level English better than what you've done so far (we managed quite a lot that wasn't dead white people, and also getting to choose which texts you applied theories etc is a whooole different thing than having to slog through yet another chapter where Thomas Hardy goes on about the purity of milking cows), I am a little surprised at the amount of upset that apparently caused. If the occasional snarky comment really meant you were planning on burning down all English Lit departments or something, every single Literature student I know would have done it ages ago!

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I am a little surprised at the amount of upset that apparently caused. If the occasional snarky comment really meant you were planning on burning down all English Lit departments or something, every single Literature student I know would have done it ages ago!

Heh, absolutely.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Isn't it great? I really hope they keep it up post-inaguration, it's fabulous.

(Srsly! No burning down of English departments! Quite apart from anything else, a lot of people I like live in them!)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

I still don't like English literature (and the study thereof), and I think I am finally at the age where I will not grow into it, I can just tell everyone I loathe Jane Eyre and Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice and other books about dead white people and read what I want.

A very hearty 'yes!' to the second part of the statement; a puzzled and slightly hurt 'bzuh?' to the first part. I think part of the problem might be that we're working with slightly different definitions of English literature - I'm right there with you on Austen and the Brontës (staaaaart me on the nineteenth century marriage novel and its late-20th-century fetishisation sometime and then stand well back, I'm told it's entertaining), but I do feel you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (can has cliche!) to some extent.

Fair enough if your definition of 'English literature' is limited to literature produced in England, but you're still chucking, off the top of my head, most of Salman Rushdie, some Jean Rhys, all of Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy (love her SO MUCH), Buchi Emecheta, even the slightly-annoying-IMO Zadie Smith... and probably hundreds more I've either not remembered here or not come across yet. They're English literature too, dammit, and I keep trying to tell people about this, one or two or seven students at a time, but there is only one of me and it's taking slightly longer than expected!

And where do Australian/NZ/Canadian/Caribbean/English-speaking Indian/Pakistani/SA literatures fit in here? Fair enough if you don't want to include American literature in the English canon, but there's a fairly strong tradition in other former colonies of teaching and understanding their own writing as part of 'English literature' (while the Oxford undergraduate syllabus gleefully gloms them up or shuts them out seemingly according to its own sweet will: Peter Carey novels and Louis Nowra plays count as 'English literature', Komninos poems and Barbara Baynton stories apparently do not - it's one of the biggest problems I have with the undergraduate English course).

Shorter deathbyshinies: I wonder if you're primarily objecting to the canon and the way it's been forced on you during the formal study of English literature, rather than the study of English literature(s) itself?

Sorry for the mini-lecture - I'm also trying to remember that you saying you don't personally like something =/= you saying it isn't worth important or worth studying! :)

OTOH, want me to bring you back some shiny postcolonial writing for your birthday? It's almost impossible to get hold of most Indigenous Australian writers in Oxford, and I'd love to see what you think... :D

*edited to cover my tracks re: abuse of the common apostrophe*
*and question mark*
*and listing*

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

I agree with deathbyshinies.

I think one of the things that I loved about degree-level study of English Lit as opposed to A level study is the fact it enables debate- right from the very first term, at Wadham- about how exactly you define English literature (the "anglophone vs written in England or Britain" question, which I like to think of as the "if you're saying English Lit is English or British lit only, then how fucking insulting of you to include Ulysses on your syllabus, no srsly, did that entire war just bypass you" question), how you approach the formation of the canon, how you deal with your own priviledge. So, when looking at Victorian lit, one of the first critical books you're asked to read is Edward Said's Orientalism (along with Gilbert and Gubar's excellent The Madwoman in the Attic, which I would absolutely 100% recommend to anyone even slightly interested in feminism and literature), which is the big book to throw at undergrads first thinking about postcolonialism. And I can't express how much I feel like "literature" is broader than just the traditional canon of dead male writers- I mean, I would class Gibson as literature (personally, I can take or leave Neuromancer, but I adore Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, I think the prose is genuinely astonishing and beautiful). I think Alan Moore's Watchmen counts as literature, as does Derek Walcott's Omeros, and all of Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Jay Rubin's translations of Haruki Murakami, and Chinua Achebe, and Tony Morrison. It's so much more than Austen. And I think that the way literature that is studied before you are 18 in this country is tramelled and curtailed to include, you know, that one obligatory Shakespeare play plus some Austen, maybe a bit of Atwood if you're lucky, is appalling. (During parliamentary debate provoked by Tony Harrison's V., a lengthy poem written in the 80s about class and race relations under Thatcher (hideously controversial at the time as it contained a fair few Anglo-Saxon four letter words) one sole MP stood in its defence, and said the great line "I think this poem should be studied in every classroom in the country. Of course, if we lived in a country where this would be possible, there would be no need to teach it.")

I really worry this comment sounds like I'm going "OMG HOW DARE YOU INSIST THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH THE WHITEWASHING OF THE DEFINITION OF LITERATURE", because dude I will be the first to agree entirely and say that there are huge, huge problems. I just wanted to say, iunno, that English students aren't totally dead to anything that happened past 1906, I guess. And, as deathbyshinies pointed out, you saying you dislike something isn't the same as you saying you don't think it's worth people expending energy studying it.

...oh, watch me say exactly the same thing as has been said previously, only less eloquently.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* LJ really, really wants me to read this comment - it emailed it to me about eight times. :)

Okay! I feel the need to begin by apologising for making you feel hurt, 'cause, dude, debate is one thing, but making you feel hurt, definitely not on. My saying I don't persnally like English lit much is, honestly, the same as other people saying they think philosophy is ivory-tower nonsense or the first thing we do is, we kill all the lawyers, or, Iona, you find truth and beauty in the Law of Property Act, you are a crazy person. Honestly, my not liking something does not at all indicate that it's not worth studying!

They're English literature too, dammit

Are they? Are they really? (Note: not sarcasm!) Because if so, then I fully take the baby-and-bathwater comment. There are many books that I love, that didn't come within being mentioned at all when I was being taught English formally - and at one point, I loved being taught English formally - and you can get very irritated at the whiteness of what you're taught, and come to think, then what you like is by definition not literature. (For example: Midnight's Children, I like very much. I would never call it literature, because it has Hindi and Urdu in it. I'm not saying you're wrong to call it literature! I'm saying, such is the power of what colonialism does to people.)

Re: other literature, I really did mean English as in "from England" - I'm a nut for American lit, particularly the Beats.

I wonder if you're primarily objecting to the canon and the way it's been forced on you during the formal study of English literature, rather than the study of English literature(s) itself?

Yes, that's probably fair. And, in addition to that, I was being flip. As I said above, I wouldn't have said that if I'd thought it would be hurtful.

OTOH, want me to bring you back some shiny postcolonial writing for your birthday? It's almost impossible to get hold of most Indigenous Australian writers in Oxford, and I'd love to see what you think... :D

omg PLEASE PLEASE. I was in Sydney three years ago and hardly saw any of it because I was too busy drooling in bookshops. That time, I read more about indigenous Australian history; I would love to read the literature!

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

Ugh, good luck on Yuletide! I just uploaded my (first) story, and it took me a long time to get the .txt formatted correctly. And I will happily look it over for you, if you like!

Dude, I need to pick your brain about race-related issues some time. I'm supposed to teach a class on diversity and racial sensitivity in the classroom next semester, and I feel woefully unqualified. I'm Inuit, and for a variety of reasons that makes my job harder when it comes to delivering a course on racial politics and identity to a bunch of young white Canadians from southern Ontario. I really like your position on a lot of race/gender issues, and your LJ has become a good resource for finding interesting links that will, hopefully, be appealing and challenging for kids who have never heard of the concept of white privilege.

Anyway. Can I shoot you an email about this, once the madness of Yuletide and the other holiday fic exchanges has died down?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, bless you! Thanks so much. And yay for you! I am in awe of anyone who's actually uploaded.

Hey, sweetheart, please do, I would love to discuss race with you! I don't know anything about Inuit culture(s) at all, I'm sure I'd learn lots from you, too! Shoot me an email any time, seriously.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I will happily read your YT story if you need another set of eyes.

I'm kind of surprised (and, weirdly, pleased-- I'm just glad that so many people care enough about literature to have an impromptu LJ debate about it) by how much a can of worms #4 has become here in comments! By "English literature" do you mean Britlit? Clearly, the solution is for you to just move here and wander around all the Beat hangouts with me. :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you so much. I think you actually know the fandom, too!

Debate, I feel, is good, though I am sorry for having inadvertently offended people with my Philistine views. I actually meant English as in "from England" - you remember me turning into goo over Translations and then at City Lights...

[mrkgnao.livejournal.com]

This is a happy-making meme. I shall accordingly steal it.

I think you are a little unfair on books about dead white people ... but I notice other people have mentioned this and you were being deliberately flippant anyway ... but since I am a big believer in the pleasures of reading, I won't irritate you by attempting to defend Pride and Prejudice :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I actually am a little unfair to P&P above; I don't actually hate it, I think it's a perfectly sweet book with a protagonist who's great fun. What I don't get is why it seems to be the one favourite book of everyone, you know? It's nice - I just feel I'm missing something with it...