some say that good things come to all those who wait

[raven]

This is going to be a long post. Have some music first. Karine Polwart, whom I discovered recently via icepixie, has a very lovely voice, and occasionally quite unsettling lyrics: Resolution Road, What Are You Waiting For?.

The good:

-Life continues apace. I am coming up on a strange time; during March, I have no classes Monday to Friday, but exams every Saturday, and a few in the middle - skills-based whatnot, advocacy and other things - which is not at all what I'm used to but perversely I'm sort of looking forward to it. I'm having trouble getting up in the morning these days, so study leave when I can work at 2am if I want to will go down well, and, well, I got my mocks back, most of them, and I'm pleased. They are a scraped commendation (59.5 - civil lit), a proper commendation (business law) and, surprise of all surprises, the exam I didn't prepare for at all - snow and going-to-India conspiring between them - the property exam, I got a highly unexpected high distinction. I feel good about it - like I might do well, not only in my exams, but in practice.

-Property law, yes. I have sudden fears, these days, that I might be a land lawyer when I grow up. I haven't met anyone else who likes it as much as I do, but people must, surely, because there are land lawyers in the world? It's so... I don't know, I don't think any law is tangible but English land law is as close as you can get to it; there's so much history in it, so much tradition, so many things you say, as though reciting chants to hold back your gods - say, "bona fide purchaser for value"^[1] twice fast before breakfast; say "freehold interest subject to compulsory first registration", and something happens by magic. But nevertheless it's elegant, internally consistent, intellectually satisfying, and I was worried my liking for land law wouldn't translate to a liking for property practice, but so far so decidedly hoopy.

Anyway. Land law, a good thing in my life. Everyone should have hobbies.

-jacinthsong lent me season 6 of Deep Space Nine, and oh, my, I love this show so much. (THEY KILLED ZIYAL. WHAT IS THIS FUCKERY. Nevertheless.) I love how full of warmth it is, how full of affection for its own characters, I love the wonderful, politically rich world they live in. I love how some episodes are about grand political machinations, and others are about weddings, about sons and daughters, about Klingon mothers-in-law. I love Garak more every time he appears on screen. (I remember reading something about how Ziyal was introduced to give him a female love interest, the tension between him and Bashir having become permeable to the thickest head, but for all the romance was a little pasted on yay, Garak's response to being told of her death is, strangely, the saddest and most poignant thing in a six-episode arc about war.)

Actually, another thought. If Deep Space Nine is about anything - about anything broad, not just Bajor, Cardassia and the Dominion - it seems to be about families, about Sisko and Jake, about Quark, Rom and Nog, simply, and about Kira and Tekeny Ghemor and Kirayoshi, and Odo and the Founders, about Worf and Dax, complicatedly. It's like they gave us this grand, militarilistic, fiercely political setting and turned around and said, actually, individuals and who they love are just as important. I love this show in a way I don't love other Star Trek, I really do.

-Something different. There's a man in my class at school, whose initial is not F. Yesterday morning I had a great deal of trouble getting out of bed, and I was cranky when I turned up for criminal litigation, and while I was crankily working through my stack of witness statements, F. was at the next table and he was talking about gay and lesbian people. F. is a devout Christian, which is one thing, and a literalist when it comes to Leviticus, which is quite another; after about ten minutes of listening to him talking about homosexuality being evil, wrong, and a sickness (and, to their credit, the people around him not arguing, but basically trying to shush him), I spoke up and, you know how you have an image of yourself in your head? Someone who is a proud liberal and a proud activist, who says what she thinks and gets her points across with elegant, economical sang-froid?

Yeah, it wasn't like that. I tried not to get upset and told him that I came to my class for purposes of criminal litigation, and there, then, should not have to listen to those things, quite apart from any discussion we might have outside of class. He said he'd got a right to state his opinion, I said not if it upset me in my crim lit class, the tutor returned at that point, case closed for the moment.

Today, I was checking my email during the break when F. came and asked for a word. Okay, I said, warily, what is it.

He said he was sorry. That he'd had no right to speak like that, and he was sorry if what he had said had upset me, and that his views were one thing but he didn't have any right to impose them on me, especially as it was something I found upsetting. He hoped I would forgive him but if not at least I'd know he was sorry.

Bless the man, really.

The bad:

-I am finding it very hard to get up in the mornings, lately. I note this merely for the record at the moment, with the additional note that it's February, I have had two bursts of culture shock in the recent past, and I have exams and academic stress at a greater than normal degree for the time of year. I am going to buy myself a wake-up lamp, and sleep in a little more than I strictly ought.

The ugly indifferent different:

-One of Shim's stranger talents is being able to declaim Kipling to suit all occasions. I have read him, not to the same degree, and while I like his writing, a lot, my thoughts are partly complicated and partly tread the usual aesthetic path of whether I ought to find value in his work, when I know what his views were. The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories aren't, shall we say, entirely representative.

I've started reading him again recently, because I was in India, and it seemed appropriate, and on the whole, I think I would rather read him than not, even if his flashes of racism and his glorification of empire are occasional bad tastes among the good. This is nowhere more evident than in O Beloved Kids, a collection of his letters to his young children, which are full of joys and wordplay and little pen-and-ink drawings and the word "nigger". But I keep reading it, and finding joy in it. I don't know. It was an old moral problem a long time ago, and one of the things I find joy in is how much he loved India, how much that love suffuses every line he wrote about the place, and should you take joy in that, or worry that the India he loved rightfully ceased to exist sixty years ago? I don't know, I don't know. I wish there was at least a starting place with these things - if, for example, the introduction to the letters had not been half-heartedly apologist, but had said outright, Kipling was a racist of his time and a little in his own special way, and this was bad, this was wrong and hurtful, and he was also a Nobel laureate for literature and his writing is full of joy and beauty, and this is good, and the mixture is uneasy but here it is.

I stun myself with my lack of profundity. I shall go and tackle leasehold interests.

---

[1] Who is also known, in quite formal settings, as "equity's darling", a phrase which delights me unduly.

Comments

[absinthe-shadow.livejournal.com]

I would never have thought land law could be as interesting as you made it. This is not a joke.

Also! I have STARTED reading the Kipling story but not FINISHED yet because stupid Wordsworth has eaten my life. But I was finding it intriguing up until the point where I had to stop and return to the hoary bosom of WW, so maybe we can discuss it when I do finally finish it, if you are not too utterly overwhelmed with work/exams.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Oh, I am pleased that these things make sense to normal other people.

I would love to discuss it! I really did love it, for all it made me cry. (But "hoary bosom" made me laugh. Ewwwww.)

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

This is sort of relevent - just thought you'd be interested to know that on Monday I have a seminar on 'Mansfield Park', William Cobbett's 'Rural Rides' and Said. I'm sure you'd hate it, but I'm quite looking forward to it.

[absinthe-shadow.livejournal.com]

I do quite enjoy situations which call for Violent Disagreement on my part - they are, as it were, Stimulating - but I expect your right and I would Get Cross. Anyway, I hope you have fun! I'm a bit jealous of you going to Austen seminars... :)

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

Actually, one of the articles on our reading list was a criticism of Said for not treating Austen in her proper context and ignoring the implicit criticisms of the salve trade within the novel, which pretty much summed up most of the ideas I'd had on reading the text.

[absinthe-shadow.livejournal.com]

...Ah. Okay, those are pretty much my criticisms too. We are clearly neither of us original in this particular respect!

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

Originality is so difficult.

[emerald-embers.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling that Kipling was very much a product of his time because a lot of the way he writes feels more ignorant than malicious in its racism - I always think there's a brief bit in Gunga Din that sort of sums it up, really; "An' for all 'is dirty 'ide//'E was white, clear white, inside". Because on the one hand to any modern mindset it provokes an initial reaction of "... what", but for all its ignorance, there's affection there.

I think his writing is lovely overall and as long as people enjoy it while knowing the context of his time and appreciating that things have changed since then, it's more or less healthy to do so.

However, at the same time, I completely acknowledge that I'm a middle-class white girl who hasn't studied sociology in any meaningful way and I could be talking out of my backside; but it's my personal opinion :).

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do agree to some extent - yes, Kipling was a product of his time - but also, I remember that he lived in India, he knew Indians, and that makes it less easy to quite chalk it up to that, you know. Or maybe less comfortable, I don't know.

people enjoy it while knowing the context of his time and appreciating that things have changed since then, it's more or less healthy to do so.

I agree with that if it is always possible, but I suspect it isn't quite; it's not easy to enjoy the worse parts of the stories. So far I haven't put one down entirely, but it's still there as a possibility.

[emerald-embers.livejournal.com]

Mmm, it's definitely a hard one to pin down exactly. I have to admit I tend to base a lot of my assumptions about old fashioned racism off my dad's, because my dad is ancient he's someone who was raised in a time where it was still perfectly acceptable (he showed us all one of his old school textbooks talking about the "young nigger boy") and for all that he's a smart man he still holds irrational beliefs that he would have been exposed to when he was younger but that have proven over the years to be completely and totally false.

It bugs me that he's smart but he can't see that half the things he was told about other races as a kid are nonsense/incomplete and that he'll blame a country's populace for its problems regardless of the cause; it's a blindness that my mum doesn't have despite the two of them being less than a decade apart in age. It's also a school thing in part, I reckon; mum went to an all-girls grammar school and was from a well off family, and she's only five years younger than dad, but I've never heard a word from her that I'd acknowledge as racist. Dad was raised in a poor inner-city area and is five years older than her but in terms of beliefs they might as well be from seperate countries and centuries, to a degree.

Still haven't worked out why they work as a couple ;), but there you go. I'm kind of glad I took a fair bit more after my mum than my dad!

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

I stun myself with my lack of profundity.

Um, SHUT UP. I had just finished reading the previous paragraph and was in the middle of thinking, "WOW, what I'd give to be able to write like she does." So... SHUT UP ABOUT THAT RIDICULOUSNESS.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

yes ma'am. *squish* I'm glad you liked the post!

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

I always assumed people did land law for the money.

Do you like Garak even in 'Empok Nor'? Personally I find it very disappointing that there is not much Garak/Bashir in season 6.

I can't stand Kipling (as a poet).

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do; part of what I like about him is that he's capable of that, being a dangerous killer, and for the most part, chooses not to be that person. "Empok Nor" does a good job of depicting that, I think.

Alas, I am sorry to disappoint you on the other two points.

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

I've not read any of Kipling's prose for ages, so I'm probably being unfair.

Also, I think it's great that you genuinely like Land Law and are not just choosing it cynically.

I love the fact that Garak has a completely different moral code from the Federation (which is one reason why 'In the Pale Moonlight' is so great), it's just that 'Empok Nor' the plot wasn't believeable and the resolution far too hand wavey. I like to pretend it's not canon.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

I like that reading of Empok Nor, though I still wasn't very sold on it (as with many plots involving Magic Drugs). Apparently Andrew Robinson also hated it because he spend ages trying not to be typecast as a straight-up murderer, heh.

(WHICH REMINDS ME WE STILL HAVE NOT DOWNLOADED HIM PLAYING LIBERACE AND GOT DRUNK TOGETHER. During study leave?)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

YES. YES, WE MUST DO THIS. sometime in study leave that is not a weekend?

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Might be a bit harder for me to work around, but we'll sort something out nearer the time :)

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Oo ooor could one of us go to the other on Saturday after your exam and spend Sat night in a pink-wine haze? I frequently make pancakes on Sunday morning :P

[icepixie]

Re: Karine Polwart: Have you listened to "Waterlily"? That one makes me cry. (Moreso because of the lyrics being based on Colin McKay's Cold Night Lullaby, the true story of his Serbian wife who was murdered during the Yugoslavian conflict while he was away getting visas for them to escape to Scotland.)

Your paragraph on Kipling is fascinating. In my Modernism seminar, we just read Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe's response to it (the one where he calls Joseph Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist"), which deals with many of the same issues you raise in regards to Kipling and India. Achebe comes down on the side of the book being too tainted by Conrad's use of Africa as mere background for the breakup of a white man's mind--among other imperialist concerns--to be considered great literature. I see his point, but it seems to me that it cuts off discussion unnecessarily sharply. We read some of Said's Culture and Imperialism along with it, and he promotes a view that is closer to my own--acknowledging the failings while still admiring what's good about it. But I fully admit that I feel that way because I'm a white American who happens to like the novel quite a bit.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I was about to make the same comment re: my feelings on Kipling being quite close to my feelings on Conrad and Achebe's critique on him. So. Thank you for saying it better than I would've! (I love Conrad and Heart of Darkness in particular, even if I "shouldn't.")

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

PS, Iona, I don't know if you prefer Kipling's prose, but if you haven't already read it, I think his WWI poetry (surprise surprise) is quite interesting. Particularly "Gethsemane," (http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/rudyard-kipling/gethsemane/); the "prayed my cup would pass" refrain becomes really eerie and poignant when you know that Kipling's son--for whom Kipling wrote "If," his most famous poem--died in WWI, having gotten a commission in the Army thanks to his father's influence. (Kipling wrote WWI propaganda at the war's outset.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have heard it - Shim has a real passion for Kipling's poetry and thus has large amounts of it memorised - and I must admit, I didn't really think much into it until I read O Beloved Kids. His letters to John are so earnest, so buck-up-and-play-the-game, so manly and Edwardian... and then they just stop. It's so tragic.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, well, then make sure to warn Shim that, STRANGE AS IT MAY SOUND, speed-reciting all of "Gunga Din" at family holidays is not that great a crowd-pleasing party trick.

...I mean theoretically if one were to try to do that.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thanks so much for the pointer re: Polwart, I do love her songs, or what I've heard of them, and Waterlily is amazing. And now doubly sad. :)

I'm beginning to wonder if there's a difference between white readings of these sorts of texts, which do note the race-based failings of the texts, don't get me wrong, and mine, which is something like "omg, he means me... does he mean me? oh, now he means me, oh shit" - etc. Does that make sense? There is a whole lot more discomfort there, which I can separate out entirely from my liking for Kipling's writing and from my own serious criticisms of racism in literature.

I would say, though, that Kipling probably doesn't fall into the same trap as the one Conrad allegedly does - his writing about India is genuine in the sense that it is not just background, it flavours everything he writes, in a way.

[icepixie]

Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense.

I would say, though, that Kipling probably doesn't fall into the same trap as the one Conrad allegedly does - his writing about India is genuine in the sense that it is not just background, it flavours everything he writes, in a way.

I'm honestly not sure I've read any Kipling beyond, I dunno, "Rikki Tikki Tavi," maybe. Even then I might be remembering a cartoon or something. But just from what little I know of his biography, that distinction makes sense to me.

[liminereid.livejournal.com]

Your thoughts on Kipling are fascinting. I've aklways loved him in many ways because I read him as a child and because it is a little girl who makes up the alphabet necklace in the Just so stories. I think you are fery right that Kipling is a sad ba;ance of his genuine enthuisiasm and love for India and failure to therefore think further and deeper about cultural conventions and his own ingrained racism

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you have a tough month coming up - good luck!
After the bad month, and after reading the 'tasting notes' tonight, I am convinced we should have another whisky night :D
<3

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I entirely, entirely agree, we totally should. Also, you were taking actual notes? I dimly recall you telling me that the whisky tasted like bacon, but apparently my memory of that night is incomplete. I wonder why. :P

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

I also have *cough* rather hazy memories of the evening. However I do have a faithful companion and scribe, who wanted to record the evening for posterity. Such a useful, lovely man.
Right then, it's agreed. When exams are done, we drink!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Pah. My faithful companion merely made fun of my hangover. But it is agreed, hurrah! We shall drink, and lo, it shall be good!

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Verily, it shall be so!
(Your companion was utterly unfair. Good manners dictates he should at least have been hungover himself. We shall repair that next time *evil grin*)

[jaebi-lit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it wasn't like that.

It takes practice, is all. The more often you speak up, the easier it becomes, too. Good on you for saying something--what F and your classmates will remember is that you spoke up, period.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I suppose that is right. I am so useless at confrontation!

[marymac.livejournal.com]

Land Law is fascinating. Mind you, I think last year it was me and the lecturer who thought that, and I wasn't much help to him since I'm the historian notetaker chick.

I had arguments with my student over it. She said dry and boring, I said rich and complicated and brilliant. Northern Ireland is still mostly running old Irish land law pre-reform, so we have all those bits to play with too. I love the idea of title deeds especially. All those families, there in your hands.

Actually, that's probably why I like it.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Aha! Yes, I remember you were taking notes on equitable interests around the time I was first reading about them. It is fascinating, isn't it? I envy you the pre-reform law; I am technically still taught about unregistered land, but by the time I enter practice it will be an archaism. A great shame, as it may be clunky and insecure, but it's wonderful.

[tau_sigma]

You are awesome. I have no brain to express how, but you are awesome. *hugs*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*squish* Yoooou. Are you looking after yourself? Are you, mmm? If not I shall shout.

[tau_sigma]

*squishes back* I am looking after myself, yes ma'am. *smiles* Actually, other than being-there-for-Anwar, I haven't been doing much; he has been busy a lot sorting out things with his family (practical things; funeral arrangements and wills and suchlike) so I have been sleeping in and playing Star Trek Online during the day, mostly.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

. . . if you wrote a novel about a land lawyer, I would read it.

I've never done Kipling. I ought.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*laughs* it is, shall we say, not the most popular of subjects. I shall bear this in mind for my future literary career. :)

Kipling is many things but not worth reading is not one of them, yes.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Actually, another thought. If Deep Space Nine is about anything - about anything broad, not just Bajor, Cardassia and the Dominion - it seems to be about families, about Sisko and Jake, about Quark, Rom and Nog, simply, and about Kira and Tekeny Ghemor and Kirayoshi, and Odo and the Founders, about Worf and Dax, complicatedly. It's like they gave us this grand, militarilistic, fiercely political setting and turned around and said, actually, individuals and who they love are just as important. I love this show in a way I don't love other Star Trek, I really do.

I want to print this out and kiss it, and you haven't even seen how it all ends yet.

You're right about Ziyal's death, by the way. In an arc in which many shitty things happen to good people, it is for some reason Garak's quiet reaction - the quiet reaction of a guy who has done a lot of killing, and seen a lot of killing - that kind of sticks with you.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* I don't even know what happens! I love this show SO MUCH I don't want it to end!

Garak is full of surprises. And in a well-written way! I really like what they do with him.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

He gets in a couple more good turns before the end, too.

After it's all done with, there's a book series that continues the story for a while. I have mixed feelings on the last couple of books, but most of them pre-2007ish are pretty worth your time if you need a fix. Don't google just yet though, as obviously with DS9's continuity, all the books are full of spoilers for the finale.

Niners: there are maybe not so many of us, but of the Trekkers, we are one of the most loyal so they do try and cater to us a wee bit more than Voyager or Enterprise fans.

[fyrdrakken]

Always a grand thing when you can find an area of fascination in the field you're training for a career in. I haven't quite managed that one.

All the Kipling I've read boils down to A) Just So Stories and The Jungle Book as a child, and B) quotes from poems that I keep running across as chapter headings because one or two military SF writers I read a lot of really love him for what he has to say about life in uniform. I keep feeling that I need to read more of him and get the broader context of his work.

Also, I'm feeling that it's been too many years since I've watched any DS9, and I may be ready for a re-viewing. Which at this day and age means buying or borrowing the DVDs, since back in the day what I had were videotapes I recorded myself as the show was airing. (And though I still have a presumably working VHS player, at some point when our cable was upgraded it got unplugged and I haven't worked out how to reconnect it to my TV yet. And may not bother.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Well, I wouldn't be a lawyer if I didn't find the law quite fun. :) But yes, land law is a surprising joy with regards to its actual practice.

It's worth noting that Kipling's view of the military life changes sharply in 1915 - when his son died, aged eighteen, in France. It's a tragic change and it shows up clearly in his poetry and prose.

Re: DS9, I get my boxsets from Amazon for really not very much, and they're so worth it, they're such a joy.

[troyswann.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the commendations!
\o/

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! :)