The Hair of the Damned

On Hiatus

2010-08-22T23:05:00.002+01:00

Temperature: 35c/95f

The word on the street, reader, is that all things must end. I'm not sure that's true, but I'm sure it's true that all things must pause. Here I am re-ensconced in WhereIlive; my term starts tomorrow, and with it what I hope will be a brief period of my life. That doesn't mean I don't expect it to be fun: in fact, I'm making a real effort to make it fun, and eventful, and valuable (that's really true). But it does mean that this blog, which was meant to chronicle my time in England, isn't really relevant anymore. So this is my last entry here.

It isn't, however, my last entry anywhere. I'm starting a new blog later this week. If you're interested in reading it, give me some way to reach you, and I'll send you the url. The Hair of the Damned will be resumed when I return to my non-US existence in ten months.

I'm not sure how I feel about these past two years, aside from feeling that they were amazingly good for me, and very important - well, I guess that is how I feel about them. I'm certainly not sure, though, how I feel about the months to come. I don't know what will happen, or what it will mean to me. But how can I be? It's the future. Which I will chronicle - with explanations, and with some reference to the past.

Come out Screaming

2010-08-19T14:53:00.006+01:00

Temperature: 27c/80f

Here I am at Parentshome. Parentshome is less hot than WhereIlive, but not by much: it's like going out of the fire and into the frying pan. I'm afraid it's also marginally more boring. There's simply nothing for me to do here, since it's not my home, none of my friends live here anymore, and it's in a suburb (neither a city nor a village). My parents are here, however, and it's good to spend time with them. I'm even managing not to fight with my mother, by dint of a good deal of behavioural control. I know that's not very nice to say, but my mother and I are very different now, and that makes for all sorts of problems.

I think, though, that this visit to Parentshome is quite good in one respect: I'm easing myself back into the States. If I'd stayed in WhereIlive this week, I would have gone into my department, seen people, and been quickly immersed into Being In The States. I don't think that would have been good. This way, although I am experiencing the States again, I'm doing it as if I were on holiday (which I am), and that's much better (although there has already been some crying. It was very short, however).

So here is what I've learned about America so far: it's really big. And there is way too much stuff. Of course America is a huge country, but I find it very interesting the way Americans take this hugeness for granted. Coming from Otherhome, I'm genuinely disconcerted by the lavishness of the quotidian here. First of all, buildings and spaces are HUGE, and that hugeness isn't shown off or emphasized for effect: it's just a fact. You wander through vast spaces to shop, to get off a plane, to take a walk, to drive, and to me it's just weird (although also familiar and comfortable, which makes it even more weird). And then there is simply so much stuff. At the shoe store (a relatively small shoe store) you can pick from ten variations on the same style of boot; at the clothing store you can pick from racks and racks and racks of clothes. I wouldn't say this is obscene, but it is intensely disturbing to me. It seems to me as if these things have just been disgorged out onto the floor, vomited out without restraint or care. In Otherhome I had what I thought was a lot - too many clothes for my closet - and I saw what I thought was a lot - twenty styles of shoe, enough packaged food to feed a militia - but it turns out I have become an amateur in a lot.

This is one of the top reasons I'll leave. I can't take this much a lot.

The one unmitigated joy (and there was a lot of it, too!) of coming to Parentshome, is that I did indeed go to New York to see Jennifer. It was super fun! We went to the Russian Tea Room, where we didn't get the Tootsie booth (they were filming something top secret in the room where the booth was), but we did get to see the giant rotating bear with fish inside, and to admire the waiters' lovely frock coats, and to catch up over a giant tea neither of us could finish. Then we wandered around Manhattan for five hours, including a visit to an excellent exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and a delighted hour in a (giant) drugstore. Although there are many good things about Jennifer, there are two really good things about her: she is always funny, and when we're together it's as if we've never been apart. So we talked and talked and talked, and on my part pretty much completely caught up. And it was delightful.

Today is my father's birthday. Tomorrow is the day I arranged to stay after my father's birthday. The day after that I'm going back to WhereIlive. And then, I suspect, real life will begin.

Blood Everywhere

2010-08-16T03:12:00.003+01:00

Temperature at 9pm: 29c/84f

In case the temperature didn't give it away, I'm back in Arkansas. The trip was hellish: due to rain in Chicago, I didn't get into WhereIlivenow until 2am, by which time all the shuttles were gone. I was very kindly offered a ride by a baggage handler ("If you're a serial killer," I said to him, "I just want you to know that I'm very unhappy at the moment, so if you killed me it would be a relief. So there wouldn't be much in it for you."), which meant I made it home by 3. At which point I discovered my door was unlocked, and apparently had been so for two months. But nothing was stolen. Which is WhereIlivenow in a nutshell.

What with the tension, the misery, the messed-up sleep schedule, and the stunning change in weather, I woke up yesterday with a migraine. Four aspirin and two cups of tea later, though, I was ready to begin my temporary life, which I did by unpacking, and then by cleaning. And cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, a task I continued today. Which is when, in the process of trying to remove the glass cover to a ceiling light fixture so I could change a bulb, I timed the screw-loosening wrong and thus caused the cover to plunge to the floor, smashing and scattering everywhere. I was totally unhurt, as I was for almost all of the clean-up process, except a moment when I nicked my right index finger at the bottom of the first knuckle. It bled a bit, and then all of a sudden it bled a lot and, rather dramatically, everywhere: the finger felt wet, and when I looked down blood had run down the nail and made a little pool on the desktop. It was quite impressive. So I washed it, and it bled again. I felt like the guy in "A Boy Named Sue," down in "the mud and the blood and the beer."

Well, that's a re-entry. Tomorrow I'm off to Parentshome for a week, including a day in Manhattan to see Jennifer. After that, I'll be putting this blog on hiatus. Before that, though, expect a picture of The Russian Tea Room, Tootsie booth!

Leaving

2010-08-12T23:35:00.002+01:00

I did not think that at the last minute something would save me, or that the end would never come, but I did think maybe I would have enough time.

Now I have to go, and I'm leaving so many things behind, and November seems a long time away, and things can change in a heartbeat, and things will never ever be the same again. If I'd stayed for a month more they could have stayed the same for that month, but now I must go, and things will never be this good again. And I am afraid. I'm afraid that things will only change for the worse, and that I'll lose chances without gaining others.

Who will I talk to? With whom will I be intimate? Who will I love? How will I manage the next 3.5 months?

S. would say, "Look how you managed six months with Mr. Fallen, all via e-mail and after only three days of knowing each other. That's amazing [he actually did say that right after Mr. Fallen let me go]. And here you have two years of exposure, at the least two months, and the phone, and skype, and letters, and e-mail. This is nothing." And he'd be right. But right now it feels like a great loss, and a forever one.

Spheres of Rice

2010-08-07T23:45:00.004+01:00

On Monday night I'm going out to dinner at Carluccio's with The Neighbour. Now, normally I tell The Neighbour whatever story something reminds me of, and in the case of Carluccio's I not only have a story but have a story I always think of when Carluccio's comes up in conversation, and whenever Carluccio's comes up in conversation with The Neighbour (as it has on a number of occasions). This is a quite good story, but I can't tell it to The Neighbour - but I burst to tell it. So I thought I'd tell it to you and get it out of my system before Monday. Last year I went to Carluccio's on a date with an Italian guy (the first time The Neighbour told me he loved Carluccio's I thought it was an amazing coincidence that this was the same restaurant I'd been to with this guy, but I've since learned that Italians in Cambridge generally love Carluccio's. Anyway...). This guy was quite attractive and had been pretty nice when I'd met him previously, and he was still attractive and pretty nice when I met him at Carluccio's. BUT (Well, okay, in all honesty at this stage I should say he was wearing an orange jumper than highlighted certain unfortunate aspects of his physique. So he wasn't as attractive as he had been. Okay, so...). When the time came to order, as an appetizer he ordered Arancini di Riso. Even though he was Italian he ordered them in English, and the English translation is "fried rice balls." And he didn't crack a smile. Not only didn't he crack a smile, he didn't even raise an eyebrow; his lips didn't even twitch. And I thought to myself, Can I seriously become involved with someone who can order "balls" in public and not betray in any way that he wants to laugh?

To be fair to the guy, he might have been dying inside and taking every ounce of self-control not to smirk. And to be fair to me, I didn't decide not to see him again based on that: he turned out to be unpleasantly aggressive, and he made a misogynistic comment. Also, we just didn't suit. But whenever anyone mentions Carluccio's, I always think of the man I decided not to see again because he didn't twitch a lip when he ordered fried rice balls.

Yes, I am facile. And, apparently, immature.

I think you can see why you wouldn't tell this story to anyone you didn't know very well.

Oh

2010-08-05T16:45:00.003+01:00

Forgive the intimacy of the following revelation; the revelation matters.

When Mr. Fallen and I would have sex, he would make no noise - except, just at the end, I could tell he was about to have an orgasm because he would say, "Oh! oh! oh!" It wasn't like, "Ah" or even an open "oh": the sounds were round and fully formed, and to be strictly accurate they were more "O! o! o!": I thought of them as little bubbles of O. It was very precise, and for that reason very striking.

I see now that that pronunciation makes the utterance very heartfelt, for when I contemplate saying good-bye to all these people, then getting on the plane and being without them, suddenly and completely and for a long time, I say aloud to myself, "O. O. O." Only this captures the precise slice of the pain, and the terrible clarity of the sense of loss. O. O. O.

Close Shaves

2010-08-04T21:08:00.010+01:00

Well, it's a bit of a tense time here in me-land, and I've decided to deal with that by...avoiding it! At least on this blog. What I will say is that when I return to Otherhome I will suspend this blog and start another, intended to cover my time while in Otherhome (which will then become WhereIlive). So this blog will cease, but hopefully only temporarily.

Now, on to the avoidance! Yesterday I was moved to think about shaving. What, you ask, could possibly move you to think about shaving? A fair enough question. To which the answer is, an article I read at my beautician's that told men how to wet shave. And as a result my thoughts were about wet shaving. And here are my thoughts: I love wet shaving for men.

When I was little, my father wet shaved. On the one had this may seem odd, because my father has a beard, and at that time had a moustache as well. But even beard-bearers need to shave, and my father wet shaved. Specifically, he wet shaved over the sink in my parents' bathroom (which had tiles halfway up the walls, and the top line of tiles had little swags of flowers tied at each end with bows on them - and now I long for such tiles, my childhood impression that they were the most elegant tiles ever unmoved by any later tiles or tile experiences).

Clearly this early exposure to wet shaving, and on the only male model I had, set it in my mind that men wet shave: that is what men do. And for this reason I do not like electric shaving for men (or for women, I suppose. But that plays less of a role in my life). In my not-so-secret

heart I believe that wet shaving gives you a closer shave - well, what I really mean isthat whenever I see a closely shaved man I think to myself, A-HA! I bet he wet shaves! And I certainly find electric shaving unsexy. If I pass the bathroom while you're shaving and you have foam on your face and a manual razor, I'll stop and admire you, but if you have an electric razor I'll just think, Uck. But really what I believe, in my subconscious heart, is that electric shaving is unmanly. Wet shaving is just more masculine, dammit. And you have my father to thank for this belief.

Isn't that funny: when I was little my father was a, shall we say, not so good father. And he was scary. I was scared of him. But now that I'm grown up I adore him, and I discover repeatedly how, in ways I think are good or at least harmless, he's set my notions of manliness. He told me once that he was sorry: he wished he'd been a better model, because then I might have had happier relationships. I told him at the time that in fact I thought the problem was that my boyfriends hadn't been enough like him. But I wonder sometimes these days if he was right.

The Mysteries of Pleasure

2010-07-29T19:21:00.007+01:00

When I leave in two weeks' time, I will not say to The Neighbour the night before I leave, "I wish I could stay here and have breakfast with you every day. My breakfasts in Arkansas will be miserable by comparison. I have enjoyed my time with you more than I can express, and my life will be the poorer for not having you in it. I really don't want to go." And I can virtually guarantee you that The Neighbour will not say, "I really don't want you to go. You have made my life so much more fun by being here. I will miss you every day." Indeed, I cannot imagine that I will make the first utterance (mine) to anyone I'm leaving here, although there are many people to whom I might make it. I won't say what I want to say because of the post below, which means I'm not going to take the risk of saying that and not having the person respond in kind, and The Neighbour, or my FTT, or S.A., or almost anyone else won't say it for the same reason, or because they might feel foolish, or simply because it wouldn't occur to them.

But why? I have given up going first, which is why I wouldn't make such an utterance, but why don't other people do it? I can't believe that, except for messed up or deeply repressed or deeply reserved (which I think I would slip in under the heading of "odd") people, anyone wouldn't like to know that they're loved and valued, and so I can't believe that people wouldn't want to make others feel loved and valued. Just being - as in, "I wouldn't be with you if I didn't love and value you" - is not enough, since every day we hang out with people we don't like, we repress thousands of irritations, and we settle. Also, just being is not enough because people don't exist, I believe, in a state where they just believe they're great, or unique: they need some top-ups to remind them. Also, the pleasure of telling someone you love (in whatever sense of that word) that you love them is enormous: how delightful to make someone you love happy! And how equally delightful to be able to say, as you do when you tell someone they're awesome, "I know an awesome person!"

What exactly is it people are afraid of, leaving aside the possibility that the sentiment might not be reciprocated? Looking foolish? I guess I can't see how expressing love makes you look foolish. Being embarrassed? Of course it is embarrassing at first to make such announcements, but the pleasure given vastly outweighs the embarrassment, I think, and in any case the embarrassment fades. Are they afraid of expressing emotion all together? If that's the case, I would, just out of interest, like to know why. What's so bad about expressing emotion? Well, I'm embarrassed about it, too, so I guess I can sort of answer that. Expressing emotion makes you look weak, because offering always makes you look weak, I think (because if the person refuses you look like a fool for offering). It also makes you look weak because it shows you have layers and needs: to say, "I like you" is to indicate that you're looking for someone to like, maybe even that you need someone to life, and that's an admission of weakness, in its own way.

And yet, I'd like to think that if I hadn't given up being brave all of these factors wouldn't be able to overcome the fact that it would make the other person happy to hear themselves treasured, unique, missed. What a lovely thing, to know you matter! And, as the teller, how lovely to know someone has made you happy!

Incidentally, on Monday I'm going to try to make this cake:

I'll try to remember to post a photo of my attempt.

Bravery

2010-07-27T22:31:00.005+01:00

"Oh, you should be brave," people frequently say. "You regret the things you didn't do, not the things you did do." Well, in my opinion, after a great deal of experience and experimentation, bravery is over-rated. So is not regretting. Or rather, you do, in fact, regret the things you did do.

If I had never told Mr. Heaven I wanted to kiss him, if I had never asked him over for biscuits, if I had never gone up to him at Hallowe'en, I never would have had all that sorrow and trouble over him. More to the point, if I'd never done any of those things, I would have been able to spend the rest of my life thinking, Maybe Mr. Heaven did want me, tee hee, instead of having to think, Mr. Heaven made me unhappy (and, incidentally, apparently didn't want me). If I had never approached Mr. Fallen at that conference, I would have been full of wrath that a member of my department got to go out with a graduate student while I got nothing (which is how the whole thing started), and I probably would have been a lot more sexually frustrated, but I also would not have got my heart broken, and I'm going to have to say that THAT would be sufficient balance for sexual frustration.

My conclusion, therefore, is that I intend to spend the next year of my life, at least, being a lot less brave. As far as I can discern, most people are not brave, and they live pretty happy lives. Sure, if you're brave you can find enormous happiness - maybe enormouser than the happiness of all those non-brave people - but you can also get your teeth kicked in by a German engineer and your heart broken by a Blake scholar of indifferent skill. So I think I'll let someone else be brave, while I enjoy my more cowardly, unwounded life.

Belts

2010-07-25T12:08:00.004+01:00

A couple of summers ago I introduced myself to the series Shameless. I came to know of it, and then watched it, because it had James McAvoy in it, and although I enjoyed the first series I didn't enjoy it enough to watch the others.

In any case, in the first episode of the first series James McAvoy takes off his trousers. Or rather, he unbuckles his belt. He does this in a kitchen, in the dark, as part of a slow and reasonably charged seduction. The scene is good, but the part that really stuck with me is the belt unbuckling (10:56 here). God (in my memory), I loved it! And what I loved was the sound. There was something about the clank of the metal being unbuckled that seemed to me unbelievably erotic. And ever since then I've had a thing for belts. I remember being disappointed that Mr. Fallen had a belt with a very modest buckle, and then even more disappointed when he told me that he didn't like big buckles. And I consider it one of the few failures of my FTT that he wears a belt with a sliding buckle:

I suppose it's more elegant - more sleek - but it removes

a certain kind of hardness from him, and it removes the possibility of a certain enjoyable complication. It seems to me that both these men, in their different ways, are closing off the pleasure of the tiny pause when the tooth has to pop out of the hole in the belt, the little distracting complexity when you have to get the leather out of the buckle, with the accompanying chink that lets you know what's been achieved and what's going to happen.

But here's the funny thing: I happened to re-watch that episode of Shameless a couple of days ago, and it turns out that James McAvoy's belt makes scarcely any noise at all! A discreet clink at best, rather than the baritone clunk I remembered. So I have got myself into a lather over something that never really existed in the first place!

Oh, Woe Is Me, to Have Seen What I Have Seen

2010-07-22T22:57:00.004+01:00

I have just come from a terrible Hamlet. I mean terrible. Never mind that my last Hamlet was the one with David Tennant, which is an unfair comparison for whatever the next one is; never mind that I have seen many Hamlets and so judge new ones sternly. This Hamlet was TERRIBLE.

Where to start? Perhaps at the beginning, where they did not start, since they cut the first scene. So perhaps with the Claudius, who was bad. Or the Gertrude,

who looked like Mrs. Pepperpot. Or the Laertes, who had trouble enunciating his "r"s. But, no, let us start with the Hamlet, who was vastly too young, but who was one of those actors who would have been too young to play Hamlet no matter how old he got: he is always going to look about 15, until suddenly he looks about 60. Which meant that his Horatio, who was the right age for the part, looked vastly too old: you couldn't understand how they'd ever be friends.

Then let us move on to the Hamlet's acting. Weeeell...Hamlet is a difficult part. It seems to me one of those parts like Juliet, where you have to be older than the age of the character in order to play the emotion that the character experiences. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a Hamlet - barring one in a college production - younger than his mid-thirties. And to be fair, most Hamlets who aren't really good make the same poor acting choice and decide to play Hamlet's melancholy as anger or crabbiness. Maybe sadness is boring? The problem is, while sadness may be boring, peevishness is downright dull, so the sense I'm always left with in the face of Hamlets who act him crabby rather than melancholy is that they're not terribly interesting. And that's precisely the sense I had with this one, although it wasn't just that. As I said to my parents, once you get a Melancholy Dane who doesn't do melancholy, the only thing left to ask is, How was his Danish accent? and in this case the answer is, Not good. Which is to say, he was a good actor, but he wasn't a good actor for Hamlet. I could maybe see him as Tybalt, and he might be a good Romeo in a few years, but he just doesn't have whatever you need to have to be Hamlet. And he was about five feet four at a maximum, which didn't help.

Aside from that...well, sigh. The Ophelia was better than many Ophelias, but I doubt very much that when Hamlet says to her, "I never gave you ought," Shakespeare intended her to snap back, "You know right well you did!" And when the not very good Claudius played the ghost (who appeared in that perfectly plausible ghostly ensemble of armour breastplate, cardboard crown, thick chain with a big bunch of mortice keys on a ring, and large diaper) he was also not very good.

And, ah, they butchered the text. No fretful porpentine! No "Why, man, they did make love to this employment"! And apparently Old Hamlet compared to Claudius was "Hyperion to a satire," while Hamlet's blandishments to Ophelia were "springs to catch woodcocks." And I suppose that these days it is the custom to emphasise the cunt in "country matters," but the fact that it's the custom doesn't make it any better: it patronises the audience and ruins the joke (you can watch David Tennant do it in this clip).

I had a good deal of time during this production to think about what the experience was like, and in the end I decided: it was like watching the slow-motion slaughter of a group of guinea pigs. You'd think to yourself, Oh, surely not that one; that one's so cute! Then, But now, surely, not this one! This one's even cuter! And that's essentially what I thought. Oh, God, surely they're not going to butcher that scene, too! But they did! The arrival of Horatio? Bang! The harassment of Ophelia? Pyow! Hamlet's rout of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Boom!

I left at the interval.

Garden Chat

2010-07-21T12:23:00.003+01:00

Yesterday a former student of mine and I met up for the last time here in Cambridge and went to the King's College Gardens to chat. In the course of the conversation we discovered that in both our experiences there is one thing that men and boys do not like to do, or perhaps simply do not do very well, and that is discuss changes in advance.

I will give you two quick examples from my own life. When Irishboyfriend was taking me back to Ireland to meet his family, he had no interest in discussing what might happen or what it might be like - this means that he displayed no discernible interest in dealing with some topics that, when I finally brought them up, turned out to be quite significant to deal with (I am Jewish. Should I mention it? Better not. I had been divorced. Could I mention it? NO). I don't mean he made snide comments about how these topics weren't important, or that when I tried to ask questions about what it would be like he was cutting; I mean it simply seemed never to occur to him that such a conversation could be relevant or useful. Similarly, although at a different level, both times that Dr. Higher and I moved house, he didn't start packing his stuff until a couple of days before - and I don't mean "his stuff" in the sense of "his clothes"; I mean "his stuff" in the sense of his many many books and desk belongings, etc. Moreover, in all my recollection I cannot think of one man I've known who has responded to a parting in the offing (which is how this topic came up, because my student has a boyfriend she must part from in a few days) by saying, "Okay, let me get your e-mail now, a week before you go, so I don't forget," or, "Right. Let's talk about how we might keep this friendship alive after you're gone." Conversely, all the women I know do at least some form of this.

This is weird. Are these men just putting things off because they don't want to think about them? Are they hopeless judges of time, so they always imagine there's more time than there actually is? Or do they simply have a ranking system in which change - which in my experience for everyone ends up being at least in part anxiety-provoking and concerning - is not concerning or does not register until it's too late? Which perhaps is another way of saying, Are men not very good at seeing ahead and guessing consequences and/or future possibilities? Which is possible, I suppose, but seems like a strange kind of life training, even if you take into account that the majority of men are raised to be more self-centred than the majority of women.

I think I will have to ask some men about this. Sometime in the future. Hahahaha.

My Neighbour

2010-07-20T11:28:00.003+01:00

Well, world, I have a new neighbour! Only he's not really a new neighbour anymore, since he arrived more than a month ago; but he's newer than anyone else I know, so he's new by default.

As it happens, although my neighbour's arrival is a good thing, because he's highly delightful, it's also a bad thing, because my new neighbour is exactly the sort of person you don't want arriving a month before you leave: a smart (SUPER smart), funny, thoughtful, lively, interesting member of the opposite sex. Thanks, God! This misfortune is somewhat alleviated by the fact that my neighbour is not interested in being more than friends with me, but I think you can see how that is perhaps not as unmitigatedly delightful an alleviation as it might be. Thanks again, God!

Anyway (BUEno), this is all by the bye, because what I actually wanted to write about was my neighbour as an example, rather than a person. In my opinion, my neighbour is not good-looking. He has great hair, but not such a great face. I should say at this stage that other people think he's good-looking (I should say this because I don't want to do my neighbour a disservice, and I'm not known for my taste in men when it comes to looks). But in not being good-looking my neighbour is the first iteration of phenomenon I had heard of but never experienced myself. Once my neighbour starts talking, he becomes remarkably attractive, and after he's been talking for about ten or fifteen minutes he has become phenomenally attractive. You sit across from him, and you think, I can't believe it. This guy is so interesting, and so alive, and so interested in life, and he has such a way of being alive to and intrigued by his life, that he's just...fabulous. You could listen to my neighbour talk all day, and I think you would never get tired, or (perhaps) any less mentally stimulated: for one thing, and I want to make a point of saying this because of how noticeable it is, he is SO SMART. I've never met anyone as smart as he is; I'm frequently taken aback by it. And I've never known before what it is to think that someone would be good in bed because of how they are rather than because of how they look, or to be attracted to someone because of the way they conduct themselves rather than because of their face. Which, now that it's written down, is a very sad comment, but it also makes my neighbour kind of a cool addition to my life.

Welcome Back

2010-07-02T22:08:00.009+01:00

I know: it's been a while. But I have been doing things and finishing things and starting things, and one way and another time got away from me.

First: it's World Cup time! As you may remember from previous posts, I am quite a football fan, and this Cup has yielded much enjoyment and many surprises. It's also yielded a good bit of tension, because I find myself (surprisingly) heavily invested in the German team. Is it leftover love of Miroslave Klose? Is it the German passport finally sinking in?

Is it the rather scary but also rather sexy black uniforms?

Is it the frankly-quite-sexy clothes horse Jogi Löw

and his fascinating determination to dress in partner look with his assistant coach Hans-Dieter Flick?

Who can say? In any case, I am all for Germany, and tomorrow they play Argentina, and my tension level is high.

Meanwhile, present at all these matches is Mr. Heaven. I thought Mr. Heaven would be gone by now, and I'm frankly irritated that he's still around. For one thing, that's therefore three months of sex he's missed out on, and thus his stupidity is driven home afresh to me every day that he remains here. Also, he was scheduled to leave, and the part of me that really deserves that German passport likes people to leave when they're scheduled to.

The presence of Mr. Heaven has led me to a larger musing, though. These days, Mr. Heaven and I are pretending to be friends, largely because I just couldn't ignore him when we were in the same room: it was too stupid. Do I want to be friends? Not really. But it's a lot easier and less depressing than actively spurning him.

But here's the thing: it's weird. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's wee-uhd (the ultimate of weird). Mr. Heaven saw me naked! And I saw him naked! Although, admittedly, I hardly remember what he looked like now, I do remember that I did see him. Yet we converse as if that never happened, as if he hadn't put his tongue in my mouth, and seen me naked, and watched me under him, as if I hadn't put my arms and legs around his naked person (now that I do remember doing). But I haven't forgotten it, and so every time I engage in this pointless chit chat with him I'm thinking, You saw me naked. And it wasn't just accidental, like when someone's your friend and then one night it all gets out of hand. The point of our connection was to see each other naked. And now we stand in spaces, and sometimes talk in spaces, as if we were and always have been casual friends. And, okay, that's very mature (I guess), but it's also just plain weird. Because it's not "staying" friends, or even accepting that we were actually just meant to be friends: it's not extending something that's natural.

I just find something deeply odd about being friends with someone who's seen you naked for sexual purposes, and whose sole purpose was to see you that way. I don't see myself ever watching a football match with Mr. Heaven without thinking, We've seen each other naked, and then we stopped for no reason. How do you readjust after that? So maybe it's not the nakedness so much as the random halt to it.

Now, the question is, does it work in reverse? Do I find something deeply odd about the idea of commencing a romantic or sexual relationship with someone who was a friend first? I've never done this, and manufacturing the situation in my imagination I'd have to say, Yes, I do find it odd. I mean, the person was your friend! And now they're not! That may take some readjustment, too.

So perhaps my issue is with readjustment, not with naked seeing, or sexual doings, or friendship and nudity.

Oh, Dear

2010-07-02T09:51:00.001+01:00

I don't want to leave.

What a Novel Idea!

2010-06-06T23:44:00.004+01:00

Reader, I am writing a novel. Or rather, I have been writing a novel for quite some time: first actual writing, then having it on the back burner, and now actual writing again.

Writing a novel, reader, is haaaaaaard work. I have, in fact, written one before, long ago, and it was thought to be good: it got an agent, and it got sent out to publishers. But no publisher took it, and I'm not surprised, because when I came to rewrite it in the cold fall of 2008 (see how I just got a little literary there?) I realised it wasn't very good at all, and I had to add to, alter, and generally improve it substantially. And that was haaaaard work. The thing about novels is, the beginning is pretty difficult, but it's doable; the end is easy; but the middle is a vast and spreading mystery.

ANYway (BUEno), writing a novel is even an odder thing, I think, if you are a literary critic by trade, because you (or at least I) can't help wondering what critics might find in your own text. So I thought tonight, What would critics have to say about what I write? Well, if we ignore my short stories (which always feature a dead person) and just work on the novels, I guess one thing they'd find notable is that the protagonists of both my novels are only children. Is this wish fulfillment, or avoidance (no sisterly relationships to have to make up), or simply self-centredness? I am very self-centred, and I'm inclined to think the last, although I think it may also be simple disinterest. I've edited my sister out of my life that she rarely impinges on my consciousness (realising that gives me enormous pleasure, actually. That's a great hassle expunged).

I think a critic might also notice that both my protagonists live in houses. They don't live in flats, and they're both married. I think this is because I believe married people own houses. Obviously many married people live in flats, but in my imagination married couples live in houses - it's where they belong (a couple of years ago I also discovered, to my distress, that I believe husbands are older than wives: this despite the fact that I'd had a long relationship with someone younger).

But aside from the flats and the only children, my books don't have much in common. Well, the protagonists are both women and both about my age, but those are scarcely

remarkable. Alas, I am a dud for future critics. So perhaps it's just as well that I haven't published.

Oddly, I remember now that the most subtextually fruitful thing I ever wrote was a story about two brothers, one of whom ended up killing the other. Jennifer was convinced it was about me and my sister, until I told

her I'd written about the Oasis brothers!

And...

2010-06-05T23:20:00.003+01:00

Also, can I just say that I really like walking around the house in underwear and high heels? I always have liked walking the house in my underwear, but only recently, because of the fan dancing, have I been doing it in high heels. For me, it combines freedom with control in pretty much the perfect way.

Not So Much with The Killer Inside Me, Thanks

2010-06-05T21:16:00.003+01:00

This afternoon I betook myself to the cinema to see "The Killer Inside Me." Don't ask why I went - there are some films I just want to see, for no clear reason: the last one was "Watchmen." I also like a good psychopath film. So off I went to the mid-afternoon sow (I also very much like going to the pictures during the day).

Weeeell...I'm not sure what to make of "The Killer Inside Me." Casey Affleck was very good, but that didn't surprise me. Jessica Alba was not very good, and that did surprise me, because I had a shadowy memory that one critic had said she was very good. But the performances were not the problem: the problem was sort of the film itself.

The protagonist is a medium-town junior sheriff who is a secret sadist: he likes to spank women (and I don't mean saucy spanking; I mean hard), and, it's implied, also to slap them around and burn them. At the beginning of the film he enters into a consensual sado-masochistic relationship with a prostitute, and later on it's revealed that he also has a consensual sado-masochistic relationship with his fiancée. He (believes he) kills the prostitute as part of a not-particularly-interesting plot he cooks up, and he later kills his fiancée for no particular reason that I could discern - or perhaps for the also not-particularly-interesting reason that he could then blame it on someone who was blackmailing him.

There is a lot of violence against women in this film. But with the exception of the quite striking punch with which the protagonist fells his fiancée (the punch seems to kill her, but she takes a long time to die), all of it is consensual, or at least submitted to without complaint. There are also several scenes that suggest that he was encouraged into sadism by his childhood house help, and that his father liked it, too. For these reasons, it was very difficult for me to see what I was to take from the film. At first I thought it might be that the line between normality and psychopathy is very thin, but given that the protagonist was portrayed as so unemotional, that seemed very unlikely (he wasn't very close to normal). Was I supposed to gather from it (and via it from the book it was based on) that all women are masochists, or that all women like to be abused? That sadists are made, not born? Or that they're born, not made? I just didn't know.

The other difficulty I had was that, although it was obviously meant to be a film noir, it just wasn't very noir. Perhaps film noir can't exist on colour film (I thought while watching the film); there seems to be something about colour that makes everything too fresh, too not-seedy. Or perhaps it simply wasn't a very noir film. For all its protagonist's double life, and the swift violence, and th beautiful dame and the canny police hunt, it wasn't particularly scary, or atmospheric, or, frankly, involving.

So in the end what I took from "The Killer Inside Me" is that Elias Koteas, who had a small role and who was the only person in the whole film who looked human, and weary, and weathered enough to be noir, is an excellent actor. But I already knew that, because I saw him as Gary Gilmore years ago, and years before that as something else, and in both cases he was terrific.

You may be wondering about my job interview. Well, it went...okay. And the town where the job would be is just delightful: I liked it very much. So at this point I'd say I hope I get it, but I don't think I will. It's not that I think I won't; it's just that the interview didn't go so well that I feel certain, or certain to any degree. Still, I have my fingers crossed. REALLY crossed.

Ceci N'est Pas Mon Amour

2010-06-02T00:58:00.009+01:00

Today came my copy of the new Divine Comedy cd. Although there are many things to love about this cd (not least the fact that it's decorated with a facsimile of Magritte's pipe painting, altered to say, "Ceci n'est pas la divine comedie"), reading the liner notes for the bonus disc (!!), extracts from the 2009 performances in Paris (!!! I was there!!!) led me to reflect that being in a relationship with Neil Hannon would be rather like spending the rest of my life with Mr. Fallen: a constant stream of self-deprecating comments and disclaimers. Or perhaps that is just an assumed persona, and he is in fact hugely egotistical. Either way, not good.

The celebrity partner field is thinning, my friends: no David Tennant; now (although it breaks my heart) no Neil Hannon. The only option left is Kim Rossi Stuart, an actor once so good looking it actually hurt my eyes to look at him, but now just an incredibly handsome bloke (although not in his Wikipedia photo!) about whom I don't yet know enough to have him unmasked.

I see that Kim Rossi Stuart's Wikipedia page says he "speaks English, French and Italian, is an accomplished swimmer and also plays the trumpet." Leaving aside the question of what makes "an accomplished swimmer" ("I can float with the best of them!"), I ask, "Yes, but can he fan dance?"

I Say I Say I Say

2010-05-28T20:09:00.006+01:00

Lately I've been reading a good deal of disappointing contemporary literature. I read A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel, and I liked it so much that I ordered Fludd, which sounded like the other of her books I would like best. But in fact I find Fludd kind of tedious: it persistently reminds me of a less-successful version of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, a book I absolutely adore. I think I probably just love TBoPR because of its protagonist, Dougal Douglas (or Douglas Dougal, one can't say which - which is part of his charm), because I generally find Muriel Spark pretty dreary, or at least over-rated (as my friend MF put it, "She's good, but she's not all that and a bag of chips") - it's her Catholicism, which is also the reason why I dislike P.D. James: both of them have a sort of hectoringly aloof tone that I associate with attempting to point you toward religious morals in their works (Graham Greene, I think, wears his Catholicism much more lightly. But then, Brighton Rock can do no wrong in my eyes, and Graham Greene has the benefit of wearing his Catholicism shall we say lightly in his life). In any case, Fludd is rather leaden, or it might be better to say heavy and dour, and I find myself not enjoying it very much.

And today I read Little Gods, by Jacob Polley. Jacob Polley was brought to my attention because he's up for a first novel prize, and he is, frankly, good-looking (in his publicity photo, anyway). When I found out he'd started off as a poet, and when I found a sample poem on the internet, I thought I'd give one of his books a go: I like contemporary poetry, or at least I'm interested in it (although, as with most contemporary literature, I don't know how to analyse it, only how to read it for enjoyment or lack thereof).

Weeeell, what can you do? It's...okay. There's one quite interesting poem (the one that lured me in), and three or four that are quite good. But the three or four that are quite good are about lost love, and if you can't write a poem that touches about lost love, what can you write a poem that touches about? Also, I feel sort of miffed at being touched by the poems about lost love, because it makes me feel like an easy mark. And the ones that aren't about lost love are simply not that interesting to me. The Liberal loved the book, but here the Liberal and I must diverge.

At first I thought I might have disliked it because, having now been a Romanticist for some eight years, I am a prisoner of conventional verse forms, but in fact I suppose it's because it's one of those poetry books that lingers in musing contemplation, and I, well, I've never been one for musing contemplation in poetry. Obviously one might have guessed this from my allegiance to that famous writer of meditative verse, Lord Byron, but even when I think of contemporary poetry I do like, it's got some oomph to it:

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood'.
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.

My father would hate this poem: he'd say it's coercive, or easy, or something along those lines. But not me, baby! I'm not quite sure what this poem is trying to do, or what its point is, but it has force, and an energy that drives it along to its end point. I think that energy is the energy of unkindness, a kind of willful taunting ugliness, but it's there. Whereas the Polley poems seem inert. I didn't really know what to do with them.

Which leads me to wonder something I've wondered all along: how do you handle it if you don't like the creative work of someone you know? If I knew someone whose poetry was essential to them, who worked at their "art," and I didn't much care for it (never mind out-and-out hated it), I don't think I could be friends with them. It would just involve too much hypocrisy, and too much denial of their essence. When I lived in Otherhome, I knew a man in the creative writing program who was close friends with a woman, also in the creative writing program, whose fiction stunk. It was unimaginative; it was banal; it was unthinking. And I used to think, Does she just not show it to him? Because if she showed it to him he'd have to know it was awful, and then how could he continue being friends with her? I mean, I could understand if it were just your hobby, but if someone's really committed to writing, and you know they're just harbouring illusions...ouch.

In other news, I have an itchy place on the top of my good foot that just won't quit.

Eh-Hem

2010-05-25T19:47:00.005+01:00

I have something to say. In fact, I have two somethings to say, but I'm not sure about the worth of saying the second, so for now I'll just say the first.

There is a good deal of chit-chat around and about - by which I mean in magazines and other media organs - about how one should be "happy" before one seeks a partner, or about how the trick to finding a good partner is to be "happy" before you start. This pisses me off: I would like someone to define happy, please.

Does "happy" mean, "satisfied with yourself and who you are"? Does it mean, "happy with the life you have"? Does it mean, "having a good time with your friends and not waiting to enjoy your life until you have a partner"? Does it mean, "feeling mentally rich and stimulated"? Because if it means those things, I agree, and I'm happy. As it happens, I do love the life I have at the moment, and what with the Sheffield interview, the Divine Comedy concerts behind and before me, and the current supervisions, I'm having a blast when I'm doing stuff.

But I think sometimes that in this context "happy" means, "perfectly content to be alone." And this I think is ridiculous. Am I happy in my life, with many interests, and glad of them, with strong friendships and a sense of myself as a person of worth (also, incidentally, proud that I made myself that way)? Hells yes, as they say down Otherhome way. But that does not cancel out, nor indeed is it some kind of opposite of, feeling that I want a partner. Indeed, as I've said before here, a good deal of the reason why I want a partner is because I find my life so interesting and happy, and I want to share it with someone who there's for all of it (well, quite a lot of it). Most of the reason why I want a partner, when I think about it, is to have someone I can make happy, not vice versa.

I know no one, really, who's just as happy without a partner as they are with one, or who doesn't care one way or the other. Wanting a partner is natural, and if you are, like me, someone who finds life richer when told to another, or when it's told to you by another, or when shared with another, or when it involves making another happy, then it's equally natural to be unhappy not to have that opportunity. If you mean that before you can have a successful partnership you must be happy in your life and self, I'm behind you. But I refuse to feel bad or a failure because, in a totally different realm from my sense of self, I am unhappy to be single.

And now I find I do want to say the second thing. In the six weeks since whatever it was happened with Mr. Heaven, not one person has told me, "I know it's hard." People have told me he's a fool, that I'm better off without him, that I'll find someone better, that I undervalue myself, that he's a weirdo, that he's not good enough for me... but not one person has said to me, "It must be very painful to have been happy, and to have wanted so much to be happy, and to have that opportunity removed. I understand that it's hurtful to like someone and not have anywhere for that liking to go. It must be terrible, too, to not be able to have sex." No one has said, "Wow, I understand that it's really painful to like someone, and then to discover they're an idiot, so you have the double pain not just of having to stop liking someone, but also of discovering that they weren't worth your liking. Or even the treble pain of knowing they're not worth it, and were never worth it, but still liking them, and being mystified and embarrassed. It's understandable that you would still continue to like them or hope to see them - and I know that's awful, too. I understand that this is really hard, that all of it is just awful and hard and painful." I have no doubt that to some extent I've brought this on myself by not talking much about this situation, and by seeming a tough person generally. Also, I don't know how much better it would have made things if someone had said that, but I can't help feeling it would have made it at least a little better.

There's an episode of "Murphy Brown," in which the upright anchor Jim Dial, through a series of perfectly innocuous circumstances, ends up having his picture taken with a prostitute. The picture is published, the media all talk about it, and no one is interested in his explanation of what really happened: they prefer the salacious rumours. In the end, he uses his segment of their TV show to address this, and in essence he says, "Everyone is impressed with the idea that I'm immoral; no one else cares that I've led a moral life. Well, if no one else will say it, I will: 'Good for me.' I've never done drugs. Good for me. I've never cheated on my wife. Good for me." This is one of my favourite episodes.

Well, I'm going to take a leaf out of Jim Dial's book. I know it's hard to be disappointed when you really hoped you were going to be happy for a bit, and when you already had had a taste of that possible happiness. I know it's hard to face having nothing when you could have had something, no matter how small that something. I know how clawingly, agonisingly frustrating it must be to long to have sex and not be able to. I know it's humiliating to keep liking someone after they've been unmasked as a wanker, and I know it's possible and painful to keep liking them despite your own wishes. And I think it's understandable to miss someone you once liked, and I can see how, at the same time, one might be embarrassed over that missing. I know how hard this is for me, and how painful, and how sorrowful. I think it must be really awful.

And good for me.

Convenience

2010-05-19T23:17:00.003+01:00

Did I tell you I have a job interview? Well, I do: I have a job interview. And since this is my very first UK job interview, it involves nearly all the preparation and memorisation that was required for my first US job interviews: memorising my teaching philosophy (oh, please!), interests of department members, descriptions of my book...

I very rarely think of a partner as a necessity. That is, I have no trouble living my life without a partner, and I even enjoy it quite a lot: I would say that unless I'm meditating gloomily on my single state I really only actively miss having a partner when I get into bed, when I want someone to talk to before I get into bed, when I take my seat in a theatre, or when I go on holiday to Venice. A partner is, thus, a luxury for me. But, in doing all this preparation, I am reminded of one of the ways in which a partner is not a luxury but a real part of one's life. The last time I did all this prep, Dr. Higher and I were living together, and he had to test me. He didn't want to, in the sense of being interested, but this is one of the things partners do: they are there, closest, and so they test you. Of course, now I have friends who'd do it, but I have to ring them up, it's easier to do it myself, etc., etc.

So I kind of miss Dr. Higher a little. Or it might be better to say I'm aware, maybe for the first time, of something elemental that he offered me.

I've Been to a Marvellous Party

2010-05-13T00:34:00.004+01:00

About five years ago, when YouTube started being YouTube, I went on there for the first time. I decided that I'd look for concert footage of Prefab Sprout, because I'd never seen them live. So I typed in the required words, and...there they were!

I couldn't believe it. I visually could not believe it: I was seeing them in concert, crisply and vividly, seeing something I never thought I'd see in my life.

And I cried.

Many years ago now, I went to see Aztec Camera with my then-husband (maaaany years ago). We sat up in the balcony; we were so far away from the stage that when Roddy Frame came on the only part of his face I could see were his eyebrows, because they were darker than everything else. But still - I had only liked Aztec Camera while I lived in the U.S., and no one in the U.S. knew who Aztec Camera were: they certainly were never going to tour there. I'd thought I'd go my whole life without ever seeing Roddy Frame live. And I cried.

Tonight I went into London to see the Divine Comedy. As you know, I've seen the Divine Comedy twice, both times from very close up. But this stage was on the same level as the spectators, whereas the last two were raised. I've thought to be many things in my life, but I never thought to be a self-and-a-half's distance from Neil Hannon, close enough to see the colour of his eyes and the way his cheekbones poke out under his skin. And (ah, but you know where this is going...) I cried.

Aside from that, he was wonderful, and it was wonderful. Wonderful.

But what did he look like? you'll want to know. Well, he was tiny. Tiny. I couldn't believe it! And his hands were tiny, too. And he had what O.M. would call blond hair, but I would call light brown. And he wore a suit with cloth-covered buttons, which to me denotes a certain attention to detail in the making - or at least makes it an unusual suit. And, strangely, brown shoes, although the suit was black. Hm.

All the Neil Hannon in the World Can't...

2010-05-07T23:18:00.004+01:00

I am a less nice person than I used to be. I felt this a couple of weeks ago - or it might be better to say I recognised that a good deal of my niceness had gone a couple of weeks ago. I have less interest in and patience with other people's sorrows, or even just their lives; I have less interest in the world around me, and in living my life in an interesting way; I have less interest in talking to other people. I see these things about myself, and I don't like it.

I know in part exactly why this is. I know I'm much angrier than I was even a month ago: I've always been an angry person, but now I can feel that anger nearly coming out, and I can feel myself making an effort to control it. And, of course, everything I've described in the paragraph above is a symptom of depression, and of course I am depressed. Depressed, and angry, and both of these things I'm unable to resolve for myself rationally because they are both justified and mystified. I'm sure this will pass - time heals all wounds; it really does, actually. But I can feel myself being unkind and thoughtless and just...less nice now, and I wish I weren't.

What It Is to Love

2010-05-07T00:37:00.002+01:00

I have sometimes - very occasionally - one of the most pleasurable sensations of my life. I will read something, or a hear a song, that is so funny, and perfect in its funniness - the wit is unexpected, but utterly apt, and because unexpected is much more perfect than it would be if anticipated - that it is, in the true sense of the word, delightful. My sensation at these moments is that my throat is full, in a curious way: full of something sticky and sweet that threatens to bubble out (like Lamia, I suppose, whose voice was like "bubbling honey in her throat"). And always what I want to do at the moment of reading or hearing such things is to kiss the producer. This happened once with Mr. Fallen, who wrote a conference review filled with puns, and it happens sometimes with Byron. I write about it now because it happened with The Divine Comedy's new song, "Indie Disco." To other people, I'm sure, it would just be a nice song, or even a clever song, but to me it's filled with...such rightness, that is at the same time a surprise: "Then hit the floor for 'Tainted Love'/ You know I just can't get enough"; "She makes my heart beat the same way / As at the start of 'Blue Monday'". And I wish Neil Hannon were here, so I could lean over and kiss him every time his song delights me.

This is what love is, I think, distilled for a moment and into a moment. You think to yourself, "This person is perfect; this person is absolutely right." For just that moment you see the outline of their superiority clearly; they come into crystal focus for you, the way they surprise and delight and, in a funny way, comfort you (because part of the delight comes from the aptness, you think, "Ah, yes, of course!", a comfort you didn't know you wanted). It's love turned from a constant support to a sharp blade.

The Intimate Lives of Germans

2010-05-05T23:06:00.009+01:00

Well, reader, I have been thinking about a broad array of things. This weekend was the Cambridge Tango Festival, which draws tango dancers from near and far, and as the weekend progressed I noticed that a number of the men I asked to dance, or who asked me to dance, were German. I didn't know this about them before we started dancing, but discovered it while we were dancing (in the pauses between songs, when we chatted).

About two months ago, I said to my friend C., "At the moment, I have a little space free in my heart for Germans," and she replied thoughtfully, "You always have a little space in your heart for Germans." At the time I laughed, but also thought that it was true, and now I think to myself that I may, in fact, have a lot of space in my heart for Germans.

In one way, this is surprising. Dr. Higher was German, and he brought with him many, if not all, of the most unpleasant aspects of Germanity: he was rigid in his beliefs and convictions; he was convinced of his own superiority; he scheduled everything (and I mean EVERYTHING); he did and believed everyone should do "the done thing," and he believed that it was absolutely clear what "the done thing" was (when I tried to friend him on facebook two years after we broke up, he sent me an e-mail telling me that "everyone knows" exes don't friend each other on facebook. Indeed, "everyone knows" was one of his favourite phrases). I did not like any of these things about him, and they weren't any nicer in real life than they sound on blog.

Yet I stayed with him, and even now I miss him when I want someone to speak German to, or our weird version of German to (who else can I tell that I'm going to das Gym, or that I've had a Nachtpferd?), or when I want to talk about German politics - or I miss being able to understand German politics through him. And Mr. Heaven was/is German, and there's another nice boy here, vastly too young for me but likeable as a friend, and I know part of the reason I like him is because he's German.

In another way, though, this liking of Germans is not surprising at all. I by no means grew up in a German milieu, but for the first seven years of my life there was a lot of Germanity in my background: we would go visit my grandparents, where if German wasn't spoken the German accent was thick, and we celebrated a German Christmas there, and ate zwieback when we were little, and I certainly heard my mother and grandparents speaking German to each other (indeed, a couple of weeks ago when Mr. Heaven tried to shut me out of a conversation on the couch while we watching football by carrying on said conversation in murmured German

with a mutual friend, I was struck and puzzled by how soothing that sound was, then surmised that it must be because murmured German would have been a background to a fair number of fallings-asleep at my grandparents. Too bad you can't ask someone to shut you out MORE, or I would have asked him to speak that way all the time). And now I'm stuck with the German football team, too, after that World Cup in Whateverthatcitywaswithallthehills. And, of course, I'm terribly German myself: stubborn as the day is long - yes, rigid - given to fits of rage if things don't happen on time, a fine complainer, and filled with the conviction that I know how to do everything right.

So perhaps it's no surprise that I have a space in my heart for Germans. Although whether I want a German to fill that space and more is a different issue.

And thus we come - as everyone knows we should - to intimacy. BF recently got tenure (hurrah!), and for some reason I was thinking yesterday about her job, and about how we make job choices generally. BF is very shy, and she's ended up being a laboratory scientist: I couldn't help feeling that the result might have been dictated by psychological desires. Forgive me if this is wrong, BF, but don't worry, because what I really want to talk about is what I did next, which is (unsurprisingly) turned the torch on myself. If her career choice says things about her psychological desires and fears, mine must do the same about me; what does my career choice say about me?

I love my job, but the part of it I love best of all is the teaching. Well, what do you get in teaching? Here is where these thoughts took a not-so-pleasant turn, because I realised that what you get from teaching is a forum in which, although you stand revealed in front of a group of people, you get to control that act of revelation. In teaching you choose what you'll show and what you won't - and if you do it right you get enormous love with very little revelation. What's more, in teaching the intimacy is all one way: I learn immense amounts about my students, but unless they are keen amateur psychologists and highly observant, they learn very little about me except what I choose to tell them.

Later in the day, I was reading an article on the internet that said we tend to mock or push away in others things we fear in ourselves. I already knew that, but this time I thought about the possible inverse of that: does that mean that we embrace in others those things we like in ourselves, or that we embrace others who mirror what we like in ourselves? I think it does mean that, and I think it also means we embrace those who allow us to continue to do those things in ourselves that we like. And I had a bit of a think about the men I'd been involved with, and all of a sudden I thought to myself, I think I'm afraid of intimacy.

I know: I spill my guts on this blog. But that's anonymous, isn't it? And even leaving that aside, let's have a look back. I loved Irishboyfriend, and in many ways we were intimate with each other, but he was sarcastic, and critical, and both those things tend to make one hesitant to confide and reluctant to show weakness (both of which I was). Dr. Higher was extremely critical, but what's more important is that I never really loved him, and for almost all our relationship I knew with confidence that I was superior to him: hardly a recipe for intimacy, either. As for Mr. Heaven, if you look back at the first entry I ever wrote about him, you can see that I was aware he was not a candidate for intimacy. And didn't he prove it with gusto in the end!

The only exception here is Mr. Fallen, with whom I made a real effort to be intimate, and whom I really loved. But he lived in England, and I in the States, so how intimate did I really have to be? Plus, the therapist before this one told me once that people find it incredibly hard to break their pyschological patterns, no matter how unpleasant those patterns may be - we prefer the devil we know. So perhaps I attempted to break my pattern with Mr. Fallen, then lapsed back.

I performed the litmus test and imagined telling this theory to the therapist. I didn't want to tell her so strongly that I think there must be at least something to it.

So, in the end, here is the conclusion I draw: at least in part, like most sneaky subconsciouses, my sneaky subconscious has devised a way to get what it wants while still looking good. I think I pick people who are not designed to give me intimacy, because that way I can avoid having intimacy whilst claiming it's not my fault. I look as if I don't have an intimacy problem, but I do.

No that I think that's the only reason I choose the people I do. I'm attracted to people physically, or intellectually, or they make me laugh (the bastards! that's how they really get me). But I do keep quite tight control of my public self, and even my private self, and it's true that I'm a very private person, and quite unforthcoming about the things that really matter to me. So, yes, I do think I have some intimacy problems.

On a more cheerful to end with, here's a photo of a tiny car that M. took for me in Holland. Look at how tiny it is! It's tiny!

God, I love tiny cars.

Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It

2010-04-27T22:58:00.002+01:00

Two of my students are either involved with each other or flirting around each other, and it's quite charming to watch. I approve of love: as an entity, particularly an entity newly springing into being, it's hard to resent.

Somehow connected to this, a friend has recently been troubled about...well, I think "about behaviour" might be the best way to put it. Although I guess it's about romantic and sexual behaviour in particular, I think it might really be about that giant and ever-looming question, "Should I be a good person?" and its corollary, "What does that mean, anyway?"

I'm not sure what it means to be a good person, or what it means to be a moral person. I don't tend to do terribly well with morality, but I do very well with principles. I'm not much interested in questions of good and bad (morality), but I'm quite interested in questions of right and wrong, because right and wrong seem easier to sort out: if something is right, I know it when I check inside myself. But perhaps that just substitutes "right" for "good," as many things I think of as "right" are probably what other people would think of as "good."

It doesn't seem to me that you are "good" or "bad" because you behave in certain sexual ways. But it does seem to me that you are happy or unhappy, and that you are able to think about what might make someone else happy or unhappy, and that things that produce happiness are right (although not necessarily good!), while those that don't are wrong. Cheating on your boyfriend: wrong, not for moral reasons, but because it will make someone else unhappy. Being promiscuous: right, if it makes you happy; wrong, if it makes you or the other participants unhappy. It seems to me that a lot of the behaviour my friend considers good isn't really good, but it is really geared to making you happier: sex is generally better with someone you know, so random pick-ups probably make you unhappier than waiting for someone you know and like, even if the happiness is simply the happiness of having a richer sexual experience. Doing stuff because you don't really care one way or the other doesn't make you unhappier, but it doesn't increase your happiness, so why bother?

I don't know. I have tried almost all my adult life to be a good person - I realise that this sort of clashes with what I said above, but when I say "good" here I mean, I have tried to do the right thing; I have tried not to hurt people; I have behaved sensibly; I have tried to be honourable and decent (I have done many things I am sorry for, too, although few I regret, and I certainly don't regret any of my sexual behaviour) - but I do not see this making me any happier than if I had been a "bad" person. And I don't see "bad" people - people who don't think before they act; people who don't care about being decent - being any unhappier than "good" ones. For a long time I believed that if I was good life would bring me a reward: essentially, I believed in some form of God or divine balancer. Now this is a belief I cannot shake, but I know it's not true. Now, with my hands bloody with the Mr. Heaven I can't wash off, I believe that being a good person makes you less happy than being a bad person, because good people think more, and thinking and being able to access your emotions is what makes you unhappy (I believed that before him, too, but not while). And I am unhappier knowing this than I would have been if I'd never tried to be a good person.

I asked S.A. if men prefer good girls, and he said, quite rightly and sensibly, that the girl preferred depends on the man preferring. On a similar note, I'd say that troubling over whether to be good or not is only worth it if you're troubled by your lack of what you perceive as goodness. There's little point in trying to conform to cultural morality; it'll never fit you. You can only ever feel comfortable in your own morality (or your own principles!). I should imagine that there are plenty of men out there who are delighted to sleep with bad girls; you needn't go good because you think it'll get you more tail. Indeed, I daresay quite the opposite is true. But you ought to try to be good if it feels right to you (a-ha! see how that worked out?). Because what's right is what's decent (although the reverse is not necessarily true), and what's decent is what's good.

Girl Talk

2010-04-27T22:15:00.009+01:00

Jamaica Kincaid has a great short story called "Girl," which is essentially a compendium of advice a mother gives a daughter. We PracCrit-ed this today, and it made me think of what how I would write such a piece, using the advice my mother gave me. One of the good things about Kincaid's story is that a good deal of the advice must have been passed down simply by observation - the daughter watching the mother and learning by non-verbal osmosis. So I tried to include that, too. Kincaid's piece has a purposive and designed narrative structure, but mine does not.

If you get gum on a piece of clothing, put it in the freezer, then pick the hardened gum off; if you accidentally dye something in the wash use Rit to get the dye out; wait a few minutes if the butter's too hard, because it melts quickly; keep cream cold when you're whipping it; make sure you don't get anything in the egg white you want to beat; there are dishes for the kitchen and there are dishes for the dining room; paper napkins are for everyday, cloth napkins are for best; cotton sheets are nicest, although they wrinkle; put your tights in the freezer for a day, then wash them, and they'll never run; always wash fabric after you buy it, so it can shrink before you make the piece of clothing; this is how you hem; this is how you slipstitch; when you go out somewhere important wear high heels; when you go to the opera or the ballet wear a skirt; don't buy a white winter coat; don't speak loudly if you don't need to; don't wear too much blush or people will think you're a hooker; this is how you talk to someone you like; this is how you talk to someone you want to make like you; this is how you talk to someone whose name you can't remember; listen carefully when someone tells a story; if you want boys to like you, be less spikey; before you break up with someone be sure you can't save the relationship; always wear a bra or else your breasts will sag; the last five pounds are the hardest; remember that sometimes your partner gets to make the decision; never let a man support you, but always make money of your own; remember that a long marriage ends up more like a close friendship; this is how to be kind to someone; this is how to be unkind to someone; this is how to apologise for being unkind to someone; this is how not to care that you have been unkind; remember to wait until everyone is served before you start to eat; don't stand up to make sure everyone is taking food, you are not a maid; don't speak in a language unless all members of the group know it; don't comb your hair in public; don't put on lipstick in public; don't wear red lipstick in the daytime; cover your mouth when you yawn; cover your mouth when you cough; animal prints are for trashy women and old ladies; always buy a new dress for a relative's wedding; never buy bouclé, because all it takes is one snag and it's ruined; this is how you get something out of your father; this is how you get something out of me; this is how you figure out how to get things out of other people; this is why you love your child even if she's not loveable; never say anything unkind about someone else's child, because they will hold it against you forever; this is how you give a child cold medicine; if you feel nauseous, put a trashcan by the bed just in case; this is how you keep a house clean; this is how you keep a house clean enough; this is how you do things efficiently; this is how you do things quickly; this is how you do things too quickly; this is how you make meringue; this is how you make roast beef; this is how you make scrambled eggs, not too loose, like your grandmother's; nur nicht alt werden; not everything is worth fighting for; always use birth control; therapy is good; don't do that - it's not nice.

Song Lyrics

2010-04-26T00:24:00.001+01:00

Tonight a group of friends and I sat around and sang songs to guitar accompaniment - well, really, we accompanied the guitar. I love to sing, so I enjoyed this very much. One of the songs we sang was "Hallelujah." I love this song because it's so rich in biblical reference, but I also love it, in a bittersweet way, because of the lines in which he says, "Maybe there's a God above, / But all I've ever learned from love / Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you." I've always hoped that there will come a time in my life when those lines won't be true for me, but there never has.

However, it's not all doom and gloom on the song front, because when I got back from the singing I got on Spotify for the first time. Unsurprisingly, I thought I'd begin by typing in The Divine Comedy. More surprisingly (to myself, although perhaps not to you), I thought I'd try listening to "Perfect Lovesong." I used to adore this song and listen to it all the time, but after Mr. Fallen I couldn't. I think Neil Hannon might have written it on his honeymoon, but in any case it contains the couplet, "We'll stumble back to our hotel bed, / And we'll make love to each other 'til we're half dead." The only places Mr. Fallen and I ever stayed together were hotel rooms, and we spent a lot of time doing just that, so understandably after we parted those lines had an unpleasant resonance - in fact, I stopped listening to the song because I would hear those lines coming and feel like I was getting stabbed in the stomach. But tonight, after two and a quarter years, I find I can listen to them. Maybe it's not my favourite song, but I can more than manage it. So time really does heal wounds.

The Divine Comedy also have the distinction of writing the song that contains the moment I most earnestly, but also most secretly, wish would happen to me. It's called "Geronimo," and it's about two lovers who have to run through the rain. They run to his flat, and the song ends with Hannon saying, "She puts on a record, / And sings into her coffee;/ He puts a blanket round her, / Sits her down, and dries her beautiful hair." It's not the blanket, or the sitting down, or funnily enough exactly any of it. It's the beautiful hair. I have an embarrassed hope, very quietly and abashedly, that someday a man will dry my gigantic, impossible hair, and tell me it's beautiful.

In any case, hurray! for song-singing. Let's do more of it. And what the hell: let's have a photo of Neil Hannon, because he's fab.

Going Home

2010-04-13T02:33:00.002+01:00

I arrived in America at 4pm on Saturday - to be specific I arrived at the Chicago airport. Even before I got through to the airport, it transpired that my airline had cancelled my forward flight a couple of days beforehand, without ever informing me. This meant that I had to call the friend who was picking me up to let her know I'd be getting later. But when I tried to use my (American) credit card to make a phone call, the phone endlessly informed me that it was "checking billing data," and never connected. I then tried to e-mail her using one of the airport terminal ancient internet computers, but when I stuck my (American) credit card into the slot provided, the terminal informed me that there had been an "error while transferring my billing data." There didn't seem to be any problem when I bought a cup of tea at the Starbucks, so all I could think to myself was how American to have these communication devices that look just fine but then don't work. And how American to expect everyone to carry their own computer (because there were just four internet terminals in the entire airport), and so not to bother to get newer, better public terminals.

And everyone was fat. EVERYONE. And the airport was so big, and so ugly, and so filled with places where you could ONLY buy ugly prepackaged food. And I was zombified with tiredness and confusion, and filled with sorrow, and I thought, I hate America.

And then I got here, to Otherhome. And we went out for dinner at a restaurant that had TV's on both sides of the booth, and when I got up in the morning it was 70 degrees (21c) at 10am, and EVERYONE was fat, or wearing a baseball cap, and all the men were unattractive, and everyone looked thick (physically) or uninterested or uninteresting and when I went into a place I knew to get a piece of cheesecake to go the waitress said to me, "It's a gorgeous day outside - now you be sure to find some sunny spot to eat that!" and I thought to myself, It's fucking 80 degrees (26c) outside; how can you call it a beautiful day, and where isn't there a sunny spot? and then I felt like a terrible person for getting angry over what this nice person had said. And then I went into my department today, and it was baking hot outside in APRIL, and there was so much unnecessary room, and all the students looked intellectually dead and...and...and it's not my home, and I don't want to be here, and...and.

I hate this country. I don't want to live here. It's weird, and too glossy, and filled with the wrong kind of bigness, and I don't fit anymore. I hate it here.

Overprivileged, gift-horse-in-the-mouth-looking, shameful me. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here.

Exile from Heaven

2010-04-09T17:59:00.009+01:00

So, for the past ten weeks I have been hanging in tension about a romantic relationship. You may remember Senor Cielo, from many months ago. Well, for a few weeks from early December to mid-January we were "involved" - which is to say we met a few times for tea and biscuits, and to kiss, and then we had sex once. And then he disappeared to write up his dissertation. In fact, the last real contact I had with him for about twelve weeks was when we arranged to meet again, a couple of days after the first time we had sex, but he had to cancel because he had to stay up all night to finish his first chapter.

I had hoped all this time that when he finished writing up he and I might pick up the hanging out and having sex. This doesn't mean that I chased him - in the beginning I'd touch base every couple of weeks, but then I stopped that - but it does mean that I hoped we might enjoy each other for the limited time he has left here before he leaves. He finished the day before yesterday and last night he and I met for tea. And at that point he told me that, based on the fact that I had once asked him at a party if I would get to see him again once he was done and said I was afraid I wouldn't, and based on the fact that I had done something else (but he couldn't remember what), he felt that I was not conceiving of this as a friendship with sex, but rather imagining it as some sort of entanglement with expectations. I assured him, several times, that this was not the case, but he insisted that he felt this, and that for this reason - and later the reason he gave was that he liked sitting around talking with me over tea, and he liked being my friend, and he didn't want to risk that - he didn't want to have sex with me again (although he never uttered that phrase, that was what he meant).

This turned into one of those conversations that goes around and around, because I couldn't do anything but say his impression was wrong, and he couldn't do anything but say it was his impression and it affected him as it did. After he said that about not wanting to risk the friendship, I said, "We're not going to be friends." He said, "Why? You see, the very fact that you say that makes it clear that you're invested in the relationship as more than a friendship. Why wouldn't we be friends?" I said, "I have a lot of friends, and I don't want to have sex with any of them. If you and I remained friends, I would spend my time sitting across the table from you thinking how much I wanted to have sex with you. Can't you see how that would be painful for me?" He said nothing.

Anyway, after the conversation went around and around for a while, I said to him, "I'm sad. And I'm going to tell you why I'm sad. I'm sad because I'm so great, and you're never going to know that. I'm so funny, and clever, and giving, and you're never going to know how much that's true. And I'm sad because I wanted so much to make someone happy, and now I won't be able to do that. And I'm sad because I thought that just for a little while I was going to get to be happy in an area where I haven't been happy for a long time, and now I'm not. And I'm sad because I wanted to put my body against your body, and now I won't be able to do that. And I'm sad because I liked you, and it's always saddening when we like someone to discover that they're less than we thought they were." He didn't say anything (at some later point I said to him, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry because I think you're interesting. There's a lot in there, and I'm sorry I won't be able to learn about it").

And then the conversation went around a bit more, until finally we were just silent, looking at each other. And finally I said, "You're a fool." And I laughed. And I said, "You're giving up me? Man, you know me; you know what I'm like. And you want to give that up?" And he said, "I don't want to give it up; it's because I don't want to give it up that I'm doing this." And then he said, "Well, you'll have to make your decision," and quick as a flash he stood up and left the kitchen. And I called after him, "Wash your cup!"

I have to say I have trouble following his logic: I can't see why not having sex with me again is going to strengthen or maintain our friendship, especially since he also told me that he doesn't see most of his friends for long gaps of time - so our apparently valuable friendship would mean we might meet once or twice for tea, I imagine. But whether or not I follow his logic, I can see that we are not going to be friends, because I'm not going to pretend to be non-sexual friends with someone I really want to have sex with.

And I am sad. When I say that, it sounds simple and clean, but it's actually complex and ragged. The whole time that he was writing up I could say that I might still see him again, but now I can't say that. And he was nice - he wasn't the greatest guy in the world, but he's funny, and I enjoyed having conversations with him. It made my day a bit brighter to see him, and because I was attracted to him, and because it was a connection away from my group of friends, I did feel that it might turn into something where for a little while someone would be just for me - I could chat to them and tell them my news and know they were listening with special interest (before we got into the big discussion last night I did, in fact, do those things, and it was nice). And I wanted to have sex with him again. And my liking for him and pleasure in his company don't vanish just because I've chosen that the best thing is that our association be done.

You can say that he is complicated, or fucked up, or stupid, or weird (all of which have been said to me), and you can conclude that he just plain didn't want to sleep with me, or doesn't much like me, or likes me much more than I like him, since he apparently wants to be friends with me while I don't with him (all of these things have been said to me, too, mostly by me). I don't know. And certainly you can say that he's not worth my thought time, and/or that I should move on - I know those things. And you can say he's going to be very lonely in life, and I'm much better, or you can say that it's plain that he is totally a wrong person for me. I sort of know those things, too (except for the first two). But none of those things can get rid of the sadness, or make me not feel that I've lost something, some little chance to be happy for a little while. And none of them can change the fact that I just plain liked him - liked interacting with him - and I can't eradicate that liking. What we know rationally can't quickly change what we feel. And you can say, as a couple of people have also said, that my image of him as being perfectly fine with this is quite probably wrong - he may well be suffering from his own little or large unhappiness over this outcome (indeed, he himself said he would "not be fine" when he went back to his room), but that doesn't affect my feelings: suficiente pan no cura un corazon roto, as I would say. I feel I got badly treated, and for no discernible reason, and as a result I am unhappy where I could have been happy, and I have feelings that I cannot get rid of but that only make me unhappy, and I am alone in an area where I could not have been. And those feelings are very hard, and very very very very very very awful. And maybe the awfulest thing is that I can't stop having them, and having them can't change anything

Sympathy

2010-04-04T23:06:00.002+01:00

One of the oddest things about friendship, to me, is the way in which a friend is able to put aside their own personal opinions about a situation that is important to another friend, and act for that person's happiness (or what that person believes will be their happiness), rather than for their own (this isn't unique to friendship, of course, but my most recent experience of it has been there, so that's how I think of it).

One experiences something of this, I suppose, when a friend wins a prize, or finishes a project. I often find myself saying, "Oh, how great!" or, "I'm really proud of you!" at these moments, and genuinely feeling those feelings: here is a situation that means nothing to me personally (I'm not finishing your article; I didn't win a prize I know you really wanted), but I'm still as pleased as if it did.

But how much more extraordinary is it when someone acts against their own beliefs or wishes simply because they believe it will make another person happy. This has happened to me, as the receiver, twice in the past two weeks, and both times I've been shocked, not by the specific act but by the fact that such an act occurs at all. People behave altruistically when they absolutely need not; they behave altruistically against their own judgement. This suggests to me that love, even the reduced love of friendship, is extremely strong.

Wow.

Lago de los Cisnes

2010-04-04T00:15:00.003+01:00

There is little better, in my opinion, than waking up to a sunshine-y bedroom when the air is cool and you have slept enough. This happened to me this morning, and considering that it was followed by another of my favourite things, going to talk to a friend whilst in my dressing gown (and then she made me laugh), I had a pretty good start to the day.

Actually, I had a pretty good start to the start to the day, because yesterday I went to London to get my hair relaxed and go to the ballet. I don't know if the hair relaxation was successful (although they seem pretty calm to me. Hahahahahaha), but I do know that, as a result of the application of the hot straightening iron to seal on the relaxant, my hair is now straight as a die. Somehow in the States they were able to give it a little curve at the bottom, which in my opinion looked much more attractive, but they couldn't manage that here - on the other hand, there were no cancerous formaldehyde fumes in the stuff they used on my hair, so what you lose on the swings you gain in the roundabouts.

The high point of the day was not the hair, however. It was the ballet. I went to see Ballet Nacional de Cuba perform Swan Lake. Swan Lake is my favourite ballet, and apparently if I told you the plot in person it would be your favourite ballet, too, because I told it to my hair stylist (she asked), and she was enthralled. Anyway, here it is. In fact, I was slightly nervous about this event, because the last Swan Lake I saw was at the Royal Ballet, and it was both dull as ditchwater and poorly costumed, and because Alicia Alonso, founder of BNdC, is famous for being autocratic and controlling, and the company is quite old-fashioned (as companies in communist countries usually are), so I was worried.

But I need not have been, because it was terrific. If you haven't read the plot summary, you need to know a couple of things for what follows to make sense. Swan Lake is the story of a man, Prince Siegfriend, and a woman, Odette. On the night before his 21st birthday, Siegfried is having a jolly time with some peasants, then decides to go swan hunting (as you do). Once he follows the flock of swans, however, he finds that they are in fact a group of women who've been laid under a curse by an evil sorcerer, Baron von Rothbart, a curse that can only be lifted if their leader Odette, finds faithful love. Siegfried falls in love with Odette, a frail and beautiful former princess (wearing white), wins her over, and promises to love her. The next night at his birthday celebration Siegfried's mother informs him he must pick a bride, but he spurns the candidates until suddenly a mysterious prince enters with his gorgeous daughter, Odile (who wears all black). Odile looks just like Odette, but hot, and through some excellent pas de deux dancing she seduces Siegfried, who vows eternal love to her, at which she and her father (von Rothbart in disguise) disappear. Siegfried, realising he has been deceived, goes to find Odette, reassures her of his love, and in order to break the spell they kill themselves by jumping in a lake (at this point my hairdresser gasped and said "Oooo no!").

A few years ago Kelvin Mackenzie of ABT added a little prologue to the ballet, using the overture as its music; in this von Rothbart, dressed as an owl, swooped about and we got the background of the curse. Utterly unnecessary. Who cares why she's cursed? Make up your own reason; it's more fun (you went right for, "she refused his beastly advances," didn't you?).

BNdC didn't have this prologue, mercifully. Truth to be told, I've always found the first act of Swan Lake pretty boring. I can never figure out why 19th-century nobility spend the nights before their birthdays hanging out with the lower orders (this happens in Giselle, too), and until we get to the pas de trois (here it is with Herman Cornejo, one of my favourite ABT dancers, at 8:00) towards the end of the act I'm just rolling with it. The same was pretty much true in this case, too, except that I noticed that all the male dancers were very good, and they had gorgeous feet.

Once the second act started, things got much more interesting. It turns out that NBdC do indeed do a very conservative version of Swan Lake. It also turns out that they are thumpers. When did this start? When I was small, we were told and told that it was vital to land quietly but for years now when I've gone to the ballet the men, in particular, land with great thumps. I guess that makes sense if there are 25 people on stage - the sound just adds up - but when those 25 people are supposed to be birds it sort of breaks the suspension of disbelief. It also breaks the suspension of disbelief if those alleged birds have some trouble transitioning between set ballet pose and other set ballet pose. At least once, the poor girls of the corps got themselves into position by essentially just walking, very non-balletically. Oh, dear. That being said, though, they did all hold their hands like swan's heads over them when they posed in fourth, which was very clever.

Swan Lake depends on its Odette, and this Odette, she was a bit of an oddity. I should say at this stage that I have seen many Odettes, and never a truly bad one. Probably my least favourite is ABT's Gillian Murphy, whom I once saw give a fantastic performance as the Black Swan at a Sunday matinee, but whom I saw a couple of years later in a televised performance and found to be all technique and little character (here she is doing the pas de deux with Angel Corella, who is a fine dancer, but who always grins like a maniac. He must be the happiest man in ballet. Save those teeth for a special occasion, Corella!). Anyway, this Odette started off, well, oddly. At first I thought she'd had a fight with her Siegfried, but at the end of their second act pas de deux, when they took their bow, he whispered something in her ear, so I though perhaps she'd been off and he'd helped her out (incidentally, I really dislike this development of taking bows in the middle of the ballet. What if actors took bows after they'd done a particularly famous speech in a play? Stop breaking the frame, please!). She just didn't seem very comfortable with him, and although I don't want to be difficult, she didn't seem entirely comfortable as Odette full stop. The only thing that made this scene interesting was the appearance of von Rothbart dressed as what I eventually realised was a moth (because it's night, of course). Which best it were to be, owl or moth, 'tis difficult to say, as Byron might have said, but what is not difficult to say is that the appearance of a giant moth flapping his wings in the background gives a certain zest to any ballet scene.

As Odile, however, she was much better. The piece de resistance of Swan Lake, in fact of all ballet, is the 32 fouettés Odile performs during her pas de deux with Siegfried. "Foutter" means "whip" in French and the fouetté is a turn in which the dancer stands on one leg, bends the knee, extends the other leg out in front, then whips it to the side to create the momentum of the turn (here is a demonstration. I give you this one because I am a left turner myself, and they're a rare thing). As you can see above, Gillian Murphy takes this bravura move and makes it even more bravura by adding doubles and triples (note the way she pulls her arms in to increase momentum), but they still add up to 32. This Odile did 29 singles, but she ended with a triple: this is quite amazing, because turning 29 times on one leg is exhausting, so to do your triple at the end is a feat. Not as much of a feat as what she did next, however. Odile lures Siegfried by performing a series of backward hops in arabesque - in all versions I've seen, three hops in plié, then one hop up to relevé (on pointe). This Odile, however, performed all her hops in plié, on pointe. It was amazing (you can see the whole thing here. This Siegfried is even better than the one I saw, who was very good).

I was irritated, though, by the fact that they chose to do a leap at the end. I like better the "backbend in triumph" of American productions.

All this made me muse, in a vague but mildly pleasing way, on whether some dancers are better Odiles than Odettes, and vice versa, and why. I myself have always wanted to be Odile: in the world of Swan Lake, it's pretty clear which one comes out better, plus the dancing is bold, bravura, and - if you do it right - quite sexy. But perhaps there are born Odettes - I'm a born Odette in real life, which is no doubt why I yearn to do Odile on stage.

I also mused to myself about why all Tchaikovsky ballets have national dance interludes. Nutcracker: national dance interludes cunningly disguised as dancing sweets (which Dr. Higher once thought were dancing Swedes, God bless him); Swan Lake: national dance interludes unashamedly undisguised, and utterly irrelevant to the ballet (although if you took out of ballets all the irrelevant dancing, you'd have about 2o minutes left). All I can say is that the gospodins (or whatever the plural is) of Tsarist Russia must have had a positive mania for the Dances of Other Lands.

At the end of the ballet it transpired that BNdC were indeed a very conservative company - and a very Soviet one! because in this version of the ballet Odette and Siegfried didn't die at all: instead, they reffirmed their love, Siegfried wrestled a bit with von Rothbart, and the spell was broken. Let me tell you, my friends, until you have seen a Cuban in tights tussling with a man dressed as a giant moth, you haven't lived a full life. Be that as it may, however, you may like to know that in the Soviet Union all ballets had to end happily, so the plot of Swan Lake was altered to have an ending in which the lovers lived. Apparently Castro feels the same way about ballets - or perhaps Alicia Alonso does - and there was this ending that sat very oddly indeed.

Still, an excellent night. Beautiful feet; men who could dance (increasingly rare in the world of ballet); and some hops on pointe that could knock your socks off. God, I love a good Swan Lake.

No One Looks Good in Yellow

2010-04-01T22:52:00.005+01:00

Yeah, you read that right. I'm taking a stand on yellow. There was no definitive person or moment who made me believe this, rather a long trail of people I've seen wearing yellow and not looking good in it. As it happens, this topic came up at lunch yesterday, right before I told people that I was going into London tomorrow to have my hair treated again (brief pause: I'm getting normal people's hair again!!). As you may remember, the difficulty with the treatment is that you can't get your hair wet for four days afterward. This perhaps would not be much of a difficulty, really, were it not for the fact that I refuse to wear a shower cap. I think they look stupid, and I just won't wear them: it's a principle. On the other hand, as I said to my friends, that means that if I want to bathe during the next four days I'll have to wear a plastic bag on my head (as I did last time), and somehow if we're deciding what looks stupid and the choices are wearing a bag on your head or wearing a shower cap, I think you can see how that's going to go. As M. pointed out, some principles are worth compromising. So I said, "All right, I'll buy a shower cap," and she said, "Maybe you could complete the awfulness and buy a yellow one."

So off I trooped to Boots today. God, I love Boots. They have everything - plus a superb make-up section, much better than any American drugstore. Anyway, one thing they do not have is a clearly marked shower cap section, so I had to ask an employee who was lurking around the aisles if they sold shower caps. "Oh, yes!" she was very pleased to lead me over to them. "Here they are!" And wouldn't you know it, there was a whole bin full of yellow shower caps. £2.49 a throw. The only other option was a clear plastic one with raised gel-filled dots for £5.

Now what is a shower-cap-hating girl to do when faced with this situation? I'm not going to pay £5 for a shower cap I'll never use again, but I'm also not going to buy a yellow shower cap - especially since £2.49 is not exactly cheap, either. So what's the solution to this dilemma?

In fact, the solution is quite simple: I went to Superdrug and bought a three-pack of clear shower caps for £1.49. AND a plastic rain bonnet for 75p, since it's supposed to rain tomorrow. Snap! (may I just say that in the process of finding the image above I came across a website that involved transvestites doing some very odd things with rain bonnets).

In other news, I had a bad tango night. Years of taking ballet classes have taught me that many things can make you have a bad ballet night (although it must be admitted that this isn't helped by not being terribly good at ballet to start off with), and I knew from once before that a couple of things can make me have a bad tango night -- rushing to get to a milonga, and listening to music while I travel to the milonga. But tonight I did neither of those things, and I still danced so badly (with my VTTT, no less!) that I decided to leave early. There are a number of possible reasons for this:

1. My VTTT was wearing a shirt I had made. I made it for S.A., but it didn't fit him, and purely by hap it fit my VTTT. He wrote to me tonight to tell me he was going to wear it, and I may have been thrown off by seeing my own handiwork in front of me, and on someone I hadn't quite got used to the idea of seeing it on.

2. I haven't done any ballet barres this week. I seem to dance better when I've done at least one barre in the gym.

3. I just feel off.

And I do. I don't know why. Perhaps because I'm slightly at a loose end. I have no work to do any more except for reading student dissertations, and that doesn't really require much. In fact, today I've been feeling rather bored and empty, and been worrying a little that perhaps when I don't have work I don't have anything to interest me. But whether or not that's true, I certainly feel oddly off somehow. I must have checked facebook fifty times today, and my e-mail at least that many times, and never with any specific hope or expectation in mind. So I don't know what's going on, but I do know that it's not good for my tango (but, then, I suppose neither is having no lessons that challenge me anymore, and usually having as my partner someone I've danced with a hundred times before).

Well, let's wait and see (and, according to my policy on life, also not say anything).

By the way, this made me laugh: http://gawker.com/5504774/bombshell-ricky-martin-is-gay

My Favourite Poet Lived in Venice, and All I Got Was This Lousy Sense of What It Must Be Like to Have Sex in an Alley There

2010-03-28T23:32:00.024+01:00

So tonight I was watching the video for "Catch," by The Cure. "Catch," which is about its persona's happy memories of a girl he used to know, is twenty years old, but it's one of my favourite Cure songs because at one point Robert Smith says, "And sometimes we would spend the night / Just rolling about on the floor, / And I remember even though it felt soft at the time / I always used to wake up sore. Hee hee hee." First of all, I never can resist an intimation of obscenity, but also, he actually does say "Hee hee hee," or at least he makes a sound that sounds like someone giving a snigger. So it has charm.

ANYwho (BUEno), I was watching the video, and I noticed that when Robert Smith sings those lines he looks so sweet, and so young. To give you some sense of what I mean, here is current Robert Smith and then Robert Smith:

And I thought to myself, watching the young sweet Bob Smith of the video apparently enjoying himself, What must it have been like to be him then? What was he thinking? What DID he think? Years and years ago there was a review of an Aztec Camera concert in the NME that began "Roddy Frame: what must it be like to be as young, as sexy, as talented, and as skinny as Roddy Frame?" This line always makes me laugh, but my question wasn't like that. I wondered, as I have wondered before, what really was going on in that person's head at that time. And then I realised that (of course) I'll never know what it was like to be young Robert Smith. The obvious answer to this is that I'll never know what it's like to be middle-aged Robert Smith, either. But somehow young Robert Smith seems much more mysterious to me - perhaps because these days when I imagine Robert Smith I always imagine middle-aged Robert Smith: young Robert Smith is as vague as a half-lost memory, and thus already unknowable, never mind what he thought.

But never mind Robert Smith, young, middle-aged, or old. I went to Venice! Yes! On a four-day trip that involved staying at perhaps the dumpiest Venetian hotel available:

this was my view

And also involved going up a very tall tower (The Campanile) and looking at the vista of the city and at the tiny people in St. Mark's Square:

And doing this I realised: I love going up tall buildings and looking at the now-tiny stuff below. I know I always say I don't care for repeated vistas, and I don't much care for vistas of, say, trees, or mountains, but show me a bunch of fields or a town or a group of people viewed from way up high, and I LOVE it. When I get back the US, I'll have to go up the Empire State Building.

Byron lived in Venice for two years, and this is largely the reason I went. In fact, to be completely honest, I went because Byron begins Childe Harold IV with the lines, "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, / A palace and a prison on each hand." For years, the second line puzzled me: in fact, it drove me nuts. It's grammatically inaccurate! On one side of the BoS is the Doge's Palace and on the other is the prison, so it should really be "either," not "each." I'm sorry to admit that it took me in the region of five years to realise that it's meant to be a joke: The Doge's Palace is here also figured as a prison, and the prison has the potential to be a palace. Damn you, LB! Bueno, I wanted to stand on the Bridge of Sighs, too, so I booked a trip to Venice. And I went, and I did.

Now, probably the thing Byron is most famous for doing in Venice is having a ton of sex. In fact, there is a letter he writes to his friend Douglas Kinnaird (a man for whom I have a great fondness) about Don Juan in which he says, "Could any man have written it--who has not lived in the world?--and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis?--on a table? and under it?" Tooled means exactly what you think it does, and obviously one thing the letter is designed to make plain is that Byron has indeed tooled in all these places. To keep up the thin veneer that this blog is an educational device, or at least a device for garnering useful information, here are all the carriages he describes, plus the sort of gondola he means:

a post-chaise. These were the carriages that carried the mail, so

they hared along at a terrific pace. They also normally had many passengers,

and both of these raise some questions for me about

when and how, exactly, Byron might have had his...experiences in one.

a hackney coach. As you can see from the size, the trickiest

to tool in. I hope it came with the villainous-looking driver.

See how the gondola has an enclosed area. Although, oddly,

the back is completely open.

This is the only court carriage I could find on the internet.

I can't believe Byron meant something as fancy as this (although

I suppose he'd been in such a carriage in his life ) - perhaps

he just meant the style, in terms of size.

a vis-a-vis. As you can see, the people sit

face-to-face, which is where it gets its name.

I'm guessing you can imagine your own table.

In any case, it's not that difficult to imagine someone having sex in alley, but only once I got to Venice did I understand exactly how easy, and how (if you forgive the word) right, it would be to have sex in an alley in Venice. Those things are tiny! Many if not most of them are small enough that I could reach out my arms and touch both sides. Bracing yourself (which I always imagine would be the main difficulty in this exercise) would be the work of a moment: either the man or the woman, or both, could easily stick their feet against one wall while leaning up against the other, thus creating a nice stable form.

And, in fact, on my first night - while I was wandering around hopelessly lost - I saw a young couple angled up against one of these walls kissing. Just kissing. But how perfect an introduction to Venice at night can you get? It was warm that first night, and they stood silhouetted in that soft air, just the sticky sound of lips to be heard. Lovely.

As it happens I didn't spend all my time in Venice looking for things Byron. At the beginning of studying an author or a subject, everything you see or experience reminds you of that author: oh! Hawthorne wrote about gables! Oh! Henry James has a whole discussion of marital fidelity! oh! Byron calls Venice a sea Cybele! (lots of people I know stay at this stage of study no matter how old or experienced with an author they become). But after a while the author just comes to be a kind of palimpsestic underpinning, cropping up only sometimes. And I suppose when you're old in studying the author stuff like that scarcely comes up at all (just to make an aside here, this trajectory seems kind of appropriate to me, because it's also the trajectory of self in life: when you're at your beginning, you're just fascinating, and the central focus [and lots of people, even when they're adults don't outgrow this]; then you become progressively less central, but you're always a concern and an interest, always bubbling under). Yes, I kept thinking of Byron on the Bridge of Sighs and the Bridge of Sighs because of Byron, and on numerous occasions I did want to stand posed before Venice and say, "Ah, she seems a sea Cybele!" (despite the fact that I wasn't entirely sure what a Cybele was - I had to look it up when I got home), but mostly I just wandered around Venice for Venice's sake.

In fact, it's quite difficult to find anything clearly Byronic in Venice. They don't have many plaques or obvious indications. I did go to the house where he lived, but in the tradition of all my attempts to commune with Lord Byron by entering his life, it gave me no sensation of closeness to him at all. But then, also in that tradition, something utterly unexpected but vaguely related - something I saw in the corner of my mind, you might say - did. And this was it:

All Venetian palazzi have these steps in front, which you go down or come up, going from or to your gondola. As you can see, they're covered in varying degrees of algae. And as I was walking away from staring across the Grand Canal in a fruitless attempt to commune with Byronicity I looked down and saw these, and suddenly I felt what it must have been like to negotiate those steps for Byron, with your bad leg and your cane and your dignity and your insecurity, and the risk that you might slip and humiliate yourself. Of course, it occurred to me later, Byron could employ someone to scrub the algae off his Canal steps, but just for that moment I felt inside his experience.

I have a belief that all people who work in Eng. Lit. make up the authors we work on, and our readings of them, and what we make up is a reflection, really, of our own interests. My dearly loved friend J. believes that Byron was an intrepid political commentator, and that all his works contain fiendishly coded political subtexts; Michael Foot believed this, too. But J. is a devoted Marxist! And Michael Foot was a liberal politician. I believe that Byron was at heart deeply insecure, and that all his works are or contain demonstrations of his own insecurity and ways of dealing with that. But I'm hugely insecure! I sometimes think that we just replicate our own hidden, or not particularly hidden, subtexts and concerns, and we're never accessing any kind of real truth about these people at all. So my Byron, scared to slip on the algae and lose his pride, delighting in jokes and wordplay, riven and confused about the world and its meaning, is really just, well...me.

Listen

2010-03-27T01:45:00.005Z

When I was young and went out dancing, the songs went like this:

I give in

To sin,

Because I like to practise what I preach.

And I thought, Oh, how witty! And how I wish I could be that way.

or they went:

Spinning on that dizzy edge

I kissed her face and kissed her hair

And dreamed of all the different ways

I had to make her glow

And I thought, Ah! How lovely.

or they went:

Your whole world could change

If you only you could just break through:

Through the fears inside your head,

'Cause your fears are doing nothing for you.

And I thought, This is a deeply silly song, and my friend Bill told me he thought they were saying, "Put some feces on your head, / Because your face is doing nothing for you."

And dancing to those songs was like feeling your heart be pulled out through your stomach, or blood coming out of your pores, or happiness refined to a thin line of pure enjoyment. Or it was an act of moving your body while you enjoyed wit.

Now I go out dancing and the songs go:

I like to play my bongos in the morning;

I like to play my bongos in the morning

And I think, Really?

Now, I was an indie kid, of course. Even when I was young, most people didn't dance to Tones on Tail, or Nitzer Ebb, and if they danced to The Cure, they danced to "Why Can't I Be You?" (but even that contained the line, "I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins," which puzzled me for months. Where does your head begin?). And even then not all the music I heard affected me so deeply, nor did I want it to. And even now there are wonderful bands, like The Killers, or The Rascals. But where I go out to dance is mainstream now, and the music is mostly hip hop.

Now, there's many a middle-aged woman despairs over the state of music, and thinks the world of dance is going to hell in a handbasket. But I listen to something like Prince's "Pussy Control," or Kanye West's "Good Morning" ("I'm like the fly Malcolm X / Buy any jeans necessary") and I don't think that. It's when I go out to clubs: then I think to myself, Does this stuff make you feel like you're going to vomit joy? And if it doesn't, do you care that you're missing that? Because I do.

Music has always meant more to me than it really means. It ought to be Sufism, I think. It all ought to be "Temptation," and "Fascination Street" ("And if you slip going under / Slip over my shoulder"), and the sublime nonsense of The KLF, and Mano Negra. It ought to make you feel you've found your It.

Telling

2010-03-25T23:51:00.004Z

In tango, every leader has a Tell. They don't necessarily know they do, but they do: each has a set of movements that go together, and the first movement of that set will inevitably be followed by the other movements - so the first movement is the tell (this is actually a poker term, meaning the gesture or face that a player always, but unknowingly, makes when she has a certain kind of hand). Theoretically, being a good follower would require not recognising the leader's tell, because theoretically a tell might not always be followed by the rest of the movement sequence, so you wouldn't want to anticipate (anticipation makes for a terrible follower), so you wouldn't want to recognise the tell. But in fact, at least for me, you cannot help but recognise the tell - but, very interestingly, the recognition is not conscious. I have danced with many men who have a tell (obviously, given my first sentence), but I've only realised that I knew they had one after I several times automatically and unconsciously predicted the movements the tell heralded. The tell is unconscious, but so in some way is the recognition of the tell: only the recognition of the recognition of the tell is conscious.

This is only really interesting to those not involved with tango because everyone has a tell outside tango, too. In fact, everyone has many many tells - tensions and relaxations and alterations in the self that indicate a given mood or thought or concern. These tells often occur when even their possessor doesn't know what he or she feels: the body, particularly the upper body, indicates feelings that the conscious mind doesn't know it has (this is one of the reasons why the body is so so interesting, but that's a post for another day). But the difficulty is that, just as in tango, you have to get close to the body to see the tells. This is why, for example, I have great trouble knowing how my VTTT feels when we discuss personal things, and thus knowing how to act: I only view or lean against his lower chest, and that's not an area that has many tells.

I'd be much better at making conversations go right, and generally at manipulating people, if I could always stand very close to them, or always interact with them when it's quiet - so would anybody with a little insight and a little patience. What a pity we don't always interact face to face, or chest to chest.

I was going to write about my trip to Venice, but that will have to wait until next time.

Potential

2010-03-14T22:24:00.004Z

My mother has a very young cousin - well, strictly speaking, I have a very young cousin. His name is Julian, and he's the son of a woman who was adopted by a woman who was somehow a distant cousin of my mother's mother. My grandmother, who was in many ways no fool, once told my mother that this woman "never should have been a mother," and she certainly was a terrible mother to her adopted daughter, who ended up a heroin addict and therefore a pretty terrible mother herself. This boy was that woman's son, and when she died (although she was HIV positive, she died because she was run over), that woman - by now very elderly - became his guardian. And she was a terrible guardian, and he was a terribly messed up and difficult kid.

Eventually, but relatively early on in Julian's life, his grandmother died, and it transpired that she'd named my mother his guardian. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, nobody wanted him: my parents were old for children themselves; he was an impossible child (stealing, fighting...). So for a couple of years he was put first into a tough love boot camp (very effective), and then into boarding schools for those with learning disabilities (of which he had many, since his mother had been a heroin addict while pregnant, and since he had been mainstream schooled all his life). But eventually my mother simply ran out of schools, and so for a year he had to live with my parents, which he did again after he failed out of his first year of college (no bad thing, by the way: my sister did it too, and it took me five goes before I ever made it to graduate school).

And the change in Julian from the time he started living with my parents for the first time to the time he left a year later was dramatic: he became more polite; he became quieter; he became more considerate and observant. My mother didn't do anything in particular to effect these behaviours (in fact, she didn't do much to effect any behavioural improvements, which is why he still does surface rude things like talking on his mobile when he's in the car with other people without asking), but simply by exposure to my parents, who are polite and reasonably considerate, who talk to each other at meals and take an interest in each others' lives, who think about things and discuss their thoughts, he became better. He saw different patterns, and purely by exposure he...changed. And when I look at him now, ten years later, he's really changed. He's training to be a chef! He's getting married! He's articulate, and thoughtful, and sensible. Not one of which I ever would have expected given what his life was like when his mother died.

And when I think about Julian I think that pretty much all my adult life, this is how I believe people can be: if you show them good ways of acting, and ways that you expect people to act well - and if, in all cases, you explain to them why you think that behaviour is good, or kinder, or better, and if it really IS - then people will change. I just believe no one acts dumbly, or badly, by choice, but rather by ignorance, or immaturity, or irrationality. I believe that people naturally mature to be better. You get better. So I'm always surprised to discover that some people just don't change their behaviour. If you're thinking, and you're reasonably self-aware, I always think, why wouldn't you?

My mother, who is not one for handing out compliments as part of casual conversation (that's more my father's line; my mother gives direct compliments), once, after I'd agreed to do something for her, said to me, "You do it out of your natural sweetness." And she was right, in a way. But I don't think I have natural sweetness: I think what I have is a natural, immobile, naïvete. I believe that given opportunities to be good and sensible, and given good treatment, all people will act well and sensibly. And while I think that's a good attribute to have (how much worse to go through life believing everyone will act badly), I also think it would be a good attribute to lose, because I think it has brought me more pain than I need.

I Don't Know...

2010-03-08T20:21:00.001Z

...who I hate more: men, or myself for not meeting their irrational, unfair, selfish standards and for caring about it. Or God, or fate, for giving me the crappy, loveless, meaningless life I have, and not the wherewithal not to care about it.

Men, I think. Yes, I think that's who I hate more. Men.

OxoniensTHIS

2010-02-20T15:13:00.014Z

Two days ago I bussed to Oxford to give a paper. Nothing very exciting - not a very good paper, and at the graduate Romanticism seminar - but it was a trip to Oxford, a city I love, and I was going to be put overnight in one of the colleges and taken out to dinner. So it would be a tiny adventure.

And an adventure it was! First I got lost on the way to the bus stop. In Cambridge. The city where I live. A bus stop I've been to about six times before. I wandered around The Area of Cambridge Near the Park for about 15 minutes, and finally I had to humiliate myself by asking a denizen. Great. Then, when I got off the bus in Oxford, it was pouring. Fortunately, I'd brought an umbrella, but there's nothing like tromping through a downpour to make you feel less than your best. So I waded through the puddles and plopping drops to the college where I was going to be put up, and they handed over the key to my guest room and a helpful map of how to walk the 50 yards to it. And I took the map, upped my umbrella, exited the college, and...got lost. A college cleaner had to guide me to my room.

Which turned out to be a hovel. And I don't mean a dubiously decorated room, or a slightly down-at-heels chamber: I mean a hovel. It was in the basement, with a single bed that was really more of a camp bed, and energy saving bulbs that burned a heavy yellow when they were fully warmed up, thus augmenting the lovely acid yellow walls and illuminating to a dull glow the thin felt carpet and rickety bedside "table" holding an even more rickety lamp. Off to one side was the bathroom, complete with icy tile floor and luxuriant paper bathmat - it was like the ne plus ultra of those English bathrooms I wrote about once before. Since the room was in the basement next to the outdoor stairs and under the indoor stairs, I had the dubious privilege of hearing every person entering or leaving the building, as well as all conversation that occurred on the stairs inside. Not that I overheard anything juicy, but I felt like the maid in a Victorian household.

This was a kind of room that I thought had vanished from England in the 1990s, when you found them in the cheaper (by which I mean cheapest) hotels. I certainly did not expect to find one as a guest room at an Oxford University college. I was so enchanted/amazed/horrified that I took photos. Yes, that is the staircase you can see at the back of the bathroom. If you look carefully at the top of the one of the room, you can see the large beam in the ceiling, though, which actually was quite nice.

As I used to say to Dr. Higher when we pulled up at one of the more questionable of the Ruhrgebiet hotels in which we stayed, Es sagt qualität!

So, after putting on some make-up and turning on the heater so the hovel would be toasty upon my return, it was off to give the talk! Except it wasn't, because when my fraicquaintance the convener G., and the "tech guy" (that's right: I needed a tech guy - except that he was really just a classicist working on Keats who happened to know how to set up the room projector), and I arrived at the porter's lodge to pick up the key, it transpired that there had been a change in policy over the last two weeks, and all keys to all public meeting rooms in the college had to be picked up by a member of the college. The member of the college was "Susan," the co-convener, but "Susan" was off on a research trip to London for the night. So...no key would be handed over. Ah, the English. This is where they really shine. The porters just couldn't give us the key, because despite the fact that the convener with me was a member of aNOTHER college, and despite the fact that the seminar was a weekly event and so familiar to the porters, rules were rules, and if they broke them for us they'd have to break them for everybody (although no one else was in the room). I stood there thinking, Oh, my God, I'm going to have come all the way to Oxford just so I can walk through the pouring rain to have dinner out and spend the night in the room of an abused servant. But instead we all asked if there was someone else we could see about this, and the porters suggested the bursar.

So off we went to see the bursar, who couldn't make an exception for us because that would mean contravening the dean, who'd made the initial rule, and he couldn't undermine the dean's authority (despite the fact that the dean wasn't around to know, and nor was anyone else). At that point I left the room, because I discovered that I had a rage problem - and when I say, "I discovered," I mean, I discovered it because I wanted to punch the bursar in the face. So I waited in an outside room while something mysterious happened, and we were at last allowed to have the key! So we trooped back to the Porter's Lodge, where the porters acted as if they'd never seen us before in their lives, and they were delighted to hand over the key. They were also delighted to hand over the a/v bag that contained a projector, and when the tech guy explained that actually we needed and had requested the bag with just the remote control, they made it very plain that this misunderstanding was entirely his fault. Thus did they display two more areas in which the English in service industries shine: the ability to pretend as if they've never been obstructive or irritating in their lives, even if said obstruction has occurred only seconds before, and their ability to make it plain that whatever way in which they've made a mistake or behaved poorly is your fault. As my other fracquaintance A., who arrived at that moment, put it, "The customer is always wrong."

Then I gave the paper. But that's not very interesting. What's interesting is what happened afterward, when A., G., and I all went out to dinner together.

It transpires, first of all, that A. also had a pass made at her by The Bitterest Man in the World, although hers was much cruder and stronger than mine. The only reason why this really matters, though, is because she didn't know I'd had a pass made at me, too, and when she found out and asked for an explanation of how the pass came to, er, pass, my explanation involved my telling them about getting let go by Mr. Fallen (because the only reason I let The Bitterest Man in the World into my room was because I was depressed about said letting go). I said, "Well, it all started because I got broken up with by Mr. Fallen."

Silence. "Wait --" G. said, "do you mean our Mr. Fallen?" Because he is their colleague at Oxford. And then, in between telling them about how I had a pass made at me by The Bitterest Man in the World, I also had to tell them how I got broken up with by Mr. Fallen. Except I didn't get to tell it right away, because as soon as I concurred that, yes, I did mean their Mr. Fallen, G. said, "He broke up with you for the woman he's seeing now?" and when we compared notes and it turned out that yes, he had, G. said, "I just met his girlfriend last week, and...I can't believe anyone would give up you for her. I mean...that woman had no personality."

Then I told the story. And when I was done G. looked sad and somewhat startled, and A. just sat there - in fact, she hadn't moved since I had clarified which Mr. Fallon I meant. I said, "Are you okay?" And she said slowly, "I'm still trying to put you and Mr. Fallon together. I mean...he's just so not everything you are: attractive, charismatic..." I couldn't believe it! It was like the best Christmas present ever, because these people were not my friends: they didn't need to say this stuff. I said, "Well, he was very funny." She looked at me as if I were alleging a cow was funny. I said, "And he told good stories. And remember I'm not the same person in private that I am in public." And then G. said, "Well, he can tell good jokes, it's true. But...I met this woman last week, and I mean...I don't mean she wasn't attractive: I mean she was actively unattractive."

You couldn't think it could get better, and perhaps it couldn't, but it could and did get just as good in a different way, because then G. said, "Did you think you would see him today?" And I, in my figure-hugging dress with my take-me-I'm-confident boots and my calm hair, said, "Oh, well, I didn't really think..." And he said, "Actually, though, I was surprised not to see him. He comes every week. In fact, now that I think about it, he comes every week, religiously. But he's not here tonight." And this, my friends, was even better than a dramatic confrontation, for ha HA! Dr. Fallen avoided me. Or rather, Mr. Fallen avoided me. Ha. Mr. Fallen avoided me, and a pair of near-strangers considered me superior to him.

So I think we can say that a journey that began in embarrassment and pouring rain ended pretty damn well. And it snowed heavily while I was there, so we walked to the restaurant in lovely thick whiteness.

And the next day I bought a lovely pair of knickers in Top Shop. I love Oxford.

Now Wherefore Stop'st Thou Me?

2010-02-12T20:45:00.007Z

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge was young, he was a child genius. Since he grew up to be a grown-up genius, you wouldn't think this would be a particular problem, but he grew up to be a grown-up genius who almost never finished anything, and one theory is that he almost never finished anything because by not finishing he escaped comparison: if nothing was ever done, it couldn't be a work of magnificent genius, but it couldn't be a failure, either - no one could ever say, "Well....it's okay, but it's not what you were when you were seven." (I think this theory is actually quite clever.)

I thought of this fact this evening while I was crossing the courtyard to print out my finished book. Yes, that's right, I've finished The Book, and I'm about to send it off to the publisher (or should that be The Publisher?). But I cannot say I feel happy. In fact, I can say exactly how I feel, because it's a feeling I've had before. I feel like I'm in shock: cold, tooth-chattery, and shaky. And scared, in that really really ominous way where you KNOW something awful is going to happen. So while I was walking across the courtyard I asked myself what the problem was, and then I listened really hard to myself while I answered. At first I answered that I was scared about the things that were supposed to happen or be dealt with after The Book was finished, but when I listened to my insides while I said that, I knew it wasn't true. Then I answered that I was scared because I didn't know who I'd be after I finished The Book, but when I listened that wasn't true either. And then finally I said, and realised it was true while I was saying it, that the problem is that I'm scared nothing will change: and mostly, I'm scared that The Book will be sent back by the publisher yet again.

I'm scared that I'm going to be this girl forever, this girl who is Working on Her Book, this girl who hasn't found a partner Yet, this girl who has a disliked First Job, but is going to get a better second one Someday. If I finish the book, then there's a risk that they'll just send it back to me again, and that's a symbol (or a synecdoche) for my being in limbo yet again, and yet longer. And, of course, as a footnote to that is the fact that if I finish The Book I am opening the door to the future, if only because I agreed with myself that certain things just wouldn't be dealt with or wouldn't happen until after I finished. But that really is a footnote. Because I'm not really afraid that certain situations will or won't come to pass. I'm afraid that in some way my future (my better future) won't come to pass, or rather that my future will just be my waiting present, endlessly repeating itself.

So I guess that's what I'm afraid of: not that everything will change for the worse, but that nothing will change, so there'll just be more of this waiting waiting waiting for things to start.

I love Coleridge's work, but I never thought to have fellow feeling for him. (wow, good accidental use of alliteration.)

La Cara Cara

2010-02-11T01:35:00.003Z

Lately I have been reading a lot of poetry, both for The Book and for teaching, and reading poetry is always a very sensuous experience to me. Also, of course, it is the run-up to Valentine's Day, which means there is a lot of love-related stuff floating around. For some reason this combined to make me think about touches and gestures of love, and tonight while I was brushing my teeth it occurred to me that I think the most intimate and loving gesture in the world is a hand cupped around someone's cheek. Not the way you do it to a friend, although I suppose the only difference between the way you do it to a friend and the way you do it to someone you love is that you love the person you're doing it to when you do it to a person you love. But, anyway, I mean specifically when you do it to someone you love.

Cupping your hand around someone's cheek is a resting gesture. It says, "I'm not hurrying. I want to rest my hand here and feel you; I want to take this minute to enjoy you." Also, it somehow means, "I am aware of you; I am experiencing you," perhaps because it's a hard gesture to perform without also looking at the person. And then, the face is quite vulnerable, and wrapping your hand around anything is a gesture of protection if not of harm, in a way. Then, too, the cheek is soft (even in men), and the palm of the hand is sensitive and often soft, too, and having a cheek under your whole hand (palm, fingers, and thumb) means that all parts of your sensitive feeling instrument are covered in something that calls forth intimacy. And it's a quiet moment; it has to be, because you have to take the time and care to cup gently rather than to grab or even just to lay.

But now I realise that the cupped palm is the gesture of supplication in love, the shape we make to some extent when we hold out our hand to be held or to take a hand, the gesture that means, "Accept me." So the filled palm is the gesture of love fulfilled, and the palm fully filled, and allowed to rest, is I guess the most fulfilled of all.

Extrinsic Motivation

2010-02-05T23:40:00.004Z

This picture makes me so happy. I just love things rendered in incongruous sizes!

Extrinsic motivation is a new term I learned from a student paper today. It "refers to doing something as a means to an end," and thus is precisely my motivation for writing my book. What I find interesting is that intrinsic motivation, which "refers to doing something for enjoyment or interest," is my motivation for doing my teaching.

So. It's also quite interesting, from a psychological and perhaps social experimental point of view, to discover precisely how long one can continue under extrinsic motivation, and what the result is. Which is a fancy way of saying, it's quite interesting to me to see exactly how long I can continue grinding away on this book without a break, and how that affects me. I am about to enter my last week of book production, and for the past three weeks I have been doing nothing in my daylight hours but writing the book and supervising. In the course of a day I will take perhaps four hours off, including two hours to eat, and eight to sleep. Other than that, using this week as an example, here is my weekly schedule. For the purposes of this exercise, "book" means actual writing revision, which includes cutting up the manuscript and scotch taping bits of it back together to increase lucidity.

On Mondays I supervise three hours of Practical Criticism and three hours of Writing or Study Skills. Then there's roughly forty minutes of cycling (exercise, so good for endorphin levels), and about an hour of essay marking. So: 7 hours supervision time (including marking), plus roughly 3 hours book. Tuesdays: three hours Prac Crit plus 1.5 hours 1688-1847, plus 1 hour Writing or Study Skills, and forty minutes cycling. So: 5.5 supervision plus about 2 hours book (I'm more tired on Tuesday, because it's preceded by Monday). Wednesday is all book (about 5 hours). Thursday is my champion book day, because on Wednesdays I have therapy, but on Thursdays I have a whole uninterrupted day, so let's say 6 hours book, plus 2 to 3 hours reading student undergrad dissertations in the evening. Then Fridays I have somewhere between 2 and 3 hours of dissertation supervisions, plus about 6 hours of book. Saturday I do miscellaneous book work (let's say 3 hours), but I also have tango class and dinner, which is a nice break of, say, four hours. Sunday I do book (let's say another three hours), plus about an hour's marking. Somewhere in there I also go to the gym for half an hour and give myself a barre (let's say 1 hour. Raises the endorphin levels).

I disregard the supervision hours, because I love them. The reading, though, I dislike and thus consider work. With these parameters in mind (how hard sciences am I!), I thus conclude that I perform 5 hours of work for Cambridge per week, plus 28 hours of book (plus 14.5 hours of fun supervising). But there is about seven hours of purely social time in there.

This has been my schedule, as I said, for three weeks. As the subject of this study, how would I say I feel? I would say I feel like a large stone is pressing on me. I do not feel this physically, but this is precisely how my spirit feels. I would also say that I feel weary, not in the sense of tired but in the sense of simply feeling that all of life is rather wearying: nothing much is interesting, and if it is interesting it isn't interesting for very long. I'm no fool; I know I'm suffering from anxiety and a mild form of depression. Actually, as the researcher conducting this study I'd say that from someone who works 47.5 hours a week, working every day, and who for the four months before that worked about 40 hours a week, working every day, and whose work has been accompanied by various employment concerns, a bit of mild depression is par for the course (although now that I've added it up, I see that's really not very much work time. My uncle Thelawyerwhobelievesallacademicshaveiteasy would be proven right here).

What's interesting, though, is that you would think that such schedule, if experienced consistently, would finally break you: like, I'd run amok through the halls of my college. But that's not what's happened. In fact, I've just gone on every week, gruelled but managing. I doubt this is a revelation in social science, since it just proves "people adapt," which is hardly hot news.

Equally interesting, though, you'd expect such a feeling would be uniform. That is, if you feel wearied and endless, you wouldn't think you would feel much variation in your level of weariness or endless, or could feel much more on top of that: people adapt. But you'd be wrong! Because today I woke up with a nice feeling of low-level panic, and this evening I wanted to cry essentially all evening. Also, my friend D. was being mildly irritating all through coffee, and rather than managing it I wanted to smack him. (side note: what is with me and the wanting to cry? This has not usually been my response to a heavy workload or stress in my life, but for the past 2.5 years...). I have no doubt that all this is because the project is drawing to its end. In one more week I'll have to hand it in, and of course that induces the panicked fear that it won't be ready, that it will drag on further...

I wonder, though, if part of what's making me so panicky and sorrowful now is the sense (knowledge?) that nothing will really change after I hand in. I won't go to the Seychelles for a holiday, and although I'm considering checking into a hotel for a night to sleep in a different bed and watch TV on a proper screen, when I check into that hotel it'll be on my own, so I'll effectively be doing something I've done many times before. Or I could go out to dinner with friends, but I can go out to dinner with friends pretty much any time I want.

O. would say that this is all a matter of attitude: if I chose to view this dinner with friends as a celebration of handing in my book, it would be different from all other such dinners. And she'd be right! But I'm not sure that, after working 28 hours a week on my book, I have the energy to change my attitude.

So I have decided to change not my attitude about dinners, etc., but my attitude about life after I finish. There is a 50% chance that my life will take a turn upward after I finish, so I've decided to assume 50% of the time that that will happen (let's face it: I can't manage 100% of the time). And I've also decided that after I finish I will, for the first time in about ten years, take a genuine intellectual holiday. I'll supervise, of course, but I'm not going to work on any other articles or do anything to do with academic publication for at least two months, and maybe four. Gad, sir, I will be happy!

This summer when I was visiting my parents I spent an evening with Jennifer. We were driving around in the car, and the talk turned to the book (not yet then The Book), which was at that time expected to come out in February. We were agreeing that it was exciting, and a big step, and I said to her, "I'm still sad, though, that I won't have a partner to share this life step with." And Jennifer said, "Emily...by February you could have a partner." "Yes," I said thoughtfully and seriously, "or I could get a boyfriend, share the experience with him, and then have him dump me anyway." Jennifer laughed and laughed, and I see now that what she was laughing over was the total predictability of our responses: she comforting me by being optimistic and hopeful for me, and me not just comforting me by pointing out to myself that my wish was as likely to go wrong as cause happiness, but foreseeing a way in which even the happy outcome could go wrong.

Well well well. At some point it has to go better than wrong, now doesn't it?

Dad

2010-01-30T00:25:00.004Z

Here is one of the biggest reasons why I love my father. I love him because, after I read him a paragraph of my draft prose down the phone, he said, "Take out 'that' in that last sentence, because it ruins the rhythm." And that is EXACTLY how I spend 50% of my revision time: listening to the rhythm of what I write and trying to fix it. I love my father because he shares that ear, and the recognition of its importance, and because he probably gave it to me.

Retraction

2010-01-24T00:08:00.003Z

Every now and again I must admit that I have been wrong, or over-stringent, and this is one of those times. Recent experience has demonstrated that I could be friends with someone who reads and enjoys Dan Brown novels, so I must alter my view and consider that, yes, I could have a partner who does the same.

You read it here.

Girl Steps into a Carriage...

2010-01-22T10:03:00.004Z

When I was little, my mother told me a not very good joke. It takes place in the 19th century.

There's a girl, and she very much likes a boy at her church. She keeps indicating her interest and indicating her interest, and he never takes her up on it. Finally, one night after choir practise, she lingers and lingers until he asks if she would like him to drive her home. So they get in the carriage, and he drives silently along, simply driving her home. Finally, after a good while, she gives a little fake sniffle. He says, "What's the matter?" and she says, "Nobody loves me, and my hands are cold!" He thinks for a second, and then he says, "God loves you, and your mother loves you, and you can sit on your hands."

As I said, this joke is not very funny. But I have thought of it frequently in my life. Really, I only ever think of the last line, and I think of that whenever I feel very sorry for myself because my life seems hard: I think something along the lines of, Yeah, yeah...you can sit on your hands. To me, it means, "You can fix your own problems; stop wallowing."

As you know, many bad things are all piled up at once in my life these days. The least bad of them is also the most mysterious, and the most immediately ongoing. This is one place where I can't sit on my hands, so there's no thing for me to do. And it's not even that big a deal. At worst, someone is being a little thoughtless, with fantastically good justification. But my hands are cold! From breezes blowing in all directions. Really really cold. And a tiny bit of warmth would be nice.

Om

2010-01-18T22:58:00.002Z

I have come to a conclusion that I have come to before: I don't know; I just don't know. About anything.

This time, however, I feel a little different about this conclusion. My friend D. says that Buddha said we are always surrounded by uncertainty; we think that given situations are uncertain, but in fact uncertainty is the condition of life (not that this is relevant, but David Hume would agree). Therefore, rather than feeling unhappy or tense because I don't know, I have decided to, to the extent that I'm able, just accept it. Non-Buddhistly, I could say that my not knowings must resolve with time: it is not so much that now I see through a glass, darkly, but then, face to face (one of my very favourite Bible quotations, and not for its promise of revelation but rather for its acceptance of mystery), as it is that time must bring resolution, since that's what time does. If I were determined to clutch on to logic in the face of uncertainty, I could say that my not knowing will resolve because after a time constant uncertainty is itself a certain state (a sneaky way of making yourself feel better, but not entirely without legitimacy). But I do neither of those things: I have decided instead to fight against all my tendencies and simply live in this state (these states?) of uncertainty, allowing it/them to flow through me in such a way that I achieve peace.

2010-01-16T14:30:00.004Z

"Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future....

I am first affrighted and confounded..."

- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Thinking

2010-01-15T22:40:00.002Z

In therapy this week we discussed overthinking. I think too much: I knew that already. The therapist was concerned by how much of my thinking was self-critical, but I was and am just concerned that I think all the time. Even during experiences that should be purely emotional and purely enjoyable, like dancing, I'm thinking away. So after we had our session I resolved to think less, to try just to experience things rather than thinking about them while I'm doing them (sine that kind of sucks the enjoyment out of them). (funnily, yesterday somebody who was neither the therapist nor me said to me, "You think too much!" I just laughed.)

Anyway, before I give up thinking too much, I wanted to post about something that I've thought on and off for several months. Intermittently but repeatedly for, say, the last nine months, I've

wondered whether I was always this way: so convinced of my own unattractiveness, so desolate about romantic possibilities, so deeply and abidingly certain that there is something terribly wrong with me. And when I've wondered that, I've also wondered if Mr. Fallen did something terrible to me, if he did me some truly lasting harm.

You see, this is what I think happened. I think I broke up with Dr. Higher, and then I lived in Otherhome. I briefly thought I might go out with someone else there, but that person turned out to be a terribly bad bet, and in Otherhome there wasn't anyone else; it just became clear to me that I wasn't going to meet anyone else. And then I met Mr. Fallen. And he seemed so right: it seemed he shared my interests; he shared my cultural references; he shared my sense of humour. And he was so nice! In comparison to Dr. Higher, he was unbelievably nice and thoughtful. And I couldn't believe my luck. I just couldn't believe that I would meet someone like that - that I would ever meet them, never mind that they would want me. And then, of course, it turned out he didn't. And I think that just made it clear to me that I was right: that no one like that would ever want me, even if they did appear again.

But it can't be that I just believed that out of nowhere. Surely, surely, I must have secretly believed all that before? I mean, Mr. Fallen can't have made me feel worthwhile so effectively that when he left I felt completely unworthwhile. It seems more logical that I always felt worthless, and just for six months I thought it might all work out, and then what happened proved to me that it wouldn't. I remember saying to my friend M. after I saw Mr. Fallen at the conference, "I always believed that I was second-best. I always believed that no one would ever pick me if they had a choice. And he proved it." I'm inclined to believe that that's the correct reading of what happened. I feared that the fact that I'd not had a lot of relationships, and that I now (then) lived somewhere where there's nobody to meet, and that I was older than most people I knew there, meant both that I was unattractive and that I was doomed never to meet anyone. Then this attractive person came along and appeared to prove me wrong, and I was happy and relieved as you are when your seemingly plausible fears are proved implausible. Thus, when they were proved plausible again, it seemed that they really must be true.

So I can't blame Mr. Fallen, and I don't. But I do sometimes stand there in my head and marvel at the fact that one event could precipitate such total destruction. I had a therapist once who said, "Sometimes you give a little tap, and the whole wall falls down"; that's what happened here. It wasn't the cause of my ruin, but it was the conduit to it.

Still, I suppose you could say that if it weren't for that I never would have faced all these terrible feelings about myself and be dealing with them.

See how I did that? I turned potentially gloomy thinking into a source of enjoyment.

A Bit Gloomy

2010-01-10T22:49:00.006Z

is how I am feeling, reader. I have begun work on my new set of final revisions, and while even I can tell that they're improving what I have, there is very little sense of pleasure in thinking about them or about the project generally, or in figuring out where to put my additions - I get pleasure only while I am writing, from figuring out how to say what I want to say, and from the occasional really interesting idea I get.

The truth is, I hate this project. The process of reconfiguring what I'm writing seemingly endlessly, always missing anything I think gives the manuscript real interest or value, always adding bits that, while no doubt true and perhaps enriching to thought about Byron, don't particularly interest me or make me feel proud of myself, has sucked me and my enthusiasm empty. I feel exactly like W.B. Yeats in "The Fascination of What's Difficult" (oh, that feeling! of course), when he says, "The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins." Only when he said that, it proved that it hadn't - the constructed poem is itself a demonstration that the fascination of what's difficult hasn't dried any sap out of him at all. But it's dried the sap out of me. Like a shirt that has been worn and washed too often, this manuscript that has been re-read and rewritten uncountable times is now for me empty of colour: it's just washed out, and trying to care about it is sheer drudgery. I know "it is a job," but I never imagined that the end result of writing an academic book could be to make you hate the subject of it, and hate the idea of academic writing. I now fantasise that when I finish this I'll never write anything again.

But that's okay, of course. What makes me gloomy is the fact that I have no relief. I was saying to my friend S.M. last night that I feel like the Little Engine that Could: I think I can, I think can, and that's fine, but there's no else here to tell me that they think I can, too. And there's no one to give my life at the moment anything to look forward to beyond this drudgery: everyone who is back is working themselves; term hasn't started; and distance and sickness have decimated the ranks of those I would be really excited to see. At lunch or dinner I sit around and talk to people, but because of the way scheduling works out those are people I don't know very well yet, so conversation is stilted and somewhat hard going itself. It would be nice EITHER to have someone really close to me, whose "I know you can do this" would therefore have some weight (not possible in this country), OR to have someone or something stimulating enough to take my mind off this wretched wretched project for even half an hour.

Of course, it's not just that. I was also slightly and weirdly under the weather, and that seems to have stuck around somehow: I'm by no means sick, but I don't feel quite right. And I wanted to make cookies but then found out I had no baking soda, and for me there's almost nothing worse than being all geared up to do something and then at the last second being thwarted. And I've been getting a lot of messages on match.com, which should be nice, except none of them are suitable, and they're pretty much all unsuitable in obvious ways (why would someone whose favourite author is Dan Brown even contact me? I don't get that). So I have the sense of dwindling prospects and grim necessity again. And when I was home the lovely Jennifer said something to me about meeting David Tennant or something, and I said to her, "I think we have to accept that at this stage I am not going to marry David Tennant or any celebrity," and it's true: I'm too grown up to be unrealistic anymore. And that's even leaving aside the disheartening meeting I had with my HoD when I was in the States, even more disheartening job prospects here, and downright depressing and scary e-mail I received from my HoD regarding what might happen if I don't return to my home institution next year.

It's just a lot of stuff all piling up at once. You know how it is: it happens to everyone. And of course it will pass, but at the moment I'm having one of those periods where it's all just too much. And will be too much for a while, since the horrible horrible book can't be done for at least another two weeks.

And now I've ripped a hole in the inside seam of my jeans! Not single spies but in battalions, my friends, not single spies but in battalions.

Back

2010-01-06T21:26:00.006Z

"We need to talk." I believe there is no one in the world whose heart does not sink or give a jump of fear when they hear this phrase, but I fear that I may be the only person in the world who finds ominousness in the sentence, "A lot of exciting things have happened to me over the past few days." Oh, God, I think, really? Things that will make you leave the country? Things that will make you want to spend time with people other than me? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that these interesting things are things that will make me less interesting. I need to work on that.

So here I am, returned to WhereIlive. The trip back was nearly as awful as the trip there. Skipping the part where I got to the US airport 3. 5 hours early, but then it only took 20 minutes to get through security (which, afterward, I realised I could have foreseen - or I could have foreseen that going out would take much less time than coming in - but better safe than sorry), it was still pretty hellish. There was a four-hour stopover in Toronto, which is only fractionally more interesting than the airport in Parentshome. Why is it that only the English, apparently, know how to make international airport areas with enough shops to keep you busy very nearly forever? They aren't a particularly lavish or spending orientated culture, but they know how to put together a Duty Free area. Whereas the US, land of the gluttonous and spendthrift, offers you a stand in a corridor; Canada had a shop, at least, but there wasn't much in it.

BUEno, after the four-hour stopover there, when we were all on the flight to London and assured we would take off in ten minutes...nothing happened. And then a little more nothing happened. After about an hour of nothing, the captain came on the tannoy and told us that there was some sort of difficulty loading the baggage, which no one had told him, and they were just finishing it up now. This is the only time I've ever heard a plane captain sound annoyed. He then told us that after that we'd need to get a wing de-iced, and then we'd be off: a total of half an hour. So, finally, we took off two hours late. The flight itself was fine, but after we landed there was something wrong with getting the baggage off, so we waited for an hour in the baggage area (I imagined to myself that it was like the car trunk/boot: you're trying to get it to stick, but it won't, so you slam it shut, and then when you come to try to open it, you can't). Then, finally released from airports after a full 18 hours, I discovered that the next coach was a local: three hours, six stops.

But then I was back. And...it didn't feel as great as I thought. That's nostalgia and anticipation for you: the longed-for never quite measures up.

(No, I don't live in a thatched cottage. I just thought it looked like the word "home." Although thatched cottages turn out to be quite expensive to keep up: you have to re-thatch. Someone who owns one told me that. Who knew?)

But it is pretty good even without measuring up, I must confess. And as we were driving through the motorways of England (which don't look that different from the highways of the South, which may be why coming home wasn't quite as good as I'd anticipated), I thought to myself that, given the rigours and tedia of these journeys, ideally, if I could arrange it, I would never go to the States again. Which, of course, is not possible, but I did take it as something of sign, and now that I'm not swimming in jet lag and travel trauma, I still take as significant in some way (although I can't tell you what way).

Everyone I know in the States keeps saying, "Enjoy the rest of your time..." or, "When you come back..." My tactless father said, "Well, you've had two years there; we only had one when you were little." The one exception to this is my HoD, who said, "Where were you the last time you were happy? Not happy temporarily, but with the underlying happiness that should get you through every day?" And when I said, "England," he said, "Then you must stay there."

Everyone here keeps saying, "You're going back? You have to go back?"

All I can do is keep applying for jobs; I knew that even before I left to go back for this visit. But I wish, I truly wish, that there were some magic way this could all work out.

Now, happy news: I washed my hair! It felt different when wet: sort of flatter, or perhaps it would be better to say more contained. Before I washed it it still felt tacky and vaguely waxy, so I expected that when I did get in the shower all this dark yuck would come off and blacken (or at least darken) the water. Not at all. When it first got wet the stall was filled with an overwhelming scent of mushrooms (which is how the air smelled when it first went on), but that was it (which was rather disappointing, to be honest).

After I got out of the shower and had a look at it, I was rather alarmed: there were medium-sized white flakes all through it. It looked as though I'd had a terrible attack of dandruff, but I think it was just the extra gunk being sloughed off. Now it's drying, and although I wouldn't say it's straight, or flat, I would say it's wavy and calm. And soft! Both soft to the touch and soft in the sense of not as rigid and coarse as it normally is. Before it stood: now it falls. I have the hair of a normal person! For the first time that I can remember. I like it!

I felt I had so much more to say...

I Travelled Among Known Men

2010-01-04T02:07:00.003Z

Deprivation, one thinks whilst deprived, is terrible. Not to have x, or to have y when you want z, is irritating, grating, and sometimes enraging. But you know what? I have a new appreciation and gratitude for deprivation.

As I've mentioned, all the time that I've been home this time I've had to depend on my parents to drive me places. I would sit in the passenger seat, or on the couch while I waited for my mother to get ready, grinding my teeth in frustration. Then, yesterday, my driver's license arrived. I asked for the car key and registration, got in the car...and took what I believe to be the sweetest and most viscerally enjoyable drive of my life - even more wonderful than the first time I drove my own car. Oh, the bliss of driving at my own speed, in the non-turn lane! And with the cd player turned up! It was exquisite, and I never would have had the keen poignancy of that delight had I not been deprived of it, and so fully deprived of it, before.

The same is true of my hair. When I stood up out of the chair yesterday, as at the times I've stood up out of the chair after having it blown dry straight, I couldn't believe how wonderful my hair looked. So smooth! So sleek! And my face had such nice bones! And was so noticeable! If I hadn't had my giant bush of hair for contrast before that, I never would have had such an experience, never would have had such exquisite pleasure in this, after all, fairly simple thing.

And now I am going back to WhereIlive. As you know if you've read previous posts, it doesn't take a journey away from WhereIlive to make me know how comfortable I am in England. But my time here has made that sense of comfort more vivid to me than it would be if I had not come here. Not that being here is an experience of deprivation in any way, except deprivation of being "home." But that what you might call passive deprivation is enough for me. I never thought to feel kinship with William Wordsworth, but packing my suitcase this night before I leave, I know exactly what he meant.

Flowing

2010-01-03T00:43:00.010Z

I have had my hair done! As a result, at least one of my worries has been allayed. Remember my telling you that I thought my hair would be pretty gross after four days? Well, as it happens, my hair is pretty gross right now! I thought that the treatment would be sealed onto the hair in the sense of heated so that it became smooth, but in fact it was sealed onto the head in the sense that, although it's sealed on there, it's left a greasy residue. And because you can't wash your hair for four days (so the cuticle can seal and absorption can be completed), the residue has to remain for four days, too. I dread to imagine what my hair will look like three days from now: I'll have to hide in my room for the two days after I come back (well, I'll go the phone place, because I need a new phone and they've probably had even less kempt customers than I will be).

So, enough about my hair. It's a new year! And I saw it in by going to a milonga - a milonga which offered a fascinating contrast in dance to WhereIlive.

The best, but also most elusive, way to express this difference would be to say that it seemed clear that all the dancers at this milonga had been trained by a Hispanic. But even that's not quite right, because not all of them looked that way. So it might more accurate to say that this milonga both demonstrated clearly the difference between a tall milonguero and a smaller one, and demonstrated the difference between the style of dancing where I live and the style of dancing here. Both of these are in relation to men, because as a woman I was only interested in checking out potential partners.

The most immediate and profound attribute I noticed is that the best male dancers at this milonga flowed. By this I mean that they were in almost constant movement, and that that movement was smooth and propelled - not propulsive, but propelled. They looked as if they were being drawn forward by a magnet; the movement had both the sense of inevitability and the sense of constancy that that description suggests (you can get it slightly from this picture). After a very short period of observation, it became clear how they did this, and that "how" was totally unsurprising. They used the floor.

I've talked about using the floor before, I know, but this milonga really made it clear how important that is. The men who used the floor were noticeably better dancers than the men who did not. By pushing against the floor, and by pushing against the floor consistently, they were able to create the forward angle that gives the illusion of constant unforced motion, as well as the movement of actual constant unforced motion. But obviously they didn't just do this by using the floor. I think another immensely important ingredient was that they kept their knees loose. As I've said before about my VTTT, they used their legs but not their upper bodies - but whereas my VTTT used his legs in such a way that he freed his hips, these men used their legs but not their hips, nor their upper bodies. Those upper bodies they kept as the forward-most part of their angled line.

In WhereIlive, I have only seen one man dance this way: my FTT. He holds his body in precisely this same way, and watching him on video I see that he also keeps his knees loose. And these men, like him, also moved their feet at the last moment, and often with the least amount of floor removal, as he does. This is part of what made me say that they all looked as if they'd been taught to dance by a Hispanic. But the other part was that they were comfortable in their carapaces: they carried their bodies as if they were pleasurable containers, which, as I think I've also said before, most Anglo-Saxons do not do.

Watching these men dance and searching for a word of comparison, I finally decided that the best way to describe the difference between WhereIlive and here is that in WhereIlive the tango is "stately." The people move more slowly, and each move is made with, if not solemnity, a certain kind of slowness that makes it look elegant. Here, the tango is "catchy," that would almost be the right way to put it. In WhereIlive we look like we love it, but here they look like they're having fun doing it.

But I thought of something else, too, and that was that I don't think this kind of dancing could be done by someone tall, and particularly not someone tall and skinny. Such a person simply wouldn't have the grounding that being close to the floor gives: they wouldn't have the benefit that gravity gives them. And without the weight they wouldn't have enough ballast, really, to lean that way elegantly, or, I suspect, to walk in that curious way. The short and slightly tubby have weight on their side. But a tall, slender man would, I think, look so odd leaning forward in that way, and I can't help but be almost certain that purely because of his lack of weight and distance from the ground the strain on his leg and back muscles to control himself in the way these men did would be gruelling, to say the least. As I watched, I began to think that this is why my VTTT has evolved the style of dance he has. He's too tall to hold himself or to move in the way these shorter men can, so he's made use of his hips to give him his distinctive smoothness and sense of fun.

On the other hand, my FTT is not at all tubby, and he moves in a version (because he is less practised, this version is less practised, but it's there) of the way I've been describing. Now, this may be because his body is, although not tubby, built along compact lines - he's not attenuated. Or it may simply be, to reiterate two earlier points, because he's grown up in a culture that's fine about having fun with your body, and/or because he had a particular type of teacher. Or it may just be that he's comfortable with loosening and moving his body. Whatever the reason, as you can see from this video, he is the only person in WhereIlive who moves the way he does.

Now, it needs to be said that they way these men danced didn't leave much room for more than simple moves: I saw one gancho all night, and very few giros, never mind anything fancier (except the one tall man I danced with, who was flashy and did lifts, yay). But I think such dancing can involve those things, as this clip shows (incidentally, here at 3:10 you can see the man perform precisely the type of posture and movement I've been describing here, from a standing start). Also, instead they did a lot of small step work. Indeed, the man who was called "the teacher" by everyone, Juan Carlos, did tiny step work like my VTTT does (little staccatto steps to the side), which made me very glad that I'd experienced those with my VTTT.

So I had a lovely, interesting time. And the men who did dance with me seemed to love me. They all said I was great and, more importantly, didn't want to stop dancing with me. And the first dance I danced with Juan Carlos (who I didn't know at the point was Juan Carlos, or the teacher), he kept say, "¡Que linda! ¡Que linda! ¡Bailas linda!" (except at the beginning it sounded like he was saying "que lindo," and "bailA linda/o," so maybe he was complimenting himself! but he did stop dancing and say to me, "You dance beautifully." And when I told him my "Professor del Tango" was un Mexicano, he seemed surprised and pleased). And they all kept asking when I was coming back, and two of them hit on me (and one, who talked about himself and about himself, and only once, and at the end of a long disquisition about himself, and very briefly, asked about me, asked for my card at the end of the night. I gave it to him, since what difference does it make?).

So I take three things from this evening: 1. men in Philadelphia, or at least men who dance tango in Philadelphia, are bolder romantically than men in WhereIlive (but then, they'd almost have to be). 2. tango in Philadelphia is danced with more fun than tango in WhereIlive. 3. small people are designed to tango.

And tomorrow I go home. Home! Where I live, and where I am happy in the way you are happy in the place you feel is your home! All through this week my parents have been talking about how I'll come back, and how I'm lucky because I had two years there, and I feel a terrible sinking in my stomach. So I better get to work on that!

Curse You, Red Baron!

2009-12-31T23:13:00.009Z

It appears I have lost my mobile. And before you say, "AGAIN?", let me remind you that last time I didn't lose it; it was stolen. Also, let me say that this time the whole thing is mysterious. I had the phone in my pocket as I walked down the street at 7pm, and the next time I checked for it (two days later), it had vanished. And I wasn't pick-pocketed. My hypothesis is that it fell out on the train; my hope is that it's somewhere in the house and will yet be found; my determination is that the phone I buy to replace it will be cheap. In fact, I've just spent half an hour looking at replacement phones, in the process of which I discovered that Vodafone, who are The Devil, are a cheaper devil than my other options. Unfortunately, if you realise you've lost your phone at 5pm American time on New Year's Eve, which falls on a Thursday, you can't do anything about it until January 2, so there seems to be no way to arrange to have a phone waiting for me when I return. Although I think I will be able to set everything up so I can go

out and buy the phone when I arrive in WhereIlive, then just ring them and have it all taken care of.

But this is not what I wanted to write of. I realised after I wrote this morning that I forgot to describe my travel odyssey. Although it wasn't really an odyssey - more of an exercise in stasis.

Everything was fine until I hit Toronto International Airport. I even got to catch up on my film watching by seeing District 9 on the plane (a depressing movie, but good). Once I got to Toronto, though, it was a nightmare. Someone just tried to blow up a plane, so security was increased, which is fair. And I have nothing against being subjected to increased security measures, either. But, argh, did it take TIME. First of all, it took about an hour to get through Customs. Somehow I got behind a huge group of Germans: presumably a flight from Germany

had just arrived. All these people needed, as per the recent regulations, have their hands or thumbs scanned and recorded. Of course, given that this is the advanced digital age, all the sensitive scanning machines kept reading wrong, or reading too quickly, so the passengers had to scan all over again. As a result, I stood in the queue for an hour (although just once I considered saying to the nearby guard, "I'm an American: can't I go first because it'll be quick?" But I considered that I've spent the last 18 months insisting I was German, and I couldn't commit such an act of hypocrisy. Also, it wouldn't have worked).

But that hour was as nothing compared to the queue for security. There I stood for nigh on two hours. We weren't brutalised, and I even got to speak some German with the German family behind me, but the sheer boredom was crushing. We stood, and we stood, and we stood, and what seemed like once every ten minutes a person would go through the magic door that led to the metal detector, and all the rest of us would extract from that a tiny drop of hope that someday it would be our turn, too.

Then, finally, it was. And I went through the metal detector, and...I went off. I thought, They're going to take me into the little room! but, no, all was not lost. In fact, nothing was lost. All that happened was that I got a full body pat down like everybody else, which offered a nice opportunity for me to chat with the pat down woman about how, precisely, one pats down for maximum effectiveness and bodily delicacy simultaneously, and I had my bag searched, which has happened to me twice before. There, too, I got into an interesting discussion, this time with the girl who searched the bag, and who was very interested in my books. We got to talking, and one way and another it turned out that she had terrible trouble with her writing. Of course she did, because this is my life, and that's exactly the sort of thing that happens to me. So she told me her specific problem (just discomfort, really), and I suggested a solution (write a little every day), as well as some words of general wisdom ("Good writing involves the fewest number of words necessary, plus adjectives. But that means all the words you do leave in have to be vivid!"), and we parted with me remarking that "It's a pity. I wish we had an hour together, because then I could really help you." Which was a true wish, but under different circumstances.

And all this time there was no water.

Nonetheless, I made it to my plane! Because it was also delayed. And on the plane I had a glass of water, and when I arrived here I had a raging headache.

Now, as I said, I have no problem with these security measures (although some chairs wouldn't go amiss). But standing there in these queues I did think to myself that if I had come to the U.S. as a foreigner on vacation and experienced this, I would never come again. It may be the greatest country in the world, but it must be the worst country to get into (or perhaps second worst, after Israel). In addition, I vowed that I would get to the airport three to four hours early for my flight out, because "I am going to WhereIlive to see my friends, and I will get on the plane EVEN IF I HAVE TO QUEUE UP ALL NIGHT." And wouldn't you know it, this morning in the paper there was an article about how airlines are terrified that there will be no holiday flyers, and another in which it was suggested that passengers arrive at the airport at least an hour before they normally would. Bring it on, 4 January! (when there's also supposed to be snow, by the way) You will not stop me from doing everything in my power to return to WhereIlive: I will be like the postman.

Not that I'm not having a lovely time, even despite the phone thing. My mother bought me a beautiful coat with which we're both very pleased, and tonight I will wear it to the New Year's Eve milonga.

Happy New Year, reader!

Parenting

2009-12-31T14:28:00.007Z

As I write this, I can look out the window of my parents' back porch and see snow falling in fat fluffy flakes on the evergreens. Not ten feet from me (although with a door in between), there is a bright red cardinal pecking at the seed and suet block my parents have hung up as a bird feeder. He is MASSIVE, and I wish my father were awake to see him.

As you may have guessed, I am at Parentshome. Neither of my parents is awake yet, because who gets up at 8 in the morning when they don't have to, except for people who are trying to reduce their return jet lag by vaguely adhering to British time? So I get up between 7 and 8, and am hoping to until I leave four days from now.

My parents are glad to see me, and I am glad to see them. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that my parents are, well...getting old. My father will be 80 next year, and that's just plain old. He's now very very deaf, and although his brain is very sharp in the present, his memory, simply in terms of remembering things that happened a few months ago, or in terms of remembering that he told you about things that happened a few months ago, is very bad (although now that I write that down, I see it's quite interesting: he certainly does remember some things that happened months ago. Which suggests that he retains the canonical memory structure - I remember those things that interest me - just in a naturally degrading form). He doesn't have Alzheimer's, that's for sure, but the memory and the ears are bad. My mother, meanwhile, has aged by becoming slightly deafer and more like a canonical old lady: she takes forever to do things (where she used to just take half of forever), and she is intensely worried about making people happy, so that even the most ephemeral of whims deserves half an hour to see if she can gratify it. Also, neither of them can drive at night along a route they don't know well. For the first time, they didn't pick me up at the airport.

This is all sobering. They are not at a stage yet where they need to be worried over, really, and they're certainly not at a stage where they need any kind of watching (and they would be livid at that suggestion), but they are at the stage where you need to start worrying about the time when they'll need to be worried over. For a long time I assumed that when they got old they would come live with me in a granny flat arrangement, but they've made it clear they don't want to do that, so I was pleased that when this time I suggested they might want to think about moving from this rather isolated suburb at least closer to the city, they said yes, it was possible. More people, more activities, less driving.

Actually, the driving deserves a little more discussion. I tried to get my driver's license renewed in time for it to arrive while I was here, but, alas, that did not work. This means that I cannot drive! And this means that if I want to go anywhere - which I do: there are Twinkies and peanut butter to buy! - I must be driven by a parent. And so far that parent has been my mother.

Reader, my mother has always been a bad driver. Now, there are many kinds of bad drivers. I myself, although not bad, am certainly a bit too quick, and sometimes more cavalier than I should be. But my mother has always been the worst kind of bad driver: the kind that calls itself "defensive," but really means "timid and hesitant." And now, now she has become a terrible driver. It's not enough to depress the brake - she must depress it firmly and abruptly, so that the car and everyone it lurches forward and then back. It's not enough to wait until there are no cars to make a turn - she must wait until there are no cars, but also a gap long enough that we can make the turn in the leisurely manner she chooses; as a result, there will be massive no-car gaps into which anyone could make a tidy left turn, but my mother will sit there watching the empty space because it "won't be big enough, I know." It' s not enough to drive the speed limit - she now drives a good five to ten miles under the speed limit. All that, and still when we pull into a slot space she misjudges every time and moves the car so far forward that the underside of the front bumper scrapes the divider. I am a terrible slot space parker: it takes me at least two goes to get in (fantastic parallel parker, though. Go figure). But even I, who am thus empathetic, cannot bear sitting there in the car with my mother as we inch into the slot (inch! that's what makes it so galling. There's plenty of time to judge, or to sense), just knowing that in a few moments I'll hear scraaape, "Sorry."

Still, the woman wants to buy me a new winter coat, and to pay for my continuing therapy, so I can't be too condemnatory. Oh, and, y'know, she gave me life.

Oh, well, I've had a problematic relationship with my mother ever since I started to grow up. When I was little, people used to tell me all the time that I looked like her, and relatives would remark on the similarity of our movements. This is great when you're 8, but when you want to be your own person that similarity turns into a kind of threat - "Will I just be my mother? Will people [will my mother] only ever see me as a replication of her?" And that's still floating around underneath, these days: I still retain an instinctive fear - although it only comes out at certain moments - that my mother is trying to control. I feel this not at all with my father, but then in many ways my father and I have much more similar personalities, quiet and gentle (although there's no doubt that it's the personality similarities between me and my mother that cause many of our difficulties) - and, of course, my father is much more passive than my mother, so he's unlikely to try to control me.

Well, I love them both very much, and they me. And, despite whatever complications, you can't say better than that.

And tonight I am off to Philadelphia's New Year's Eve milonga. Perhaps my driver's license will come, so I won't have to take the train.

After the Thanks

2009-12-26T22:06:00.004Z

Reader, when you are a 41-year-old woman - or perhaps just when you are this 41-year-old woman - it turns out that saying, "No, thank you" to an internet match, even when you have corresponded with this match to an extent that allows you to be 95% sure that "No, thank you" is the right answer, and even when all your instincts tell you "No, thank you" is the right answer, is a tense business. What if this is it? you think. Not in the sense of what if this is "the one," (a concept I don't believe in), but what if this is "the last one"?

There are women who don't worry about this, I know. There are magical women who just believe someone will come along for them, or who don't much care if someone does. God, I wish I were those women. We never notice the things we don't worry about (I, for example, don't worry that I'm stupid, or that I have poor taste in clothing, or that I'm too short, or...or...the thousand other things I never notice because I'm not worrying about them), but I, at least, notice the things I do worry about. And I worry about this, as you know. And I wish I didn't. Well, sometimes I don't: and that's a start.

My new year's resolution, by the way, is to eat more carrots. More green vegetables, too, but really more carrots.

Thanks

2009-12-26T01:04:00.006Z

There are some things I will never understand about the English as long as I live, and two of them are their mania for discomfort and the way some of them positively race toward old age. Here I am at my nanny's, and when I tried to take a bath at 2 in the afternoon there was no hot water. She'd obviously set the boiler to come on once in the morning and once in the evening (because I could have a hot bath at 8), but to be off completely in between. Madness! Why not just split the difference and keep it on constantly at a low level, so people could have baths anytime they liked? Plus, she'd set all the thermostats so that they heated up the house to 15 c (59f) during the day, but only heated up to a toasty (or perhaps reasonable, depending on how you look at it: 70f) temperature at night, so that all through the

afternoon I had to huddle on the couch in the chill, with a cold nose, or lean against the Aga. I am well aware that the response to this is, "Put on a jumper," but you know what? If you can afford special Christmas trays (that's right, not just dishware but trays), you can afford to heat your house to a livable level more than once a day.

Understand, please: this is not a complaint against my nanny. One of the things that's always mystified me about English houses is the way that many of the older ones just have no heating in the hallways: there are radiators in the rooms, but the corridors are like icy winter paths. All right, now we're all conserving energy, but back when these houses were built we were not trying to do that, so what's the point? That you should be made extra glad to get in a room by enduring a bit of suffering in the corridors? For God's sake, call me American, but I'm going to stand by my belief that it's a basic right of life to have a radiator in the hallway. You can turn it off if you like, but at least you should have the option to live in comfort if you want (and, again, surely low-level heat throughout all areas of the house that are frequently used evens out to be cheaper than high level heat in some rooms but icy breezes floating in from others?). I say: I am a human being, and I should have the basic right to bath whenever I like and not suffer when I step into the corridor. As should all humans everywhere.

Then there's the fact that she's moved her bedroom to the ground floor. Okay, it used to be at the top of the house, and that's about as far away from the kitchen in the basement as it's possible to be (let's leave aside the whole Lord Lucan and lack of natural light-influenced question of whether you want to have your kitchen in the basement at all), but I know she didn't move down to the ground floor because she wanted to be closer to the kitchen. She did it because she was worried about climbing so many stairs. My God, I wanted to say when she told me this, you're 63! And not one iota weak or reduced. But, oooooo no, the time is coming! So, hey, let's welcome it with open arms. Okay, this house is designed by a person who has a total disregard for house layouts or for good sense (giant dining room and small room on ground floor; on first landing, small room; then up to second landing, where

there is the parlour and another small room; then third landing with one small room; then top floor with large bedroom and another small room: it's as if the [obviously Victorian] architect tried to think about the most awkward home layout possible). Anyway, the house admittedly has a long and steep central staircase, but if I lived here I'd be running up and down that staircase every day (I did it three times in a row today, in fact, and intend to do it for half an hour tomorrow), just to keep myself fit and oiled. But no! There is a mindset that some of the English, in particular, seem to have - although my German last boyfriend's family had it, too. It's the "Oh, I'm getting old," mindset. They rush toward old age with open arms, apparently eagerly anticipating reduction and decrepitude, and luxuriating in it when it does come. It's the chronological equivalent of never opening your windows, and I just don't get it. Uch, make it a bit of a challenge for Deterioration, and you'll keep him at bay for a bit longer: why wouldn't you want to do that?

- Mind you, I never understand those people who go out for a walk on Christmas day, either, and that seems very English. Not that I don't like a walk, but why on Christmas? Who wants to amble around in the freezing cold chit-chatting in a great awkward bunch when you could be at home in the warm playing with your gifts and having a real conversation with one or two? If you're going to go for a walk on Christmas, at least stride purposefully, to warm yourself up, or amble with one person, so you can talk.

Anyway, rather ironically I wanted to write this post about all the things I'm thankful for. I've had quite a lot to be thankful for this year, and if you can't express thanks on Christmas, when can you? (all right, on Thanksgiving, but I don't celebrate that anymore. Or on New Year's Eve, but I won't have time to do it then.) And the first thing I'm aware of being thankful for is that I have a nanny who has a giant comfy house, in which I can spend my Christmas eating Indian food from Marks and Spencer while I watch meaningless TV (well, at the moment I'm watching David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing together, and that's not meaningless). And that I have two living upper-middle class parents with an equally nice (if not even nicer) home to which I can go in two days, and who are willing and able to buy me the foodstuffs I demand.

Next to that, of course, I'm most thankful that I'm not in Otherhome. My university has been very good to me, and I've been very lucky, and I'm thankful for both those things and the profound basal-level happiness they've been able to give me. As I am blissfully thankful to have found work here, and to have found the kind of work I have. And while you might expect me to say that after that I'm happy that I discovered tango, I'm actually not. What I'm happy for is that I discovered my beloved VTTT through tango, and that I made the tango friends I did, because all those people have turned out to be more than tango people, and they've connected me to at least one person who isn't a tango person at all, but for whom I'm very thankful, O.M.

I'm thankful, too, that I have the freedom to make my own life. That doesn't just mean that I'm thankful that I have a portable life - I don't own a home, and books can always move - but also that I'm thankful that I have the money and the education, which really means the power, to make a new life for myself when the old one is unsatisfactory. And I'm thankful, too, that I have parents who support me while I do that. And I'm thankful that I do the kind of job I do, which - although harder than some people think, and in certain ways very boring, or at least tedious - allows me immense freedom and immense pleasure, and is, in a way, a job of luxurious privilege.

I'm thankful because, as bad as my personal life is, it isn't as bad as it was in 2008: I haven't

had my heart broken; I haven't been made bereft, and I've even managed to go on five dates - which, okay, isn't much to some people, but considering how many dates I went on last year (0 to 1, depending on how you look at it), is fantastic. I even got to do some kissing in the course of the year (although not when I expected to do), and I love kissing. So I'm thankful for that, too.

I'm thankful, too, that I fell in with a group of people who so obviously like me. Never before in my life have any concentrated number of people made it clear simultaneously that they find me special, meaning both important and unique, and although I still retain all my fears and worries, in very small ways the sense of being consistently loved and valued, as if that were a given, has made me confident.

I'm thankful for my therapy, because it has done me some good. And I'm thankful that my life is simple - again, a byproduct of money, but also of good planning and my own ability to pleased with relatively little in most areas, which is good. And also for

my physical capacity: I can still run up and down those stairs!

And I'm glad that I'm mentally alive. Okay, I'm not the youngest girl in the room by a long shot, and I'm terrified at the thought of taking my clothes off in front of a man (that's not an exaggeration), but I know, as a constant if not constantly conscious knowledge, that I'm interesting: that I have thoughts, and ideas, and knowledge, and a hell of a lot of good stories, so I'll never be boring, and I'm never bored to be alone with myself. I am, indeed, never alone with a Strand.

And finally, I'm just thankful to be alive, and fascinated by the experience. Remember that flagstone in Edinburgh that said, "It's a grand thing to get leave to live"? Well, it is. Every day of it, no matter how sad or fearful I am, something interesting happens, something to think about or tell about or store away to remember later. That's why I could never commit suicide, worse luck - I'll always want to experience tomorrow's interesting thing. And I am thankful for that: that life, whatever it might be like at any given microcosmic

moment, is alway bursting at the seams with occurrences, and is always a grand thing just in the very fact of its existence.

Men, Actually

2009-12-25T21:26:00.006Z

I am spending Christmas Day at my nanny's, but without my nanny (who is spending Christmas at a friend of hers - we're like a Christmas chain!). I was going to watch Love, Actually - a film I dislike but am willing to watch solely for the moment when Bill Nighy says, "Thank you, Ant or Dec" - but it turns out that it's on an inaccessible channel. So instead I thought I'd write an incidental post.

Maybe a month ago my FTT asked me in a tone of some astonishment why I preferred men. Girls, he said, were so much better: softer and...well, actually softer was the only specific attribute he picked out, but the general impression was just "better." In a vague way ever since then I have thought on and off about what it is I like about men, what it is that makes them appeal to me more than women (bearing in mind that I don't think sexual attraction is a matter of choice, and that I can't imagine ever being homosexual, or having homosexual desire - please note that I'm not saying this isn't possible for some people: just not for me. I'm very firmly heterosexual. So I guess what I've really thought about is what I like about men, not why I prefer them, since it's not really a matter of preference).

So... What I Like About Men

Perhaps funnily, one thing that I like about men is precisely that they're not soft. Men are hard, but both unexpectedly and in an unexpected way. When you're a woman, you don't notice that you're soft, although I suppose you are. You're just the way you are, but your areness becomes the norm. So what I like about men (this is the unexpected thing) is that they don't feel like me. Their bodies feel different, and they feel surprising because all that time of living with myself, and interacting with my own body (putting cream on it, putting my hands on its waist and hips, clasping its hands or rubbing them) has made my own body what's the norm for me. But men are so much less pliable than me! I don't mean they have big muscles - I actually don't like muscly men, but have always preferred slim ones or ones who aren't overly developed. I mean that they have more musculature - no matter how skinny or under-gymed they are, they just feel harder. And that difference is attractive to me. Plus, they don't have breasts. Now, when you carry breasts around all day they're not that interesting: you sort of forget about them, except as objects that fit into tops or as pieces of your body you need to worry about sometimes (cancer, sagging, size worries as mentioned). But I've danced with women, and embraced them, and to me breasts against me feel weird: they interfere with my breasts. Whereas a male chest, that I fit against; it accommodates me.

Also, men are bigger. Well, that one needs no explanation.

But also, I like it that men feel rougher. I don't mean they are physically rougher, but rather that they feel rougher. When I stroke the place where my neck turns into my shoulder, the skin feels like some kind of smooth fabric, but when I put my lips on a man in the same place it's a little more tacky, a little less refined. I love it when men don't shave, and even when they do shave it I love it that their features are rougher than mine, that men tend to be physically sharper than women (even the chubby ones).

And there are things I like about them mentally, or perhaps it might be better to say in terms of character. Men tend to be less likely to perseverate on emotion than women. Now, here I have to be careful, because I don't care for men who are solely practical, or who follow that tedious cliche line about how women are "complicated, and they, the man, just doesn't understand emotion. That's a kind of maleness I always suspect is posturing, really, and I know there are men who understand and experience emotional perturbation or complexity. But men seem to be much better than women at recognising when there's been enough emotional perturbation. So they do all the frowning, and the considering, but then at a certain point they also make a final pronouncement and move on. Women can sit there for hours going over meanings and possibilities and maybes - the time for this is infinite. With men, it's finite, and I like that.

But also, you know, they shave their faces with creamy white foam! And they have straight hips, so that when they wear their trousers slung low you can see their stomachs that are somehow different from ours! And they're damp in the neck! And they have tender neck napes, neck napes that are like an unexpectedy revealed secret: so different from the napes of women's necks. And they smell different! Not their aftershave, or their sweat, but just their natural smell: it's darker, and lower, and somehow...firmer.

And all of that is just...lovely. It's just right. So that's what I like about men.

Hark!

2009-12-24T23:59:00.004Z

Christmas approacheth. In fact, it approacheth so fast that it's basically here, if you work by the "horological" time system, in which a new day begins at 12am. I, however, work on the "chronological" time system, in which a new day begins at the moment you wake up, and

the old day lasts until you go to sleep.

Today, the day before Christmas, I am moved to think about other people. A number of years ago I told a friend of mine that I never believed people liked me very much, because I couldn't believe that they would like someone who sat around in her gnome pyjamas all day (as, in fact, I have done today), who was often irritating, and who could be boring. His response was, "Aren't you underestimating other people?" This had never occurred to me before. And for some reason - perhaps because of the hair straightening - this popped into my head again today.

I find it mystifying that anyone could find me attractive. This is, first of all, because I'm just...me. But it also because I have such a clear notion of what men find attractive: large breasts, nice bottoms, youth, good hair, a beautiful face. And I have none of these things. Also, I can be irritating. Reader, I find to my own shame that I have been brainwashed by the media without being aware, and, worse, while believing that I had not. But I find it nearly impossible to believe that someone might look past my small breasts and my no-longer-anywhere-near-my-twenties-ness, and my terrible nose, and my hair of the damned, and love me anyway. And I finally it even more impossible to believe that there might be men who find small breasts attractive, or like what time does to a woman, or who might think that my non-mainstream hair is not of the damned, or who might value personality above the physical. Oh, I can say it when it comes to people finding my friends attractive, and I can even believe it for them, but I cannot believe it for myself. I found Mr. Fallen, with his at least an extra stone of girth, wonderful; I found Irishboyfriend, with his wire tooth thing and his missing fingertop, sexy -- in fact, those were the very things I found sexy about him. But, oh, my goodness, I think, why would someone find me attractive? And perhaps that underestimates me, but it also underestimates other people, and makes them very shallow. And for that I am ashamed.

Don Juan to Be Done with That Book?

2009-12-23T23:13:00.009Z

I am Byroned out. I have read philosophy; I have read secondary materials about philosophy. I have thought - actively thought - long and hard about where that philosophy finds expression in the works of Lord Byron, and what he does with it. I have been impressed by Byron's mental skills - at first I said he was smart; then I believed he was smart; but now I know he was smart. I have re-read The Giaour not once, not twice, not even nice, but as many as ten times: I now live a life where bits of The Giaour pop into my head unbidden in appropriate situations (yes, there are situations where bits of The Giaour are appropriate). I have revised my book twice, and now I'm in the process of revising it a third time. And for the first time ever, I just have had enough of Byron.

I sit around and worry about this book. Both publisher's readers have pointed out its central problem: it's a book about Byron's philosophy that doesn't really seem to enmesh itself in the philosophers or philosophical ideas that surrounded Byron. It falls down when it comes to connecting Byron to philosophy and when it comes to its readings of philosophy. And when I finish this third revision it will fall down in that area again (although to a much MUCH lesser extent). 75% of the time I consider this book a failure: I have not been allowed to do what I wanted to do (write a book about how Lord Byron developed a philosophy) because literary analysis being what it is I can't really do that (if you say, "Byron became a sceptic," people quite rightly ask, "Well, did he read Hume? I mean, maybe he just followed Hume; where does he differ from him?"); what I have done instead, which is showing Byron in light of the philosophy of his time, I have not done well. 25% of the time, however, I see things in a different light: I am not a philosopher; I have no training in philosophy; I have no real interest in it; despite this, I have managed in the course of four years to read and come to grips with a whole bunch of Enlightenment philosophy, and actually to have ideas about where it's being mirrored, and how, in some literary work. I have gone from zero to about 45 in four years, and that's no mean feat.

But let us pass on from this: if I am sick of Lord Byron, let me write about him no more here. Instead, let me chit-chat about some of the fabric of my life.

First of all, there is still snow all over the place here. I took the train into London today, and outside the windows there was an England as close to the English idyll of Christmas cards as you could wish to see. White countryside? check. Suitably blanketed livestock? check. Nestled farm buildings? check. For goodness sake, there was even low-lying fog garlanding the whole landscape!

It's a good thing the view was so nice, because the trip to London was pretty much a waste. After much hard thinking, I have decided to have my hair straightened. -- Sorry: relaxed, as the salonnières keep reminding me. -- The process I will be undergoing relaxes and smoothes the hair by adding protein to it and sealing it in. The hair is not straightened, but rather any curls are reduced to waves, the frizz is sleeked down, and you can straighten or control it in a fraction of the time it normally takes.

All my life I have burned to have smooth, sleek hair, so I am willing to pay the not-small sum of money this process costs (it lasts for three months). My trip to London was to visit a salon - apparently the only one in London - that does this (none do here in WhereIlive). This visit took five minutes, and in the course of it it turned out that not only do they charge £130 for the process (which I was willing to pay), but they also make you buy a special shampoo and conditioner, at the cost of another £30. Plus £20 to get to London again to have it all done.

Now that is a lot of money: £180, to be precise (my basic math skills have not yet deserted me!). And at today's exchange rate, £180 is worth $297. So I say to myself, why not have this process performed in the snuggly environs of my parents' house in the States? At a salon mere steps (well, tire rotations) from my parents' home, a nice woman will perform it on me for as little as $250, including free shampoo and conditioner. Not only that, but the largest drawback of the process (aside from the possibility that it may all be a rip-off, and I may not get the glossy hair of my dreams) is that you must wait four days before washing your hair after you get it done. Not that I couldn't take that (although my scalp would get very itchy), but I bet you look pretty manky after four days of not washing your hair. So how much better to have only one of those four days pass after I reappear here in WhereIlive? My parents, as I said to S. today, do not care how I look if I don't wash my hair for three days; the people on the plane will only care for eight hours, max. If I get my hair finished by 4pm East Coast time on Saturday 2 January, I can wash it again at 9pm English time on Wednesday 6 January. Which is precisely what I plan to do, as I rang and made the appointment tonight.

I was talking to S. because once I realised I was going to spend around $300 the amount looked huge - much bigger than £150. So I needed him to talk me down and tell me to do it.

Anyway, the upshot was that the trip to London was pretty much a waste of time. What did I get out of it? Two small books to give as presents,

one narrow silver ring that cost £5, and that I'd been looking for for months, one £3 olive pashmina to replace the one that vanished, and a subpar panino I could have got right here at home. Oh, AND a Krispy Kreme glazed donut that I bought to eat on the train to save the whole trip, but when I started to eat it it turned out to have raspberry jam on the inside despite being on the creme shelf, and I hate raspberry jam filling, and I'd really been looking forward to the creme. So I got a bunch of piddly stuff, a subpar panino I could have got right here at home, and an irritating donut.

Still, it wasn't all bad, because I also got to see this sign:

It's a yoghurt ad, but it made me laugh anyway. It also made me think of that Pulp song, "Do You Remember the First Time?"

It also wasn't all bad because while I was there I somehow began thinking about teeth. I have always allegedly had a bit of a hang-up about teeth in boyfriends: I have often said that I like a man to have "good teeth." But ambling down the slick streets of late-afternoon London, it occurred to me that I've only ever actually had one boyfriend with well-aligned, undamaged, white teeth, and he was the boyfriend I liked least. Aside from him, there have been small teeth (husband), teeth involving extremely cool metal wire grip (Irishboyfriend), teeth with central gap (Mr. Fallen), and strange teeth that were shorter on one side than the other. In fact, if I think not very hard about it, I realise that really excellent teeth always slightly disconcert me: they look so fake. So I must now acknowledge that when I say "good teeth," what I really mean is "not teeth of the Shane McGowan level." Or a few levels above.

And then I came home to a spectacularly messy room. For some reason, it's bestrewn with bras. Why do I seemingly have so many bras? And, perhaps more significantly, why do I leave them out, rather than putting each away before I get out a new one?

Besties

2009-12-19T20:55:00.004Z

"What's a best friend?" someone asked me a couple of days ago when I was talking about them, and although this question at first seems breath-takingly stupid, if you give it a second it reveals itself as actually breath-takingly troublesome.

I mean, what is a best friend, really? I can't say a best friend is the person who knows you best, because sometimes you

know someone is or will be your best friend when they know you hardly at all. I can't say a best friend is the friend you've known the longest, because by that logic your best friend would simply default be the person who's known you longest, and that's obviously not correct. I can't say a best friend is someone to whom you'd tell things you wouldn't tell anyone else, but because in one way or another that description fits all my friends. Your best friend doesn't even have to live close to you: for a long time now, I've had Situational Best Friends (SBF) and a Best Friend; the SBF is my best friend where I am, but my Best Friend is my long-term BF.

So what would I say a best friend is? I would say a best friend is someone to whom you can tell your news and your troubles knowing not just that they won't judge, and not just that they will consider those news and troubles thoughtfully and objectively, but also knowing that they will not try to do anything with them. This is why it's so hard to explain what a best friend is - because it's so hard to explain what that last phrase means. Of course a best friend will say if they're concerned for you, and will tell you things you don't want to hear sometimes if they think you're thinking or behaving foolishly, but it seems to me that a best friend must also give a sense that they're in it with you, whatever "it" is: if you're happy, your best friend is at least a bit happy, too; if you're sad, your best friend listens and respects your sadness (although not forever). A best friend is someone you tell your stuff to not just because you need a receptacle for secrets or a well for troubles, but because you know they want to hear just because they're interested, and that they're interested just because they're your friend. Which I guess is just a complex way of saying that a best friend is the person who listens to you most carefully.

Although not just that, of course. Best friends know you best, and so know how you'll react in a given situation, or how best to help you in such a situation. Best friends make the right noises at your confidences. And maybe most of all your best friend is your best friend because, for whatever reason, you just like seeing them a little better than you like seeing anybody else. This is also, I think, why they're the receptacle of your secrets: you tell your secrets to your best friend because you want to, because you want to become entwined with them that way.

See? Best friend is hard to explain.

All of this comes up not because of but linked to the fact that my closest friends here tell each other everything. I mean, they tell each other stuff I would never dream of telling anyone. As a result, they know each other very well, but not in a way that gives any sense that that knowing is special or unique: this is just the kind of stuff you know if you know a person well, is the suggestion. And because we behave as we see modelled, I've now done this with a few of those people. And you know what? It's quite nice. It does feel like I'm just doing what you do when you know a person well, and perhaps because there's no sense of such tellings as a big deal, or of the revelations as shocking, it simultaneously brings you closer to the people and relaxes you. Oh, you think, this isn't such a big deal after all. And now I am known. Both very pleasant sensations.

Snowly

2009-12-19T13:06:00.006Z

We have had a huge amount of snow here - at least 6 inches - and the result is that WhereIlive looks (a) beautiful, and (b) quite like home. I LOVE snow. Have I said this before? I'm sure I have, but it bears repeating. I mean, I really love snow.

In honour of the snow I'm going to tell a story I would never tell to a crowd of strangers, but which I can tell on the internet because I can pretend no one's listening. Two years ago, I went to London over New Year to be with Mr. Fallen. I flew from Otherhome, and on New Year's Eve day in Otherhome it was perhaps fifty degrees F, with not a cloud in the sunny blue sky. I was so excited to be going. You know that excitement where you wish you could physically push time forward, and wish there was some way to make all intervening events happen faster so you could arrive at your conclusion as quickly as possible? That's how I felt.

We all got on the little RJ that was going to fly us from Otherhome to Chicago (where I would get the plane to London), and shortly after we taxied onto the runway the flight attendant informed us that we would be delayed because it had started to snow in Chicago. Okay, whatever. We sat there for twenty minutes, and then he came over the P.A. and informed us that we would be further delayed because the snow had caused Chicago to space more widely its incoming and outgoing flights. We sat there and sat there for perhaps an hour, and I stared out the window at the afternoon sun shining out of the crystal blue sky, thinking to myself, There can't be that much snow in Chicago if it looks like this here. And at the end of the hour the flight attendant's voice came again, telling us that we were going to delay still further because...CHICAGO HAD CLOSED THE AIRPORT DUE TO SNOW!!

And I wanted to stand up and scream, "I am going to London to get laid, and this plane will get to Chicago so I can catch my connection IF I HAVE TO FLY IT MYSELF."

But I didn't, and we sat on the tarmac for twenty minutes longer, after which we were cleared for take-off, and I thought, See? How much snow could there have been? Typical American overcaution. And when we got to Chicago there was a full-scale blizzard. (although we still departed reasonably on time. Someone on that flight told me that international flights, unlike domestic ones, are very rarely delayed, and even then not for very long.)

So what moral might we draw from this? Well, one possible moral is however much I love snow, I love sex with someone I'm attached to even more - a good moral, I think you'll agree. Another possible moral is that you shouldn't hold the announcements of your airplane personnel in dismissive contempt - and I will say that this experience taught me that moral, because I never have done so again. Or you could just take this as a random story that I find funny, which is how I take it.

Revisioning

2009-12-17T19:31:00.006Z

I was going to write this post about some news I got about Irishboyfriend earlier this week, and I still will, but first I want to write a tiny bit about what I've been doing, and what it's made me think, yesterday and today.

So I've been revising my book again since Tuesday, as I mentioned in my last post. Yesterday I finished cutting and pasting chapter 2, then typed it up and went to bed. Today I read chapter 1, revised it a little, then printed it out. I don't know why this took a whole day, because I scarcely did anything to it, but it did.

When I got told I needed to do more revisions to the book, I was told that I needed to integrate the philosophers' ideas more thoroughly with what Byron was doing. I was in

despair, because I had no idea how to do that: I just didn't. So I wrote to a very wise friend of mine, older than I and very successful in my area, and asked him to read parts of the book and make some suggestions. Which he did, with great care. I've tried to take the questions he suggested for the parts of the book that he did read and apply them to all my revisions, most notably, "Can you find a way of making the philosophy do more to expand the notion of instability?" With chapter 2 I could juuuuust about do that, but with chapter 1 it's a real struggle. I have no idea how to do that.

Anyway, when I printed out chapter 1 today and was walking home, I thought to myself of how I was going to go back to my room and sort out how to do this on my own. This is never what I would do, but I thought of sitting down on my bed with my manuscript bits, reading them, and trying to figure out where and what to fix. And then I thought, not in a resentful way but just in a factual one, that this is why people come in twos. If I had a partner I would still have to do all this work on my own, but I would know that in the background there there was someone who would give me a pat, or who would be waiting to go out to the pub with me when it was done. Not someone to help, but someone to be there if I needed help and they could give it. I thought the same when I gave my big dinner party a few weeks ago: I didn't really want someone to help me do stuff, but I wanted someone to watch out of the corner of their eye to see that I still didn't want someone to help me - or to notice that I did.

Anyway, to the real post! Earlier this week I discovered that Irishboyfriend's wife is going to have a baby! You will perhaps wonder if I was jealous, and I wondered that myself. I certainly did feel some sort of jealousy at the news, but without very much analysis I noticed that this jealousy was of the fact that Irishboyfriend had a wife (which is to say, I felt a particular manifestation of a general jealousy), not of the fact that she was having a baby. In fact, I had a chance to test this hypothesis later, because two nights ago my cousin wrote to tell me that his wife was having a baby! And I was pleased! (well, as pleased as I can be, as I believe that my cousin and his wife will someday get divorced [and not some day in the very far distant future], and I'm sorry that a kid will have to go through having its parents get divorced. But maybe not...I mean, if I had to peg one of my cousins certainly to get divorced, it would be this guy's sister, 'cause her husband for sure is gay and has already cheated on her [with a woman, though]. So maybe my cousin and his wife will not be the ones for the chop...) I like babies, although I've never particularly wanted one myself, and I'm pleased other women keep producing ones for whom I can buy cute clothes and charming books.

BueNO. I did not find out about Irishboyfriend's (well, I guess I should call him FormerIrishboyfriend's) baby via an e-mail or a letter, but rather via a facebook update, which told me he'd reactivated his running blog, and when I went to his blog he had written that he was reactivating it because his wife would be having a baby about the time of next year's Boston Marathon, so he thought he'd write the blog about his training and her pregnancy in tandem. He felt that this gave the blog nice narrative tension: "Will I be able to make the marathon, or will the baby decide to show up on the very day of the Marathon?" (I paraphrase).

Uh-huh. Well, I'm not making any remarks about that narrative tension, or the question, or what it might reveal about FormerIrishboyfriend. Instead, I thought I would honour him and indicate what a successful father I think he'll be by telling The Soup Story. The Soup Story is one of my most famous stories about FormerIrishboyfriend; it is perhaps equalled only by The Kettle Story, but I think The Soup Story is more appropriate here.

Many years ago, when I was still involved with FormerIrishboyfriend, I got sick. Now, for me "sick" has a specific meaning. It's not like, a cold, or the sniffles: "sick" means I am confined to bed, genuinely too ill to work or otherwise to function without great effort (I don't often get sick). So there I was on my bed of pain, and ThenIrishboyfriend came to check on me. "Can I get you anything?" he asked. "Well," I said. "What I'd really like is a bowl of soup. Could you make me a bowl of soup?" "Okay," he said. Then he teased, "But I only do this once." And he made me a lovely bowl of cream of mushroom soup.

The next day I was still sick, and still in bed, and he came over to check on me again. "Do you need anything?" he asked. "Well," I said, "I'd love it if you'd make another bowl of soup." And he said, "I told you I only do that once." And he did not make me a bowl of soup.

The worst thing about this story is that I stayed with him for at least another year after that, and in the end he broke up with me.

He's said he's had a lot of therapy since we broke up.

Working on Working

2009-12-14T23:35:00.006Z

This seems to be the week of random single memories, because two days ago I had one about my father, and tonight, while I was doing my ballet barre in the kitchen (perfect location, it turns out: warm, big, quiet), I had another. I was holding onto the countertop and moved my hand forward so it touched the edge of stove, which, to my disgust, was lightly coated in grease. And this made me remember weekend mornings with Irishboyfriend - not every weekend, but a fair number - when I used to make him a breakfast that included very thin potato slices, fried. In this memory, which was all the days smooshed into one, it was sunny, and I was in my favourite flat in Massachusetts, and he was in the bedroom reading while I cooked the potato slices, wearing a long white nightgown I used to have but since have lost. It was the grease on the stove that reminded me, of course, because the grease in which I fried the potatoes went everywhere, but what a nice memory to spring from grease: bright but n

ot hot, alone cooking for someone I loved in the next room, my feet bare on the boards and my long white cotton nightie circling around me.

Anyhoo (BUEno), that's just by the by. I've been working today, and knock wood it's been going pretty well. Of course, that may be because a good deal of the work has been cutting up my chapter and repasting it so the narrative runs differently. And when I say, "cutting up" I mean, cutting up," and when I say, "repasting," I mean "with Scotch tape." For some reason, this is the only way I can successfully reshape a piece of writing of any length; I suspect it's because it's the only way I can see it all before me and get a sense of its rhythm. Anyway, now half my desk is covered with little strips of paper containing a sentence or two sentences and the other half is covered with sheets of notebook paper alternatively taped to partial typewritten sheets and covered with a paragraph of handwriting followed by a partial typewritten sheet. As I said, it's been going well - I just feel bad about killing so many trees.

Tonight at dinner I had a most interesting and wide-ranging conversation with S.A., on subjects both mentionable and none of your business, thank you very much. One of the mentionable subjects, however, was my hypothesis of this morning (while I was making my first cup of tea in the kitchen) that men raised by single mothers are better than other men. In this hypothesis, men raised by single mothers are better than other men; it seems to me, from my experience, that they tend to be more open to discussions of emotions, more interested in talking aimlessly about the world (this is a vastly important skill, I think), and less rigid about gender expectations. Also, they seem to be more relaxed and open generally. Also, also, they like to dance - an attribute very rare among men. Exhibits in favour of this hypothesis include:

My FTT - okay, rather conservative in the gender expectations department, but surprisingly open (given that) to discussions about emotion and psychology, and deeply deeply (deeply) interested in clothes.

Now, I recognise that this hypothesis has a number of pieces of evidence against it:

Exhibit A: Dr. Heier. Well, his parents were married until he was around 18, so maybe he doesn't count. But he was certainly vastly closer to his mother than his father, and he was not in any way relaxed (although neither was his mother), and he certainly had stern gender expectations - if a film possessed the merest hint of male homosexuality, you could feel him practically go rigid with discomfort.

Exhibit B: The many men I know who are relaxed and open, and chatters, despite being raised by both parents. Okay, that kind of throws a spanner in the works.

So perhaps I'm going to have to work on this hypothesis (which is why it's a hypothesis, not a theory). If I work empirically, however, I could draw the conclusion that men raised by strong mothers are, subjectively (me being the subject), better than other men. This is because: first of all, in my experience men with strong mothers are not afraid of, and often know how to deal with, strong women (yes, strong women have to be wrangled, just as do strong men. That doesn't mean you shut them down, but it does mean that there are ways to be strong and tempered, and ways to be strong and dictatorial. A man who has had a strong mother can avoid the risk of a strong woman becoming the latter). Second, men with strong mothers seem to have learned, somehow, to engage in conversation - that is, to listen and engage with other people - rather more pleasantly and effectively than other men. And they tend to be fairly comfortable in the realm of emotion, or at least of discussion that is not rigidly goal-centred. They also tend to help out more around the house. Also, they tend to notice what you're wearing (hey, it matters to this subject).

Although this post really isn't going anywhere, I'll end with some supposition as random as the rest of the thinking. My supposition is that all these benefits come into being because of the increased communication exposure gained by growing up with a woman. Women talk more than men, and by and large they like to converse more than men. Now, the fact that women openly enjoy this and to some degree expect the same from the people they live with means that the men who grow up with strong women are to a degree forced to join in. But I actually don't think force comes into it. I think we largely do and are comfortable doing what we see modelled: we think this is what all people do. Men who grow up with someone who chats randomly, who helps out as a matter of course (something women also tend to do more than men), who is open and comfortable about discussing emotion, and who pays attention to her own appearance and that of others, will simply do the same - they think it's what people do.

Or so I believe tonight.

At some point I'm going to blog about feminism. But I think everyone involved, reader and writer, will have to gird their loins for that one.

And tomorrow I get my hair cut and blown dry straight, in anticipation of a formal dinner for O.'s birthday tomorrow night! Reader, I love getting my hair straightened. I know we should love ourselves the way we are, and I do. It's just that...I really love myself the way I am with straight hair. So I am looking forward to tomorrow. And Wednesday I have a date! And I am interested to see if my loved straight hair will make any difference to my date!

It's Not a Fling, You Know

2009-12-12T23:19:00.006Z

Mmmm, I'm so tired, and I should go to bed, because I'm still under the weather, but I HAD to write.

There's this guy at tango; let's call him The Flying Scotsman. He's very well known in the WhereIlive tango community (eye roll), in that everybody hates him. This is first of all because, as a friend of mine put it, he's an asshole. This is a word I very much dislike and actively try not to say, so the fact that I used it will give you some idea of how apposite it is: there is really no other word to describe him. In addition to that, however, he is a terrible dancer - he does, in fact, dance like a train. And the worst bit of it is, he's a teacher.

Now, every tango dancer has of course had lessons from someone, somehow. But the thing about most tango dancers, at least in WhereIlive, is that you can't really tell with whom they've had lessons: they may develop their own style (subject for another post), or they may have no idiosyncracies and simply dance well (or badly), but they don't bear the clear marks of one teacher or another. Unless they've had lessons with The Flying Scotsman.

Twice in two months now I've danced with young men at a milonga - the second time was tonight - and I have instantly identified them as having had classes with TFS (which is to say I guessed, and when I casually enquired where they'd had lessons, they confirmed my guess). They both have a distinctive style: it would be most accurate to say that they are mannered without being skilled. First of all, TFS teaches that the main means of guidance is the hand. This is not true in tango, and it's difficult to convey how both unpleasant and potentially downright damaging it is to have someone pushing you with considerable force here and there in the small of your back. That's bad, but to add insult to injury (literally) he teaches them to cross their ankles and do a "one foot flat, one foot posed on toe" position as the final or resting position of each step. I'm sure the theory behind this is that it looks suave, but in fact it just looks posey and pretentious. Also, when I danced with these men it rapidly became clear that they have no real experience. They're just beginners, but they've been taught all these advanced flourishes. And as a result they're just not much good: you'd have to take them right back to the beginning to fix them.

I cannot conceive of what woman would ever find it enjoyable to dance with these men. I understand that TFS does some quite interesting stuff in his lessons: he talks a lot about posture, and weight and body placement. So I'm willing to believe that there are things to be learned from him, and I'm willing to believe that a woman might find it enjoyable to learn from him, at least when it comes to those things. But to dance with someone who dances like that seems to me not just unpleasant but, even in the short run, painful: the damage to your back muscles would perhaps be small, but it would certainly be noticeable.

I did consider telling tonight's young man what he was doing wrong, but then I thought about how long it would take, and how bad it would make him feel. So I just requested that he be a little lighter in guiding me (by my back).

Scriptora Judaica

2009-12-12T19:38:00.010Z

Writing, reader, is a strange exercise. It is my job. There is no way around that: whether I am a fiction writer, or an academic writer, or a teacher, at least 50% of my job involves picking up a pen or putting my hands on the keyboard and writing. And yet, unless I am commenting on a student paper, writing is always in some degree terrifying. Now, it is true that on a small number of occasions I am filled with the Muse (although, because there was no prose when the Muses were invented, my Muse would have to be Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry - that's her over there), and then the words come pouring forth, but even though at that moment there is no fear, there is fear on either side of that moment, because there's always the possibility that that won't happen again. I have had long periods of writer's block (LONG periods of writer's block), so I am familiar with that feeling.

I've never been afraid of the blank page, but I suppose that page is really a metaphor, a metaphor for the commencement. Only I've never really been afraid of the commencement of a piece of writing, either - in fact, I'm very good at opening paragraphs. What I'm afraid of is the long thickness ahead, the places where, after the good beginning, it all goes wrong and doesn't work, or can't be made to say what I want it to say, or to have the import I want it to have. "Terror" really does describe the feeling I have in this regard when I pick up the pencil (which is how I start most academic things I write, at least).

But sometimes, reader, after I pick up the pencil...it all goes right. This is not to say that the words pour forth, that I write for hours and hours until I've finished some golden production, but rather that as I get into the writing of that first paragraph I get a feeling that it's all going to be fiiiiiiiiiiiine. It feels that drawn out and smooth. That doesn't mean there won't be difficulties along the way, or that I won't at some points feel hopeless and as if I can't scratch through to what I want, but there's a moment's knowing that it's all going to be okay; it's going to work out after all. And that moment, with its combination of joy, relief, and a curious reminder of my own power, almost cannot be beat.

Meanwhile, it is the second night of Hanukkah. Now, I'll be the first to admit I'm not much of a Jew-y Jew, but for some reason Hannukah brings out the Jew in me. Perhaps because I light the menorah in the dark, and the quiet, and recite a prayer while I do it, and therefore am somehow in a meditative state, performing this action is the only time in my life that I feel a member of a community. In the real world I don't much care for communities, either - my childhood showed me that groups are pretty much always out to get you (although I was thinking at brunch this morning how very much I like looking across the table, and down to my left and my right, and seeing that everyone seated there is a friend of mine) - but on Hannukah I draw great satisfaction from the realisation that all over the world other Jews are, or have been, or will be, doing exactly what I'm doing at that moment: that I am a Jew, a member of the Jewish community - a survivor, a brick in an old wall, a member of an indestructible certainty. Yes, I'm proud of that, and restful in it.

Missed

2009-12-12T17:45:00.005Z

"You have to let him miss you." I should have included this in the ealier list of wise utterances. My friend Jennifer said it to me years ago, when I was going to cancel a trip to New York (to see Arcadia, so you can imagine how blinded by love and worry I was) to stay with Irishboyfriend. After the bra thing, I think it's the piece of advice that resonates most strongly in my life, not just with reference to me and men but with reference to me and other people, and with reference to women and men generally. I think of it often, almost always when I'm about to do too much for someone (of either gender) or to be precipitate in some way (usually with a man): I hear Jennifer saying this in my head, and I haul myself back.

I possess a general desire to have situations resolved immediately: if I send an e-mail, I want the response in an instant (and, conversely, I find it very hard to leave an e-mail unanswered in my own inbox); I very seldom leave phone messages because I have no idea when the person will call back, and I can't stand waiting for them to do so. I remember almost twenty years ago when my Anglo-Saxon professor was explaining to us how mysterious and worrisome life and the world seemed to the Anglo-Saxons, and he said, "But even today the world is a mystery in many ways. When we drop a letter in the mailbox, we have no idea whether or not it will get where it's going." I felt a chill go down my spine, because that had always been one of my greatest concerns (which is why I feel a good deal of sympathy in that scene in When Harry Met Sally where she puts a letter in the box, closes the little door, checks to see it's gone down, puts anothe r letter in the box, closes the door, checks...with each letter separately). Anyway, the point is that it's therefore all of a piece that if a man doesn't get in touch with me promptly I get tense. Or used to, before I figured out how not to do this (which is: go off and force myself to focus on something else until I get sucked into that, instead).

But this is not just me. I have a friend now who's just embarked on a new relationship, and she has worked herself into a wire-tight knot because the man occasionally won't text as often as he did, or because the wording of his e-mails (which she parses like a philologist in search of a lost root) seems less-than-ideally sweet. And I just think, and try to say, "Calm down!" I say wise things like, "Remember, you're checking him out, too: he doesn't have all the power," and, "Usually what we think is behaviour based on feelings about us has very little do with us," or even just, "He's stressed!", but I see so much of the me I used to be - and could very well be again if I don't keep my head if I ever have another relationship - that I worry and wonder.

This tension over contact and its significance seems to be limited to women. At least, I've never encountered a man who worried over it as many women I know do. I wonder why this is? First of all, are there men who worry in this way? (or, do all men worry in this way, but they don't share it with women? Hmm...) Well, presumably yes, since there are men who do everything - or rather, since there's some man out there doing each thing there's some woman out there doing. So, then, I wonder why this worry seems to predominate in women. No doubt it's because generations of women have sat by the phone waiting (as Dustin Hoffman nearly says inTootsie), and have passed the belief that one waits and worries while one waits on to their daughters. And no doubt it's also because women tend to be more anxious than men (there's a question in its own right: why?). And of course women are encouraged to be openly vastly more insecure than men. But why is it, I wonder, that women tend to feel you should be there - whichever of those two words you choose to put the stress on - and be there consistently and immediately, or else love is going, and men don't tend to think so? I wonder what difference has been trained in there, or is biologically inherent? And I wonder how I'd go about researching it...

Well.

2009-12-10T22:56:00.002Z

Well well well well well. A very enjoyable date.

Bed, Rest

2009-12-09T15:11:00.005Z

My great-grandmother (or maybe my grandmother, since my mother inherited them from her) used to have these lovely little bed jackets. A bed jacket is an item you don't see much anymore, given that the time when women used to spend their mornings lounging around in bed, even receiving visitors there, is past. Today, however, I wish for a bed jacket, as I am self-confined to bed for the second day in a row.

I love bed. I used to spend hours in bed. At night I would get in bed and do my grading there, assisted by my handy bed desk. In the morning I would wake up and do my reading there, assisted by my handy knees (incidentally, best way to create a secure prop for your book with your knees: get yourself into position and then pigeon-toe your toes. For some reason, the grip

is much stronger, so your knees don't slide down). After I finished a paper or a chapter I would climb in there to revise it. But now I don't spend so much time in bed, and I don't know why (although I do still spend a lot of time on the floor reading. Don't knock the floor, baby! Sitting on the floor against some sort of perpendicular solid, preferably slightly scrunched up, is to me the most pleasant and comforting of reading positions). I've opted to spend a second day in bed because I'm trying to recover quickly, but so far the only result is that when I get out of bed, or when I sit up, my head swims and I get the sensation of sort of being stoned. I feel like the woman who wrote Seabiscuit! And it's so boring. And I have no visitors. Although I could have visitors if I wanted, but I don't really want because, although there's almost no more delightful vision than that of sitting up in bed talking to a visitor (more delightful might be the visitor getting on the bed with me), if someone came to visit I'd have to put on my pyjama bottoms, and that's a drag.

Anyway, confined to bed as I am, I discover that suddenly all the stuff I hate doing seems like the most desirable activity in the world. I want to go to the gym! I want to work on my book! I want to write student recommendations! Instead, I am experiencing forced leisure - except it isn't really leisure, because I can't really concentrate, so I can't read, for example.

A couple of days ago I was talking to someone who said, "I don't really think about work when I'm not working." I found that a most extraordinary fact. But...but...who doesn't think about work when they're not working? Well, this person, apparently. But I think about work all the time. But then, I'm working all the time.

Or so I thought.

I started to think about how often I work, and in my rudimentary calculations it's not a lot. If you add up the time I spend on facebook, or doing tango, or watching stuff on youtube or iTunes, I don't work much more than most people - in fact, I probably work less (although God bless O., who said, "Well, as a writer you're working all the time." I love it that someone thinks creative writer is my real job). The difference is that work is always hanging over my head. In fact it's been that way ever since I was in grad school: when I was working on my Ph.D. I used to feel guilty every time I went to the movies, feeling that I ought to be at home waiting for an idea to come, or working, although ideas rarely came, and I rarely worked, when I was at home for those otherwise-movie-wasted hours. Also, I intersperse my work with so much play that I frequently have work "left to do." So perhaps what I ought to do is just do my work, and get it over with, and then have my fun. This is not a new idea, but it's one I'm going to try again in earnest.

When I first went to Otherhome, in the first semester I was there, on the days I didn't have to teach I would do my own work from 9-5, with an hour or so for lunch, and then at 5 I would start my preparation for the next day's classes. And it worked a treat! As did the working earlier this term, where I read all morning and afternoon without checking e-mail. But I'm thinking of something even firmer. I'm thinking of just working until the work is done, then stopping, rather than filling in the time with more work.

Once or twice over the last few years I've tried imagining what I'll do when the book is finished: not what I'll do next, but what it will be like to have nothing to do for a bit, what I'll do with all that leisure. And always, not so very far beneath the surface, is a feeling of confusion and cold dread. I really have no idea who I'll be without some ongoing work. And that's not good.

Encounters

2009-12-08T22:24:00.004Z

A good deal of "meeting" people on the internet involves evaluating the likes and dislikes they list, or list for you. This has always struck me as a somewhat odd way to evaluate someone - as if everyone who loved, say, Everything is Illuminated is exactly the same sort of person - but for some reason when I was puttering around the kitchen yesterday it struck me particularly forcefully as bizarre. Perhaps because I was thinking about something math-y, and that made me think of Dr. Higher, and that made me think of how we change, or might change, or should change.

There's something about this way of considering someone that seems to me to imagine them as eternally going to be the person they are at the present moment: "Ah, you do not dance tango. Thus, you never will dance tango. Thus, you are out." But before I met Dr. Higher I had no idea what an algebraic geometer was, or a sheaf, or a bundle. And now I miss having someone to talk to me about those things, and although I wouldn't say I remain actively interested in them, I do perk up when I hear about them. And before I met Irishboyfriend I couldn't have cared less about George Whitfield or Father Ted, but now Ted, at least, is intrinsic to my life (also, I know how to give a pill to a cow). And look at tango, or iPhone apps, or the hundreds of other things I've started to pay attention to that I never even knew existed to be paid attention to before.

So it's odd to learn about someone based on their interests, and perhaps even on their likes and dislikes. There ought to be some way to get a sense of their personalities: are they thoughtful? Do they remember things you say? (this one should come very high) What do they laugh at? Because it seems me that although your interests change, your approach to those interests is probably unlikely to change radically by the time you're, say, in your thirties.

Although there, too, I think I might be wrong. I've known people to undergo radical changes in their personalities or approaches to life or understanding of the world quite late in the game. So who can say?

I was thinking about that the other day, too, because I was thinking about the fact that it looks as if my VTTT might be single again. Although I'm not really attracted to my VTTT, and I certainly don't think we have enough to support a relationship, he is objectively an attractive man, and on hearing this news I did think, Hmm... But my VTTT is 13 years older than I, which I've always considered too large an age difference, and I was slightly surprised to discover this change in myself.

I always thought that adulthood was a monolithic state: that at some point you arrived at a stage where you were certain - of what you knew, of what you believed, of how your world would go, of how you felt - and that was adulthood. But I surely must be an adult by now, and that's not how it is at all. There are just as many surprises, and reconsiderations, and adjustments and changes, as there were when I was 20 - more, in fact. Which I suppose is healthy - better than being set in your ways, better than having the conservativism that comes from certainty - but is also rather wearying. Or perhaps it's better to say, rather surprising.

Sickness and Health

2009-12-08T15:24:00.009Z

I'm home sick in bed. Well, under normal circumstances I'd be home, but I wouldn't be sick and in bed. This development is very annoying, because I was supposed to start writing today, and although I'm not running a fever or rendered incompetent, I'm just sick enough that I have no attention span, and thus can't produce. Grr.

Also, my sickness is interfering with...my date! That's right: I have a date. I know it's a date, because I made it -- and I made it in date-y language, so unless the other person is mentally deficient, they must recognise that it's a date. So if it turns out not to be a date as far as they're concerned, that's no fault of mine. Unfortunately, my sickness means I've had to postpone: my date was for tomorrow, but even though I'm on the sickness mend, I won't be mended by tomorrow. So I've had to put it off, hopefully only until Thursday. Reader, I will keep you, as it were, updated. Hahahahahaha.

But neither sickness nor dates is what I wanted to write about today.

My parents, I often think to myself these days, did a remarkably good job of raising me. They gave me a reasonable set of moral standards, and a hell of a lot of good sense: I recognise that I'm likely to be happiest with an age-appropriate mate; I accept that there are different stages of life and different experiences and behaviours appropriate to them; I think carefully about my decisions. And when I think about how my parents managed to shape and influence me in lasting ways, what immediately springs to mind is things they've said to me. Of course, a lot of the influence parents and other role models have is silent and subtle, absorbed by unconscious observation, but in my case - perhaps because I'm so word-oriented - a good deal of the way my parents continue to influence me is via actual verbal advice and observations they've given. Especially my mother. She's a difficult woman, my mother, but she's certainly had some very wise things to say. So I thought I'd use this post to ruminate on the best pieces of advice I've received, from my parents and elsewhere.

"When you're married to someone, you have to see them every way. You see them healthy; you see them sick. You see them happy; you see them irritated. You see them good; you see them bad." My mother told this to me years ago, just as part of a discussion we were having (weirdly, I remember exactly where we were: she was wiping a kitchen counter, and I was getting something off the back stairs). I remember it not just because it sometimes seems to me a useful way to evaluate a partner (would I want to stick with this person when they're being crabby?), but also because it reminds me, and has reminded me when I've been in relationships, that you're in it for the long haul, and that you can't just quit because the person turns out not to be quite as nice as you'd like.

"Always wear a bra, or else your breasts will sag." My mother told me this when I was about 19 or 20 and succeeded, frankly, in scaring the crap out of me. Years later she revealed to me that her breasts had always sagged, so the advice was based on no experience and thus was largely worthless, but it was too late! The damage had been done. And now when I get up in the morning the second thing I do (after turning on the computer: before e-mail, it was the first thing I did) is put on my bra. I have been mammarily traumatised. Thanks, Mom. Still, as she and a number of other people pointed out to me, it can't hurt, and to be honest it probably has helped me in the breast department.

"The first time, you don't have to get it right; you just have to get it down." My father said this to me when I started writing my dissertation and was finding it so hard to get onto paper what I wanted to say. I remember this observation (or warning) not because I've come to accept it as true, but because I still get upset when I can't say what I mean in my first draft: every time that happens, I reassure myself by saying this.

"I had a very difficult relationship with your aunt. But now it's worked out, and although it's still problematic it's a very valuable relationship to me." This is another one I remember because it forces me to question myself. When I think about my own lack of relationship with my sister, I think of my mother saying this, and I wonder if someday it might still all work out. I wonder if I should hold on, just in case it one day turns into something valuable.

"I don't think cross-cultural relationships can work." This is a strange one. When my mother first said it to me, my blood ran cold (I've only ever fancied people from other cultures!), while at the same time I was aware of its strangeness (my mother is an immigrant from a family of cultured upper-class German Jews; my father is a member of a working-class Protestant family: when he told his mother my mother was Jewish, she said, "Don't say such a thing!"). As it happens, I don't agree with this statement, but I do think it has a truth in it, in that I don't believe a relationship can work if the two people have nothing in common (studies have shown that opposites do not attract), and in particular if they don't have language in common. Which is to say, I think both partners in a relationship must share fluency in a language. I also think that it's incredibly important for the partners at least to try to know each other's native tongues - maybe things didn't work out with Dr. Higher, but they wouldn't have worked out a lot sooner if I hadn't had some sense of German. That helped me to understand him a little better.

"Remember, it is a job." Not from a parent, but from my advisor. This definitely counts as one of the top most useful pieces of advice I've ever got, although it's also almost totally opaque. In fact, it work so well precisely because it is almost totally opaque. You know how you often wish that things came wrapped in drama or an announcement of their own importance? Well, this actually did. When my advisor took me out for tea after I passed my defence, she said to me, "This is the last thing I'm going to say to you as your advisor: Remember, it is a job." Dun dun DAH. At the time it was so rhetorically effective that I didn't ask for clarification, but I think that's just as well, because it's meant that I have been able to give it many meanings. I think of it at the end of every semester, and now every term, when you have to do all the little draggy stuff like recording grades or marking late papers: these are the parts of my job that are a job, and I have to accept that they're part of it. I think of it when I have colleagues I don't like: they're not my family; it's a job (actually, my advisor told me this is what she meant). I think of it when I have to do committee work, or check my Works Cited for typos, or when I don't get my way about something, or when I'm writing all those boring recommendation letters. Remember, it is a job.

"Either you're in or you're out, but if you're in, you're in." Yeah, can you believe it, my sister said this to me. She said it about someone else, but I nonetheless often hear it ringing in my ears. This is another one that comes up when I have to check the Works Cited for typos, but also when I'm having trouble writing and decide to "give myself a break" by checking e-mail every five minutes. It's actually quite useful.

"They always star Bruno Ganz." You have to say this to yourself in a worldweary voice, which is how my mother first said it to me,

although the tone was for no particular reason. I'm afraid this one offers no larger life lesson; it's just something I remember. I was telling my mother the plot of Knife in the Head, a quite good but also quite odd German film, and in introducing it I said, "It stars Bruno Ganz." This was her reply. What I think she meant was that for a long period it seems as if every German film had Bruno Ganz in it - although what she may have meant was that a certain kind of German film - thoughtful, slow, Important - always seems to star Bruno Ganz (both are true). In any case, even now Bruno Ganz shows up in a surprisingly large number of German films, and whenever I see him I think of this line.

"If a man doesn't know what he wants after three weeks, he knows but he's too scared to tell you." This came from MCLSJB, less than a year ago, but it's proven very handy. It's not just that when I've taken this as a rule of thumb about men it's turned out to be true, but also that it's a good way of separating the sheep from the goats: when I look back I discover that male wafflers I have known have also proven to be less-than-brave or less-than-frank in more important ways, too. But it's also turned out to be a useful tool about myself. Before I would waffle potentially endlessly about difficult decisions, but now I remember this utterance, and after whatever constitutes three weeks in the given circumstances (30 seconds, if I'm deciding on lunch; 3 weeks, if I'm deciding to go home for Christmas), I just ask myself what I really want, then go with the immediate answer. Well done, MCLSJB!

And now I find myself fading away with illness. I need a nap...

Leafing Though

2009-12-03T23:25:00.004Z

Reading is a curious thing. It takes much more time than, say, watching a TV programme. It also offers much less immediacy, since when watching TV you see the characters that in reading you have to make up in your head. It's an isolated and isolating activity.

And yet we do it. You're reading this right now, for example. And if you are, you chose to, rather than doing something like talking to a friend, which would

seem a much more enriching activity. And not only do we do it, but we talk about it, and not only do we talk about it, but sometimes we are interested to hear about it even if we haven't done it. O.M. was telling me last night that she'd been reading Catherine Millet's new book, and even though I haven't read it and she didn't tell me the plot (which I already knew, from reading articles about it), I wanted to know what she thought of it. B. wrote to me from Russia telling me he'd enjoyed Our Man in Havana: I haven't read it, but I quite like Graham Greene and, although I have no plans to read Our Man in the near future, I was interested to hear that someone I liked had read a book by someone I'd liked. In that case, it was partially because I now will make a mental note to read it, but it was also because just generally I like to know if you're enjoying the book you're reading or not.

What is it that makes reading so enjoyable, I wonder? And what is it that makes it for some people, in a world where there are many other options besides reading books, a thing they still do as a matter of course? You get drawn into other worlds, certainly. And you have to do some of the drawing yourself, which I really think is part of the attraction: you envision the characters and the situations, and so you're more interested and invested in them. But at the same time there's the fact that the author is doing a good deal of the work - most people have favourite fictional characters, for example (the man who appears in Markheim, for me, or Henry Tilney, whom my friend K and I decided in college would be the perfect husband, and for whom I've always maintained a residual fondness), which suggests some authors do especially good jobs of creating characters, or at least that character - and the fact that that work is being done, and an experience offered to you, is very soothing. Certainly this passive reception is a large part of the attraction of reading, but so is the active reception. And then there's the thinking. I don't just mean the thinking about larger issues that a novel might raise - I mean even just the simple act of going back over the plot in your mind, thinking about what the characters have done and what you've particularly liked.

Following on from that, as I've said I'm currently reading Tender is the Night. It's certainly depressing, yet...I like it ("I like it; I like it"). Essentially, I like

Fitzgerald's writing very much. I sometimes think that I pay a lot of attention to the way in which literature is written - the use and placement of words and the effect those have on tone or weight - because I'm a writer myself, but really it's probably just something that's happened as I've got older. In any case, Fitzgerald is very good in this way in Tender: he deploys words to effect extraordinarily well. Also, he's a very keen observer of human emotion, and a very good comprehender of it. For example, the main character, Dick Diver, is deeply attracted to the young Rosemary Hoyt, but even as he embarks on an affair with her - or wavers toward doing so - he retains his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman he knows, and that they are deeply and necessarily bound to each other. His desire for Rosemary is fresh, but his love for his wife is deep, and seems (at the stage I've reached, anyway) to outweigh his desire. Yet his desire pulls and haunts him. Fitzgerald clearly comprehends that and how that this might be the case, and not only does he comprehend it, but he portrays the feelings vividly enough that the reader accepts them (understanding them is a different story).

There's a really marvellous portion of a chapter, in which Diver is haunted by a description of an at least sensual encounter Rosemary may have had in a train compartment: he imagines a request to pull down the curtain, eagerly granted, and the question, "Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?", becomes a refrain he can't get out of his head. It comes to him in several different situations, and with several different metaphorical meanings, in the next couple of chapters, and one gradually comes to see the way in which lust - or at least an utterance that inspires lust - can become a kind of warning against itself: "the curtain" gradually, metaphorically, becomes the veil that Diver draws in front of his desire for Rosemary, or his tendency to imagine her in this arousing situation, so the words that indicate arousal themselves become a warning against further arousal. Very well done on Fitzgerald's part.

Yet the book has very little apparent style, or perhaps it might be better to say very little apparent idiosyncratic style. All that Fitzgerald deploys stylistically seems designed first and foremost to give reader clear access to the situation and the characters' experience of it (not that this always works, I hasten to add, and some plot developments seem very odd. There are some bits I don't get at all). And thinking about this in the kitchen tonight while I was making my milk, I thought that perhaps that's the sign of a great prose writer: a great prose writer makes style secondary to the desire to communicate his or her world. Which is not to say the style need not be apparent, or even foregrounded. But the goal is always to make it do service to the communication, so that even overt style is used for a purpose, a purpose of clarity.

In any case, as the woman in the play does not say, You've a way with you, F. I'm sure I like it.

Let Me Be Brief

2009-12-01T14:42:00.003Z

O. and I have a kind of ongoing game or joke in which we identify very short sentences, spoken by the other, that contain whole sad stories: so far O. is the winner, having once uttered the sentence, "I used to have that watch, but it broke." What a story of tragedy that sentence seems to hide! Today at lunch, however, I discovered that exactly the opposite can happen: "I lost my room key," my FTT said, "but then I found it again." What a narrative of joy that sentence contains! First the fear that the key is gone forever, with the attendant irritation at the hassle and fee incurred, then the happy discovery that none of that will be incurred at all, for the key has been found! All that joy in eleven words.

Lord Farrow Never Wore a Bag over His Head

2009-12-01T01:25:00.009Z

When I was in Marks and Spencer today, I suddenly remembered as I was going up the escalator (and staring at a really nice bag [that's it there]. Actually, as I noticed it I was surprised that I noticed it while I was remembering what I was remembering, but then I realised it was a very nice bag, after all) something S. said when I told him about my meeting with Mr. Fallen this summer, and how I had said, "I'm sure they didn't notice," when Mr. Fallen remarked that he'd managed to fool people into believing he knew more than he did. S. said that he believes that people only say that kind of thing because they want you to contradict them: it's a kind of cheap way of getting a compliment.

I didn't think he was correct at the time. Then, I thought it was actually a way of pre-empting other people's similar remarks: if you get in first, they can't hurt you. And I still believe that. But these days I also believe (as I think I've believed before, because I have a vague memory of doing so), that it's a way of getting yourself used to the facts. I think Mr. Fallen's life had shown him he couldn't be that smart or knowledgeable - after all, everyone around him was getting jobs and having success, but he wasn't, so what conclusion could he draw from that? - and he was reminding himself of this truth in order to come to accept it, and thus not be hurt by demonstrations of it. I thought of this because as I was wandering through M&S I was reflecting on the large amount of clothing that I own, and that my salary has enabled me to buy. It enables me to do this because, as a single person, I don't have the expenses of someone with a family, or even with just a partner. And I was reflecting to myself that my future would hold an equally large amount of clothing, because as an undesirable over-the-hill woman I would continue

to be single. And then I thought that S. would say I was saying that to be contradicted, but that I wasn't: I was saying it, as I say it to myself at least once every day, and often say it aloud to other people, because I think it's wise to get used to the truth.

Incidentally, however nice that black velvet bag is, it isn't as nice as this bag, which has the added attribute of wit. So if I don't have to go back and rot away the rest of my life in Otherhome, maybe I'll actually be able to buy this bag, thus spending some of my lavish single cash. If you must be unwanted, at least you can be unwanted and well-accessorised!

My friend L would say we should put that on a pillow.

Let's All Keep Calm

2009-11-30T23:25:00.012Z

From the literally ones of responses that have poured in, it appears that there is concern that people may be defriended. Chillax: no one is going to be defriended.

Today I had my very last set of supervisions for this term. I still have Study Skills supervisions, but no more with my regular students. How irritating it was, then, that my last supervision should turn out to be with my least favourite student of this cohort and my most favourite, simultaneously. My least favourite student is a young man whose abilities as a literary critic are, let us say, in directly inverse proportion to his pomposity. He is very pompous. My favourite student, by contrast, is very quiet, but when he does speak he is always right on the money. My least favourite student is disappointing enough on his own, but having him in a duo with my most favourite student was something like having an inferior diamond on a piece of showroom velvet, then putting a first-water diamond next to it: the first diamond was just bearable when it was alone, but now it's impossible to turn a blind eye to its flaws (although I'm guessing that in that metaphorical (well, similical) situation you wouldn't want to put up your hand repeatedly at the first diamond and say, "Don't speak! Now, go ahead, second diamond" -- although maybe you would. I'm not a gemologist, so what do I know?).

I am sorry to see this term go. I liked pretty much all my students, and my very favourite (from a different cohort) I liked very much. He had a sense of humour, and you could see him actually,

physically struggle with interpreting literature. When he was leaving the final supervision last Friday he gave me a little extra smile, and I was quite flattered, until I stopped and had a look at myself shortly afterward in Boots and realised that all my red lipstick had come off, leaving me with only a bright red lip line, and that my hair was MASSIVE. So I'm guessing the appreciation was merely intellectual. Or perhaps he thought I had deliberately modelled myself on Mrs. Rochester (on the right, there - we were doing Jane Eyre), and he was admiring my themed look.

Incidentally, none of my students in those supervisions recognised Mrs. Rochester as a symbol of potentially terrifying female sexuality and repressed womanhood. This reading has become so commonly accepted in the States that it's now simply understood, not to say banal. So I was very surprised indeed.

In other news, I engaged in snotty one-upmanship with a man on match.com. He contacted me, and I contacted him back. His initial e-mail was widly extrapolatory of my profile, and I wrote back asking him how he'd got these impressions. He responded by saying we should talk on the phone, and I wrote back saying I felt uncomfortable talking on the phone to people I don't know (true), so I would like us to continue to communicate via e-mail for a while (of course I should have cut this all off after his initial e-mail, but, hey, I'm desperate). He then wrote back an e-mail in which he basically flat-out stated I was a weird for not wanting to talk on the phone, insulted the study of Wordsworth (??), told me I was naive, and informed me that I had missed out on something great by refusing to get to know him.

Now, I know it's fruitless to engage with the lunatic, and that there is nothing to be gained from such engagement since the lunatic always think you are the lunatic, but I have been low, and I think I just wanted to feel I was superior to someone. Or to feel that I was in some way worthwhile. Or...who knows. Anyway, I wrote back and corrected his spelling and grammar. Was it petty? Yes. Did I derive any long term satisfaction from it? No. Was it pleasing for three hours? Yes. And that's enough for me.

Boy, I certainly am going to have lots of stories to tell my fifteen cats when I'm old.

And in the final bit of news, I had coffee with Mr. Cielo yesterday (chillax! again. It wasn't a date. It was a hanging out. Although I'll give him credit: he managed to keep a conversation going for one and a half hours with someone with whom he apparently has zero in common). After this coffee (which, as the previous parentheses demonstrates, showed me how little we had in common), in a fit of temporary Idon'tknowwhat (defiance mixed with desperation, I suspect), I invited him to the dinner party I'm throwing on Sunday to honour Pearl Harbour Day (it's my favourite holiday). And he accepted! But everyone else there is a close friend of mine, and they all know each other! Now it will be me, a bunch of close interwoven friends, and Mr. Cielo! To whom I have nothing to say! Argh.

And lastly, BF sent me this poem, saying it made her think of me and this blog. I like it very much, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.

Who Is Now Reading This?

May-be one is now reading this who knows some wrong-doing of my past life,
Or may-be a stranger is reading this who has secretly loved me,
Or may-be one who meets all my grand assumptions and egotisms with derision,
Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.

As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck! O self-convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it;)
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease.

—Walt Whitman

The Okay Looking and Darned

2009-11-25T23:18:00.009Z

When I heat my milk to "very hot," if I put my nose very close to the milk and inhale, I can smell the smell I remember from when my father used to buy us powdered milk while my parents were separated. Before he mixed in the water, the granules out of the packet smelled the same way. I suppose in the heating process the milkness separates from the water, so I am smelling the beginning of the powdering process, perhaps.

You will notice that I am back to making my own hot drinks.

I'm currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I remember when I first started going out with Irishboyfriend I read The Beautiful and Damned, and I became deeply depressed. In fact, I think The Beautiful and Damned may be the most depressing book I've ever read. Uch, I wandered around gloomy for at least a week. Fitzgerald is interesting: clearly, he was able to see the desperation and hollowness at the root of the privileged Jazz Age lifestyle, yet he wasn't able to stop living that lifestyle until circumstances forced him to. This ability to see clearly in others the very foolishnesses that you yourself are enacting seems to be a more common life paradox than I supposed, though.

In any case, Tender is the Night is also depressing. Thanks, F! I don't remember The Great Gatsby as a laugh riot, but I also don't remember it as all that lowering: nonetheless, it would seem that I ought to stay away from Fitzgerald novels, because I am now depressed. Although obviously we can't blame TitN for this with certainty (also, the short stories are not at all depressing).

Certainly, circumstances round my way are a bit gloomifying lately. For one thing, talk about tango seems to be taking a larger and larger role. Not tango itself: just talk about it. This is sad, because I like talking about tango to some degree, but now things have got to the stage where anytime it's mentioned I feel myself tensing up and all the joy leaking from my heart. It reminds me of that scene in Remington Steele where Laura and Mr. Steele go to Mexico, and every band that comes by at dinner plays "Guantanamera." "Guantanamera" is an enjoyable song, but you don't want to listen to it at dinner every night, especially repeatedly: to make the simile a bit more apt, Carlos Gardel is a fine singer and his tango songs are moving, but if he simply burst into song every time I sat across from him at dinner (which would admittedly be pretty extraordinary, because he's dead), I would soon choose not to sit with him, and I would grow to dislike his songs greatly.

Secondly, one of my friends is engaged in behaviour I dislike. Even worse, one of my friends is engaged in behaviour I deeply dislike. Usually I try to balance behaviours I dislike against my overall liking for the person, and I can often make space for the disliked behaviour in the larger whole. In this first case, that's becoming increasingly difficult, and in the second case, it's not possible: that behaviour is not just morally unpleasant to me personally but is also being performed in the face of plain evidence that my friend would not like it if someone were doing the same in return. That is, it is not just morally unpleasant (a debatable label, since the only morals that count here are those of the participants) but also illogical and, well, stupid. Stupid in that it reveals my friend to be considerably less reflective and even just sensible than I had thought. So people are being hurt (I know), people are behaving badly (I think), people are not being respected (I believe), and people are behaving ass-ishly (I must admit). Yet I love my friend, and to cease to hang out would cause my friend puzzled pain. Yet I don't feel right making some grand pronouncement, because the disliked behaviour has already been going on for some time.

That one causes me to heave a heavy sigh.

Then, I had a saddening therapy session today. I dislike therapy sessions in which I want to cry, because I consider it shaming to cry in therapy: I don't like to cry in front of other people in the first place, plus I'm there to do rational work on myself, plus my problems are essentially inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and I'm not going to compound the self-indulgence of going to therapy by self-indulgently crying. So the session was upsetting because I nearly cried. But also, of course, it was sufficiently upsetting that I nearly cried: it's hardly heartening to say to someone aloud that all the evidence suggests that you'll never find a partner, then enumerate the evidence (can you enumerate evidence? or is it evidences?) that suggests that, then admit that you're depressed because no one cares for you specially, then admit in the end (even if you've known it before, and the therapist has, too) that you have no self-confidence and many reasons to believe you're unpartnerable (although I think the stuff after "and" should come under the above enumerated evidence[s]).

I think I'm just going to have to accept that when I look back on my life I will see here a long period in which I was deeply unhappy, with that unhappiness very occasionally interspersed with happiness. And I think I'm also just going to have to accept now that I am now deeply unhappy, and have been deeply unhappy for two or three years. I can't fix this or alleviate it, so I think I'm just going to have to think of it as something I'll endure and then get past. The therapist today suggested that we take a moment "to respect that unhappiness," which if you don't pay attention sounds like one of those crawly New Age things certain therapists say, but if you do pay attention perhaps does something important: it seems to me that it might suggest that that unhappiness is a temporary condition, & hence one that has to be acknowledged rather than accepted.

I also think, as I have had occasion to think before, that perhaps I should just stop being friends with many of my friends. It would certainly make my life easier. I think (as I have had occasion to think before) that I should try to locate some people of my own age and be friends with them. But the difficulty there is that everyone sometimes acts irritatingly, so how am I to say that my new, more age-appropriate friends would not eventually act as upsettingly as my current friends?

Pruderie Anglaise

2009-11-24T23:05:00.005Z

One day last week I was discussing with some people at the lunch table the fact that I'd been trying to persuade B. to stay. One of the people was a friend of a friend, Mr. LaMosca. He knows me, but he doesn't know me very well (and I don't like him much, although he may not know that). He said to me, "Vespertina, why don't you share your love with B, if you know what I mean?"

Now, here we have what I find a strange situation. What I did, I believe, was say nothing, or say something like, "I'm not going to do that." What I wanted to do was say, "You're revolting." What I now think I should have said, and wish I had said, was, "How dare you? You scarcely know me. How dare you make such a grotesquely inappropriate remark to me!"

But the second thing I felt was a kind of amazement at Mr. LaMosca's remark. When did it become all right for us to make remarks

about quite intimate matters in a casual public way? I'm going to bet that my father didn't tell any of his women friends that he had a thing for seeing two women together (even if he did). I bet my mother never had a friend say at lunch, "If I don't get laid soon I'm going to be really depressed," as if she were saying, "If they don't serve croutons with the salad again soon I'm going to be really depressed," as a friend did at my lunch table the other day. I don't want you to say those things in front of me, because I don't want to know those things about you. My sex life is my business, not because sex is bad, but because that life is MINE, not yours. If I want to have sex with my friend to entice him to stay (which, although I'm not entirely sure, I believe qualifies as a low-level form of prostitution), that too is my business. If I talk about sex on this blog, and about my sex life, it's because when I write I conceive of this as having no audience, or at least an audience that will never meet me, and so these are in a way private utterances (yes, this is how I think while I write, although when I'm not writing I know that's not the case).

It seems to me that in some curious way we've lost a sense of perspective, or of awareness, so that the ability to recognise situations in which it's inappropriate to say something has eroded, as has the sense of whom it's inappropriate to say them to.

Or perhaps it's just that these days I hang out with very young people, and so the sense of what should be said, and when, has yet to be worked out?

For me, personally, part of my difficulty in these situations is that I dislike people who attempt to shock or browbeat you with sex: those who make sexual remarks because they want to see you be shocked. I dislike that kind of power, and I dislike giving that kind of value to adolescent idiocy (although in the case of Mr. LaMosca's remark, I think that actually bordered on sexual harrassment). So I sit there and listen to it without flinching, even though I'd like to flinch. And also, as I've said before on this blog, I'm not a prude, and I don't want to be thought one. And I want to be someone people feel they can be honest with, or talk to if they need to, and one of the things people are shyest about talking about is sex. But I guess maybe this is a place where I should take a stand, if this distresses me so much: am I not allowed to say, "I don't want you to talk about this in front of me" or, "I find that offensive/inappropriate"? I've already started saying, "This is not a subject to discuss at the lunch/dinner table," about more general private discussions. Of course, that's taken enormous effort of will on my part, but I guess having exerted that will in one area, I can exert it in another.

I left that party early. I told everyone I had a headache, but the truth is that I left because I felt fat, and because I didn't have a partner. I felt miserable without someone, and when I looked around at all the people who weren't there with someone and who didn't seem to mind, I felt ashamed and a failure for being miserable. It thus seemed better not to be there, so I left, and now I'm glad I did. I missed out not just on having my own multifarious inadequacies thrust in my face, but on being shocked. And no doubt I would have had my sense of being a failure increased when no one else present appeared to be shocked at what shocked me.

Tonight I left the milonga early because my hip muscle still hurts, and I want to rest it. Who knows what shenanigans I thus missed there?

My Waterloo

2009-11-23T21:00:00.003Z

This afternoon I was walking down the shiny wet street when I was hailed by a voice, and looking up, discovered a fracquaintance. This is one of my favourite things that happens in

WhereIlive: I love meeting people I know by chance on the street or in the shops. I don't know if I would love this if it occurred elsewhere (the couple of times it happened in Otherhome it was nice to see the person, but I didn't have the same feeling of warmth about the meeting itself), but here it somehow gives me a feeling of belonging, of being so much a part of the community here that I meet people I know anywhere I go.

In fact, I was on the street coming from a seminar at which we had been discussing a book by my friend J. J. is the sort of scholar who has his books talked about as the topic of whole seminars (in other words, he is a famous scholar), and I wanted to go because I wanted to see what they would make of him. As it happens, they made a good deal more of him than I, because I didn't get a chance to read the extract, and I haven't read the book for years. So I must read it again soon. In addition, though, I found the seminar interesting because as part of it we got into a short discussion/disagreement about whether "history writes literature," and I've been thinking about this topic ever since.

This disagreement started because one of the men at the seminar objected to his sense that J. believes that history writes literature; he said, "History does not write literature." Now, obviously this is a tough statement to respond to truthfully without knowing what he means by "history," and in my usual articulate way I asked him what he did mean: "Do you mean, things that happen to people?" Nice. What I meant, and eventually half-managed to say, was, "Do you mean historical events?" - although what I also meant and mean is, Day to Day Events and Alterations that Arise from Historical Events. As far as I could determine (for the conversation became rather crowded at that point), Yes, he did mean that. So what he meant was, Historical events don't write literature.

In which case, I must say, I believe that history does write literature.

We are our backgrounds, surely? We are other things besides them, but we must ineluctably be where we came from and what surrounds us. I confess here that I just can't imagine how anyone could argue against this now, how the notion of a person as an untouched island can exist. And if we are our backgrounds and surrounds, then it follows logically that what we produce is, too. After all, as a product of the self, what we produce has the same influences as the self that produced it. While I wouldn't argue that literature is simply a flat reflection of history, I would argue that history influences what is written - in terms of subject matter, but less obviously, and I would argue more frequently, in terms of how it's written and how subjects are approached. Indeed, one can validly argue that without the French Revolution Lyrical Ballads would never have been written, not just because the Revolution inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge, or because it opened up society to them in ways that made plain utterance the speech of the common man interesting, but because it forced writers to focus on England, since they couldn't GET to Europe, and the notion of examining the poor of England, rather than some great European sight or theme, arose (or was suggested, or was implanted).

Of course literature also transcends history. We may be our backgrounds and our surrounds, but we're not just our backgrounds and our surrounds. But of course, as I pointed out in the only decent observation I got out in the whole seminar, that's the contradiction of literature: Literature is trascendent, and that's why we study it; but literature is not transcendent, and that's why we study it.

Le Nez, La Nariz, Nasus, Die Nase

2009-11-18T23:24:00.009Z

I am reading a little book entitled Modern Delights, in which various famous people take a very short space to dwell upon one thing that delights them, and the reason why. This got me thinking about what I would put in such a book, leaving aside all the things the contributors already put in. Interestingly, no one selected as their delight Petty Hatreds, in my opinion one of the most delicious delights life has to offer ("Peas? God, I despise peas!" "Look at that haircut! What a stupid haircut!" - these little stabs of rage let you know you're alive and vivid). Nor did anyone select Talking About People You Know When They're Not Around, another joy of minor but complete exquisiteness (a subdivision of this, Talking with Someone You Like About Someone Both of You Don't Like, is perhaps even a little more pleasurable). I cannot select Music, because that goes beyond delight, and I was going to select The Smell of Cut Grass, but Tim Rice beat me to it. Plus, I own a candle that smells like cut grass, and once something gets into the state where it can be imitated and thus enjoyed separate from its self, it would seem to be unavailable as a source of enjoyment in its own right. So after careful thought I decided to enlarge upon the I've Got a Candle That Smells Like Cut Grass strand, and name my delight as: Smelling.

Right, don't get me wrong. Not the way I smell, but the act of smelling. And let's be clear: when I say "smelling" I mean not just generally being hit by the smells of the world, but rather really smelling stuff, deeply and fully. The best way to do this is not to smell actively (although you can do that), but rather to let the scent seep into you slowly, while you attempt to clear your mind of anything else.

Scent is underrated as one of life's delights. We know we like to see and touch (actually, another one of my delights could be Touching Stuff You're Not Supposed to Touch); we know we like to taste; and we're pretty sure we like to hear. But rare indeed is the person who admits to being conscious of scent, or who gives it primacy. Big mistake. Scent is, I believe, the only sensuous experience you can have that isn't mediated by thought or conscious neural byways, and it has the most plangency of any such experience. And smelling deeply gives you maximum pleasure in this regard.

Let's take the example of spring sunlight. Spring sunlight has a definite smell, and it's one of the happiest smells in the world: it smells not yellow, or even clear, but a little bit hot. I don't mean it IS hot - if I meant that, I'd say it - but it smells like heat. Next time you go out into spring sunlight, give a big deep sniff. It smells different from winter sunlight, or from late summer sunlight (which offers its own olfactory pleasure): it has a little hint of hot lying underneath it.

Most smells have layers, and those layers are very interesting if you don't let them go past but rather try to grab and describe them. The clothes of S.A., for example, smell like an old (but not antique!) dry wooden wardrobe (incidentally, he does not keep his clothes in an old dry wooden wardrobe). For a long time I thought that was just his scent, but then I discovered that B's clothes smell exactly the same way. So maybe it's some male Russian thing, although since they don't eat the same things, and S.A. doesn't even live in Russia anymore, I'm not sure that can be true. At the milonga on Tuesday I put my face partially in O's hair while I led her, and although her hair smelt of coconut (as she confirmed afterward), at that level of closeness the coconut divided itself into several sub-scents: a slight sense of oil or cream, a vague sweetness, and a slight dark nuttiness that I also associate with the smell of coffee (one of my top favourite smells). Books smell a number of distinct ways: some high and acidic, some like inexpensive paper, some glossy and heavy. I wouldn't know any of this if I didn't linger over those scents, at least in my mind, and that lingering is a source of enormous delight.

I would say I think every scent can be interesting and even pleasurable, if you linger over it the right way, but then I remember the smell of feet, and I am forced to admit that such is not the case.

Interestingly but unsurprisingly to those who know me and him, this disquisition leads me to think of my FTT, who perhaps smells better than any person or thing I have ever smelt. He smells so good that the only way to describe it is to say he smells so good that the only way to describe it is to say he smells so good. In fact, the only real way to describe it might be just to say he smells so. But as this suggests, the pleasure of this smell is not increased by anatomisation: its ideal experience is as pure sense; you just open your nostrils, blank your brain, and breathe in. Que onda, indeed!

But perhaps this is true of all delights: they are worthy of examination, dissection, and precise description, but ultimately the primary delight of delight is just revelling in it. So I say, Bring on the scents!

Growth

2009-11-18T15:46:00.004Z

So. My friend B. has been visiting, staying with me for a week. When he first wrote and asked if he could stay in my room, I was hesitant: we knew each other last year, but I wouldn't say we were close, and in fact we were different in ways that seemed to indicate deep incompatibility. But when someone writes to you and says they've always thought of you as a friend; you've suggested that they could come visit; now they want to come visit and they want to stay with you - you can't really say no, can you? So I said yes, and he arrived.

And, in fact, it isn't bad. It turns out you don't really know a person until they come live in your room. This makes sense, if you think about it and interpret it literally (by which I mean, don't substitute "house" for "room"). You and the other person are in a small space, and even if you're only both there for a couple of hours before you go to bed, that's still the time of day when you're unwinding and thinking most ramblingly. Plus, you see somebody brushing their teeth, and that's pretty intimate (I used to have a friend in college who couldn't stand people brushing their teeth outside the bathroom: for him, you brushed your teeth in private and in a designated area). So one way and another, just by virtue of being around, B and I have managed to discuss what makes someone smart, feminism, finding love, the personalities of some of our friends, our families, our siblings, how he feels about his life, and the plusses and minuses of capitalism. And although nothing untoward has occurred (yes, back down, hopers! This was suggested to me as a solution to my problems as early as February [which seems years ago], but I don't think either of us is interested), I can see now how those "last man on earth/arranged marriage with a semi-stranger" scenarios could work out. Because if the person is always around, and if they're reasonably pleasant and thoughtful (good heavens, he volunteered to make me, and then made me, a cup of tea!), they do grow on you. Purely by virtue of being constantly thrown in the way of someone not totally anathemic, you become attached - and by being exposed to that person you discover they have opinions and thoughts of a type you'd never have expected, and these pleasant discoveries increase your liking of them.

With the result, in this case, that now that B has gone off to a conference for a couple of days I find myself rather missing him - or at least finding it odd that he's not around. And also find myself thinking that my life will be fractionally the poorer when he leaves for good on Sunday. Which I certainly did not think when he left for what was supposed to be forever this July.

Because It Is Painful, and Because It Is My Hip

2009-11-16T20:09:00.007Z

I have pain in my right hip. I've always been very concerned about my knees and hips, because one of the long-term difficulties of a lot of ballet dancers is hip and knee pain. I haven't done enough ballet to have earned that pain, but I've always been worried that I'd wind up with it by freak -- largely I'm worried because I'd be devastated if I couldn't use my legs easily, and this worry makes me keep an eye out in this area. However, when I took ballet in college I couldn't pass my leg from arabesque to a la seconde

without a quick sharp pain in the thigh and hip, and when I asked my teacher she checked and told me I had a muscle that didn't flip over when I circled my leg (although my a la seconde was certainly not as high as the one pictured here). I had no reason to doubt her, and I think it's probably this muscle (which I now see is called my tensor fasciae latae - at least, that's the one that hurts) that's getting irritated, and probably because I don't stretch it as much as I used to. So tonight at the gym I took care to stretch on the floor afterward, which had the double benefit of loosening my thigh (as it were) and feeling really goooood.

Earlier today I had PracCrit supervisions. I've now managed to cluster all my PracCrit supervisions into a single morning and early afternoon, which nicely leaves the afternoon free for other things (in this case, writing supervisions). Even more pleasurable today was the fact that we again did one of my favourite poems (which makes it sound as if these poems just happen to come up. What I mean is, I chose one of my favourite poems), a haunting brief piece, part of Black Riders and Other Lines, by Stephen Crane:

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

Of course, I've always liked the last three lines of this poem most. I interpret them as a kind of metaphor for the revelling in sorrow that people often do. It's curious to me that we seem to like lingering over emotional pain more than emotional pleasure, but it seems we do, and those lines capture that: I am eating my own heart, yes, but I like it precisely because it causes me pain and because it is mine to eat - because it is my right. There's also a relish in self-destruction there - a kind of auto-masochism - that I find both familiar and fascinating.

The smalls liked the poem too (Hurrah!). But they came up with all sorts of other interesting observations. Probably my favourite was that the description of the way the creature holds his heart makes it vividly physical, so that there's a visceral sense of the repulsiveness of the act (I had felt this repulsion, but never thought about what in the text produced it), so that the heart is simultaneously an object and a symbol (this simultaneity is quite hard to produce in your head, and is thus quite fascinating). But I also liked one student's point that the two "bitter"s, separated by the dash, give a sense of two divided halves meeting each other, thus reflecting (or suggesting) that the meeting between the speaker and the creature is a similar such meeting, and another student's observation that whereas the instinctive reading encourages us to give the creature an ugly (in fact, bitter) tone, it is possible to read it as simply thoughtful or accepting, reflecting or simply commenting, rather than relishing.

Way to go, students!

Yo Soy La Milonga Longa

2009-11-15T02:55:00.007Z

Tonight was the autumn all-night milonga, much anticipated and eagerly attended. And indeed it was very good, although this seems to be one of those nights when I managed to alienate or escape the attention of every man I know, bar one. I did see my VTTT, and also OSF, but neither one danced with me. Indeed, only once was I danced with by someone who wasn't already my friend - although to be fair I came home early because my feet are in agony, so who knows what might have happened? As it was, though, it's one of those nights where if you wanted to you could believe that you'd done some unknown thing to make everyone mad at you.

I don't believe that, though, and it isn't what I want to blog about. What I want to blog about is my FTT. I haven't mentioned him for a very long time, and you might have thought he'd left. But no! He's still very much around, and in fact he plays a larger role in my life than he ever did. Just not as my FTT. But he still dances tango, and he sometimes still dances it with me. And he danced it with me tonight, and while he was doing so I realised that I love dancing with my FTT more than anyone else I dance with.

I think my VTTT is the best tango teacher in the world. I'll have other tango teachers, I know, and they'll probably teach me all sorts of cool and interesting things, and because I'm more advanced I'll probably learn more with them. But no tango teacher, I'm willing to say now, will ever be as good in my eyes as my VTTT. He was exactly right for me. And in just the same way, I don't believe I'll ever enjoy dancing with anyone else as much as I enjoy dancing with my FTT. He takes you in his arms and it's like...it's like trust made into action. He smells just right, and the way he holds you is gentle, but simultaneously certain: you feel that he knows everything about how to do what you're about to do together, and that he'll make sure you do it smoothly (of course, this is true. I see him dancing with other women, and I can see how he's reading them to learn how to compensate for them, but to compensate in such a way that they never know he's compensating). And his steps are so small, and even when they're not small they're intricate and clever, so when you follow them, if you're going to follow them as well as you want to, you have to be him a little bit. It sounds mad, I know, but it's sort of like dancing with a parent's whisper, or with the hand they stroked you with when you were little and sick, and at the same time it's like having an intensely private experience - not sex, but a private experience - in public.

Now another thing. The dress I wore tonight comes up to my middle back, and when we were dancing he put his hand on the portion of my back not covered by my dress. Of course he put it on my lower back as well, and for the most part, but just for a few seconds he put it on my bare upper back. He didn't mean it intimately, and I didn't take it intimately: it was where he had to put his hand to guide me, and it was where he happened to put his hand. But simply as a physical experience rather than a gesture with intention behind it, and indeed in the very casualness of its assumption of necessity and acceptance, it was the most intimate physical gesture I've experienced in months. And it felt so nice.