life without a plot

# 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...

::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.

Perhaps it's the remainder of Saturday with the prospect of Sunday (always so much more pleasant than Sundays themselves), but I'm feeling moderately relaxed for the first time this week. Did some actual, if minimal, cooking after coming home from work, frying chicken to go with the salad, and some belly-dancing practice, and will probably watch the remaining S1 Dr. Who episodes & relax & enjoy not feeling as anxious and depressed as most of last week. (Had another of those ridiculous embarrassing anxiety dreams where I am late to work; I wish my subconsciousness would at least chose to angst over more serious issues. Gah.)

( ... )

Since TM is a kind of comfort food reading when I'm in these kinds of moods, I reread both Tod In Venedig and Tonio Kröger this week, neither of which I remembered particularly well - and don't remember enjoying as much - and it's fascinating reading those two back to back with the ideas about art and the artist, the balance and relationship of art and life expressed in both. Interesting to compare the melancholy, but accepting, almost conciliatory ending of TK (is there even another example where TM doesn't kill off his artist-protagonist?) with the bleakness of TiV, the warmth of the one with the coldness of the other. Another thing I hadn't remembered is how dark TiV is, and I don't mean in a stylish, decadent sense, but in a cruel and relentless one. Even with a subject that allows little else, there's something almost self-torturing in lending auto-biographic traits to von Aschenbach and then taking him through this kind of experience and humiliation. What makes it more depressing and almost eerie is TM at thirty-eight writing out this fate for his something of a decade older protagonist...


After that tried TM's Die vertauschten Köpfe (couldn't get into it), Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi & der Friseur (lying on my bed half-read since months) or Bulgakow's short stories (finished one, but was discouraged when the next one started with references to characters from Russian literature half of whom I didn't know).

So I picked W.A.Hoffman's Brethren - Raised by Wolves (the novel that so irritated me starting off with the three instances of eye-rolling in as many pages) up again, and while it does improve - no more eyes were being rolled until page 130something, although 'emerald orbs' make an appearance -, having read about 140 pages and skimmed through the rest I'm still far from enthusiastic.

( ... )

Also continued watching Dr. Who and really love it, although the seasons are sadly short and I've seen the Captain Jack episodes before. It's not the show to make me think deep thinky thoughts, but it's charming, got a lovely balance between gut-wrenching emotional and funny, drama and humour, enjoyable characters, and that's more than I've found in a show (Torchwood aside) for a while. And it's always nice to see the lovely John Barrowman in better than pixelated YouTube quality. :)

Lazy.

Read. Ate.

Watched a taped episode (the one after the pilot, I think) of Six Feet Under, which I kind of liked (first scene, interracial gay couple - what's not to like...), and kind of didn't, because how many shows about dysfunctional families can a person watch and not get tired of it; a funeral home setting doesn't make that much of a difference. And the sister so far seems to be something of a clone of whatshername from Cybill.

.:.:.:.

Re-watched the first two S4 B5 episodes, and am still trying to make sense of how we're to understand what happens to Sheridan on Za'ha'dum. There's the literal reading, obviously, but there's a metaphorical? psychological? philosophical? level to it, too. This isn't only about physical death, but what does Lorien mean by surrendering to death? Confronting your mortality? Giving up your sense of self, stripping yourself of everything, every desire, even the desire to live? Facing the darkness within yourself (as opposed to the idealism of seasons 2 and 3)?

Somehow I think there ought to be more to it than Delenn giving him a reason to live. It kind of connects with Comes the Inquisitor, but on the other hand it seems to me that another person, however beloved, cannot be the answer to the questions Lorien asks...

What happened, what did Sheridan see or realise, that turned him into the man we see afterwards, who in some ways is like Lorien said he needed to be, showing less doubts or fears, but also by consequence a lot harder, quick to take some pretty harsh decsions. How does this connect with the idealism and integrity of the character carefully established during the earlier seasons?

I understand how people can have issues with Sheridan's persona in S4, except that I don't believe he's supposed to be quite the same person as he was. We're meant to see the darker, dangerous side for what it is.

S4, with the resolution of the Shadow-war is metaphor for growing up (in fact IMO the metaphorical level overshadows the story telling level in this case), the emancipation from parental figures and the unquestioning acceptance of their values. But like the biblical myth of the fall of man, this must result in a loss of child-like innocence, which Delenn refers to in War Without End. (In fact there's an interesting detail that gains an extra perspective with the knowledge of how events really turned out - when the Delenn from the future talks about the terrible cost of winning the war, which could only have been avoided at too high a price, at this point the obvious meaning was the horror of the Shadows winning the war. But in retrospect the too-high price would also have been to remain in a state of child-like dependence and spiritual immaturity.)

I believe we're meant to see this loss of innocence already beginning to happen here.

There's another thing, though. The problem may be that Garibaldi's arc determines so much of S4, to the point of them having to fit Sheridan's arc around it; I think his character may suffer from that.

.:.:.:.

Las gestern die in der Mitte begonnenen Hadrianmemoiren zu Ende, bestaunte die Bibliographie des Arbeitsmaterials und fing von vorn an zu lesen. Tatsächlich benommen wie ein Jüngling von der Schönheit des Buches. (TM Tagebücher, 12. 12. 53)

He. It's always nice to discover a connection between your favourite authors. Makes me want to re-read it, too...