Must really stop giggling every time I think of the Boguslawski case, but this is difficult given that my mental connection of the facts of the case with its name involves imagining a bunch of Polish people in an English courtroom shouting “LAWSKI!” and “No, BOGUSLAWSKI!” at each other.
(Sorry, I know that’ll be lost on anyone who doesn’t know public international law. I’ll stop talking about it soon enough, I promise. Monday is jurisprudence.)
This might be one of those things where you just had to be there, but during the captions segment of Have I Got News For You last week, one of the pictures was a close-up of several medal-festooned Chinese military officials standing amidst others in a choir-like formation, eyebrows resolute and aggressive, mouths formed into perfect O’s fervently singing what must have been a political anthem.
Someone’s caption was “That man on the right is thinking: For God’s sake will somebody say ‘klahoma!”
Brilliant.
I can’t guarantee it really was Zadie Smith I saw coming out of Bookhouse (lovely discount bookstore off Tottenham Court Road) on Saturday, but it certainly looked a lot like her. Thoughts of saying hello skittered briefly across my mind, but disappeared almost immediately. I figured even literary celebrities might get tired of being recognised, and what with loaded Tesco’s bags in my hands and a bad hair day, I didn’t really feel I was in optimum mode for meeting anyone anyway.
What would I have said, anyway? Do you come here often? Lovely bookshop, isn’t it? Hey, liked your book. You really do like Salman Rushdie a lot, don’t you? Not that I’m saying your book’s derivative. He should be flattered, really. And so should you, because his writing style’s so tough to copy, I mean, emulate, no, I mean…er…lovely day, isn’t it?
I was probably right to keep all that for the inner monologue. But I really do like White Teeth, even if a large part of that liking is derived from loving Rushdie.
[Indulge me on a tangential analogy here: I like And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead largely because they manage to incorporate a ridiculous amount of all that is good about Sonic Youth in their work, and avoid the bad (Kim Gordon vocals, for example). Perhaps it’s completely arbitrary of me to say Trail Of Dead’s Madonna and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are influenced but not derivative, but somehow that’s how I intuitively feel about them. The realm of artistry is theoretically open to both the Velvet Undergrounds and the Velvet Underground-influenced, although in practice we may justifiably bicker about the door policy. (There is no guest list.)]
[Footnote to above tangent: I probably diss Kim more than necessary. She takes a lot of getting used to, but it wouldn’t be the same without her. Love Kim, really.]
I write the Great American Novel, save it to disk, and come in here to find that my disk can’t be read.
Okay, it wasn’t the Great American Novel. It was company law notes on agency and shareholder litigation, plus two blog entries, and I’m not American. But regardless of all this I claim the right to be annoyed.
Public International Law on Thursday. If Re Pinochet (No.3) and humanitarian intervention don’t feature strongly in the paper, heads will roll, namely mine.
From Neil Gaiman’s journal:
“I finished Miguelanxo Prado’s story for Endless Nights yesterday — a very strange story, in which we get to see one of Dream’s first relationships, and learn weird things about the DC universe at the dawn of time (so there will be some people who will find it really cool that Killalla of the Glow is from Oa, and some people will simply go “What a short name for a world”). The strangest thing was writing a two page scene for Delight – who is, obviously, in a hundred million years or so, going to be Delirium, but isn’t her yet.”
The information above will mean nothing to you if you’ve never read Sandman, but if you have, please join with me now in responding: I WANT.
Me: “COPY”
Photocopier: ADD TONER. DO YOU NEED HELP IN ADDING TONER?
Me: “YES”
Photocopier: PRESS “INFO” FOR HELP IN ADDING TONER
Me: “INFO”
Photocopier: [extremely complex instructions beginning with OPEN FRONT COVER and moving on to tasks such as configuration of nuclear reactor, retrieval of lost space probe, removal of own appendix with dessert spoon…]
Me: “CANCEL”
Photocopier: [extremely complex instructions beginning with OPEN FRONT COVER and moving on to tasks such as configuration of nuclear reactor, retrieval of lost space probe, removal of own appendix with dessert spoon…]
Me, exasperated: “NO”
Photocopier: ADD TONER.
Me, giving up but wilful: “NO” (!)
Photocopier: ADD TONER. (!)
Me, starting to find this funny: “NO” (!!!)
Photocopier: ADD TONER. (!!!)
Me, in fits of laughter: Interactive technology my arse!
(Other people present make timid expressions of concern before running away from strange girl.)
I decide my cheek and the library table are getting on a little too well for their own good, so I stagger to my room and put on some Sonic Youth at their most dissonant and abrasive – crashing guitars, wailing feedback, screamed vocals, the lot. I jump around a lot.
Feeling better, I go downstairs for dinner and find a string quartet playing in the dining room. How nice. A former hallmate’s brought his quartet here for some small-scale performance experience. I sit down and spend most of the performance trying to physically restrain my cringes at off-pitch notes and jittery timing, both of which literally give me goose-bumps in their imprecision.
Sometimes life’s little juxtapositions amuse me.
I have nothing to say right now that isn’t about jurisprudence (quick summary: love Socrates, hate Dworkin, think Fuller lacks precision, originality and intellect), and outside all is malaise and greyness.
And it occurs to me that I would still rather live here with every day like this than be back in Singapore with no worries and blue skies every day.
I have neither the time nor energy to wade through angst towards clarity, so for now I’m not bothering with either concept. I just want to stay.
Cryptonomicon is still good going whenever I have time to pick it up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel an ongoing and recently gnawing need to feed greed. Which is rather absurd, given that American Gods has languished, unopened, for far too long on my bedside table and needs a lot of TLC, The Prince really should get reread soon so I can return it to the guy I borrowed it from six months ago, and I really want to finish Love In The Time Of Cholera some day instead of reading it halfway three times and inexplicably abandoning it each time despite liking it very much.
So I suppose that means I shouldn’t go out and buy Atonement today then.
Of course there is also the small matter of all the other books that remain unread and completely unfamiliar, such as Cases And Materials In Company Law, Cheshire And North’s Private International Law, Dworkin’s Law’s Empire, Shaw’s International Law…
I think this all boils down to an acute case of eyes bigger than brain.
In my hall’s somewhat lacklustre attempt to celebrate St George’s Day, there was bickering over finding someone to play God Save The Queen on the piano.
Me: Tay, God made you more musically talented than me. You should play it.
Tay: God also gave me a fiiiiine ass to sit on, and that’s what I’m doing right now. (plonks himself down in my seat)
Me: Fine. So what if I say God also gave me a fiiiiine ass to sit on, and I’m also gonna sit on it right now? (I plonk myself down)
Tay: Well your ass ain’t finer than mine.
Me: Oh yes it is.
Tay: Oh no it’s not.
Me: Well my ass can kick your ass’s ass!
So much for my brilliant legal mind and rapier wit.