life without a plot

Another quote from RTD's book —

To be honest, I have trouble with 'escapism' full stop. It's usually a derogatory term. Or condescending. At best, cute. [...] It makes the pastime, whether it's a hobby or a job, seem tiny and silly, when it's a vital part of your life. [...] Writing is actually my way of engaging with the world, not escaping from it.

Now admittedly unlike him I'm not making a living out of my (not-)escapism, so maybe I have something less of an argument there, but I do agree with this on several levels.

( Reality (or not), art, writing; TV, storytelling and metaphysics; Andromeda, Smallville, Firefly and Bush-ite America. Broadly generalising and meandering without really going anywhere. )


Also... The Surinam toad and its reproductive habits. The things you learn on the internetz...
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Half an hour later. Um. Note to self. Don't start watching animal videos on YouTube.

::yawns:: I guess it would have been too much to ask to be eased gently from holiday-mode into work-mode.

Woke up from a nightmare today where - my sister, I think - killed someone and I spent the the best part of the dream trying to get rid of a plastic bag with (curiously small) body parts. Very relieved to wake up, let me tell you. That's what you get when you're wishing for 'real' nightmares instead of university/work related anxiety dreams. :)

~

Brief holiday summery.

# Lazy, lazy, lazy. Never even made it to Maishofen, stayed in Salzburg the whole two weeks.

# The single exeption from the general & completely embarrassing laziness was a lot of Russian learning. Once I actually brought myself to open the book & put the CD into the CD player, I really enjoyed it, or at least it wasn't a chore & gave me the sense of having achieved something and actually using my brain for once; I don't know why I kept putting off and off and off until I'd forgotten so much, for one and a half months. My brain works in strange and unfathomable ways. [ETA a couple of tiring work days (& coming home completely braindead) later... oh wait. Question answered.] Repeated, wrote a lot/много писала, and I mean a lot, used up almost a whole spiral notebook, the next person to use the recycling bin is going to wonder, because as it was I couldn't spell at all without checking with the textbook over and over, and sadly knowing how to pronounce the word rarely helps (*is nostalgic for Spanish*), browsed a bit through the rest of our textbook and went through the first six tracks of my vocabulary CD [новые слова изучала]. I hate the early stages of a language when you're hitting walls with every step & can't say anything beyond, Меня зовут Вероника, живу в Вене, русский язык изучаю, because you're lacking the grammar and words. Grr.

At one point, when I was tinkering with my TW fic I started to write g's for d's and cyrillic s's and for a moment couldn't remember how to write a latin one. *headdesk*

# Reading: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (reread), and then The Making Of Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (new) & more about that later, because the desire to say something even remotely intelligent and coherent is what keeps me from hitting 'post' since Monday-ish; maybe when I've also reread the relevant diary years. Still very brilliant; still completely heartbreakingly sad. Struggled through the music passages like always with only a very shadowy understanding, because my theoretical knowledge stops at being able to read a (simple) score, but repeatedly caught myself at the thought that I must get the CDs. ::facepalm::

Finished Modern Nature and started Smiling in Slow Motion (rereads; & btw, watched The Garden just before I left, which is eerily, elegically beautiful & which I'm going to take a gazillion screencaps of for my screensaver folder to replace the current Torchwood wallpapers); read Dostojewskij's Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch (one of those books that are just a bit too close for comfort, even if you're aware of enough distance and difference not to actually identify) and Vladimir Sorokin's Der Himmelblaue Speck (No comment here; so far I've always liked his novels, but this was just crazy, and not a little shocking; I've no idea where, if anywhere, he's going with it; probably I've missed the point completely.)

Tried to reread Mrs Dalloway, but while I still love Virgininia Woolf's prose, I can't seem to focus. I stare at a paragraph for minutes, starting over and over, and my mind keeps drifting, I've no idea why.

# Discovered to my complete shock & amazement that I was still fit enough to run through the park, down the whole Hellbrunner Allee and back again without a break. More morning runs. A bit of biking around, to Bad Reichenhall and, once, around the Untersberg, this with a lot of ups & downs, geographically speaking.

# A bit of uninspired (everything too lush & green, too neat & picturesque) photography, although with some surprisingly nice results when I least expected them. Or at least that's what I thought when I quickly looked through the pictures yesterday.

# Watched some old school DW, Genesis of the Daleks, which was a bit... um, archaic?, and, er, maybe kind of stiff when you haven't grown up with it, but I can totally see the cult potential (although I think I prefer modern day Sarah Jane), and City of Death, which I genuinely enjoyed (without politely phrased reservations); funny, with Douglas Adams' touch very recognisable.

# Day-trip to Munich, Lenbachhaus and Pinakothek der Moderne. The former — lots of early Kandinsky landscapes; lovely but almost impossible to appreciate hanging side by side like that, one explosion of colour after another, impossible to chose; frustration at the sudden complete block in my mind at his abstract paintings, fighting my stupid and too literal brain for something like fifteen minutes, trying to make some kind of connection, with some success, but no real understanding. It's strange, or maybe more precisely, fascinating how these things work, or don't work. Earlier that morning I had the rather unsettling experience of looking at a painting and suddenly it kind of... dissolved and all I could see was strokes of paint on a canvas, and it meant nothing at all. It passed, but wtf, brain? Münter, Jawlensky, Marc; Klee, lovely - mystery and subtle humour. Sitting in the garden, the sun coming out after a rainy morning, writing this into my notebook, the square paving stones of the path, greyish- brown, with moss and the occasional small plant growing between them, like a Klee painting. Nothing that I completely loved, but a lot that I liked.

The Pinakothek - More expressionism, since it fit the theme of the day, skipped most of the rest.

# All the time the underlying (although not very worrying) question, why all this, what am I trying to find in all those, books, stories, art — distraction, entertainment, truth, a better understanding of life? Coupled with the suspicion that it all isn't quite real, quite essential, at least looking at it (creating might be different); but what is? The obvious answer is children, but I don't have the least desire for a child. So. ::shrugs:: Also a certain restlessness, dissatisfaction with the sameness & repetition; I think I need a out-of-Austria holiday soonish.

Had a so-so Sunday, late breakfast with R.-from-work and R.-no-longer-from-work, and I definitely need to find a way around those initials, but since Vienna is such a village when it comes down to it, I'm not really comfortable with names... Anyway. Extended breakfast, then the Derek Jarman exhibition in the Kunsthalle, which I found a little disappointing because I expected to see more artworks and fewer films. We watched the biographic film by Isaac Julien, and personally I'd have also liked to see Blue, which I've never seen before, but the other two seemed a little disinclined to spend more than an hour watching a blue screen...

So then (with only R.-from-work) on to watching Mamma Mia, which was, much as expected, a mostly okay and sometimes genuinely funny and touching feel-good summer movie. Generally speaking it failed when it became too dramatic (comparatively speaking, that is), but Meryl Streep was fantastic, her songs fitted her perfectly and her version of The Winner Takes It All sent shivers down my spine and made me want to stand up and applaud at the end of it. Dancing Queen was just the cutest thing ever and Christine Baranski fabulous as usual. It's a pity the movie couldn't uphold these standards throughout, and I don't know who thought it was a good idea to cast Pierce Brosnan, who simply can't sing at all, there's no politer way of saying it. That was just... painful.


Walked home in the evening sun, made myself a salad & am now watching Erasure videos on YouTube. (Which is not as completely random as it may seem, because I started out with Derek Jarman's It's A Sin video for the Pet Shop Boys, but the internet tends to side-track you like that...)

My very exciting life. *g*

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky exhibition, another thing to strike off the to do list. Liked it.

Liked it?

And that's another strange thing I've been noticing lately - I don't know if it's because I've been moving away from academia for a while now and am losing the knack of being able to dissect everything mentally & verbally, or if I've found a different way of looking at and enjoying art that simply doesn't fit into the mental categories I used to have, but I've entirely lost the ability to verbalise my appreciation, even in my head. I can stand in front of almost every painting/work of art (withing a certain range, still, but the range is so much wider than it used to be) and, if I let myself, almost fall into it, because there's this power and energy in most good art, regardless of style or subject, but I can't explain it beyond that, at least not in a remotely adequate fashion. Books are still easier, but to translate mediums in my head like this seems impossible.




Sister and boyfriend have found another, more happily willing godmother candidate, which I guess is the best solution for everyone involved, except now that makes me irrationally sad and a bit jealous. Er, no, i don't pretend I'm making sense here, even in my own head.

The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.

Friends should drag me to exhibitions more often. Ironically, R. ended up not really liking Bourgeois's work, but I was intrigued. I can't verbalise it -I don't even have the vocabulary to intelligently talk about modern art - I won't pretend to understand it in the sense that I informed myself about the artist's intentions and aims, the deeper meaning of her work, &c. but something about it spoke to me, seemed somehow compellingly familiar, the older drawings as well as the more recent fabric pictures. Something I'd feel comfortable having around at home, if I had a home suitable to put up this kind of art, or the money to buy it with; which I don't think I've ever felt about any contemporary artist.

An oblong picture with black waves, that, despite the title 'landscape', resembled nothing so much as a turbulent sea, stretching from the lower left corner to the middle of the right side, black fabric, the structure and depth indicated by very exact parallel stitched lines, the remaining upper two thirds of the canvas painted a uniform light blue. The contrast between the dark, intricately patterned mass, beautiful, but confusing, almost oppressive and the clear, light sky was almost... transcendent?