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Monday, October 18th, 2010
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12:42 am - To sleep, perchance to dream
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I thought that I had this under control again, but once more I am finding it almost impossible to stop doing things and go to bed, to cease enjoying the silence and calm of the early hours of day. This is not a true insomnia; I am tired and should I lay down I would find myself asleep in the blink of an eye, but the problem is that I just don't want to. The very idea of turning around and going to bed when I could be doing any number of things makes me cringe and shudder, turning to whatever it is I am wasting my time with with even more determination. It is entirely possible that I could even do a whole night's worth of study if I hadn't of got utterly distracted by my bookshelf. I am not even completing things, just rushing from one book to another, picking up a pencil and making frenetic lines hither and yon, then grabbing the nearest chemistry book and see how much I can learn of chemical notation between the hours of 3 and 4 am. That was last night. Tonight I am attempting to force myself to stop by writing about it, and fool myself into thinking that writing about it is of course the equivalent of going to bed at a sensible hour so that I can get up and do one of the million things I must do. This in lieu of teaching myself to paint properly (apparently the best time for that is in fact 1 am), awaze kata, playing my flute (which I have picked up again after an intermission of 10 years) at ungodly hours and getting the police called on me. Perhaps I am beginning to feel that I need to be awake 36 hours at a time in order to get out of life everything that I want to learn and do? There is so much to do and so little time to retain it before my brain eventually becomes a rotting sponge and my joints give out on me making me a pain ridden twisted mess. Possibly. Possibly even I am just a bit manic and am running on a high from flute practice that lasted 4 hours - such a relief, I had forgotten. Yet I can't forget the last time I really gave into the urge for more than one day, I didn't sleep for five days running and may have been approaching incoherent lunacy, ignoring the heart palpitations and twitching.
I should, I must, je dois, il faut me dormir. I cannot afford the fatigue, but I just plain don't want to succumb. Dammit.
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| Saturday, August 28th, 2010
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5:12 pm - This post is bought to you by Eliminating Procrastination Fear.
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I appear to have been putting off posting almost as much as I have been putting off writing up anything significant in my thesis. In light of this seeming relationship, I thought that if perhaps I post something then maybe I will in fact be able to write something more than disjointed rambles for a literature review. So it is that I am now going to give a few photographs from my trip to Europe, but not the long ramble on the nature of gratia lacrimosa because that is apparently a whole different post altogether..
( Read more... )
current mood:  thirsty
current music: Blackheart Procession - Blue Tears
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| Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
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11:01 pm - Kerplunk
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I have returned, and am absolutely knackered, but just got out of work tomorrow even if I still have to go into return a book and renew a whole bunch of others. Screw needing money to eat, it can wait for a few days until I can walk in a straight line again. I need to lose weight anyway. The cat is happy to see me, but the taking up again of sundry responsibilities seems terribly unpleasant. Bah and humbug.
current mood:  listless
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| Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
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1:53 pm - Items off camera
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| Saturday, April 24th, 2010
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6:01 pm - Leeches
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Leeches
From the Master of Christ's College, Cambridge
28 January 1915 Sir,
Our country has been for many months suffering from a serious shortage of leeches. As long ago as last November there were only a few dozen left in London, and they were second-hand.
Whilst General Joffre, General von Kluck, General von Hindenberg, and the Grand Duke Nicholas persist in fighting over some of the best leech-areas in Europe, possibly wittingly , this shortage will continue, for even in Wordsworth's time the native supply was diminishing, and since then we have for many years largely depended on importations from France and Central Europe. In November I made some efforts to alleviate the situation by applying to America and Canada, but without success. I then applied to India, and last week, owing to the kindness of Dr Annandale, Director of the Indian Museum at Calcutta, and to the officers of the P. and O. Company and to Colonoel Alcock, MD, of the London School of tropical Medicine, I have succeeded in landing a fine consignment of a leech which is used for blood-letting in India. It is true that the leech is not the Hirudo medicinalis of our pharmacopaeias, but a different genus and species, Limnatis granulosa. Judging by its size, always a varying quantity in a leech, we may have to readjust our ideas as to a leech's cubic capacity, yet I believe, from seeing them a day or two ago, they are willing and even anxious to do their duty. They have stood the voyage from Bombay and the changed climatic conditions very satisfactorily, and are in a state of great activity an apparent hunger at 50, Wigmore-street, London, W.
It is true that leeches are not used to anything like the extent they were 80 years ago - Paris alone, about 1830, made use of some 52 millions a year - but still they are used, though in much smaller numbers.
It may be of some consolation to my fellow-countrymen to know that our deficiency in leeches is more than compensated by the appalling shortage of sausage-skins in Middle Europe. With true German thoroughness they are trying to make artificial ones!
I am yours faithfully,
A. E. Shippley.
Gregory, Kenneth ed., The First Cuckoo: a selection of the most witty, amusing and memorable letters to The Times, 1900-1980, London: Unwin Paperbacks,1976, p.91-2.
Thank you ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nonsequitania, it has been providing a great deal of entertainment. There are of course other letters I love, but the anxiousness and enthusiasm of these waiting leeches amused me for hours. Not to mention the rather random segue into sausage skins at the end. Truly, I do feel compensated in some strange and bizarre manner. Certainly it is better than whatever the ANZAC mutilations celebrations offer this year around.
Failing that I have just been working, desultorily studying (Aha! It has started at last - although I do need to write that paper), booking plane tickets for Europe and moving ever closer to getting myself diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. I am still hopeful, and more optimistically, that it just might be Parvovirus B19 mediated arthritis. I rather hope the latter, as it means it will go away. In the meantime, hello large doses of steroids and finally being able to move around. I never thought I would say that sentence out loud.
current mood:  enthralled
current music: Zbigniew Preisner - Requiem for My Friend
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| Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
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12:25 pm - Urghle umphf.
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I have officially moved and have nearly handed back the keys on the old place. It is all clean inside and I have just got to wait for bin day in order to get them empty. The phone line is now connected to the new place, but I must ring up to get a phone number so that I can forward it to the internet company to action. Talk about idiotic. I had to tell the phone company that when I said 'disconnect and reconnect at the new house' I really did mean for them to disconnect it in the first place. Not just sit and stare vacantly. The cat is somewhat clingy, but otherwise settling in just fine, and all my books and tea are unpacked. The important things you know. Now if I could but summon the energy I could get on with the umpteen other things I am meant to be doing.
Apart from this I have had a somewhat horrendous birthday where I spent most of my time with my original 'illness', as well as a cold. Still, there was cake so that helps somewhat, even if I was probably more of a burden to everyone else than I intended to be. As it is I have absolutely no stamina, and still need to lie down ever six hours and get 12 hours a night. On the upside, the doctor when he was drawing a litre of blood for testing, did prescribe me some lovely anti inflammatory tablets. Reminding me, I need to ring him and inform him that I may have been exposed to Legionnaire's Disease, if that is of any help. Charming. Someone want to chop it off at the head? I'll even sharpen the axe.
current mood:  sick
current music: Student Chatter
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| Friday, March 12th, 2010
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5:19 pm - On the move.
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I have, after quite some pursuit, finally acquired a new place of abode. It is possibly someway out of the central hub, but at the same time I have a good $160 more a month to spend than if I stayed here. The town house is larger and has modern type accoutrements, such as heating and cooling. The back area is paved (not concrete!) and quite spacious. The place is opposite one wall of the Old Pentridge jail, a notorious prison that is now being turned into yuppie housing. The irony is very strong, don't worry, the fact that their main door is now a coffee house is something I may never recover from.
We also appear to have somehow managed to be renting from Max Fabris, the gentlemen who started the dojo with my sensei (where I train) before they had a bust up. His sister is our land lord, and she is my sensei's ex fiance before he went and married his current wife. Uh. Suffice to say we found she is not over him yet. *boggles* The Petal is still regretting put her foot in her mouth! Still they let us sign the lease so that is a relief. The world is a very, very small place. Nevertheless, I think I will enjoy it even though I shall miss being so near to my French teacher and everything else.
So, I will be moving in about a week and will have no phone let alone internet for another week at least. Not that I am a regular poster here by any means, but just in case anyone cared. If you have my old address and would be interested in gaining my new one, just comment as replies are screened.
current mood:  chipper
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| Thursday, January 21st, 2010
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3:21 pm - Pro Crastination.
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I have so much work to do, so I instead of doing the umpteen tasks I should be doing, I am going to upload a gratuitous image of my cat. That way I can feel like I have accomplished one small task even though it has nothing to do with anything.
There. He does like curling around a rose bush of a morning. Currently he is attempting to squash my hat, and knows I am not best pleased with his efforts so is sleeping with one eye open ready for action. Oh well, I suppose it is time to .. clean the kitchen, the bathroom, start researching a lecture, drawing various items, writing a paper and.... oh yeh. Eating!
current mood: lethargic
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| Saturday, January 16th, 2010
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2:10 pm - Donations.
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| Monday, December 28th, 2009
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1:04 pm - Very belated birthday art for Perverse Idyll
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Dear Perverse Idyll,
The phrase 'better late than never' is an ever popular one and this is most certainly late. I cannot guarantee however, that it is any better for being late. Nevertheless I hope it brings some pleasure. May you not only continue to celebrate the day of your birth but also go on enjoying the life that was the main reason for the day in the first place. There need be no dates for living.
NB: I have no scanner here, so this is taken by digital camera and not very well at that. My apologies.
current mood:  accomplished
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| Saturday, December 12th, 2009
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6:24 pm - How many friars fit on the head of a pin?
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*blearily pokes her head out of hibernation* I came on-line this morning at work to find that it had been snowing in my in box. Considering the fact that it is officially summer over here the snow flakes were a very pleasant, if somewhat confusing, surprise. So thank you _inbetween_ and drvsilla, I shall hold them in my mind's eye when it hits 115F in the hope that they don't melt immediately, even though they be virtual flakes.
Otherwise I have just been, well if not busy all the time, then busily writing posts in my head and not writing them down. I seem to have gotten quite good at that. There was the perfunctory one about the weather, which ranged from whining about the spate of extreme hot weather we have had and praising the amount of rain that has fallen. There was the post bemoaning the state of my legs, bad timings of senseis and hoping against hope that menopause will set in early (very early) so that I can move about like a normal person. Most recently there was the very excited recounting of the Franciscan (OFM) conference I attended. It would have contained excited hand waving over the lovely French plenary, amusing anecdotes about friars, the somewhat obvious but altogether pleasing discovery that being around so much religious belief made me very uncomfortable, and of course wild guinea pigs. Instead I shall subject you to my routinely reappearing rant. Most alliterative, non?
Whilst at this conference that was celebrating the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis's death, one repeated comment was thrown at me by certain people who shall remain nameless. You see, for many years I have had an unaccountable penchant for Thomas Aquinas. Not his theology, his theology bugs the hell out of me with his constant continued repetition of Aristotle (someone else who annoys me), a lack of originality and infinite nit picking of logic to win an argument. In a lot of ways, he is in fact too much like how I debate. No, I have been somewhat obsessed by the depiction of him in his own vita (lives) and the way if you peer very hard at the hard shell of veneer that is his academic writing, you can occasionally get a very tiny glimpse of the person he was. I think ultimately he was not a very good man nor a very bad one. His argumentation style shows a certain amount of arrogance and tendentiousness, not to mention competitiveness. He was rather good at being the 'go to' guy for the pope and for his Order.Through the blandness of his words, sometimes there flashes through heat. Yet he did care greatly about issues of imparting knowledge of God in teaching, so everyone could access it and struggled so very hard to achieve this in the face of all logic that dictated he was unable, and even when he failed in the end. No matter that I would rather read Bonaventure, Roger Bacon or others. Thomas was deeply concerned with education and his vision of the divine (no matter that in the end he sort of went 'fuck it') and seems to have been oddly gentle in a rather distracted manner, if rather too stern about exiting rooms when people stopped talking about God. I think perhaps it is the struggle between what came naturally to him and the wish to mold himself into the perfect man of faith that intrigues me. It also makes me sad, this rigidity in faith and practice, the refusal to have any of what I would call 'fun' and to follow his inclinations. Intriguingly he seems to have been rather talented at poetry, music and composition, but then spent most of his time not doing it and instead writing long winded theology, because he felt it was better put to the service of the Lord. That for me is endlessly sad and ultimately fruitless, because he died feeling he had failed in his task. I know that sort of frustration and it makes me sympathetic. He is possibly one of the very few of the friars I study who I think I can say I actually don't dislike.
In all of this you may notice, the matter of his size does not come up. Except for when I open my mouth about Aquinas, every single time I had to first of all talk about how fat he was before moving on! I came to him without an image of what he looked like, not having seen any pictures or having sat through a lecture on his writings where apparently they regale you with the old tale about him being so gross that they built a special table around him so he could eat. What I read was his vita from the thirteenth century, of which the only physical description of any length is rather more complicated than just someone describing him as they saw him. In fact, you should as a rule of thumb never rely on what someone says in a vitae of a Saint, it is largely to do with portraying the Saint as a Saint and not as how they were. They are made to fit into particular tropes that are designed to convey a lot of information to a very wide audience, so they are all variations on each other and upon existing imagery. Thus you end up with depictions of Christ as mother, of stigmata, of the uses of the hair in Magdalene and in Mary etc. Much of it also needs to be translatable into visual imagery too. So it is inherently unreliable for anything that is as literal as 'what did he look like.' Fabulous for everything else though.
Let me give you an example of what is present in his vitae. This is from Bernard Gui's vita, and he basically rewrites William of Tocco's earlier version.
''He was tall and stout. He held himself erect, as men of an upright character do so. His complexion was healthy, as of one who shunned excess of any kind; and in colour like ripe wheat. He had a large head, with a full development of the organs that minister to reason. He was somewhat bald. His body had the delicately balanced texture that goes with a fine intelligence; yet virile also, robust and prompt to serve the will, and trained never to shrink from any pain or peril by a soul that drew its confidence from God.'
So yes here, we have him being described as tall and stout, which I would argue is about all that can be used of this description in terms of 'what he looked like.' No he was not a tiny man, but what concerns me about this depiction is that his size is being directly linked to his perceived intelligence and his virtue of character. He is of good posture because his character is good, he has a good complexion because he does not live to excess, his head is large because his brain is large, he is of a lovely texture to match this intelligence. He is robust and his body is under his own wills control. Here what is being described in not necessarily what he looked like, but what his spiritual saintly profile looks like. After all, it is not really possible to be enormously fat and shun excess of any kind, nor to be be able to subjugate the body into obedience when it is clearly out of control. Thomas was not a saint because of his asceticism, like Francis, nor is he one who is martyred. He is there for his theology and so everything is geared to make his thoughts seem the most important. In some ways his fatness also reflects how far away from the body that it didn't matter, being all of the mind. Indeed, that rather infamous Catholic historian G.K. Chesterton even says,
'"St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy."'
In fact, I think Chesterton's description of Aquinas is perhaps only right in terms of him of the magnanimosity of him. He certainly was not shy, although he was certainly deliberating and contemplative. What is clear though is that Thomas's size is important because it is the type of thought he produced, his size and his direct comparison to an ox. This is most important, because he was known during his life as the 'dumb ox.' Whilst the 'dumb' part of the name itself probably directly relates to his lack of German and inability to communicate when he went to study under Albertus Magnus, the description of the ox is once again not just about how he looks. For example:
'He was so big that because of his body's massiveness he was called the Sicilian ox. The mother of Brother Reginald, his socius, recounts that when he was passing, the peasants in the fields left their labours and came near to look at him, full of admiration for a man of such corpulence and beauty.'
At first glance it is obvious that he is just large, and it is possible that the peasants were just admiring someone who was well fed, but I would argue that once again his size and body were tied into his potential. This parallel is much more obvious when you look at what Albertus said about why he was called that. Albertus says that though they may call '...him the dumb ox, but he will make resound in his doctrine such a bellowing that it will echo throughout the entire world.' Correspondingly his size expands with his intellectual feats and his holiness. In order to bellow throughout the whole world, one must be large enough to be heard. Thus everyone can therefore describe his theology in terms of this particular image of him as the ox and all the qualities associated with the image from not only Christian times, but the Roman as well. As Gregory the Great says 'For he that blesses outwardly by preaching receives the fatness of inward enlargement.' For the medieval, the internal was the external.
So where does this leave us? Tocco calls him 'corpus grossum', which although I have seen it translated constantly as 'corpulent', the word grossus does not necessarily indicate fatness but is also about large, great, thick or coarse. An interest comment on his Sicilian heritage actually, because he was always portrayed as very southern Italian. I think perhaps the best we can do is the small description provided in his canonisation documentation where the Cistercian lay brother, Nicholas of Priverno, just says very bluntly that Thomas was, 'a big stout man, with a dark complexion and bald.' I rather like this, because it seems to reflect that fact that Thomas whilst he might not have been a petite lad, he did in fact spend most of his life walking around between Paris and Rome, was bound by the laws of his Order that enforced not only mendicancy but also set food that ways to be served in the refectory. Food that was dominantly vegetarian and grain based. Before anyone tells me that no religious Order stuck to its rules, I would like to point out that this was the early part of the Order of Preachers, and they were only just making their laws and had not had time to break them like in centuries to come. Thomas is not depicted as eating much in any of his vitae, in fact most of the time he forgets to eat because he is so busy writing. Yes, another trope, but there is no other present in his vitae. Nor is the story of him and the table there either.
In fact, the story makes me wonder about something - much of the imager of Aquinas as grotesquely obese comes at the time of the reformation, a fact that is of importance because what is the traditional depiction of a friar as portrayed by anti mendicant literature? Fat. Even before the reformation you had Chaucer and his fat friars being farted and it is an image that is taken up and run with - Friar Tuck anyone? It is after all the direct opposite of what they are supposed to be about - poverty and mendicancy. I would not be remotely surprised if the image of Aquinas a great big intellectual (a long tradition in and of itself - Luther tends to get larger and larger...) gets tied up in the anti mendicant stuff coming out of the reformation. The story of the friar who is so fat he needs part of the table cut out to fit him, sounds to me much more like propaganda that has been taken on board than anything else. Much like the description I just found of him when googling as 'with dropsy and a hideous deformed eye.' What? I mean, what? Yes he died of something that could have been dropsy, or a stroke, but that was late in life when he had basically exhausted himself. So there seems to also be a large amount of 'you aren't perfect, but look, neither was this saint!'. I personally, will just stick with Nicholas of Priverno, who had no point to make other than that yes he had met him, and he had heard him preach and teach and meditate. Thomas Aquinas was not morbidly obese, just rather tall and solid. Anyone who wants to damn well argue the point can go and read the evidence themselves and come up with some valid points, because I am sick to the back teeth of having to wade through refuting what is patently a 700 year old construction just so I can talk about the man. It is also indicative of what it is like trying to talk about his writing - 700 years of theologians not paying attention to him, but their own agenda.
On a final note, here is one of Thomas's better known hymns, the Pange Lingua Gloriosi Mysterium. It is sung to Gregorian chant during the procession of the Eucharist before transubstantiation at the feast of Corpus Christi, and is thus written to be a solemn meditation on this act. Yes it is deeply religious and rightly so considering who wrote it so I apologise for those who aren't going to like that, be it just Catholicism or religion in general. No I am not going to provide the translation because it is better in Latin and I think perhaps it is a better way of approaching Thomas than through other much more pretentious high theological methods. Just imagine it in performed in Notre Dame, in solemn procession with simple, plain chat sung by a choir of monks, to a melody that imitates the old troop rythymn of Caesar's army. Smell the incense, the intensity of the moment in the elevation and transubstantiation of the host (the last two versus), and in that instant where his faith and art reach the pinnacle of expression I think you will find Thomas.
- Pange, lingua, gloriosi
- Corporis mysterium,
- Sanguinisque pretiosi,
- quem in mundi pretium
- fructus ventris generosi
- Rex effudit Gentium.
- Nobis datus, nobis natus
- ex intacta Virgine,
- et in mundo conversatus,
- sparso verbi semine,
- sui moras incolatus
- miro clausit ordine.
- In supremae nocte coenae
- recumbens cum fratribus
- observata lege plene
- cibis in legalibus,
- cibum turbae duodenae
- se dat suis manibus.
- Verbum caro, panem verum
- verbo carnem efficit:
- fitque sanguis Christi merum,
- et si sensus deficit,
- ad firmandum cor sincerum
- sola fides sufficit.
- Tantum ergo Sacramentum
- veneremur cernui:
- et antiquum documentum
- novo cedat ritui:
- praestet fides supplementum
- sensuum defectui.
- Genitori, Genitoque
- laus et jubilatio,
- salus, honor, virtus quoque
- sit et benedictio:
- Procedenti ab utroque
- compar sit laudatio.
- Amen. Alleluja.
P.S. I have been given a one year stipend scholarship for my doctorate. It is a consolation-encouragement prize for missing out on the big three year scholarships, and it entails instructions to try again for next years rounds. Not what I wanted, but it is better than nothing I suppose.
current mood: disappointed
current music: Ave Verum Corpus - Mozart
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| Friday, October 16th, 2009
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8:07 pm - Abbey Road
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Finally! The photos that the Fabulous Fablieaux took for me in Leeds have been deposited on my USB.
First of all we went to Kirkstall Abbey, which is a small daughter convent of the much larger and earlier Fountains' Abbey. Both of these are Cistercian houses, and as such, are meant to be very austere and plain buildings with no decorations and minimalist architectural flourishes. As you can see, Kirkstall is a lot closer into Leeds, which you can tell because of the blackened stone from the coal and industry. It is in fact inside of Leeds, and rather astonishingly enough, one of the most complete abbeys in Britain. This means that it has a second story still intact, and part of the church roof.
ETA: ARGH. Stupid thing has made them all huge, and I refuse to go back through and edit the lot. View at own risk.
( Here lies lots of images... )
current mood: accomplished
current music: Hole - Malibu
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| Sunday, October 4th, 2009
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10:10 pm - Once more unto the breach dear friend, once more.
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Dear _inbetween_
I realise that Shakespeare was talking about battle and not about birthdays, but sometimes they seem to be one and the same, no matter what anyone tries to tell you in about how they should be sparkly days filled with spongy kittens and floofy ducks. So because I don't see you as a floofy duck person, and because I find a birthday is akin to throwing yourself into the breach for another round of struggling, I wish you dear friend, a birthday that is neither not spent in taking on pain. May at the very least you not need to close the wall up with English dead, but instead find a way free.
Once more unto the breach dear friend, once more.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.
Ad multos annos.
As always yours in sincerity and friendship,
enname
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| Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
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11:20 pm - .. and she rose again.
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What a belated post.
I arrived back about three weeks ago, and have since then been working casually in a full-time capacity. Diving back into employment has been a bit of a shock to the system needless to say. Just as I was getting used to relaxing and travelling I had to cease and desist rather abruptly. Admittedly I knew it was going to happen, but I am reserving my right to whine about it anyway. In the meantime I have also had the mother of all bouts of pre menstrual mood swings, where I've vacillated between homicidal, depressed, manic and utterly unable to sustain contact with other living beings outside of work who pay me to do so. At one point I was told by a friend that it was worrying how I had all her neurological symptoms from having part of her brain removed, only of course I just had hormones. Never, ever feel like your very mind is fragmenting in a way that proves the existence of gases in a volcano - rapidly expanding and unstable. Hopefully I have now regained some equilibrium, and all need to scream and run away from people into hermitude it just the normal sensation.
Most belatedly I would like to thank those who put up with my presence, _vargr_, inbetween and eretria, allowing me into their homes despite my apparent latent ability to leave a trail of computer destruction in my wake. If I did not say it enough then, after or at any other point, thank you.
Outside of this I am not sure where to start. After all there are two conferences I attended, and I could bore you all with a ludicrously detailed report of all that went on, such as just how much I learned about the bodies of the dead, other random facts and just what academics look like. This is an enormously entertaining past time when you meet half your footnotes in one afternoon and spend a lot of time exclaiming 'oh, so that is why your writing sounds like it does!'. How about instead I tell you a few highlights for now? Leave the academic stuff for another, drier post. Or recount a few, because this trip I never got enough time to just sit down and write anything. My head was spinning around all the time in the company of people. This does of course mean if something is not mentioned, it is not a highlight. Just that I could write for pages and I want to post something.
( Read more... )
On that note, I am going to cease and desist. French homework awaits me, bed soon to follow and finally... a link that I promised I would provide in my next post.
For the 'lightness of mind' of icarusancalion: http://icarusancalion.livejournal.com/894371.html#cutid1. Those who know me know that I do not link like this lightly.
current mood: discontent
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| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
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4:44 pm - Up, up and away.
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This is a note to say that I am currently out of town, out of state and out of country. Will return to one, or all of these things, on the 1st of August.
Tinny, I got your card!!! It was certainly worth the wait. What a snail! Not to mention those standing in its shadow. Thank you.
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| Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
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2:09 pm - Meme not of the brief.
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"Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" politely declaiming ‘words’, and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you." </a></b></a>perverse_idyll gave me the following:
Irony
The fact that this is associated with me is somewhat ironic in and of itself. In fact quite possibly I may have laughed loud enough to startle a poor, gentle student who was passing by. For many years I trundled along with an instinctive idea of what irony was, mostly in regard to humour and its use in satire. It was not until the always fascinating </a></b></a>nonsequitania wrote her Master’s thesis on Early Modern English Irony that I approached anything that resembles an academic understanding of it. So you see it is usually N. who is associated with irony rather than my generally incompetent self who always had trouble articulating it, and I am therefore blaming her squarely for influencing me. Otherwise, what irony most means to me is when it is used in my favourite way, creating a sense of twist and bitter humour that displays all sides of the coin in one flash of insight. I like to think that my sense of it is fairly highly tuned, although the image of a quivering tuning fork is probably a little over the top.
Perfectionism
I am an imperfect perfectionist. My need for perfection is tainted by remember how my grandmother got towards the end of her life with her obsessive behaviour, and a concern for my own sanity. You see, I get very frustrated when I am unable to obtain perfection and tend to fall straight down the hole of self-laceration and abuse. After all, if it is not perfect then clearly it reflects badly upon my own intelligence and personality, which should cease to exist for sheer incompetence. Consequently I have been known to not try doing something if it won’t be perfect, or to just give up the task at hand before completion because I know that it won’t be perfect and the effort of making it so stresses me out so much I freeze. Or I leave deliberate mistakes in (my thesis) as a middle finger to everyone. The reason I refuse to do belt gradings for karate is because I know I cannot be perfect and would prefer to not change than to face an average performance. I would prefer to fail. Learning things from scratch always challenges me because I have to remind myself constantly that as I am merely a beginner, there will be mistakes and errors no matter how hard I try to be an old hand. This does of course mean that I tend to drive myself to learn everything about chemistry/biology/physics/French in half an hour, and then go sulk for five weeks when I can’t. Perfectionism drives me to ineptness.
Medieval philosophy
Such a teensy topic! I mean, the medieval period happened for the entire world. I will however just focus on Western philosophy and avoid talking about the content, because I am not going to summarise nearly 1500 years of writing. For a very long time I was quite upset that as an undergraduate I was not drawn towards topics that were ‘cool.’ Questions that revolved around daily living, women, literature and other such interesting topics always ended up with me getting low marks. Instead if I was presented with a list of essay topics I would always gravitate towards the ‘intellectual history’ one. The topic that made every student grey with horror; that was filled with high theology and dry Latin texts. It has taken me a good five years to realise that I am just not cut out for fun study topics, but instead am better at the stuff that used to define academia before the seventies: men, sermons, theology, ethics, and philosophy. I even bore myself, but there is something oh so familiar about picking up a book of Aquinas, or reading St. Gregory that is hard to shake. Not to mention that they are more often than not good philosophers. Of course they are not perfect, I can’t say I agree with many points and often refuse to even consider a lot of them, but they question ruthlessly. They also spin endless loops and whorls of thought that are then woven into the supplies that build the ‘cathedrals of ideas.’ There is no constant striving for the ‘truth’ or the ‘new’, but instead endless rewritings of the truth that is contained in old knowledge. Yet in all this reiteration and patterning there are small little gems of difference sewn down, little fragments that are not just the same thing said another way (suffice to say that post modernism is about as new as Carthage). It is also rather nice to see concern for the soul, for the spiritual and not just the material, or even perhaps the relationship between the unity of the whole world and all that it contains. I even rather like the bits I hate, woven as they are into the fabric of discourse and the garments of the past.
Sometimes though, I wish I could run off into some other field of fun study. I would certainly get less of an ‘ERGH’ look when I explain what I am writing on if I could say I was studying the historical impact of film noir, or looking at the role of some exciting myth. Oh well, c’est la vie.
Books
I read them? Facetious answer aside, I am not sure there is much I can say that most people who read books can’t add. When I was a child we only got one television station, and I had very few friends (this is not a plea for sympathy mind you) so what I spent most of my time doing was reading my way into oblivion (and bad eyesight). Indeed, I have no clear memory of ever being taught to read, or not having been able to read. For that I probably have to thank my mother, who read a lot to me. Basically I love stories of all sorts, it is pretty much why I class myself as a historian because it is another way of getting stories. Books tell good stories, they are portable and you can revisit them whenever you want. All I wanted to do was to not be where I was, to travel and to do things that I was bound by reality not do, so reading gave me that. It still does, as the books I am likely to get excited over are those that drag me into a whole new place and leave me reeling for days afterwards, whether or not the focus is on people, place, time, imagery, instructions or action. Not to mention books are full of information, and I love learning new things. There are entire acres of things to know, and I have limited time and brain space! Not to mention time. That is perhaps the most irritating thing.
As a side note, I adore old books. If I ever had money, I would probably end up with an antiquarian collection of phenomenal proportions. The physicality of the bindings, pages and the smell of different paper runs fascinates (this of course goes for all books as well, not just the rare) my inner historian. For example, I was in the Bodleian library in Oxford opening a little box that contained a thirteenth-century sermon handbook, and was assailed by the smell of incense. Vellum, being skin, holds smell better than paper and I realised that I was immersed in the scent of someone else’s memory formed sometime in the last 800 years. That is texture and experience that cannot be found in a visit to a tourist site (and it doesn’t even matter what was written in the book!) that is reverberating with children's screams.
Portraiture
Like much of my relationship with art, and the idea of creating art, my relationship with portraiture is fraught. Where is the point in drawing or painting someone after the invention of the camera? It can’t be to capture a likeness, because the camera can be used to capture more than just the physical attributes of a person. Perhaps film’s greatest claim to fame is the ability to hold moments and be manipulated to bring out personality. Anyway, most portrait artists work from photographs, further eroding any meaning. Personally, the only reason I can see for portraiture is for my own benefit – it is a legitimate time and space that I can stare at a person without being told to go away and stop being weird. I like the struggle of trying to get what I see in front of me, not just in terms of face and light but also personality and sense of character, into a one dimensional medium. Technically it is a challenge with the need to understand the smallest muscular changes, and I like to think it hones my ability to ability to bring a sense of life to other (Ok, so I don’t do much other than figurative drawings, shut up) figurative drawings I do. Not to mention making my reading of body language better. Still, mostly though it just caters to my obsession for staring at people like a cat watching its prey. I love faces, all faces, myriad faces and their respective ins and outs. Just wish I had the patience to do hair properly...
current mood:  full
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| Saturday, May 30th, 2009
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4:19 pm - Je n'aime pas le rhinoceros.
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I have tickets!
These mystical ticket type things would be for my flight to the UK in July. I nearly have tickets for all the other gadding around Europe, two conferences, and trains. Barring two pieces of accommodation I am set. Food will be an optional extra. The cat has a home for the duration and I will pay up rent in advance. On the irritating side of things I still do not know whether I will be employed come the end of June, although Mr. Calm seems willing to put me back on a casual contract so that I can possibly pay rent. I swear, most of the time the library does not know its arse from its elbow, least of all that it has a body. Metaphorical body of course. Now I just need to write my paper for the Newcastle-on-Tyne conference. Ergh.
Otherwise I have just been working six days a week most weeks, taking French lessons and trying to get my leg-knee to cooperate with existence. Who would have thought that learning to walk like I have for the past 28 years would be so difficult? Two months of walking strangely and I have now spent another three months trying to rediscover my normal gait and therefore not ruin my knee. The moral of the story is 'bends the knees.' In the mean time I get to do at least one of the repertoire from the 'Ministry of Funny Walks.'
Currently though, I would just like to stop sounding like a 'bullfrog' because of this cold, and if possible feel less like death warmed up. To all those who wish to make a swine flu joke at this point in time, I would like to point out that it is merely ye olde rhinovirus doing the rounds and you can therefore feel free to make 'nose' jokes instead. Please note that it is deeply unpleasant to sneeze through one's eyeball. Messy.
current mood: sick
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| Monday, April 20th, 2009
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5:55 pm - Once more, with feeling.
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I am spectacularly lazy and cannot be arsed importing the reams of rubbish from my livejournal over to here. What I will do, however, is set up this post with any art work (in the loosest sense of the word) that I foolishly posted over at my livejournal. Hopefully this means it will all be located under one single tag, possibly even with labels. Maybe. Then again it may not be.
Obviously, a birthday present. Based on nonsequitania. Couldn't be arsed getting rid of the Deviantart stamp, or you know, uploading my clean copy.
Study in bad drawing.
For The White Road
In thanks for a particular scent.
I think this sums up PMS for me.
Random, framed and reflected.
Little Majethrim and baby sister.
SGA, obviously.
A bit of randomness.
For Seven Walls.
Its old, its dodgy and oh well.
The Babelfish - again couldn't be arsed getting rid of the Deviantart stamp, or you know, uploading my clean copy.
Link to the deviantart page: http://enname.deviantart.com
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| Sunday, April 19th, 2009
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3:46 pm - Ali Banana
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One and a half hours to go, and then I can go home from work to well, do some housework. May time fly like the proverbial banana. That by the way, makes the Latin quote look really strange. Tempus banana.Tempus banana-it.
Yesterday was quite busy. Finally my poor boots have made it to a cobbler for repair. Whilst attending the airshow in March, I found one of them had a rather large hole. This was extremely noticeable due to the sizeable quantity of water that was being tipped out of the sky down upon me, and flooding into one shoe and not the other. There is a great difference between wet leather and soggy foot. The other pair of boots are going for stretching because the people of the world have lost their arches. You see I do not have high arches - they are just medium - but every single pair of shoes I've tried on recently has cut the blood supply off to my toes and tried to crush my foot down. Therefore my conclusion is that as I have not changed, then everyone else is becoming flat footed. These boots more so than anything else. Hopefully having them stretched will mean I can wear them in properly and not end up a cripple. The whole thing is very strange though and I am going to blame it on the prevalence of wearing thongs (flipflops to the non Australian audience). No matter that of course my feet are very wide due to running around barefooted most of my child hood, but shh. I stand (ha!) by my footwear argument.
After this most pleasing, and rare locating of a decent cobbler, I then wound my way over to the Australian Karate Championships. Of course I turned up just in time to have missed two of the squad get through into today's finals, but I did get to see a couple of fights. It was most interesting, if nothing else for the somewhat flu addled commentary that the Okra was giving. Being that she has reached the World's level, she knew what she was looking at, and could tell me what I missed because I had blinked. After this the Undecided and I conveyed her back to the dojo to lie down/use her ventilator, before heading out to dinner with sensei and a few others. Then I carried got her to bed and came home. And it was good. :P
Now I've finished sounding like a cross between the bible and some 6 year old's diary ... I suppose I should go and do me some actual work here in the check-in room. Or not.
current mood: bored
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| Sunday, April 5th, 2009
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2:34 pm - Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
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Rumours of my death have been vastly exaggerated. True this is simple to say when there were never any rumours to begin with and a decided lack of deceasing, but I shall not let reality get in the way of over dramatic proclamations. Least of all should such pesky little details flit their way between me mutilating two perfectly elegant quotes. Fie! Fie to the conventions that argue I should construct verily a cathedral of ideas, a tower of the aesthetic, a blancmange of pedicles. Let my stitching on the suture of imagery be wonky, the chemical reaction fail and the skin slough.
In the last month I have been busy what with attempting to learn all of chemistry in two weeks, remind myself of physics from 10 years ago, skim read biology, memorise anatomy, failing the Graduate Australian Medical Admissions Test (Please do not try to reassure me about the GAMSAT because I knew I would fail, and sat it to learn how not to sit it in the future.), graduating, writing and presenting a paper at the festschrift run by the history group I belong to, working full time, avoiding my birthday, training at karate and getting a few hours sleep here and there. All of this has made for the most burgeoning of months, reeling from one half hearted attempt to another like some sort of drunken hen's night bash on a pub crawl. The individual is lost to the staggering, tottering, wobbling high heeled, multi headed beast that stumbles down the boulevard at two am in the morning, seeking yet more and more stimulation, glare and cacophony. My need to do just one more thing, because I might not get to do it ever again, is almost as overwhelming as that farewell to arms. To just learn everything.
Now I have washed up on the shores of April, hoping for some peace and quiet. I am not sure how long I will be able to stand the so called peace and quiet, but currently I am relaxing. Outside it is pleasantly below 20C, there has been some rain (rarest of rare treasures!), and my hot crossed buns are about halfway to being made. The yeast is making the house smell like a bakery, and Mozart is requiting his requiem, whilst the cavity is sowing seeds. I can almost ignore the urge to try and make my own life into a whirly-gig, perhaps a cup of tea and a lie down with the koala-cat-thing would aid me in this quest? Alas there is this week of pms driven mania to survive. Unkey the handboard! Draw the man bridges! Dead the clothelines! Call out the watch and police the clocks! Goad the bones, inter the Caesar - ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
Must go check the dough.
current mood: refreshed
current music: Mozzie Art
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