life without a plot

# Real life. (Blah.)

I was planning to go for a walk today, but then I slept until 10-ish, breakfasted and wasted time on the internet, practiced Excel, had a bit of lunch, half-heartely thought about where I might go, couldn't decide, and ultimately decided that I needed a lazy stay-at-home day after last weekend's stress.

Also decided I'll do the ECDL certificate after all, since I've already done the Excel and Access classes and can learn the rest from books, and will probably do a HTML/CSS class in September, since I've always vaguely wanted to learn that from a scratch and be able to do more than just type a few basic codes... So there I was, feeling unusually active and hopeful, until I randomly browsed through job adds a couple of days ago and pretty much ended up thinking, why even bother, I can just kill myself now, because I'll never be qualified for, or do anything other than retail. Stupid, pessimistic, mood-swingy brain. But maybe it is right, after all?

What also irritates me is that I've done barely any reading at all recently, mostly because when I'm reading it's Lukianenko's NIght Watch series in Russian, and for obvious reasons that takes up a disproportionate amount of time. ( It's kind of fascinating, though. )


# Various media stuff:

* Saw Thor with G., and, just, gah. Either it's because I'm not familiar with the (comic book) source, or I'm simply getting too old for these kind of movies, but I found it almost insultingly bad. ( The worst thing was, it was actually my idea to see it, because I was a huge fan of Kenneth Branagh a longish while ago, and... )

* Stuck about two thirds into Smallville S6... ( Lj tells me it's been over three years since I watched S5, but in many ways it's as if I never left at all... )

One of these days I'm going to write something rambly about the whole identifying-with-characters issue. Because I honestly have no idea why I always fall for the characters I fall for, who, as a rule, have nothing whatsoever in common with me, at least as far as I can make out.

# Also watched RTD's Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). They're both a bit too children orientated for my taste, and the stories are nothing much (although they both do have their moments), but I enjoyed Dark Season especially. It's a bit DW-ish, and the characters are just thoroughly enjoyable. There's a young Kate Winslet as Reet, and the girl playing Marcy just radiates a certain Doctor-ness. Which is probably more due to RTD writing her, but I could so see her as a female Doctor. Actually, I'm going to pretend she's a Time Lord now. Miss Maitland, exasperated and torn between believing and not believing is also a rather lovely character.

( Wherever you are, whoever you are, there's always a strangeness in things. )

(The whole thing also dates like whoa, but that can't be helped with a story from the early 1990ies involving computers. In 1991 I think I actually still typed my proseminar papers on a type writer...)

Century Falls sort of gives the impression that it's trying to get somewhere more ambitious and dramatic, without quite succeeding (yet), but it also has its moments, all those old ladies, and generally speaking enough female characters to pass half a dozen Bechdel tests...

* Somehow, I'm still watching A Game of Thrones. I don't know... there's still stuff I'm not too happy with and I'm not even particularly interested in all the political scheming and violence, but the characters have definitely drawn me in, and even more than that I want to know more about the mythology of it all, the dragons, the Wall, the White Walkers, and the winter, which they keep hinting at. (Also, although that is nothing new, I'm really, really bad at recognising actors. I eventually, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally when he started talking about cannibalism, recognised the actor who played the guy from the cannibal village in Countycide, but I didn't recognise Aiden Gillen at all... Imdb tells me Sibel Kekilli is also in there, but who is Shae?

I was planning to go out with the camera today since we got quite a bit of snow over the last few days and it's (presumably) really pretty once you get out of the city, but I turned off the alarm, slept until ten, finally crawled out of bed around 11-ish and didn't have the energy for anything at all. Plus, there's Russian homework that still needs to be written. Yesterday wasn't even particularly stressful, but I've been hurting in one place or the other for the last two weeks, and I have absolutely no tolerance for that kind of thing. My body is supposed to function, damn it, and I hate it when it doesn't. It's enough that my psyche sabotages me all the time. But at least the pain medication doesn't seem to have lastingly upset my stomach...

On the downside, I seem to have developed a quite scary craving for chocolate and sugar. Apparently I can either have stomach problems, or a body I'm moderately happy and content with, but not both.

~ ~ ~
Read Ellen Kushner's story The Man with the Knives, and, meh. I still adore Swordspoint, but every single thing she's written afterwards left me wishing she'd finally leave that universe and those characters alone and create something entirely new. I don't remember much about The Fall of the Kings, except that it left me extremely frustrated and completely indifferent to the characters, and that the sudden introduction of supernatural elements into a universe that used to be entirely secular struck me as odd and OOC. The Privilege of the Sword seemed overly fanservice-y and even though getting a sort of happy ending for Richard and Alec was nice, I still wish she'd stuck to telling the girls' stories and made it a lesbian love story. I ended up liking the protagonist quite a bit, and throwing her into a novel along with already established characters IMO diminished the impact of her story. So now she wrote yet another, this time well and truly final ending for Richard and Alec, and it's depressing as fuck. I'm especially annoyed since I always found Richard the more compelling and interesting character. Alec's overwrought angst and various neuroses are bearable only when balanced by Richard's quiet and calm; on his own he's a character that I find hard to like. And to be perfectly honest, if the story had to continue after Swordspoint (personally, I'd have much preferred it if she'd left the characters there), I would have been perfectly happy with the Greek island ending of TPotS; I didn't need to learn that Richard died (probably suicide?) and Alec's arc, after yet more angst and self-harm, ends with ~healing~ heterosexual marriage. Gah. If she wants to write more female characters, more power to her. But she should give them their own stories.

~ ~ ~
Merlin finale - good parts, blah parts, annoying parts. I'll have to rewatch the last three episodes to sort out my thoughts.

~ ~ ~
I've been wasting way too much time on YouTube recently, but a song I've listened to a lot and really love is Svetlana Surganova's Коробли (Ships). (In case anyone is actually at work on a Sunday—there's a bit of NSFW non-sexual nudity in the video.)

( Tentative and probably much too literal attempt at a translation. )

# I'm not actually dead. I've even been online, more or less - I used to insist that Salzburg/Maishofen was my internet and computer free time, just me and my books, detox, but I've finally caved and bought myself usb-stick internet for my sister's old laptop that I mainly got to familiarise my Mac using self with Office, Excel, etc., which I've totally failed to do so far. But, holiday internet. *conflicted sigh* I'm not using it as much as I do at home, partly, but hopefully not only because I'm paying for bandwidth; I'm feeling quieter here, more at peace, not as compelled to follow every bit of discussion or drama, because god forbid I should miss someone being wrong on the internet somewhere; more removed from it all; but the mere fact that this whole world is there when I want it is a reassurance. Which actually scares me quite a bit. We shouldn't be so dependent on things that... are real, I'm not going to argue that, but also in a way seem very fragile and... disappearable? Which isn't a word, I know. Maybe it's not having grown up with all this technology that makes me a bit wary of its permanence and ultimate reliability.


# Anyway. ( Had seven rather nice days of skiing... )


# With all this and my whole lack-of-fitness related state of constant tiredness I didn't get a lot of reading done so far. Finished re-reading TM's Königliche Hoheit, which I still find kind of... sad. There are brilliant ironic and genuinely funny parts, but the love story, while touching, strikes me as more melancholy than not.

Then read R. Safanski's Heidegger biography (Ein Meister aus Deutschland), which I picked rather randomly out of my father's bookcase for no very good reason, except that I vaguely wanted to start getting over my complete stupidity/lack of understanding/slight apprehension when it comes to philosophy, which I've always avoided because it seemed a bit too abstract for my too-materialist, too-concrete brain that finds it easier to look for models and answers in history, sociology and psychology, and found it readable and interesting when I opened it and gave it a cursory glance. And at least in the first part of the book Safranski did manage to convey even to me an idea what philosophy can be about, and while the philosophic parts were a bit of a difficult read at first for the complete newbie lacking even a good part of the basic terminology, also an impression of where Heidegger was going with his ideas. But then of course there's the inherent question about the worth of philosophy when it doesn't stop the philosopher from being just as fallible and wilfully blind as the next average, unphilosophic person... In any case, it was a fascinating introduction into the history of thought in the 20th century, and I found at least Heidegger's early philosophy with its importance of questions instead of answers, deconstruction of absolutes and emphasis on personal perception and immediate experience of living interesting, if a little too... self-involved, maybe, in the end? It touches something I've been wondering myself - how much, how far can you deconstruct absolutes and preconceptions, something that studying history does, too, until you're left with nothing, floating in relatives, questioning and second guessing your every opinion? Feeling like you're losing yourself in all the ifs and buts and OTOHs and looking at everything from every possible angle? And what then? Where, to quote Buffy & Co, do we go from here? Are there any answers? Or is this only a problem because on some fundamental level my ex-catholic brain hasn't quite given up wanting or believing in the existence of absolutes?

[On a side-note, in my personal and admittedly once again completely materialist opinion the next major revolution about human thought and self-perception, the definition of man and structure of society will be caused by what science will discover about the function of the human brain over the next decades.]

It also totally made me want to write something about the philosophic background in TW, which I guess is wildly, wildly inappropriate? Not to mention completely presumptuous and idiotic considering my vague to the point of barely-there-at-all knowledge about 20th century philosophy. But I already have ideas & notes! Gah! Read about Heidegger and wrote notes about Jack. Oh dear. *facepalm* But he's such a classic example of being 'thrown' into life, and if it isn't the knowledge of his own mortality that defines his life (rather the reverse), it's everyone else's. Would it be possible to do this sticking strictly to the TW-text and not dragging and actual philosophers into it & thereby making an utter fool of myself?


# Saw Avatar with G. last week before I left & was mainly bored & more bored (also cramped after three hours & I still find 3D movies exhausting to watch), although I have to say I kind of liked Neytiri. What completely baffles me is that apparently you can spend what must have been an absolutely indecent amount of money on the special effects, and still have a script & dialogue that are this bad. What could a good script writer have cost in comparison?


# I'll have to catch up with all the recorded figure skating when I come home, but I'm sad that Lambiel didn't make it on the podium. This was the one Olympic fairytale I really wanted to see happen.


# Friday already! Having to drive home the day after tomorrow. Still so much Russian homework to do. Back to work on Monday. I think I'm going to be sick.

I've read so little recently that it's probably only my struggle with Russian vocabulary & such that keeps my brain from completely evaporating - or at least that's what I hope -, but I actually did finish the last volume of Ricardo Pinto's Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy and Corambis, the fourth volume of Sarah Monette's The Doctrine of Labyrinths.

[ETA: spoiler warning, not so much for Corambis, because if you made it through the first three volumes there isn't really anything in the fourth to actually warrant a warning, but on the off chance that someone on my friendslist doesn't know Pinto's books and wants to give them a try - personally I'd very much recommend not spoiling yourself for the ending.]

Now Pinto's book was surprise in the absolute best sense of the word. When I read the first volume a (longish) while ago I did admire the originality of the world-building (and the way he eases the reader into this completely alien world without too much obvious exposition is still equally remarkable), but I'd be lying to say it was really on the list of my favourite fantasy novels. And judging from my brief review of The Standing Dead I didn't feel all that enthusiastic about it at the time. However, these are definitely books that not only stand the test of rereading extremely well, but actually profit from it, because I'm pretty sure I enjoyed and appreciated both volumes more the second time round.

So I can't exactly claim that I've been on the edge of my seat for the last six years, but since I don't like unfinished stories and this one definitely was powerful enough to linger, I kept checking amazon occasionally, although after all this time I'd almost given up hope of ever getting the conclusion.

But now that The Third God has finally come out, ( I can only say it was very much worth the wait. )


Ironically with Monette's books it was the exact opposite, and it's a bit depressing to still remember how instantly I was pulled into the first volume, how much I loved it, and how my enthusiasm has gradually faded since and a story I'd loved in the end turned out to be a ( story that just wasn't for me. )




And now I'll really have to start packing & cleaning, if I actually want to leave to day...

# Long time, no update. Mostly due to being tired and inarticulate and really boring, and did I mention tired? Slept until 11 on Sunday, and then again three or four hours in the afternoon. Didn't even manage to do my Russian homework.


# New layout, because I needed something a bit more colourful in this dreary weather, and liked this one when I saw it on someone else's journal. I only kind of wish I'd known it'd also involve hours of inapt chasing after and trying to eliminate all the underlines and bottom-borders that the usual A {text-decoration: none} typed into the custom CSS box wouldn't take care of, and then changing the link colour for the entries since the links were barely visible without the (pseudo-)underline, and giving them a mouse-over colour. However, mission accomplished. Stop laughing now, nacktmull70. ;)

Alternatively, I wish I were less obsessive about underlined links. But I really do dislike them.


# ( Dollhouse ep.1 )


# ( Being Human ep.4 )


# There's some kind of huge TW S3 spoiler that I'll now have to avoid until, what, June? For months? Oh, *sigh*. Not that I actually hang out in TW or DW related communities, but I do remember where I found out about Snape killing Dumbledore, and it wasn't anywhere HP related...


# I got the DVD from our belly-dance show yesterday, but haven't dared watch it yet, because what if it makes me want to give up dancing out of complete embarrassment? Which would be a pity, because we're working with a veil this semester, and I do enjoy that...


# Read Robert Menasse's Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle over the weekend, the first book in a long while that I actually read from start to finish in three days and couldn't put down. Now if I only were able to say something appropriately clever about it... Part of the problem is that it's an intelligent and complex novel that I'd probably have to reread to really discuss, because I think I missed a lot, and my brain still doesn't seem to be completely online, but more importantly it struck me as a very personal book. I've read a few reviews, and most of them dwell on the the historic elements and insist that it's actually two novels, but IMO that is wrong, at least insofar as what the book is getting at and actually discussing is something beyond the sum of the two story-lines, something for which the historic elements and the whole structure of the book serves as a vehicle, a parable, a rhetoric figure, so to speak. Essentially, IMO, it's a book about identity, specifically Jewish identity, and it seems disrespectful to analyse and make assumptions from an outsider perspective.

I guess this is where people who embrace the whole 'Death of the Author' thing have it easier. I felt uncomfortable enough talking about TM's Doktor Faustus because it's such a personal novel, even if TM himself wrote a The Making Of novella emphasising how personal a book it is, and then handed over the missing pieces with the diaries, and maybe I should dig up, finish and post that entry one of these days. Not to mention he's been dead for quite a while.


# Every time I fall in love with a new show I have the tendency to friend all kinds of communities that I barely skim anymore a few weeks later mostly because of the ratio of stuff that's worth reading vs. stuff that isn't, but sometimes keeping them around is actually useful. bbc_merlin_news linked an interesting essay by lilithilien about Tarot symbolism in Merlin. What especially struck me in view of my own lengthy ramble about The Labyrinth of Gedref was how the image of Merlin and Arthur facing each other across the table and the two cups mirrors the Two Of Cups card in a way that I don't think can be coincidental. I'm not familiar with Tarot beyond the reading soavezefiretto did for me once so I wasn't aware of the symbolism of the card (which essentially seems to be in keeping with the dragon's 'two halves of the same thing', and the process of getting there), or, in fact its existence, because as far as I remember it didn't turn up then, but it neatly falls into place with my own interpretation of the episode...

First snow. Last family birthday before Christmas, my father's. Spent yesterday evening making another Schwarzwälderkirschtorte. (Incidentally, six months today until my next birthday; half a year gone already, *sigh*.) R. called in the afternoon, sounding quite desperate, she wants/needs to return the second cat she adopted since he doesn't get along with the first cat, or just doesn't get along full stop, and could I drive her/them there tomorrow? G. wants an article proof-read. My mother is a saint and fixes the belt of my belly dancing costume. Stress. My bike has a flat tyre and I've no idea when to bring it to the shop whose opening hours coincide with my own work hours. More stress.

~

On a completely unrelated note, reading Ruth Klüger's weiter leben I came across the following passage:

Ich bestehe auf diesen Unterscheidungen, riskiere bewußt, wenn auch ungern, die Leserin (wer rechnet schon mit männlichen Lesern? Die lesen nur von anderen Männern Geschriebenes) durch Belehrungen, die noch dazu teils von Laienpsychologie abhängig sind, zu irritieren oder gar zu brüskieren [...]

(emphasis mine; roughly translates as 'Who's counting on male readers? They only read things written by other men.')

How much of a hyperbole is that? Or is it a hyperbole at all? Truer in 1992 and before than today? On the whole it doesn't seem so very farfetched to me, because it took me a while to notice my own deeply ingrained misogynistic streak that made me almost automatically pick books written by male writers or the works of male artists. That changed to an extent over time, but it really was fandom that made me aware that the male perspective isn't necessarily... the neutral state, the default, the norm. A longish while ago I wrote an jl entry wondering whether men identify with female characters in novels as easily as female readers, or at least female readers of my generation and older who were brought up on the classics, identify with male characters. Admittedly it's probably not a universal experience; my (ex-)therapist didn't really understand when I tried to explain that, and the thought clearly hadn't occurred to her before, but I'm not completely alone either since I distinctly remember reading someone's lj-entry describing much the same thing; maybe people in slash fandom are more likely to notice and talk about these gender related issues? (My sister, when I asked her, said that in her experience men just didn't read a lot of novels. Now, is that true?)

Tired, cranky, headache. Don't want another family birthday. Even if it's my niece's. ::whine::


Since I never seem to have the time to actually sit/lie down and really read anything recently, I haven't much more than browsed through Russell T. Davis's book (although I have started at the beginning now, and it's rather fascinating. Also his frustration with TW 2.1, which I was going to say maybe was the reason why KKBB never completely worked for me, but apparently it got dumped on Chris Chibnall eventually...), reading a couple of pages here and there (so he wasn't completely happy with the Rose/Doctor.2 ending, either), but leafing through the pages I stumbled across this.

Put a man and a woman of roughly the same age on screen and you're telling a story. That's a love story. (Storytelling is very heterosexual in that sense. But that's why gay storytelling is exciting, because the images are still new.) The choice to put those two characters together on screen, in a story, is the crucial thing. Everything else is just detail. And luck. That's what makes you care. The archetypes. They run deep. [...] Man, woman, on screen = love story. Very little work necessary. (p 123)

Which I kind of agree with and kind of disagree, because while it's undoubtedly true, this (and I've said that before) is what for me makes so many of the heterosexual relationship on screen essentially uninteresting. Maybe/probably my brain is simply wired wrong, but if too much of the subsequent story relies just on this, and only this, I'll yawn and and switch off — or start slashing, depending on how interesting the rest of the show and the other characters are. It may be a love story, but it's also often (to me, at any rate) a boring love story. Now I'm not saying that I've never followed or enjoyed one of the will-they-or-won't-they-get-together storylines, but on the whole they don't make for the best storytelling, because once that question is resolved most of the time a) the show is over, b) they're heading towards break-up, or, special bullet point for Joss Whedon, c) someone gets killed.

So generally speaking putting a bit more work and character development into it is not actually a bad thing. The IMO still perfect example of Doing It Right are Sheridan and Delenn on Babylon 5, my OTPest OTP for something like a decade. It's hard to attempt looking at a show one has watched & rewatched with a fresh eye, but was there ever even the suspense of whether they'd get together? I don't think so, or at any rate one was rather more worried about them winning the war and saving the universe. Having a plot that encompasses and mingles action and romance rather than dividing it in two separate storylines, and upsetting a lot of tv gender clichés in the process is what made it so epic and unique. Thank you, MJS. :)

Now Joss Whedon frankly sucks at writing relationships, especially happy relationships, because as a rule he only sets them up to end them in the most painful way possible, but Buffy and Spike, in their own messed up way were a bit like that; even when it always was pretty clear they wouldn't have a happily ever after, they both learned something about themselves and each other in the process, which changed them for the better, it was plotty and not boring to watch. OTOH most of the male/female relationships on Angel were completely uninteresting; Cordelia/Angel as well as the Wesley/Fred/Gunn triangle, because they're indeed little more than man, woman, on screen = love story, and barely that, maybe partly because they never needed to work as relationships for the plot to go forward. I don't think saying that canonically Angel and Wesley had the most complex, if completely fucked up, relationship on that show has anything to do with slash googles, and one day I'm really going to write that essay. Or, Smallville, when I was still watching; Clark/Lex vs. Clark/Lana.

On a similar note, to be perfectly honest, Jack/Ianto would never have caught my interest, and certainly not got me writing all those endless rambling meta posts, if it hadn't come after Cyberwoman with the Fragments backstory and all the... if not exactly canonical, then at least canonically implied complexity and ambiguities resulting from that. So granted, once again a bit messed up, and maybe unhealthily codependent and whatnot, and apparently I've got a faible for that kind of thing, but take that away, and the banter-innuendo-coffee thing would be really kind of boring.

Well, in my opinion. It's pretty obvious that 90+% of fandom differs. Cf. above, brain wired wrong, and all that...

::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.

12:30 at work is when my brain decides to have thinky thoughts about everything from random trivia to Life, the Universe and Everything. Not when M. or B. are there, because then if you aren't working you're socialising, but when I'm alone, when there isn't any work to be done except dusting which can wait for the next day, and not too many customers to distract me, my brain tends to wander. During M.'s last holiday I -- not exactly wrote, except for a few sentences or fragmented phrases here and there, but plotted a good part of the never-to-be-finished-but-fun-while-it-lasted TW fic.

When I come home in the evening there is barely anything left; mind wiped blank, no real will (or need) to write, words slip away or suddenly lack conviction and whatever thoughts I had before seem stale and a bit alien. No longer quite true, or quite me. Language and thoughts/feelings drifting in different directions...

~


Watched The Tempest a couple of days ago; didn't dislike it, but didn't find particularly inspiring or compelling either. Too short maybe, just barely telling the story? Or perhaps I've missed the point? But then, I remember almost nothing of Peter Greenaway's version (even the title only when The Tempest didn't turn up what I was looking for on imdb.com) beyond having seen it (before The Baby of Mâcon put me off Greenaway's films for pretty much forever), so maybe the play just doesn't strike the right note with me...

I've also started to reread Modern Nature, which I originally read when I was around 20, 21ish, while working on an excavation in Enns in summer, shocking one of the other students (I still remember her saying how The Crying Game had made her want to throw up, so I thought she deserved another shock or two) who wanted to know what I was reading on the train, and probably pretty much convinced her I was a lesbian. Which I wish I could be more certain about after all this time, instead of just not being very interested in anyone. Er, tangent.

I think I actually like the journals better than the films, the poetry of them, interweaving memories, art, sex, death, love, illness, film, politics, and always returning to the leitmotif of the sea and the sky, the landscape at Dungeness, and the garden he builds against the elements and against time.


Admittedly my fascination with the garden is probably the romantic escapism of a city person who managed to kill all but the hardiest potted plants, and types away at her computer listening to the noisy grasshoppers (?) in the yard. Still though, the descriptions of the garden always seduces me, and make me vaguely long for something like that, because it seems such a real thing, in touch with life...

Dear asshole dog-owners,

Admittedly I'd kind of missed that this was a dog-zone and I wasn't supposed to bike through there, but this still is no reason to physically stop me and explain this fact to me while I'm being surrounded by your three madly barking, not very friendly dogs one of whom actually nipped my ankle, trying to keep my my legs out of their reach and getting increasingly panicky, while you and your girlfriend are completely unable or unwilling to control them. No thanks for rekindling my fear of dogs that I'd kind of got rid of,

Me.


*cough*


In pleasanter news, I lost about half of my hair at the hairdresser today, which makes it shorter than it's been since I was nine or ten - chin length in front, really short in the back; I just hope it'll still look nice when it only gets my quick head-down-blow-dry treatment.


.:.:.:.


Am I getting crankier and harder to please the older I get? I've finished Lynn Flewelling's Shadows Return and am not very enthusiastic about it. The characters are all there, but they walk through the plot a bit lifelessly, so that despite the rather high angst level ( spoilers ) I found it hard to really care about what happens to them. The whole thing feels a bit... sketchy? slapdash? fanfiction-like? Some of the ideas could be interesting, but I don't find the execution and the result very compelling. It might have to do something with the fact that while Shadows Return has about the same amount of pages as the earlier volumes, the font is visibly larger, and in terms of wordcount it must be about a quarter to a third shorter than any of them, which would explain why the plot seem rather less complex and the writing less detailed in general.


Same with Life on Mars. I finished S2 last weekend and while I liked the last two episodes better than the previous six ones, I never was really happy with S2. The main problem for me was that to make Sam's betrayal at least somewhat plausible the characterisations and the antagonism were more extreme than in S1, and a bit too extreme for my taste; The Gene Hunt of S1 I more or less believed when he said there were lines he wouldn't cross, S2 Gene Hunt I'm a lot less sure about. And Philip Glenister is a fantastic actor who is reduced to stereotypical yelling and punching in S2 far too often. Another problem is that all the episodes that tackle the big issues and -isms while trying to balance historical accuracy with 21st century values are at least slightly awkward, even when they're trying to do it right, or especially then. Personally I find the fact that it takes Sam to inspire his future superior to become the man Sam will admire a lot more problematic than the casual 1973 racism. I suppose what they were going for with the story-line was that both in Sam and Gene's case the people they idolised were, or turned out to be, not that perfect after all, but in these specific circumstances it comes off as more than a little patronising. And on the whole I just find it easier to ignore the subtle sexism that keeps Annie in uniform as a matter of fact in S1; the blatant and constant in-your (her)-face sexist remarks once she's promoted are much harder to take from characters I'm supposed to find likeable.

And the end is a bit too nostalgic and escapist for my taste. Maybe it would have been better to just have Sam jump, and fade to black, the end, no clear resolution.

/whine



Eh. Sometimes I think I'm too stupid for the smart tv shows. All the clever people love Farscape, while for me that's the closest I've ever come to watching a show just for Teh Pretty. OTOH, Torchwood, which something like 95% of fandom is only watching for the slash factor? Watch solitary_summer write. And analyse. And write some more. And, hey, amazon has just dispatched my S2 DVDs.... :)