mutability

Whenever I go clothes shopping, I feel like a shape shifter. For one thing, I am smaller than I used to be. But still, guessing which size I am now and therefore which garments might fit is always tricky. In one shop or brand I'm one size, in another, something different. Add in the fact that I'm more than common tall, and sometimes it feels like nothing looks right. With each new top or skirt or pair of jeans, my body seems to shift and grow or shrink like Alice. I know it's the clothes that are variable, rather than me, but still, it's an unsettling feeling, as if my limbs and torso don't quite belong. A cropped jacket, for instance, looks totally ridiculous, flapping somewhere at the level of my bust and making me look like an overgrown toddler. Jeans that gap at the waist or bag at the crotch or are too short or (wonder of wonders) too long or just plain wrong.

I went shopping for jeans and failed to find any I liked. I did, however, find a hooded sweatshirt that was miraculously long enough in the arms and body and, though it has a kangaroo pocket, it's placed low enough that it doesn't look silly (sometimes they're placed so high they start just under the bust on me, most unflattering). And I bought new pyjamas, which are blessedly easy to get to fit, since they're fairly baggy and I don't care too much if the arms and legs are the right length.

you like me, you really like me

Aw, thanks guys. It seems you like the random mixture of things that appear here.

I shall endeavour to continue in randomness. :-)

trying to be sensible

This has never been a very sensible blog, has it? It's such a random mixture of moans and pictures and thoughts and questions. I wonder what it's for. Perhaps I should have more of a vision for what I want to do with it. Perhaps I should start a new blog for the sensible stuff (assuming I have something sensible to say about anything, which I'm not entirely sure I will). Perhaps I should just post things here.

I'll have a think. Does anyone have any comments? Why do you read pigwotflies? Is it because you've met me and/or are related to me and want to see what I'm up to? Because you find it amusing/intriguing/are dazzled by my insightful writing (I think not somehow)? Adrian got me blogging because he thought I'd like the intellectual discussion side of things. I've stayed out of the theological discussions he gets into, mostly because I don't think I've got much to add. But there are things I like talking about, books, art, science, philosophy. The discipline of turning a random thought into a short, coherent blog post might be useful.

Perhaps it's time to raise the bar of what makes the blog, rather than waffling on. And then, paradoxically, I might write more. Or I might intimidate myself and write less. Either way, I'd like to blog to some purpose, I think.

sunday night

I'm feeling better, thanks for the kind words and encouragement.

I like Sunday afternoons, anything feels possible. I've been for a walk along the river, admiring the autumn colours and the sunset. Now I'm listening to the Archers and soon I shall make some food and settle down to knit or watch Henry VIII or read something.

A new week is starting.

who stole my gorm?

Give it back, I need it.

I have no energy today, it's cold and wet and rainy and I've not really accomplished much today through lack of gorm.

I hope a good night's sleep will help.

happy birthday to me!

HP is staying for the weekend to celebrate with me, I'm having a party tonight, people are coming, we will have fun.

I like birthdays!

Nothing but curious pleasures

A certain BFC (aka big fat/fine cat aka my uncle Jon) asked about how I found Pericles etc, so here's the promised post.

I did finish reading Pericles. It's a bit like The Winter's Tale with added shipwrecks and no bears. I think I read it a little too fast to appreciate it properly. I'd like to see it performed. The structure's interesting - narration from Gower and dumbshows to show us what's going on. Most of the really dramatic action seems to take place in the dumbshows, except for the storm at sea in which Marina is born.

The main point of looking at Pericles for the seminar was the choices made in editing and we had a go at editing a bit of the beginning of 2.1, which was trickier than I thought, if you're going to worry about the placement of every jot and tittle as well as try to guess whether the apparent mistakes are due to misreadings, mishearings, uncertain spelling, archaic words or something else. I think my attitude would probably be to change as little as possible and work out the details in performance, repunctuating or substituting words as necessary to make sense of it. The way different editors differ over the placement of commas or the interpretation of ellisions sometimes seems a little far away from the text's first incarnation as a performance. But then, punctuation can make a huge difference to meaning, so it's not unimportant.

Yes, I did read all of Titus Andronicus, not just the fly-killing scene. It's a pretty gory piece of work. Again, I feel I need to see a production or two to appreciate it properly. I can't help wondering how things like "Enter the Empress' sons with LAVINIA, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished" would be staged. The fly-killing scene (3.2) is a later addition to the play. I saw it as a private family scene, in contrast to the more public scenes that surround it. For some reason it my head it's like a scene from a film, very claustrophic and dark, with the Andronici gathered together, eating, because they need sustenance, comforting each other and gathering strength for their revenge. The camera plans along the table and flicks from face to face as they react to Titus's pouring out of his heart and attempted comfortings of Lavinia. The killing of the fly is like a summary of the entire play - "How if that fly had a father and a mother?" - that's the problem with killing people: their families generally want revenge and in this play that pits a father, Titus, and a mother, Tamora, against one another for revenge for their respective offspring. But of course "it was a black ill-favoured fly/ Like to the empress's Moor" so it had to die. There's the personal element of revenge and the tricky character of Aaron the Moor (also a father, in his own violent way). It's all wrapped up in those few lines. Hmm, perhaps I have more to say about Titus Andronicus than I thought?

And Cymbeline. I love Cymbeline! I really must read it. (And Jon, you MUST let me read your thesis). Yes, there were some bits that cut in the last production we saw that were included this time, notably the doctor with his suddenly remembered details, the comic jailers, Posthumous' family and Jupiter appearing from the heavens (actually appearing swathed in a giant silk parachute, rising out of the box which was the main consituent of the set. People found their costumes in it, props were taken out of and put into it, Iachimo hid in it, obviously. Actually I think it disappeared for a bit in Wales, which missed a few tricks, it could have been the cave, or the grave, or a boat, or cover for the battling armies.) Some other bits got missed out. Imogen's speech to the headless body of her (supposed) husband was even more truncated. It was a fun production, played for (even more) laughs than the Barbican production, with a wonderfully devious and scheming Queen. Although she did seem to go off her head rather too rapidly. Cloten began almost every one of his scenes by hurling his doublet to the ground and lived up to his name (definitely Clot-en).

On to this week. I'm currently supposed to be reading Dr Faustus, Mankind, extracts from Mediaeval morality plays and some scenes from Henry VI 3, King John and Macbeth. And it's pouring with rain and nothing could be nicer than curling up with some books and Radio 3.

ETA: I think part of the problem with the film of As You Like It were all the bits that got cut in the final scene, particularly Hymen (fair enough, no-one knows who Hymen is today anyway and what would she be doing in 19th Centuary Japan?), with some lines reassigned to Rosalind. Unfortunately they cut most of the 'If I were...would you then.." lines that explain how each character then reacts to the revelation of Ganymede's identity as Rosaline, so to have everyone suddenly understanding when she appeared dressed as herself again made very little sense. I don't think As You Like It makes that much sense to start with, but it's a comedy and believing in the character's rather unlikely deceptions is part of the fun.

head in a spin

It's been a bit of a stressful weekend. We've been trying to find a third person to share our house for ages, to no avail. So many people have come and looked and liked and then decided to live elsewhere. A solution of sorts may have been found, but it's not all sorted yet. If you're the praying kind, please can you pray for wisdom and God's direction in knowing what to do? Particularly that if what I'm trying to sort out right now is the wrong thing to do, that God will firmly shut that door.

Sorry to be cryptic, I just don't want to tell the world everything.

apologies

To the dozen or so people who sent emails to my gmail address. Emails which I have only just discovered because I hardly ever check that email inbox.

I think I have too many email addresses.

underestimate

I've just been asked for ID buying wine (and other things) at the Co-op. To be asked whether one is over 18, a week or so before one turns 28, is flattering, I suppose. But I was feeling all grown up and sophisticated in my new coat and favourite boots. The woman at the cash desk was apologetic and decided it was a sign she was getting old.

shakespeare week

That's what it feels like right now. Yesterday I saw As You Like it* tonight I'm going to see Cymbeline. I'm halfway through reading Romeo and Juliet, I've got to finish that and Pericles by Thuirsday evening and have something coherent to say about the fly-killing scene in Titus Andronicus. And I've been reading Making Shakespeare by Tiffany Stern.

I am happy! :-)

* It was OK, the lead actors are good, particularly Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind, but somehow it doesn't sparkle as it should and it doesn't quite make sense to me, at a psychological level, particularly at the end when all the couples are matched up. I'm not sure whether that's the play's fault or the way the film chops it around. I'll have to read it again.

ooooooooooooooooooooo

Look look! Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on Radio 4.

Big silly grin.

today I am mostly...

...reading Ulysses. Trying to see how much of it I can get read in one day.

So far today, I've also broken a glass and sent shards of glass all over the kitchen, re-wired the vacuum cleaner plug so that I could clean it up, washed everything on the kitchen worktop that got covered in little bits of glass, checked my emails, sent party invites on Facebook, registered for a conference and written a blog post to tell the whole world what I've done.

So not a lot of reading then.

black swan

I've just come back from seeing Atonement which is beautiful and sad. Which is all I can think to say about it at the moment.

Except that the music is wonderful in the way it draws together atmosphere and sound and the feelings of the moment and the sound of the typewriter, drumming away at the beginning and returning again and again and the sound of repeated notes in the piano and the buzzing of a fly creating the oppressive heat of a summer afternoon.

I think it's got into my prose style a little. All that brittle wartime dialogue in cut glass accents.

I came the long and scenic way home, feeling the need for sunshine and air and the wind in my face. It had rained while I was in the cinema and the sky was fresh and full of crepuscular clouds. Dashing along the river, I saw a black swan. I stopped, it cried, just once, and swam on. I remembered how as a child I thought all swans were black because the ones in the park were and how excited I would be to see white swans. Today, to see a black swan was somehow thrilling and alive-making. On home, as fast I could across the common, past the cows and the evening sun dazzling straight in my face.

Now home, where it's warmer, a little and the pears next door are hanging heavy. Are they ripe yet?

science in art

I'm just finished reading The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. It's a fun read, concerning the investigations of PhD student Ariel into a mysterious novel, reputed to be cursed, also called The End of Mr. Y by an odd Victorian scientist called Thomas Lumas. The first few chapters felt like Thomas had stolen my ideas of what I wanted to do with my life and given them to her character. Ariel goes to a lecture by Prof. Burlem on Lumas, and after it, he offers her a PhD project based in a Literature department looking at the history of thought experiments. (If only...) As the novel begins, Burlem has disappeared, a building at the university has collapsed (apparently to no-one's great suprise) and on her way home, Ariel finds a copy of Lumas' cursed novel in a box of books in a second hand shop, which she quickly buys, before the shop assistant can realise its value. Chapters from Lumas' novel alternate with Ariel's first person narrative of her, rather dark and gloomy, life. (I was amused to notice that Ariel, like the heroine of Thomas' previous novel PopCo and Thomas herself, eats a vegan diet. This is mostly irrelevent to the plot apart from the fact that as an impoverished PhD student, Ariel can afford to buy very little food, although I'm sure a dietician would have something to say about the perils of surviving on potatoes, dark chocolate, black coffee and slivovitz.)

The collapsed building is a means for introducing to Ariel's department office a evolutionary biologist and a theologian. Here things start to clunk a little. An impromptu dinner party is the scene for a discussion of origins and truth. The themes are relevant, but I don't think they're handled very well. If you want to write a novel which explores theoretical physics, philosophy and multiple dimensions, then you're going to need to explain them somehow, but how exactly is tricky. Giving differing philosophical positions to different characters is usually how it works (David Lodge does it rather well) but somehow it didn't quite work for me. The theologian character, Adam, becomes more important by the end of the novel, but the biologist seems to be there only to be to impart some information about science and then fades into the background.

It's a highly fantastical novel and by the end we've left reality far behind. I did like the unravelling of Ariel as a character. At the beginning, I wasn't sure I liked her. By the end, she had become rounded out and understandable, as facts and snippets of her past life were revealed. It's an odd mixture of quantum theory, Baudrillard, time travel, Heidegger and a whole string of literary theorists and philosophers, predictable in some aspects (start with quantum indeterminacy and a world constructed from langauge and see where you end up) but ends up in some unexpected places. The effect is a little confused, as if too many ideas got thrown into the the mix. It reminded me of PopCo by the same author and of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

I'm vaguely thinking about dissertation ideas at the moment and thinking about doing something about how scientific ideas get used in literature. I'm not sure if this novel is typical of the sort of thing I want to investigate. More data needed, I think.

bye bye work, hello uni

Today's been a weird day, for good reasons. I had my official last day at work and my first contact with the other students and the lecturers for my new course. Leaving work for the last time, having said goodbye to everybody (and eaten a delicious, if rather large lunch) was odd. I'm both happy and sad to be leaving, which I suppose is a good position in which to be. I did spend quite a lot of the afternoon trying to cram all the contents of my brain into the brain of the person who's replacing me, which was a bit much, both for her and for me. We didn't quite cover everything, I've promised to write her some more notes. It's only when I had to explain all the things I did in my job that I realised quite how complicated it all was and how much I just do without thinking.

And now I'm a student. Not just that, but I'm an ARTS student for the first time in my life. All those jokes we used to make about lazy arts students with two lectures a week who never got out of bed before noon are now coming back to haunt me. I'm definitely the only person on my course with a Physics degree. Everyone else has come from English or History or other Humanities subjects. And so far there are no men. Some are apparently enrolled on the course, but none of them turned up tonight. It's a long way from those lecture hall and demonstration labs where my lab partner and I were distinctly outnumbered by male physicists.* It's all different. But different is exciting and I'm very very excited and happy to be finally starting!

*Who don't all conform to the geeky stereotype. But many do.

talk talk

So, I've just been speed-dating. And it was OK. I think I've introduced myself and explained who I am more times in the last few hours than I have since I was last a Fresher (hmm, I suppose I'm technically one of those again). But it was a good evening and some of the guys I met were interesting in an "I'd like to talk to you again" sort of way and some of them were interesting in an "I'm sure you're lovely but we have nothing in common" sort of way and all of them were friendly. So, we'll see what happens. But I'm glad I went.

...and collapse in a heap

This has been a very very busy and stressful week and I'm so glad it's over.
In a sense it's not as I've got 2 days left at work, one tomorrow and my last day on Thursday. But the weekend conference I've been preparing for all week is over and I get to go home and relax (i.e. collapse in a heap, have a bath and curl up on the settee with a good film, not got the brain power for reading).

And very very soon I will be a full time student and not be trying to concentrate on a full time job and studying all at once. Hooray!

cows and sky

cows and sky, originally uploaded by the pig wot flies.

The view across Coldham's Common as I cycled to work this morning.

bad day, good food

Yesterday was not a good day. A situation at work made me angry enough to have to walk out of the office and go and kick apples around in the college grounds and ring my mum who calmed me down. It's still not really sorted, but I'm less stressed now.

On the good side, I went into town for lunch and wandered round the market. The stalls were full of wonderful fruit and veg, so many beautiful fresh things to eat, including fresh figs. I've eaten figs once before, but I'd never cooked them myself, so I decided to buy a few. I'd never realised how beautiful and delicate they are. A little googling found me some recipes. I tried a couple out.

For my main course I roasted a fig in the oven with some goat cheese, rosemary from the bush outside our back door and a few walnuts. Heavenly! I've never tasted anything quite like it. The cheese and herb flavours complemented the taste and fleshy, succulent texture beautifully.

Then for dessert, I poached a fig in some red wine, with cinnamon. I ate it with a dollop of greek yoghurt. It wasn't quite as luxuriously melting as the roasted fig, but still beautiful.

There's one fig left in my fridge. They're so delicate it won't keep for long. I might try roasting it with nuts and honey, or maybe goat cheese again.

Mmmm, I think I have a new favourite food.