On Saturday night I thought we were being courageous by braving Finsbury Park (we went bowling, trendy hipsters that we are), given its reputation for street and violent crime, and recently, fomenting terrorism. And then these Orthodox Jews strolled in and signed up for a lane. Respect.
My capsule review of The Hours (movie): Felt like hours. Buy the book instead.
And now the long rambling one: I have a long-standing habit of marking passages I particularly like in books, and typing them into my computer as part of a compilation I keep of such passages. Soon after starting the book, I abandoned the exercise, because I realized it would involve typing in almost the whole book. Every time I grope around for a word to describe the quality of Michael Cunningham’s prose, I always end up with luminous, but don’t like using it because it sounds so pretentious (“Luminous, darling, an absolute triumph!”). He combines lyricism and economy of language with such success that every sentence, every page seems to take on a disproportionate amount of beauty and insight relative to the slimness of the containing volume. When I finished the book I was disappointed it had ended so soon, and seriously considered reading it again.
In contrast, at certain points during the movie I was convinced Virginia Woolf’s longing for death couldn’t possibly exceed my own. I was annoyed by its lack of subtlety, bemused at the poor quality of acting, and generally b-o-r-e-d. Julianne Moore was flaccid and one-dimensional and Meryl Streep was slightly better but laid on everything way too thick. Strangely though, I thought Nicole Kidman looked more attractive in prosthetic nose and frumpy dresses than I’d ever seen her before, and Claire Danes was so gorgeous I momentarily questioned my sexual orientation. Alison Janney was fine but shouldn’t even have bothered getting out of bed for a movie role that so grossly underused her considerable talent.
Fun moment: when Leonard finds Virginia at the train station and she pleads with him to move back to London. They’ve been staying in Richmond, a peaceful suburb, since they’ve been advised that London destabilises her and was apparently behind her previous suicide attempts. The problem is that she loves London and is bored out of her skull in Richmond. She says something to the effect of “If Richmond is life, and London is death, then I choose death. Between Richmond and death, I choose death.” Everyone in the Odeon Covent Garden cinema chuckles smugly.
Later, we walk home along the same streets of Bloomsbury where Virginia Woolf lived and loved and went slowly mad all those years ago. Hopefully I will leave these years in London having done only the first two.
In conversation with John, I unveiled the new and improved Action!Michelle, proudly brandishing this week’s lindy-hopping and yesterday’s swim as evidence of her diminishing slackerdom. So what have you been up to then, I asked. Oh, was in London last weekend for the anti-war protest and am surfing in Devon this weekend, Thunder-Stealing!John said blithely. Arse. I must now go and do something like spelunking in the sewers of Hackney or rappelling off the erotic gherkin to maintain Action!Michelle’s market share.
In halcyon days when I updated regularly, I once explained why I love lindy-hopping madly and therefore why one of my biggest regrets about how I’ve chosen to spend my time in London was that I’d let that lapse.
Until NOW! In a recent surge of dynamism I marched down to the London Swing Dance Society’s Tuesday night class, and have since rediscovered the meaning of addiction. Everything is coming back, the sudden sinking feeling in the chest when I realize the hour is over, the little private skip of joy when I realize there’s still the next class to go (I attend both Beginner and Intermediate), the dopey grin I try to suppress in front of the stranger that is my partner as we both move to the music and wait to start the dance in earnest, the somewhat challenging exercise of trying to mentally rehearse my newly-learnt steps on the way home while trying not to give any outward signs of the “triple step, step step, ba di ba da” inner monologue that accompanies my walking.
I’m going to see Amon Tobin DJ at Electrowerkz tomorrow, and am confronted with the strange reality that despite my long-standing admiration, nay, adulation of his work, the night may still pale in comparison to my future Tuesdays in a musky studio dancing to the Chattanooga Choo Choo.
Apologies for recent silence. After lovely weekends away (we went here and you must too!) one tends to come back to earth with a resounding kaboom.
I’m reading Jane Kenyon, and while the Malvern Hills are far from Barbados (literally, ha ha smack), and even though the student life I return to in my Bloomsbury flat in the heart of my beloved London is far from torturous, this stanza still struck a chord:
“Goodbye Barbados – goodbye water, hiss
and thunder; scented winds; clattering palms;
stupefying sun and rum; goodbye turquoise,
pink, copen, lavender, black and red.
Tonight another couple will sleep in our bed.”
– from Leaving Barbados, Jane Kenyon
Have done lots. Fell asleep in Metropolis. Blissed out at Sigur Ros. Romped wild-eyed through Atonement. Improvised a tutorial. And am off to the Cotswolds tomorrow for cheesy romantic weekend.
Some worries: possible possibility of random suicide bomber at train station tomorrow, for example. Russ’s safety in New York. Family in Singapore, way too near Bali.
Might say a prayer tonight. In thanks. In worry. Ultimately, I suppose though, in His hands.
Sex And Lucia involved more fucking with my mind than with Lucia, which is saying a lot considering the amount of action she gets in the film. Given that films at the Bloomsbury Theatre only cost £2.50, I can certainly say I got a lot of bang for my buck.
But let me not be overly narrow in describing the artistic vision of this movie. It is definitely about more than Lucia fucking Lorenzo, Lorenzo fucking Lucia, Carlos fucking Elena occasionally, Carlos’s enormous penis, Antonio fucking Belen’s mum the porn star, Belen fucking herself with her mum’s dildo while watching her mum’s porn films…
There really is more to it than that, it’s just that after today’s mind-numbing hours of IT copyright law and comparative discrimination law, lecturer voices straining over deadened air in lethargic lecture theatres, page after page of paragraph after paragraph of refined civilised Times New Roman espousing refined civilised legal principles in the refined civilised library, I really just want to write FUCKING.
You may or may not have heard the one about the dyslexic atheist who lay awake at night wondering if there was a dog, but whatever the case, they always say start with a joke. I actually prefer the one about the dyslexic devil worshipper who sold his soul to Santa, and should probably say I think both jokes rather misrepresent the problems of dyslexia sufferers, but my point, and I do have one, is that we went to the dogs on Friday night.
We went to the Wimbledon track, because Walthamstow (which is, incidentally, the first place in London I knew a postcode for – fans of early 90s boy bands should be able to figure out why) doesn’t do Friday nights. It was quite a walk from Tooting Broadway tube station, firstly because it was quite a walk, and secondly because it involved walking in Tooting. As we wandered tentatively past a breast scanning clinic on a deserted road, we remembered a very early date when Alec managed to mistake a VD clinic in Peckham for the Old Vic (a rather long and surreal story, but hey, he got the girl) and were starting to wonder if it was all going a bit pear-shaped.
But we finally got there, and got down to brass tacks. We didn’t win the first few races we bet on, but about four races in, we were starting to get the feel of things. After some discussion, we decided to bet on the trio of Beat Them Melv, Mustang Messiah and Call A Copper. I walked confidently to the counter, asked for a trio on tracks 2, 4 and 5, and was somewhat perturbed when the betting coupon named Ravilello Girl, Quick To Move and Baran Magic. It soon became clear that, tit-like, the pair of us had been scrutinizing the form for completely the wrong race. And of course, it turned out to be the closest we came to winning anything the whole evening.
I think I’m hooked.
Well, Italy didn’t happen, due to snow. Bugger.
This was rather disappointing, given that we’d actually managed to do a fair bit of planning for this one, as opposed to our little jaunt to Spain, and actually most other holidays I’ve ever gone on. Add the fact that I’d been using the thought of the holiday to keep myself going over the past couple of weeks of essay hell, and am now hard pressed to find something similar to tide me over the next few months. Add the sharpening feeling that my time here is inexorably winding down and I haven’t done enough. Add the general malaise I’ve been feeling over the past month or two that I’m going through a “minging period” (my most recent haircut, which featured extreme fringe action, is now growing out, which means I no longer look like a quirky interesting person with a unique sense of style who cut my fringe that ridiculously short on purpose, I just look like someone who made a horrible mistake while running with scissors).
Add all this up and you have a rather depressed Michelle.
There are, however, Pollyanna moments in the gloom. Alec as SuperBoyfriend in aforementioned depression crisis. Loads of CDs arriving in the post, in bubble-wrapped packages. Schindler’s Ark (Thomas Keneally), which apart from being a great book in the pure literary sense, also unsurprisingly helps to put things in Michelle World back into perspective.
And, and, and, Justin Ruffles, as in way-funnier-than-me Justin Ruffles, thinks I rule! Or at least, he wrote it on his site, which I acknowledge can be a rather different thing. Apparently I have a “groovy urban boho life spent cruising bagel shops, watching films in Swahili and listening to music sung in ancient tribal click languages”.
This is, unfortunately, mostly wrong (well, maybe the bit about the cruising…) and should not be allowed to mislead people as to my coolness, or, as it were, ruleness. My closest contacts with Swahili have been watching The Gods Are Crazy about a million times when I was ten, and having an Irish boyfriend who mumbles. My most boho moments go no further than a preference for cider (oops, that’s “hobo”) and an occasional predilection for subtly incorporated tie-dye. While I’ll ‘fess up to a music collection I do think is fairly cool for the most part, I have just spent the last two hours watching the Michael Jackson interview on ITV, and writing an email about it to other members of the Michael Jackson mailing list I have been a member of since 1995.
The Saturday poem in the Guardian Review is one of those little weekly happy nuggets in the family-size bucket of happy that is the Saturday papers. I kept the page with Missing God (Dennis O’Driscoll), from December. It did occur to me that it could be found online, but there’s something about the dog-eared, raggedy-edged pages of newsprint that I’ve built up over my few years here that’s more appealing than liquid crystal displays.
Elsewhere in poetry, Sweetbread (Robert Wrigley) is most definitely the loveliest poem about offal I have ever read.