lighting trees in darkness
Apr. 25th, 2010 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenFirst of all, thank you all for your comments on my last post, they were very much appreciated, and I am sorry for disappearing for a fortnight.
As for why I did that... well, I'm quite busy, and what with one thing and another I'm suffering quite badly with anxiety at the moment. My workload is building up gradually, I have an interviewing assessment next week (which is haunting me a little), and I keep thinking in spare moments of the whole moving-abroad thing, so, yes, the ground-state is a little tense. Maybe a lot tense, but it's situational. ("Yes, it's your worst fear," said my talk-therapist, "you're normal.")
But, the weather is getting better and better - god, today was lovely; sunlight like golden sugar, there's that glorious sweetness coming back into it - and my life is coming together and anxiety apart, I feel good. Yesterday night![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jacinthsong and I drank half a bottle of wine each and went skipping across London in the last of the daylight, with glitter eyeliner and glitter eyeshadow and body glitter and glittery nail polish and glitter hairspray, and when we got to the venue (it was a club night called Stay Beautiful, and there was a lot of glitter in evidence) there was quite a bit of vodka. We looked awesome. I danced a lot. And collapsed into Laura's pillows at some post-midnight hour and woke up with glitter in my ear.
Today we mostly sat in the sunshine, watched Deep Space Nine and Doctor Who, and I have come back to Oxford and am feeling unaccountably sleepy. Things:
-I just read Blackout, the latest installment in Connie Willis' time-travelling historians universe. I said, just starting it, that it was going to be somewhere in the middle of the other two novels, when it came to tone - obviously, not a comedy like To Say Nothing of the Dog, but maybe not an angstfest like Doomsday Book.
Having finished it, I'm now not so sure. There's a scene in Doomsday Book - I was just re-reading it on the train - that always kills me dead. It's when Dunworthy wakes up, having spent days near death, convinced that Kivrin is dead, and that she died thinking that he wasn't going to come for her, that he didn't care. And this could be such a melodramatic scene, so overdone, and so at odds with what came before - despite the fact it's from his point of view, Dunworthy's reserve is never really breached - and it isn't. It isn't at all. Dunworthy asks Mrs. Gaddson - awful woman who has spent the whole novel thus far reading from the Bible to people who don't want it read to them - to read from Matthew. It's barely spelled out that the verse he picks is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
...and, oh, oh, it ties in so beautifully with the rest of it all, when Kivrin is shouting for help and it isn't clear if she means God or Dunworthy or if it doesn't matter because both are unimaginably distant, but it's such a small thing. It's always a small thing, in these books. She has this enviable talent for showing you the whole, enormous, literary story in small things - in individual people and individual days - and it's this I'm seeing in Blackout. In giving us so many sets of characters, all dealing with small things - rationed stockings, children with measles, public transport - against the backdrop of the Blitz, I think she's building up to something like Doomsday Book in the weight of its themes.
At the moment, actually, I think the novel is quite flawed - there are too many sets of characters, it's too long with too little happening - but it's not half of a duology, as I thought it was, it's the first half of a single novel. The second half, All Clear, is out in October, and I'll reserve judgement until then. In the meantime it is very nice to have something new in this universe.
-I am, as mentioned above, also still watching Deep Space Nine, and still really rather in love with it. I am four episodes from the end and will wait until I've finished it until I talk about it in general, but more briefly, I was watching an otherwise unremarkable late episode, "Covenant". The plot of it is fairly dull - it sets up what comes next - but begins with Odo, Julian and Ezri sitting around a table talking about nothing very much. Odo says that Kira is at the service at the Bajoran shrine, and he wishes he could go with her, but he doesn't share her faith.
Julian and Ezri point out that if he wants to explore faith, he doesn't have to pursue Bajoran religion - he could try something else. Maybe Klingon religion. Yes, Julian goes on, he could eat the hearts of his enemies, and go to Sto'vo'kor when he dies.
Yes, Odo says, exasperatedly, but he still wouldn't get to go to services with Kira.
...yes, it's just a little scene. But I do love it. I love how it works as a sweet little prelude to an episode about religion even if you don't know these characters at all. But this is why Deep Space Nine is the best of the Trek series, in my opinion; it's the way it deftly, lightly, pulls in a lot of things - Kira and Odo's blossoming relationship, Odo's continued quest to try and understand humanity, Ezri and Julian being respectively a therapist and a doctor and not really knowing how not to offer advice, and it does that against the backdrop of its own universe, a universe with religions with their own metaphysical concepts that the viewer knows about, because there have been episodes about all of these: about all the character threads, and about the religions too. I mean... this is a show that is now, after seven seasons, very comfortable in its own skin, and it shows in the lightness of the writing. I love it, I really do.
...bah. I am dull. In short: I am well, there is glitter in my ear, I like books and TV.
Tomorrow, law calls. Night night.
As for why I did that... well, I'm quite busy, and what with one thing and another I'm suffering quite badly with anxiety at the moment. My workload is building up gradually, I have an interviewing assessment next week (which is haunting me a little), and I keep thinking in spare moments of the whole moving-abroad thing, so, yes, the ground-state is a little tense. Maybe a lot tense, but it's situational. ("Yes, it's your worst fear," said my talk-therapist, "you're normal.")
But, the weather is getting better and better - god, today was lovely; sunlight like golden sugar, there's that glorious sweetness coming back into it - and my life is coming together and anxiety apart, I feel good. Yesterday night
jacinthsong and I drank half a bottle of wine each and went skipping across London in the last of the daylight, with glitter eyeliner and glitter eyeshadow and body glitter and glittery nail polish and glitter hairspray, and when we got to the venue (it was a club night called Stay Beautiful, and there was a lot of glitter in evidence) there was quite a bit of vodka. We looked awesome. I danced a lot. And collapsed into Laura's pillows at some post-midnight hour and woke up with glitter in my ear.Today we mostly sat in the sunshine, watched Deep Space Nine and Doctor Who, and I have come back to Oxford and am feeling unaccountably sleepy. Things:
-I just read Blackout, the latest installment in Connie Willis' time-travelling historians universe. I said, just starting it, that it was going to be somewhere in the middle of the other two novels, when it came to tone - obviously, not a comedy like To Say Nothing of the Dog, but maybe not an angstfest like Doomsday Book.
Having finished it, I'm now not so sure. There's a scene in Doomsday Book - I was just re-reading it on the train - that always kills me dead. It's when Dunworthy wakes up, having spent days near death, convinced that Kivrin is dead, and that she died thinking that he wasn't going to come for her, that he didn't care. And this could be such a melodramatic scene, so overdone, and so at odds with what came before - despite the fact it's from his point of view, Dunworthy's reserve is never really breached - and it isn't. It isn't at all. Dunworthy asks Mrs. Gaddson - awful woman who has spent the whole novel thus far reading from the Bible to people who don't want it read to them - to read from Matthew. It's barely spelled out that the verse he picks is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
...and, oh, oh, it ties in so beautifully with the rest of it all, when Kivrin is shouting for help and it isn't clear if she means God or Dunworthy or if it doesn't matter because both are unimaginably distant, but it's such a small thing. It's always a small thing, in these books. She has this enviable talent for showing you the whole, enormous, literary story in small things - in individual people and individual days - and it's this I'm seeing in Blackout. In giving us so many sets of characters, all dealing with small things - rationed stockings, children with measles, public transport - against the backdrop of the Blitz, I think she's building up to something like Doomsday Book in the weight of its themes.
At the moment, actually, I think the novel is quite flawed - there are too many sets of characters, it's too long with too little happening - but it's not half of a duology, as I thought it was, it's the first half of a single novel. The second half, All Clear, is out in October, and I'll reserve judgement until then. In the meantime it is very nice to have something new in this universe.
-I am, as mentioned above, also still watching Deep Space Nine, and still really rather in love with it. I am four episodes from the end and will wait until I've finished it until I talk about it in general, but more briefly, I was watching an otherwise unremarkable late episode, "Covenant". The plot of it is fairly dull - it sets up what comes next - but begins with Odo, Julian and Ezri sitting around a table talking about nothing very much. Odo says that Kira is at the service at the Bajoran shrine, and he wishes he could go with her, but he doesn't share her faith.
Julian and Ezri point out that if he wants to explore faith, he doesn't have to pursue Bajoran religion - he could try something else. Maybe Klingon religion. Yes, Julian goes on, he could eat the hearts of his enemies, and go to Sto'vo'kor when he dies.
Yes, Odo says, exasperatedly, but he still wouldn't get to go to services with Kira.
...yes, it's just a little scene. But I do love it. I love how it works as a sweet little prelude to an episode about religion even if you don't know these characters at all. But this is why Deep Space Nine is the best of the Trek series, in my opinion; it's the way it deftly, lightly, pulls in a lot of things - Kira and Odo's blossoming relationship, Odo's continued quest to try and understand humanity, Ezri and Julian being respectively a therapist and a doctor and not really knowing how not to offer advice, and it does that against the backdrop of its own universe, a universe with religions with their own metaphysical concepts that the viewer knows about, because there have been episodes about all of these: about all the character threads, and about the religions too. I mean... this is a show that is now, after seven seasons, very comfortable in its own skin, and it shows in the lightness of the writing. I love it, I really do.
...bah. I am dull. In short: I am well, there is glitter in my ear, I like books and TV.
Tomorrow, law calls. Night night.
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no subject
on 2010-04-25 02:12 am (UTC)I did not realise your affection for TOS could be supplanted.
no subject
on 2010-04-25 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 08:49 am (UTC)I envy your going abroad, although I completely understand the fear: right now I've got too many commitments to move anywhere, but maybe one day I'll get a couple of extra ponies and abandon it all to travel Europe in a restored gypsy caravan (or maybe just the UK in a narrow boat if I can figure out how to navigate the Birmingham bits with two or three Exmoors).
Talking of books, have you any opinions on Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Major-Pettigrews-Stand-Helen-Simonson/dp/1408804255)? I found it charming and only had one Brit-pick for it, but I was very aware that Mrs Ali and her family were being written more from an outsider's perspective than were the Colonel's family and supposed friends.
no subject
on 2010-04-25 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-25 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-26 03:09 pm (UTC)I actually think she's too harsh on Winn (that analysis misses out that, while she's not a nice character, she did try and serve the prophets and the people for a *long* time and ultimately just can't see faith as its own reward) and that it's wrong to say Bareil isn't a man of faith, but the whole series of posts (http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2008/02/back-through-wormhole-table-of-contents.html) is a good read.
no subject
on 2010-04-26 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-26 04:32 pm (UTC)I love the alien-cultures essay so. Partly because I was wankily glad to see that someone else had independently had the same thought as me about "different expressions of Ferengi-ness".
no subject
on 2010-04-26 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-27 09:46 pm (UTC)My nails need polishing. This is not an unrelated observation. I have glitter overcoats in many color schemes.
no subject
on 2010-04-28 01:26 am (UTC)*hugs* for the anxiety (well, not for the anxiety; for you because of the anxiety), I hope the spring weather and brightness will help.
no subject
on 2010-04-29 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-29 11:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-04-30 12:09 am (UTC)(I am watching old HIGNFY, and Joan Collins has just almost forgotten kissing William Shatner, bless her. 'Did I? Oh, I did. I was the only person Captain Kirk ever fell in love with.')
no subject
on 2010-04-30 12:19 am (UTC)Do call! I will be here! Hurrah. :)
no subject
on 2010-04-30 03:50 pm (UTC)2) I have three shades of never-worn nail polish lurking atop my desk at home waiting for me to get around to trying them out. In particular I've been thinking of using the pale blue, mayhap with a subtle silver glitter overcoat, but then again seeing it standing next to the cobalt blue makes me sort of want to try out this, where one takes a pair of shades of nail polish and makes three intermediate blends to get each nail a different shade in a sort of gradient effect. (I'm not actually sure if that photo is of the blend or just of someone with five different shades of nail polish, but I couldn't find the tutorial on how to do it. Fortunately I remember basically how it worked.)
no subject
on 2011-03-03 01:43 am (UTC)I should probably have an icon.