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

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

All I will add is that any definition of English literature which excludes people on the basis of nationality is stupid. 'English' has to mean anglophone, or it just doesn't work.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Though, again with definitions going fuzzy at the edges...is Robert Burns taught at Oxford or other places that go by that def? How about Trainspotting? How far does dialect go before it stops being considered anglophone? (actual questions, not rhetorical)

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

Of course, that is a problem. Robert Burns is taught at Oxford, and I imagine Irvine Welsh would be acceptable as well. What is English? is ultimately a linguistic question, and I wouldn't want to go in to defining when a dialect becomes a different language (though mutual comprehension is a good rough guide). An interesting example is whether Anglo-Saxon should be compulsory in Eng Lit courses. Personally I consider it a seperate language and think it shouldn't. The Oxford course considers it English, but Arthur Quiller-Couch who compiled the first Oxford Book of English Verse, started with Middle English in 1250, because he didn't.

[magic-doors.livejournal.com]

I did an analysis of how language is used to create distinct narrative voices in Trainspotting for my A Level cousework. Admittedly it was for English Language rather than English Lit, but I think it certainly counts as 'English Literature'. It's Scottish Literature as well, of course, but by and large I would define English Literature as anything written in English. Sure, you can narrow it down to the work of English writers, but I'd see that as a subcategory.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah - I didn't mean because Welsh is Scottish, I meant because large parts of it are IIRC written in Scots. (Or is it just a very broad Scottish accent? Maybe I'm misremembering how broad the dailect was) I would certainly place it as Eng Lit myself, was just throwing it out as an example that didn't necessarily fit in neatly.

[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

'Scots' is a dialect, rather than a language, because it's based upon Northumbrian Old English carried upwards, rather than upon any separate language originating in Scotland. So Scots is on the same level as, say, true Geordie or Scouse dialect, as a form of English, whereas Scots Gaelic, or Cornish, or Northumbrian Gaelic, are of course all separate languages and anything written in them would not count as 'English literature', despite being written in the British isles.

Yeah, I know. I had a huge argument with Simon because I wanted to include, in an essay, some 9th century Northumbrian poems, but he said I couldn't because they were in Northumbrian Gaelic ('wealisc', or Welsh) and not Northumbrian Old English.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Tell me about Scouse dialect, do! I've always wondered if any work has been done on it and its forms - and presumably, its links with the speech patterns of Liverpool's Irish population.

And, also, something else I wonder: is Scouse, when spoken proper, actually intelligible to people who weren't born and brought up in Liverpool? I can't tell, you see - but I find myself having to think it through when I come back to the frozen north, which suggests you can lose your ear for it.

[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

Scouse is a dialect spoken by people who are not as northerly as they think they are. :) - no, honestly, much work has been done on Scouse dialect. It's more the domain of modern sociolinguists than historical sociolinguists such as myself, because Scouse-proper didn't start to develop into something akin to what it is today until the Irish population began to arrive, as you've noted. It and Geordie are the two most studied dialects of English, due to their being the most unintelligible and lexically different - both Scouse and Geordie have lots and lots of actually different words for things, so people like to go mad studying them. I can understand proper Scouse, but I'm from Northumberland, and I've been much exposed to urban Geordie, which a) shares a lilt with Scouse, although Geordie has more of the Welsh (from the original Gaelic-speaking population) whereas Scouse has much more Irish, and b) means I'm already attuned to understanding heavy dialect. So I really don't know whether people from a place without a strong and colourful dialect - or indeed, southerners of any sort - can understand Scouse at all!

I do get that feeling, though, you know - you're on a bus, and suddenly you think everyone sitting around you is speaking a foreign language? That's bloody weird.

ETA: When I say 'modern sociolinguists study Scouse', I mean they start studying it from its 16th century roots, of course. But I am stupid and live in the eleventh century. *explicates*

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

I agree with that entirely.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, one of my second-years did something on Irvine Welsh for Paper One last year, so he *is* being taught in the English department - and since the stuff I do is, often quite literally, Welsh's equivalents writing six hundred years earlier, there would be serious problems if he was considered not part of the 'English' canon.

OTOH, I often feel quite awkward telling people I do 'Middle English', since I actually really don't - and only a small proportion of them have actually heard of 'Older Scots', or realise that anyone was writing in Scotland before Henryson...

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

How does "medieval Scottish literature" sound? Or do you then get jokes about Braveheart?

[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

*ties self down*

I so want to leap into this and yell DIALECTOLOGY FTW and be a professional northerner.

For the sake of everybody, I will sit on my hands. :)