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

[absinthe-shadow.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that you were criticising without having read them. Sorry if that's how it came across.

Of course there is no specific level of qualification which entitles one to comment - as far as it goes, I don't have my degree yet, so we *both* have only an A-Level in English Literature - *but* I do think that judging English literature based on an A-Level course is a little unfair. You know how wrong A-Levels can be. Any definition of "literature" that was fed to you then isn't just being challenged by you, but by almost everyone working seriously within the discipline.

Of course it is awful that you aren't represented in the traditional canon: the same can be said for a lot of groups of people, and it's always awful. When I find people-like-me in traditional Victorian novels they end up dying of tuberculosis. I know that probably sounds a bit funny - and I'm definitely not trying to say that "zomg, The Disabled are so much more oppressed", as I don't think there's any realistic way of ranking how "bad" the stereotypes are, and it would be pointless to try - but as always, it isn't when you're the one affected. There aren't a lot of positive portrayals of queer people or non-cisgendered people, or, indeed, women - talking of being the love interest - which is partly why I was so shocked at the books you chose to list, since, in the genre of the English novel, their strong women are almost the ur-women. I suspect I would have reacted less strongly if you'd listed Dickens and Hardy instead, which says more about me than about you, I suppose.

Have you read Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's pro-Jewish novel? I know that many people now argue that Jewish people are "coded as white", but I strongly suspect that is not universally true even today, and as I understand it, certainly wasn't true then. I'm not denying the broad insularity of Victorian literature, but there are,as always, exceptions.

Regarding English as a discipline - we do have postcolonialism now. Even here in Oxford it has a pretty strong following, and a great many significant critics have much wider definitions of "literature" - as inferred from their writings, rather than personally asking them! - than you seem to imagine. I may be recalling this entirely wrongly, so forgive me if I'm mixing you up with someone else, but I *think* I remember you talking about the generally Western focus of the Oxford philosophy course? The limited extent to which one can study other traditions? I don't see why English more than any arts subject incurs your ideological wrath.

I can't really comment on Shakespeare, because the idea of getting tired of him just makes me boggle at a very fundamental level, but I will say that I don't believe in "trash",* and neither, to generalise a bit, does postmodernism, one of the most influential recent schools of thought in English Studies.

*In the course of my work, I necessarily proceed from the assumption that there are varying degrees of quality, but I recognise the impossibility of an objective defintion and feel that negative labels of that sort cannot fail to do more harm than good. In commenting on this post, I never meant to judge your choice of reading. I am myself re-reading Noel Streatfeild at the moment, a choice which would hardly garner much admiration from diehard supporters of the Victorian canon.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Perhaps English incurs my wrath more because it's more reified than the other arts subjects and humanities? Philosophy, for example, is just less important in the sense of people thinking and talking about it on a day to day basis even outside the academic sphere. (You're absolutely right about my views on Western-dominated philosophy - a post for another time.) I don't know why I'm more defensive about my choice in reading material, and thus keen to yell indiscriminately, than I would be about other things. I feel the need to talk about what I read as trash because, well, most of the time, I don't read Shakespeare, I read things off bestseller lists, and that's just the way I seem to be made.

I have not read Daniel Deronda. Tell me about postcolonialism. (And Noel Streatfeild.) I think I would enjoy it. And I apologise again if I said things you found hurtful.

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

Yup, postcolonialism is a pretty big deal. In fact, one of my interviews at Oxford primarily focused on postcolonial writers, namely Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Sujata Bhatt. Jane Eyre and Hamlet also came up, but 2/3 of the interview was postcolonial. This despite the fact that the Oxford course rarely touches upon postcolonial writing. I was very impressed.

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

When you say 'rarely' - it's (potentially) in 2 out of your 4 Mods papers (you could write on it for both Paper 1 & 20th century), and could be in 4 out of your 9 degree papers; if you wanted to write on postcolonial texts for your linguistics paper, your special author, your special subject and your optional thesis, you most certainly could, as long as you were careful and/or able not to repeat material. Do not underestimate the flexibility of the Oxford course, esp in your third year!

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

At Wadham, you study it a bit more, because you do Critical Theory.

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

MAKE ME MAKE ME MAKE ME

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

Ah that's good to know!

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

Hey that's good to know. I keep finding out that it is much more flexible than I'd previoiusly thought.

[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

It's not true at all that Oxford barely touches on postcolonial writing. You can do a whole Finals paper on it, you can write entirely on postcolonial literature on one of the Mods papers, if you so choose, etc. If you did get into Oxford, you'll find postcolonial literature has a big following here and is much studied and discussed, as are postcolonial readings of older texts.