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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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?

[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!

[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*

[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?

[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. :)

[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 :)