The Garret

I have not yet decided whether my LiveJournal will be deleted, or whether it will remain in its present state of defunct disuse. But any new content will be happening at Dreamwidth.

Meanwhile, here is some selectively selected Tennyson, used semi-satirically.


[...] I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
[...]
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows;
[...]
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(from "Ulysses")

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Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,
And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,
That twice have heard keen April's clarion sound
Since here we first together saw and heard
Spring's light reverberate and reiterate word
Shine forth and speak in season. Life stands crowned
Here with the best one thing it ever found,
As of my soul's best birthdays dawns the third.

There is a friend that as the wise man saith
Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me
Hath time not shown, through days like waves at strife,
This truth more sure than all things else but death,
This pearl most perfect found in all the sea
That washes toward your feet these waifs of life.

--Algernon Charles Swinburne (from Tristram of Lyonesse)

Happy Poetry Month! Here, have some nonsense.

The Jumblies
by Edward Lear

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There are very few hours left in this year and I feel that I ought to say something about it. A lot happened! I did many things!

2014 is the year I went to Iceland and took selfies in front of a glacier and sprawled on a black volcanic beach.

Some wonderful people got married to each other and I played fiddle at the wedding with some of my favorite people, and I got to spend time with some of my other favorite people.

I did not write a lot on LJ, but I wrote a lot of other things, or at least wrote a lot of drafts of a few other things, even though it was really hard and I spent whole days sobbing under my blankets because it was hard and then I made myself do it anyway. I took a bunch of supremely stupid standardized tests and I really hope I get into a PhD program that makes this entire fall worth it.

My faithful Ovid the Macbook went into honorable retirement--not exile--after six and a half years of loyal service. I am typing this on Diomedes the Shiny, which is swift and powerful and will hopefully survive whatever battles we face.

2014 is the year I was supremely grumpy about books. But I also fell in love with the Symphony from the New World and discovered red lipstick and Kraken rum.

I was really pleased to discover yesterday that I could read (without dictionary) the following line from the German translation of Graceling: "Dieser Lord hat eine Tochter, die mit Gedankenlesen beschenkt ist."

I am not Graced with thought-reading, but I am hopeful. Happy New Year!

Much has been happening and, as is the way of it, I have not posted about it. However! Here are several exciting things:

1. Yesterday I did SCIENCE! I looked at slides under a microscope and recorded things for Archaeologist Housemate. In future there may be things to centrifuge.

2. A couple of weeks ago I impulse-bought a giant pink digital watch at CVS. I am now convinced this is what I was born to wear, especially with Zoya Blu nails.

3. I am apparently going to Scotland in two weeks. Yay? It was not my idea, or my choice of timing, but I'm reminding myself how much I like Edinburgh and am determined not to be terrible about it.

4. I am going to Iceland after that for a few days, because it was the most amazing thing I could think of to do. (And because I'm already missing a ton of work for Scotland, so I might as well miss more work to do something I want.) There was a long and hilariously complicated scene at the travel agency, culminating in the owner offering me a job. She was only half joking.

5. Archaeologist Housemate was cleaning and almost put a bilingual collection of Rainer Maria Rilke in the to-sell pile. I fixed that: she's going to want it some day. Leafing through it I found this: ( Collapse )

Today was a beautiful day, of the kind that remind me why I moved here. Wrote a bit, got a smoothie and drank it in the park with Cavafy’s selected poems, took a nap with Copernicus, wrote some more. Slow progress is being made, much of it on the wrong side of the line between context and wild speculation.

I got an ARC of The Bane Chronicles (collected), and I keep saying I’m done with that whole series, but it is awfully addictive, if absurdly overwrought in places and totally lacking in main characters who are less than ridiculously, angelically (or demonically) attractive. Magnus Bane is pretty much the only character I would actually want to read about at this point (though the terrible movie gave me an unexpected fondness for Isabelle Lightwood). Nostalgic terrible sweater blast! Plus I like just about anything Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson write.

I also like Cavafy a lot, as it turns out.

“One of Their Gods” (C.P. Cavafy, tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

When one of them moved through the center of Selefkia
just as it was getting dark—
moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome,
the joy of immortality in his eyes,
his hair black and perfumed—
the people going by would gaze at him,
and they would ask each other who he was,
if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.
But some who looked more carefully
would understand and step aside;
and as he disappeared under the colonnade,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
going toward the quarter that lives
only at night, with orgies and debauchery,
with every kind of intoxication and desire,
they would wonder which of Them it could be,
and for what suspicious pleasure
he’d come down into the streets of Selefkia
from the August Celestial Mansions.

April has slipped away too fast. Work has been busy, and I've been busy outside of it. My adventuring has been curbed somewhat by extremely persistent plantar fasciitis in one foot, which I finally contacted a recommended doctor about, only to be told that they don't do feet. Sigh.

Anyway, I have not forgotten it is Poetry Month (for the next few minutes). Through a string of coincidences involving a remaindered box of postcards and Emily Dickinson, I've been reading Muriel Rukeyser, who won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1935. I find her often incoherent, but I like some of her phrasing very much. The following is pure Wellesley benediction; I read it and find myself back in the chapel squashed between my friends on an uncomfortable bench. The choir has just finished, or possibly the group that did Indigo Girls songs, and we are all of us being encouraged by somebody with a PhD and a gown:

“This Place in the Ways”

Having come to this place
I set out once again
on the dark and marvelous way
from where I began:
belief in the love of the world,
woman, spirit, and man.

Having failed in all things
I enter a new age
seeing the old ways as toys,
the houses of a stage
painted and long forgot;
and I find love and rage.

Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year
and always less self-pity
since I know in a clearer light
the strength of the mystery.

And at this place in the ways
I wait for song.
My poem-hand still, on the paper,
all night long.
Poems in throat and hand, asleep,
and my storm beating strong!

(Muriel Rukeyser, The Green Wave, 1948, p. 21)

Hello my darlings, I did not mean to be so long away. I have been having ADVENTURES and also being busy. Which is better than being not-busy. I have read several terrible books and a few good books and binge-watched a lot of television (a4yroldfaerie, when you told me of Young Americans the first time why did you not tell me that Bella was AWESOME?).

For Valentine's Day I winged out my eyeliner and dressed in fuschia and Swarovski and went to hear Dvorak's Symphony from the New World. The performance was excellent and the program notes were snarky.

In early March, I went to KPOPCON to hear Javabeans and Girlfriday talking about idols in dramas.

For St Patrick's Day, I finally bestirred myself to go see Frozen, and you know what, I have A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT IT. Despite its massive narrative problems, I spent most of the screening with tears of joy running down my face. I am not exaggerating even a little bit. There were actual tears. ON MY FACE.

Finally, I convinced some friends to see the Veronica Mars movie with me last night. IT TURNS OUT I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS ALSO. I came home and lay on the floor with the expectation that the feelings would recede to a manageable level. They did not. The ONE THING that would have made it possible for SPOILER and SPOILER to finally SPOILER ACTUALLY HAPPENED ;ALSDJFLASKF;ALSKJFAL;KJDFAL;DKJA;DJKSF I cannot deal. I feel kind of like snowqueenofhoth after seeing Revenge of the Sith, only less SPOILER and more SPOILER.

It didn't work the first time, but I am so overwhelmed with feels that I think I will try this floor thing again. Dvorak is not helping either, because as it turns out, I have feelings about that too.

Happy New Year!

Work has been pretty all-consuming, but I felt very Berkeley this morning—went to the Cheeseboard for a ginger cookie and cheese roll, looked at "comfort shoes" at the mature lady-clothes shop, went to Andronico’s (which has the exact same bulk bins as Monterey Market, only more so). Came home and did half an hour of yoga with assistance from Copernicus the cat. Spent the rest of the day finishing an advance copy of The Blazing World, which I don't think I'm allowed to discuss pre-publication but about which I have many thoughts.

I thought about going back out and getting milk and eggs for a quiche tonight, but in the end opted to make a sort of salad by cooking frozen blackberries together with tofu and leftover sushi rice in a little pot and mixing that with spinach and pepitas garnished with fresh blackberries, sort of a less successful riff on Heidi Swanson’s black rice and cherry salad. It was… not all that delicious, to be honest, but it looked pretty. The white rice absorbs the blackberry juice and looks kind of like pomegranate seeds, if you don’t look too closely. Dinner reading: MFK Fisher’s Musings on Wine and Other Libations. She's delightful.

In other news, inspired by mousapelli and by extreme intellectual boredom and hatred of retail, I am seriously considering a try at a PhD. Probably in comparative literature rather than straight-up English, though really a mountain--nay, a mountain range--of research needs to be done before I even know where to apply. I had this revelation just in time to miss all application deadlines for this fall, so I'll have to wait almost two years to actually start--assuming I find a program I want that wants me--but I am pretty sure I can fill the time. I have a few real-world sources, but any suggestions and/or advice would be most welcome.

If I insist on spending all my spare time writing scholarly papers about Greek literature in Victorian children's novels, I might as well get credit for it.

My anthropologist housemate K. recommends that I take up kendo to increase my confidence. We shall see.

I suppose it would be accurate to sum up 2013 as "the year I moved to Berkeley and had a lot of feelings." I also read a lot of books (no surprise) and watched a lot of American television and only three Asian dramas (yes surprise) and, to judge by my diary, had a lot of feelings about those. I took a semester of Korean (excruciating but also entertaining), expanded my cooking repertoire, and went apartment-hunting twice.

It's so weird to see myself as an adult. I think it's helped me begin to think about the future, though. And I'm afraid, but also--for a change--hopeful.

Happy New Year.