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

[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.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

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
Aha. I love you. I miss talking to you about books. *noms*

Also. Does the prevailing setup mean that if you write about Nabokov in Oxford, you can only study The Real Life of Sebastian Knight onwards? I think the anglophone def is the only sensible one, but like all definitions, it goes really wonky if you start pushing it and asking awkward questions...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

This comment does not sound like that at all. Thank you for posting it. I agree with deathbyshinies too - I've written a bit above about internalised colonialism/racism, and why that, too, influences my definition of what literature is.