Forsythia

When I was in London last week, the front gardens of the houses near my hotel were sprouting forsythia.  This was the first time I've seen forsythia this year, and I was very happy to encounter it.  Forsythia is, weirdly, my favorite flower.  I think it's because it's the very first sign of spring, so it often appears when everything around it is still wintry, and it's so determinedly not wintry.  There's no wishy-washy forsythia, or pastel yellow forsythia:  it's always a bright, announcing yellow.  For this reason, it always says "happy" to me.  This was especially true in London, because the weather was largely cloudy and wet.  You really haven't appreciated the full marvellousness of forsythia until you've come upon a lone bush of it in someone's otherwise green or brown garden on an overcast day.  It's a sight to lift the spirit and fill it with confidence of and for the future. 

In addition to being in London (which in the end was not very pleasant, because I was in large part laying to rest some difficult personal stuff), I went up to Cambridge to select a room. Wolfson College turns out to be easy walking distance from the center of the town, and although it seemed a little cut off from the rest of the university, I can't really make any judgments based on Easter vacation.  I did manage to find a room, but only after quite a bit of irritation.  First of all, there is a certain amount of vagueness in advertising:  "double room" can mean "room with a double bed," but it can also mean "room with two single beds." In fact, that's what it mostly means.  All the rooms I saw, with one exception, had either two single beds or one single bed.  And those single beds are not big.  We're talking perhaps 2/3 the size of a usual single bed -- these are what the English call "twin" beds, because they go with another, equally narrow, bed, and when twinned the two make a decent double bed.  On its own, however, each makes a decent

 jail cell cot.  So I saw a number of rooms with beds like this:

and a number of rooms with two separate twin beds.  The kindly

porter said to me, "I tell married couples they can tie the legs of the beds together and turn the mattresses sideways, and then they have a double bed."  But I'm not paying £200 a week to lash my bedlegs together and sleep with an uncomfortable ridge across my stomach!  But the difficulty was, all the twin or two bed rooms had bathrooms in various stages of goodness, from the modest but beshelved:

to the absolutely luscious:

The one (that's right, one) room that did have a real double bed had a terrible bathroom.  They call it a "wet room," which means there's a water-absorbing floor and, although an oblique shower cubicle, no shower curtain:  the whole room is designed to get and be wet (hence the name).  I hated this bathroom:

I don't think it has a medicine cabinet, and it certainly doesn't have any shelves on which I can put my make-up, or even my toothbrush.  Plus, as my mother once said of me, I am a woman who likes her baths.  But then the bedroom looked like this (sorry, I can't figure out how to right the one of the bed):

And that was pretty hard to resist (I was partially seduced by the peach sheets).  So I signed up for this room.  I can buy a cabinet in which to put my make-up, and I think I can string up a makeshift shower curtain, so the whole "wet room" aspect is circumvented.  I even took it for the whole year, although if a better option shows up I'll try to switch.

But that leads to the second irritation.  It turns out that people book their rooms months or apparently even years in advance.  So when I came in there were very few rooms left.  I was lucky this one was available (and it's on the ground floor, so people could peer in, AND it has a crappy bathroom).  I really think this information should be included in the instructions for applicants my home university gives out:  "Please be aware that accommodation is hard to get in college, and even if you are only applying for this fellowship you should book a room NOW." On the other hand, I now have a room with a potentially supercomfy double bed, with some seriously welcoming sheets.  I can just see myself waking up there in the morning, sun streaming in and someone I love beside me, so I can snuggle up to him in the pouring light. Obviously this presupposes some sun and no one peeking into my room despite the open curtains, but I have been in Cambridge on sunny days, and I bet Wolfson students and staff aren't perverts, so there is hope!

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I am tired of being unhappy.  To the extent that it's possible for anyone to deserve anything abstract, I deserve better than this.

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News for the Weekend

So today at long last I found out that I did get the Cambridge Fellowship.  Sweet! as they say here. I will be spending a full academic year at Wolfson College, Cambridge, (that's it on the left) with no teaching duties, or indeed duties of any kind.

Unfortunately, finding this out didn't really make me feel better for longer than about 15 minutes.  I think this is, first of all, because it took so long.  I was afraid that by the time I heard I would be so keyed up that hearing would cause only relief, or at least more relief than happiness, and it seems I was correct. Mostly, I just feel relieved that now I don't have to feel anxious anymore.

Also, I think it simply doesn't yet seem real.  After all, I won't be leaving for five months.  To be fair, though, February's gone by in a flash, so perhaps the next months will go equally quickly. And my semester is nearly over - or at least there are only two weeks until spring break, and only another six after that.  I think that could go quickly.  What's more, I suspect that once I start organizing things, making plans, and generally getting ready to exit my home and my country for a full calendar year, the fact of my going will come to seem much more real and exciting.

But, finally, I have to admit that I'm in part not happy because until this moment I have been able to imagine that getting the fellowship, and announcing it, would fix everything in my life:  that I would make it known, and certain circumstances would come under instant review and positive alteration.  Now that I have the fellowship, however, I have to acknowledge that that won't happen, that the best that can happen is that I will make it known in certain circles, and destabilization may occur, causing things to work out for me in the long run.  And compared to instant change, possible incremental change is depressing -- even definite incremental change would be depressing.

I never can decide whether or not I'd be better off if I thought more positively of myself and my circumstances.  If I just said, "You know what?  This is all going to work out for me in the long run!  I can sort this out the way I want, no problem," would I be better off?  I think that if I do that and it doesn't work out, I will feel worse than if I hadn't had positive beliefs in the first place.  On the other hand, maybe if you believe positively you make positive things happen:  send positive energy out into the universe, carry all before you with your confidence, are more likely to sway people and be powerful because you yourself believe in yourself...whatever.  I suppose the only way to determine which is true would be to change my lifelong habit of refusing to think confidently and positively, then see if that works.  But I'm not sure I'm capable of effecting such a wholesale change all in one fell swoop.

Anyway, I'm going to Cambridge!  And no matter what that makes happen or doesn't make happen, it means I will have a year filled with occurrences and circumstances I can't even imagine now.  And that in itself is positive and exciting.

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Porous

Still no news on Cambridge.  Only one more day to go before I can call and harass someone.

Tonight I went to my first ballet class in nearly two months.  Not surprisingly, I was stiff and out of shape.  More surprisingly, I just couldn't concentrate.  I waited a long time to go back because I didn't want to be too sad to get anything out of it, but it turns out I am still too sad to get anything out of it.  I kept thinking about the thing that's been upsetting me, and that would make me forget the combinations, which is both deadly and the reverse of what's supposed to happen. Ideally, class should force you to focus on class -- if you want to do it well, you need to concentrate on what you're doing -- and that pushes everything else from your mind.  For me, everything else was pushing class from my mind.

In order to try to clear my passageways, I decided to come home and do a little writing.  And because I wanted to write about something that would move me away from everything I've been thinking about, I decided to write about a really random topic that just popped into my head:  skin.

I was watching the Oscars last night, and I admired Anne 

Hathaway's skin when she was on the red carpet (that was a beautiful dress, too, by the way).  Then this afternoon my Divine Comedy DVD arrived and, watching it, I noticed that Neil Hannon has very thin skin under his eyes:  as thin as the skin one usually sees on old men. Given this background, I guess skin isn't that random. And, oddly enough, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about it.  

At some point, something seems to happen to skin.  I'm not sure when, but some time in the late twenties the pores on some facial skins get bigger.  This certainly happened on my skin. But apparently it doesn't happen to everyone.  When I was watching the DVD today I was struck by how very much Neil Hannon's skin seemed to have had just the opposite happen:  it's as if his skin turned to paper.  I've heard people described as having "parchment skin" before, but I didn't really know what that meant until  I saw him on the DVD.  Not that his skin looks ugly, or old.  It simply looked smooth -- and under the eyes it looked fragile, tender.  Curious.   His pores, it would seem, did not get bigger, since this smooth look would seem only to be possible with small pores.  And men have thicker skin than women (this is a physical fact, not just a figure of speech), but Neil Hannon's skin looked very thin indeed.

Then, too, the aging of skin is a mystery.  Smoking ruins it for sure, and so does going in the sun, but aside from those things it just seems to be the luck of the draw.  My family has all had great skin -- we've all managed to look about ten years younger than we really are (well, I'd say I look about eight years younger than I am).  And nothing seems to have caused problems with that.  My father was a heavy smoker until he was 30; my mother certainly spent a great deal of time in the sun as a child; I never go in the sun, don't smoke, and push fluids, but I wouldn't say I look any younger than they looked at my age.  Curious.

Then I think about the kind of skin I like.  I've always preferred pale skin, and in part I've stayed out of the sun just because I think I look better pale.  Last summer my friend Leslie said to me, "Whenever I read about women in novels who have milky-white skin, I think of you."  I would say that ranks in the top five of things people have said to me (right up there with the time I went out to a concert with my friend Stephen, all dressed up, and as we were walking home at the end of the evening he said, "Every other woman there had something wrong with her:  her shoes were wrong, or her lipstick didn't quite work.  But you, you looked perfect."  Beat THAT!  And he didn't even want to sleep with me).  But I've always preferred it for other people, too.  As my list of Things I Like, below, makes plain, pale men are for me.  Maybe I'm instinctively attracted to good health, and pale skin is a sign of that?  Funnily enough, my former husband tended toward the olive, and I left him.  And my last boyfriend was also darker-skinned -- and what's more, preferred me with a tan (although it came from a bottle) -- and I broke up with him, too.  So perhaps I do have some kind of tendency to become less attached to the less pale.

And on that nonsensical note, I exit.

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Patience is bitter, but its fruits are sweet.

...or so says Rousseau.  

As of 16 minutes from now, there will only be three more days before I can call up and ask about the fellowship.  On the one hand, I'm looking forward to that:  I'm justifiably irritated that my department wants my course descriptions for next fall, my bookstore wants my book order for next fall, but I have no idea whether or not I'm going to be here next fall. Plus, knowing that I had the fellowship would make it easier to live here in the near future -- I could move more easily through my days if I knew they were numbered.  On the other hand, lately I've been realizing that I just believe I'm going to get this fellowship, but I could in fact not be selected.  It has happened that the first-ranked person has been passed over.  So maybe waiting to hear is not so bad.  Of course, I won't know that until I hear.

Anyway, I decided to while away some of the remaining time by writing a post about New Order.  I've been listening to some of their old stuff lately, and it reminded me how affecting music can be.  I once tried to explain to my best friend an epiphany I'd had while listening to a Cure song, and she said, "You just get so much more out of music than I do."  I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly true that I get an enormous amount out of it. Truth be told, I think it has a greater effect on me even than literature, which I've made my career.  And this effect is most clearly displayed by New Order.

I didn't know who New Order were until I lived with my friend Jennifer for a year. 

I scarcely knew Jennifer before I moved in with her, so I didn't know that she had what was, for America in 1986, very unusual taste in music.  Jennifer's very favorite band was Joy Division.  She's the only person I've ever met who actually had a crush on Ian Curtis (that's him on the right.  I myself have always thought that Ian Curtis is one of the most nondescript people I've ever seen.  He's not unattractive, but he's not attractive, and to me he just looks like thousands of other ordinary English boys).  Of 

course, by this time Ian Curtis was dead, and Joy Division had become New Order...and Jennifer had all their albums (I think at the time that meant four).  The first thing she ever played me was "Temptation," off the Temptation ep.  

Now, I had already heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on my own, and I thought of it then what I think of it now:  that it was a fine song, but nothing to drool over.  Since I'd moved in with Jennifer she'd played me other Joy Division, and I certainly thought "She's Lost Control" was very good (although not as fantastic as I now think it is).  But Joy Division did not prepare me for New Order.  Ian Curtis has a very unusual voice for a singer of popular music, I know.  But "unusual" does not mean "plangent," and I found and find his monotone a little dull after the first couple of lines.  But Bernard Sumner!  I once read an interview with Peter Hook in which he described talking to 

his mother after Ian Curtis hanged himself and the band decided to continue on under a new name.  She said to him, "What will you do?"  And he said, "Bernard Dicken will be the singer."  To which she apparently replied, "But Bernard Dicken can't sing!"  If you listen to "Temptation," there's no arguing with that, and if you listen to later stuff you can see that, although he got a lot better, he never became what you'd call a singer.  Not that Ian Curtis was what you'd call a singer, either - but the two are totally different.  At least up until Technique Sumner sounded to me as if he was pitching his voice riskily high:  he always seemed to be singing slightly above his natural range, and cracking could be a mere hairsbreadth away.  The result of this, for some reason, was an undertone of anguish for me so emotionally raw that it grabbed on to my own raw emotion.  And Peter Hook's bass imitates and enhances that sense of anguish.  He plays so high up on the neck that it's actually slightly slightly painful to hear.  The combination of the two creates a tightly suppressed pressure in my stomach - which is where I feel music.

But "Temptation" has neither Sumner singing like that nor Hook playing like that, so that can't be the reason why I was entranced by the band from the first.  In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I think I paid attention to the song because the opening line is, "Oh, you've got green eyes," and I have green eyes.  But I suspect that what hooked me was that four-on-the-floor beat.  There's no mistaking "Temptation" for anything other than dance music, and the best kind of dance music:  the kind that forces your body to move whether or not your mind wants it to.  And if you listen to the lyrics of "Temptation" your mind will not want to dance.  This is a song in which a man seems to be mourning the human lot -- "Bolts from above hit the people down below;/People in this world really have nowhere to go./Oh, it's the last time, oh, it's the last time."  Even if this isn't an expression of sorrow, it's an utterance puzzling enough that you want to stop and think about it for a bit (the last time for or of what?).  But that utterance is set to a driving back beat that just, literally, moves you.  This construction is repeated in numberless New Order songs:  "Face-up" (in which Sumner screams, "Your  hair was long; your eyes was blue:/Guess what I'm gonna do to you?/Oh, how I cannot bear the thought of you!" over a poundingly complex drum line), "Perfect Kiss" (with its strange lyric about, apparently, suicide and guilt), "Love Vigilantes" (which Jennifer and I loved one summer, and played in the car whenever we drove anywhere)....  In fact, I would say it's their trademark (well, that and Hook's bass).

I think, honestly, that it's this combination that makes New Order affect me so strongly.  My body dances with happiness while my mind listens to those terrible sorrowful lyrics sung in that anguished voice, and my emotions are made miserable.  The result is a strange kind of catharsis -- I might even say a perfect catharsis, because my body performs a catharsis of happiness while my emotions are worked up to a pitch of intensely felt sorrow that is also released through the dancing.  "Temptation" was the first example of this, and it still remains the best and fullest.  There's a point close to the end of the song where Sumner sings:

Bolts from above hurt the people down below;

People in this world we have no place to go.

Bolts from above hurt the people down below;

People in this world we have no place to go.

And then, with his voice rising as if what he had to say was now intensely urgent,

Bolts from above hurt the people down below;

People in this world we have no place to go.

Oh, it's the last time; oh, it's the last time; 

Oh, it's the last time; oh, it's the last time; oh, it's the last time...

This point in the song is the closest to a Sufi transcendental experience I've ever had.  The lyric, combined with its music, becomes incantatory:  it sucks you into its moment as fully as possible.  Moreover, if you're dancing (and at that point I always am), you can release your head from you neck and snap it back and forth.  I'm quite sure this does or will do some damage to the brain stem, but the effect is to release me from my mind in some way, so that I am erased and become, for that moment, part of the song itself.  There's nothing outside the body moving to the music, and there's nothing moving inside the body but the music.  It's ecstacy, in both senses of the word.

How could poetry ever have anything on that?

(This doesn't work on the 7", by the way.  They've edited out one of the "bolts from above..." sections, so the cumulative lead-up is destroyed.)

Funnily, Jennifer and I have had some sort of strange cessation in/of our friendship, an unexplained trailing off.  But I'll never stop being thankful to her for this introduction.

Incidentally, my parents were shocked at the band's name.  They kept asking me if I knew what it meant, and they simply couldn't get over that a band would ever choose that name, or be successful once they had it.

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Today is not going to be a good day.  I just feel it.

On the other hand, I should remember that there's just as much chance it WILL be a good day. It's only 8:53am; I have no idea what the day holds.  Somewhere else things could be going some way that I can't even imagine, and that could affect my day.  Or it could just be that wonderful things are to happen, and since I haven't even left my house they just haven't happened yet.

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Small Saturday Thoughts

As of today there are only 11 more days until I'm in a position to demand some news about the Cambridge Fellowship I applied for.  I was originally told there'd be news around the end of January, but of course bureaucracy moves more slowly than promises promise, so now the new date is February 27.  Since the fellowship is for the academic year 2008/09, I think it's reasonable to want to know by the end of February.  Also, it would give me something to look forward to, and a point around which to organize my life.

The picture above is of the St. John's College library.  I won't be going to St. John's if I get the fellowship, but I liked the picture because it makes the library look long, and empty, and most of all quiet, quiet in that funny way where the silence makes you imagine what the place would be like if it were noisy:  a silence so silent that it produces its opposite in your mind, and that production makes you feel the silence more deeply.  In Canto V of Don Juan Byron says, "Perhaps there's nothing.../...saddens more by night as well as day,/Than an enormous room without a soul/To break the lifeless splendour of the whole. // [I]n a mighty hall or gallery, both in/More modern buildings and those built of yore,/A kind of death comes o'er us all alone,/ Seeing what's meant for many with but one."  But my experience is just the opposite.  I find it enormously pleasurable to stand in places that are often full but are empty at the time I'm standing in them, or to stand in huge places that could hold many but are currently empty and silent.  There's something about the lack of crowd where I know there could be (or know there was) a crowd that makes the silence, and the peace, fuller, and makes me experience it more fully.  I don't know what that shows, except perhaps that Byron truly didn't like being solitary, and I truly do - solitariness being made more emphatically solitary when it occurs in somewhere designed to be crowded.  Um (as Byron would say).

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