It's a regular European fiesta here at this bootless moan headquarters. We have our first European visitor, straight out of the heart of that great Gallic land, home to the short President with the hot wife (sounds like a fairy tale) and an enviable nuclear power portfolio: la France! My guest came from Le Vésinet, somewhere I (in my considerable Franco-ignorance) had no clue about. However, as always, Wikipedia lent a helping hand, and informed me that it's actually rather swanky. So I'm afraid that it might trump the dried meat capital of Brazil that we had as the last international visit. Sorry chaps! Here's what Wiki had to say:

Le Vésinet is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris 16.4 km (10.2 miles) from the center. Le Vésinet is one of the wealthiest suburbs of Paris, known for its wooded avenues, mansions and lakes. It contains many English-style gardens designed by French landscape gardener Paul de Lavenne Comte Choulot.

Well, I'm impressed. Though not surprised - it was always inevitable that a higher echelon of digital travelers would leave their footprints on this hallowed turf - partly because of the use of words like 'echelon'. The other Euro-news is that I joined an online Model United Nations (MUN). I wanted to be a Climate group which observed, but by a freak accident, someone took that literally thirty seconds before me. So now I'm Luxembourg. Unfortunately, though it looks a great country, all the papers I can find are in French or German. I would love to be cultured enough to read those languages, mais malheureusement... I did however find some stuff about their shipping presence, so if something comes up about shipping, I should be able to represent Luxembourg with a quiet confidence well-suited to the gentleman diplomat persona I have adopted for the MUN.

That is all.

Labels: international visitor, MUN

Over the last few days I have been missing London so much. I think the city is one part of it - compared to where I live, London is huge, dynamic, and always accessible. If I want a beer from Earl's Court at 2 in the morning, I can get one in London. I do not have a shop in my village, open at 2 in the morning or otherwise. Obviously it's pretty dull here as well - the Greater Reading area is hardly the most buzzing of places in terms of its cultural calendar. In London I might go for a walk by the South Bank if I was bored, or pop to Regent's Park, or go to a bar in Angel, or...anything really. But here, there's not really much in way of comparison. Perhaps I just feel extra antsy because so much of the house in now cordoned off; as a result of the extension the only living room we now have is the conservatory. I don't think it's just that though, because more than missing the city itself, I miss all the friendships I had there too. I don't have a huge number of people left in Reading, so obviously it's partly a numbers game. But I also just look back at living in Camden with a wave of nostalgia - it used to be great to wake up and go make a bleary-eyed tea and see one of your friends making toast in the kitchen, and have a natter to them about what was going on with them. I just really want to be around people! Unfortunately two of my closest friends are away at the moment here in the 'Ding (as some of us refer to that mighty town) so perhaps my options just seem worse at the moment.

I think if I was to sum this whole post up it would be I MISS LONDON AND MY FRIENDS AND I HAVE CABIN FEVER. And of course I miss the girl. But that's always the case. In honour of my emo-ishness I have included a picture of what I looked like when I wrote this:

Labels: bored

Today after dinner the whole family inadvertantly got embroiled in a nostalgia trip, especially our time in America. We traded anecdotes, laughed as we remembered, or at least pretended to remember, all the jaunty times we had spent abroad. Somehow this led onto a discussion of the sights of our former home, Plano, TX (Texas to the unAmerican, unintiated). And of course, we decided to do that thing which so often happens - we used technology to try and recover our nostalgic eden, and only ended up making it seem a bit further away.

To the point, we followed the old highways, retraced our old steps (suprisingingly regular it turns out) and looked at all the sights from above as best we could. There was some discussion as to whether Dad's office was, in fact, where he said it was, and not a mall, but we are fairly confident now that it is indeed said office.But what was most telling was when we looked at the house.

So, wallah - I give you 4541, Hitching Post Lane.

(That's it on the side if you find it difficult to make connections)

Not a bad place at all, and we certainly enjoyed our time there. Lovely big rooms, lots of ensuites, all in all, a genuine American slice of lebensraum. And then my finger fell backwards on my mouse, scrolling the zoom outwards. Behold, the cream of Americana, the most super of suburbs, the matchbox house capital of the greater Dallas area - our housing estate.

Wow. Ours is the little one marked A.

Labels: random

I've just come back from the driving range - after work Dad and I decided to go hit some balls around, but didn't really have time to do a whole nine holes. I have to say, I was more Happy Gilmore than Nick Faldo. That said I think I'm sorting out the slice I've had for a while now, so it wasn't a wasted trip at all. I do need to seriously look at my swing though, as the papa is getting an awful lot longer on equivalent hits, and I really doubt that it's because of any greater strength on his part. Maybe I will have to start sneaking off on my own and getting some practice in. I know that sounds a little bit...unsportsmanlike, but to be honest, to maintain an illusion of effortless superiority, I really amd ok with it.

Otherwise not much as been on, so I think I'll start another book (I finished The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro the other day, and it was really excellent). I'm eyeing up Richard III, which, to my great shame, I have never read. For some reason I have difficulty in reading anything I associate with uni at home though. I guess I figure I need to be reading it 'properly'. Well, we will see. So far the only things I have read that is really relevant are a few chapters out of Kerrigan's book, and flipping through some illustrations and paintings in a book on Renaissance art, bit of a primer I bought a few weeks ago. Although even those have been mildly succesful, and I discovered that in 1591 lovely Elizabeth was treated to a pretty extraordinary example of hospitality at Elvetham where a new garden was established with an island and tritons for her pleasure. That and the fact that I discovered that 'island' is both a noun (self-apparent), and a declarative - 'I land'. I'm really getting excited by this terraforming idea - I think it has a lot of legs, and lots of interesting crossover with ecocrit. On top of that I'm starting to think about the idea of replication and miniatures, which kind of goes hand in hand with terraforming. For an idea of this kind of duplication I had a look at Albrecht Altdorfer's The Battle of Alexander at Issus, which seems almost fractal like in its reductions. Anyway, that's just nonsense really, but suffice to say, I'm excited. Definitely excited. Also I wish I had graduated. I think I'm the only one in the world who hasn't yet, and after seeing some lovely pictures of my girlfriend's graduation, I want to wear a stupid hat too! Bring on Spetember I say!

Labels: islands

Amazing news with regards to this bootless moan's (hereafter tbm) agressive international expansion - we have had more international visitors! In fact, we have doubled our international visitors. Admittedly that doubling is from two (California and Moscow, if you remember from previous posts) to four, but I'm still chuffed. And where in the world were these visitors from? A double visit from the best city in Brazil, home to three football clubs, three universities, and famous for it's role in the nineteenth century as Brazil's leading producer of dried meat...Pelotas! Yeah I have absolutely no clue either, but that's beside the point. Someone in the nineteenth century stronghold of dried meat production loves it. So this is a shout out for them.

Otherwise, the news of the day was that results came out today. This was a mixed blessing. With the exception of two modules, everything else was a first, which is obviously pleasing. But what is a bit sad is that my two 2.1's were in Shakespeare and a piece of Renaissance coursework. That they happen to be the modules I'm going to be involved with next year is a bit...lame. I did do better in the straight Renaissance paper, so that softens it a bit, but I just wish I could have done better in Shakespeare. If nothing else it categorically proves that you just can't tell what's any good - I thought that Shakespeare was my best module, and it was far far from it, while the module I thought went badly was my highest. Who knows eh?

Was hoping to feel a bit better on my foot today after wrenching it last time I went for a run, but unfortunately no joy. Taking anti-inflammatory stuff at the moment, so hopefull that and a bit of extra rest will be ok. I really want to get back on the road though - I'm really feeling a massive long run at low pace - especially after finding out my Dad ran half-marathons in 9.30. I'm running half half-marathons in under 7.30's now, so I can easily manage that, and I'd like to kind of trounce him. Maybe a nice long one after work tomorrow. See how the foot feels. Apart from that, I haven't really got a huge amount to say, well, not that's worth listening to anyway. So I'll draw a line under it here. Turrah.

Labels: blog, exams

I realise it's been a long time since I posted anything on here. That's partly because I'm a rather soporific summer holiday, humid and uneventful enough to put a damper on the drive to perform even the most basic of tasks (like update the blog). Partly it's also down to my dissatisfaction with the blog - I had strongly considered changing the layout of the thing, but eventually decided I did like this after all. I may change the header though. I'm still dissatisfied by the lack of a comment facility though - something I think I need if I'm ever to get anyone to engage with the blog in a meaningful way (as I hope it will work from September). I also really need to add an RSS feed, but I think this is quite doable. Partly too I just don't have a great deal to say, having had little of interest happen.

Today I want to talk about Shakespeare, and specifically, Bardolatry and Shakespearean actors. I watched a Channel 4 documentary called To Be or Not to Be...In Shakespeare which was an interesting look at how actors (many of them very accomplished indeed, people like Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart) thought about playing Shakespeare's characters. Two things struck me. A) Although I'm always happy to admit that Shakespeare is a profoundly important dramatist, I really take objection to the way the actors talk about him as such a phenomenal, one-off, dramatist. The way they spoke about him really calls into question their exposure to wider Early Modern drama, and I have to be honest, when someone who performed in like one tour of Love's Labour's Lost begins banging on about how no-one can touch Shakespeare, you do feel like sitting them down in front of Marlowe's Edward II and not letting them leave until they have read it. Yes let's venerate Shakespeare, but not at the price of being blinkered to all the other staggering achievements of that literary period.

Secondly it reminded me of an interesting set of lectures that took place in a few years ago at UCL that I went to see. As part of the (quite interesting I think) drive for a multi-perspectival approach, two Shakespearean actor alumni had been invited to talk about the challenge of playing Shakespeare. I'm all up for this type of thing, and I do think that academics have to be careful not to assume their brand of Shakespeare has greater veracity than the quite different experience of performing it on stage. However, one of the actors made something of a faux-pas in front of the collected students / faculty by getting a bit too enraptured in a particularly airy speech on how Shakespeare's rhythms were so natural and human that you almost didn't need anything else.* And then she said something quite revealing; 'The words don't really matter'. There was understandably vocal disagreement from the lecture theatre - after all, the people in front of her dedicated their time to precisely what she had just labeled as superfluous. I think in that instant it became quite clear that there had been for this woman at least, and possibly for a very many actors, a disjunction between the laudatory tones they invoked Shakespeare with, and the actual reason for that celebration of his work. If you don't care about the words...well it's just pantomime isn't it - dress up with some interesting cadences shouted to the rafters. And to be honest, there are far too many performances in which actors rely on dynamic speech patterns as a novelty to kind of 'make it new', and allow the text to break out from people's conceptions of what Shakespeare is. I'm all for it, helping break down the image of fusty Renaissance verse is a fantastic aim. But the words themselves are enough - it's the words which have the exciting, alienating power that is too often forgotten about. We shouldn't be trying to think of ways to make the words exciting. If they don't come out as cabled, savoury verse, then you're doing it wrong.

Also exciting is that my breakdown of marks comes out in the coming week. This is exciting for no-one but me, but I am excited enough to let said excitement bubble over into the internet. I'm just interested to see how they all went really - for example - how far did forgetting the name to that play hurt in Romantics? Did anyone buy the dating of a clearly Romantic text as Sidnean in the Commentary exam? We wait and see.

*P.S. - I'm sick to death with actors talking about iambic pentameter with extremely dubious authority, saying 'it is of course, the beat of the human heart', as if to make some kind of comment on Shakespeare's supposed grand, universal appeal. Well yes, it may be. But the majority of the world doesnt versify in that way, and much of Shakespeare's work is in prose. So please stop trying to mythologise him.

Labels: Shakespeare

"The circle of human knowledge, illuminated by the pale, cold light of reason, is so infinitesimally small, the dark regions of human ignorance which lie beyond that luminous ring so immeasurably vast, that imagination is feign to step up to the borderline and send the warm, richly colored beams of her fairy lantern streaming out into the darkness ; and so, peering into the gloom, she is apt to mistake the shadowy reflections of her own figure for real beings moving in the abyss.

Sir James George FrazerThe Golden Bough

April 2010 / May 2010 / June 2010 / July 2010 / August 2010 / September 2010 / February 2011 / April 2011 / August 2011 / September 2011 /

Messing with Illustrator / /homeless / The irony of househunting. / Househunting / Some old material / Favourite capture on Google Maps Street View / Idiot librarian / THIS IS NOT THAT DAY! / Confirmation (not religious) / love data? love data. /

The title of this blog comes from a poem by Coleridge, A Wish: Wriiten in Jesus Wood, Feb. 10th, 1792, Plus most blogs are moans anyway. Including this one. lol manuscripts

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I'm a 23 year-old student in London Cambridge London, studying English Literature Law. It's hard to really think of anything truly personal I can put here that might give you some idea of who I am, so I will just tell you that my favourite Shakespeare play is Richard II, my favourite chocolate bar is Snickers, and I have a bit of a thing for instant coffee, especially if someone else makes it for me.

I'm interested in Renaissance Literature, Higher Education policy, and libraries.
I'm completely in love with a Scottish girl.