It was a good day yesterday

It really was! I rocked up at work just as the cathedral bells were ringing (if I'm through the door while they're still striking nine then I'm not late in my book). It was fairly quiet for the first couple of hours and I ended up writing 500 words on my chapter while I was there. Then, I got it confirmed that my pay rise is permanent.

After work I went to the pool, expecting it to be filled with children on account of the holidays, but I had the whole pool to myself! That was great, but then I needed other people to entertain me, and some comedy babes arrived and one of the lifeguards nearly fell off his chair: it was like watching a carry-on film. The babes were good value, though, because they didn't swim at all and just stood in a huddle in the shallow end chatting and doing each other's hair. I think they were maybe checking their bikinis weren't see-through before their holidays?

I've written 4000 words this week, which has got to be a record for my thesis so far. My supervisor should take holidays more often and hit me with the deadline-hammer.

Socks, rain, wikipedia

It has rained a lot but there's been no flooding at all (on account of the Wear being in a big deep hole). This is a picture of some rain and our hedge that magically appeared one night about six months ago when I was in the pub.

I've also finished my Jaywalkers now. The heel flap worked really well and I've now only got annoying holes at the top of the join on one side of the heel rather than both! Stupid heels.


There's absolutely no flattering way to take photos of your own feet. Also, on the day that Abingdon was flooded, note the background here!

Here's a close up of the stitch pattern and the non-holey-side heel pickup (I finally discovered what the flower button on my camera does: knitting photos!):


Today I also listened online to a programme about Wikipedia on Radio 4. I thought it was quite balanced and interesting. I use Wikipedia a lot to double check things I think I know, and for easy explanations of things when I'm at work (like what metastasised means: I feel very lucky I've never come across that word in real life). I liked reading the encyclopedia we had when I was little, and I still waste lots of time clicking through trails of connected articles on Wikipedia. The problems with it really boil down to people having to know how to use it (like any source of information). Not only do you have to read differently and follow the official, front page text back into the discussion page, you also need to follow the links given for sources so you end up reading and evaluating and the information yourself. How not to do it: I had an essay handed in to me last year with a Works Cited that just consisted of the word Wikipedia. Not really a recognised work of academic criticism and not really cited, guys. I found the most interesting part of the programme was the climatologist guy who was complaining that his life got taken over by his need to keep re-editing the global warming page to reflect the evidence from current research. He got really frustrated that he was having to explain himself to people who were very, very stupid and who kept on disagreeing with him on the basis of beliefs rather than the sources he was showing them. It didn't really turn out to be an anti-Wiki story, though, because his expertise did prevail, ultimately. So, in conclusion, Wikipedia is not eroding my authority.

Potterdammerung

Since I've been at work the last few days I've had nothing to do but cruise the Guardian and BBC websites reading all the Potter pre-release articles. And the amount of bile (mainly in the comments rather than the original post, to be fair) spewed about the books and the people who read them really shocked me. I can see how you could just not be bothered by the whole thing, but I'm a bit mystified at why you would get so outraged by other people's enjoyment. In the new book there is a little comment on this which I liked a lot (it's not a spoiler and I won't attribute it to a character, because that would be a spoiler I think!): "That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing."

I don't feel like I want to be swinging my cultural capital around to defend Harry Potter (which happened in comments on both the Guardian and the BBC), but I would like to at least question the idea that slightly ploddy prose and poor editing are a valid reason for moral panic. Nobody would say JKR is an amazing prose stylist, and she's by no means my favourite contemporary writer for children, but she really understands fiction and the pleasure you can get out of it, and I think that's probably the kind of thing you'd want your kids to be learning from books. Reading unambitious prose that tells a banging good story doesn't poison your little brainbox or magically destroy literary masterpieces with every paragraph.

The reason I prefer Cultural Studies over English Literature as a term is because, unlike Voldemort, I think that the things you don't value are probably the things you don't understand. There are lots of books I don't like because I think they're too confusing or difficult (I still haven't finished that Wyndham Lewis tetralogy), unegaging (this is where On the Road falls), or completely objectionable because they're in conflict with my take on things (this is why I don't like The Alchemist or The Lovely Bones), but those are all because of me, not because of the books. The thing about books (and particularly books, which don't yet have the marketing heft of music or films behind them) is that if they're incredibly popular, it is worth looking at what they're doing right and how those strategies are effective and interesting, rather than just calling people who enjoy them illiterate morons. Then again we could just all get together and mock the people who were queuing up outside Waterstone's in London from Wednesday dressed as the Lestrange sisters; they'd made up quite a shockingly poor chant (given they'd had two days to compose it by the time they were on the radio last night).

So yeah, I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Radio4=knitting

Ok, this is a quote I heard on Broadcasting House yesterday about why radio4 isn't attractive enough to people under forty: "It's as if you're walking down the street and you walk into a shop and it's full of old people knitting." I WISH YOU DID DO A KNITTING PROGRAM RADIO4! It would certainly be more fun than The Archers or You and Yours or that stupid program where they go to places and have to describe everything (because hello it is RADIO) and have ridiculously oblique clues about drainage ditches and Second World War submarine defences.

Unexpectedly, I am back at work tomorrow (woo, riches).

Farewell to my wallchart

My wallchart has served me so well over the last nine months, and I can't get used to switching back to my calendar (even if it does have flower fairies on it). I've recommended them to so many of my students as well, because it's way easier to get organised when you can see multiple months at once. Mine is colour coded so I can see when I'm working (green), teaching (and related stuff like training and handback sessions - red) and every time I write 1000 words I write them on my chart in a blue circle. The three massive blue circles are where I got over-excited when I finished a chapter.

I love my wallchart.

New improved rose-scented Myspace oddballs

So I got a myspace message asking me if I wanted to be an eye model?! Because apparently they're shooting eye make-up and glasses stuff in Durham and Sunderland and they need models. That is surely not a real job. Although I am unemployed again for the next few weeks, and it would be hilarious to tell people I'm a model and watch them double take.*

I just watched Bartoli beat Henin: it was so cool. I like how women tennis players actually have arms which take up three dimensions. The post-match interview where she talked about seeing Pierce Brosnan was also really funny.

Today, after I had washed my hair with rose shampoo and put on my rose perfume, washed my hands in rose handwash and got dressed in clothes washed with rose fabric-softener, and sat down with my rose and raspberry tea and a turkish delight to finish 'Westward the Course of Empire...' I read this:

[ok, you need to know that, in the story, everyone is eating these deep-fried roses (which apparently do actually exist: I google-image-searched them) which have some weird chemical effect on them, but some of the characters say they're obscene and here's the reason:] "You don't put what's beautiful inside you, as fuel, when the whole reason it's beautiful is that it's outside you. Supposedly certain things are in the world. To see. Not to chew up and swallow and expel."

That also being a commentary on the story's whole project of re-processing John Barth (exhaustion vs. fuel). But also made me think maybe I ought to change my shampoo at least.

*If I was going to be a body-part model I would 100% be an ear model. I have really good ears.

I planted my plants

I finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds in the bath last night. The second half was much easier going than the first half: without any kind of context for the Finn MacCool stuff it was just really onerous, and pretty much meaningless for me too. I was googling it and found this quote from Dylan Thomas about the book: "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl." Maybe I didn't enjoy it as much as I should because I'm not loud, dirty or boozy?

At work this week I've been reading "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way" from Girl with Curious Hair. I've had to stop myself laughing too much in the office because it's really clever and funny, but also heartfelt and insightful. It's about John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" which I never really liked that much; it's definitely my least favourite from that collection. Wow, that's like three generations of metafiction right there (DFW does this hellishly predictable play on "metafiction" in the context of this massive MacDonald's advert reunion: it becomes"meatfiction." Oh yeah.)

As I was cracking open the Saul Bellow I started last night I found a piece of paper representing Five Embassy Vouchers (redeemable against products from the "famous Embassy catalogue"). On the back there's some health advice for all the people frantically inhaling with the intention of getting free mugs (or w/ever):
ADVICE BY H.M. GOVERNMENT
If you do smoke cigarettes
Leave a long stub.
Remove from mouth between puffs.
Inhale less.
Take fewer puffs.

No one needs this smoking ban rubbish: inhale less! This goes for everyone; problem solved.

Here is a picture of my sprouting garlic and one of my unidentified plants. The pot full of mud will be peppers, eventually (also, oooh look at my ammonite!):

Green fingers?

1) I bought some compost today; I'm going to try to grow a pepper.
2) In celebrity dream news, the pope was in my dream last night.
3) I worked for about 2 out of 5 hours at work today. But they wouldn't let us use the internet because they wanted the new people to concentrate. So Bored. I read the entire LRB from cover to cover and I'm excited about Don DeLillo's new book coming out in paperback. Why are there so many adverts for psychoanalysts in the LRB? There's one particular advert that has annoyed me for the last few issues, this is the text: "Experienced, Harvard-educated psychotherapist based in Harvard Square specialises in the predicaments, conflicts and neuroses of creative and metaphorically minded individuals, especially academics, writers and artists." Because the neuroses of everyone else don't make for entertaining enough dinner-party stories? And since when are academics creative?
4) I'm excited because I'm going to print out all of my thesis so far in the department tomorrow. It shall be immense and run to many pages and I shall hole-punch them all and put them in a folder and stroke them (before setting in with the red pen to do rewrites).
5) I can't stop listening to Elgar again. It's worse when I start humming along.
6) When my new housemate put this poster on her door I knew we would get along:

cat+knitwear=art

7) My old housemate came back and picked up the rest of her stuff and apologised and gave me a hug! Lucky I hadn't freecycled it (oops!). So she's forgiven and I feel a bit bad for bitching to everyone about it now. But now I have nothing to freecycle and I really want to!