November
Tragically, I Was an Only Twin - Peter Cook
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
Dimsie Grows Up - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia - EM Delafield
The Purposes of Love - Mary Renault
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren - Alan Coren
Dimsie Goes Back - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Shakespeare Wallah - Geoffrey Kendal
Books do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell
Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell
Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell
Dimsie Carries On - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Takes Charge - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
The Encircled Heart - Josephine Elder
The Saturdays - Elizabeth Enright
Anything Can Happen - Jane Shaw
Now and Then - William Corbett
The Trouble With Vanessa - Jean Ure

( November Books. )

Tags: books, comedy, girlsown

I have the best housemates.

I'm thinking of getting Windows 7. Anyone know whether I'd be better with "home premium" or "professional"? They're the same price with the student offer. I'm not bothered about having to do a clean install.

I am very much looking forward to hearing David Mitchell sing.

Tags: isihac, questions, techy

I have been reading 101 Poems by 101 Women for several years now. Slowly. It is edited by Germaine Greer, and the poems are arranged chronologically, starting with Anne Askew in 1564. I have finally reached the 1950s, and am starting to enjoy it more. I have liked reading the earlier poems, but they tend towards the long and tortuously rhyming which is not at all my preferred style. I had not come across this poem before, and I liked it a lot, so I am posting it. It is not very short, so most of it's under a cut.

The Centaur
By May Swenson (1956)

The summer that I was ten—
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must

have been a long one then—
each day I’d go out to choose
a fresh horse from my stable

which was a willow grove
down by the old canal.
I’d go on my two bare feet.

( The Centaur. )

I am going to see The Habit of Art with whatho next month, and I think I should try to read some Auden, and possibly also listen to some Britten. Generally I don't do any preparation for plays, I like to see if they stand alone (and also I am lazy), but somehow it seems that I might get more out of it if I knew something. I'm not sure.

I am currently roasting a chicken. I put onion and garlic and a lemon in it and everything. I'm going to have roast potatos with it, and then I'm going to make stock, and on Saturday I'm going to (try and) make risotto for the first time ever. I can't tell you how grown up I feel.

Tags: food, poetry, theatre

For the past few days I have been having really painful occasional anal spasms. This is probably easily explained by a combination of diet and citalopram, but the Muller Light adverts from a while back have had more effect on me than I thought, because all I can think is that, somewhere, someone is blithely having inadequately lubricated anal sex, and I am paying the price.

Tags: body, ow
Current Mood: sore

jekesta made a vid about Riptide, which I am linking to for two reasons.

1) I think it's a good vid.

2) As Jen says in her post, she has been making it for AGES. And having lived with the pain and trauma of no-one she loves doing anything that fits the music EVER, I think there should be some good to come out of it. It should be seen so that mine and Alice's (okay, and Jen's) suffering was not in vain.

It is not actually entirely Riptide, the verses are lots of various other fandoms. Some of them I even know (Prisoner (Cell Block H), The Persuaders, various incarnations of Star Trek), and I enjoyed it even never having seen Riptide.

Also, at the bottom of Jen's post, when she says that I suggested lots of scenes she could use but they were all from JUMP! Street, that is true*. I could pretty much have done that entire vid using only scenes of Hanson and Penhall. I'm not saying it would have been a better vid (all vids everything ever would be better with more Penhall), but we could all think it quietly to ourselves if we liked.

While I am doing this, I will also link to her webpage on nets, which is one of my favourite things. It makes me laugh every time I read it.

* ACTUALLY, when she first showed me the vid yesterday it had a small scene from JUMP! Street, but it seems to have been taken out now. HMPH.

Tags: jump!, peter deluise, vaguely fannish

My dad has a Wii, so a game seems like a possible Christmas present. I've only played Cheerleading on the Wii, which is BRILLIANT but possibly not my dad's thing. So if anyone has any recommendations of good games I could think about, that would be great. Ideally it would be something that has multiplayer so my mum could sometimes play. He's not big on killing stuff - on the PC he mostly plays Civilization. Something fun but with some challenge to it.

Mmm, I made snickerdoodles. They didn't spread as much as they should, but they are still very yum indeed.

I have a second darts player that I like (the first is Simon Whitlock). He is Kevin McDine and we share a birthday. He makes lovely faces, and his music is "Live and Let Die".

I think I am sufficiently energetic to go and see Morris tonight.

( Freemasons' Hall. )

( Leisure Games, the Stephens Collection. )

( Nation. )

( Adam Hills. )

We watched Doctor Who on Sunday. OH GOD IT WAS EVERYTHING I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE, AND LESS. Roll on regeneration.

Tags: comedy, museum, theatre

Last week I was in London seeing people, plays and museums.

( Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, St Barts Hospital Musuem. )

( Pains of Youth. )

( Mixed Up North. )

Tags: museum, theatre

Some quotes I liked from Ladelle McWhorter's book Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (1999).

'I am older and wiser, more patient and sedate*.
(In footnote) * Ask anyone.'

'People who say "just let go and feel the music" are complete idiots.'

'Too many of us - the most highly educated of us especially - assume that if we've read a few books, understood the arguments, and maybe written some words about them here and there, we have therefore undergone those books' radical critiques f the most fundamental truths of our culture. This tendency is probably one of the most obvious vestiges of our resilient Cartesianism. We believe we can change our minds without changing our hearts, without changing our bodies, without changing our lives.'

October
The Military Philosphers - Anthony Powell
A Comedian's Tale - Ian Cognito
Dimsie Moves Up - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Moves Up Again - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Among the Prefects - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People - Toby Young
Dimsie, Head Girl - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Intervenes - Dorita Fairlue Bruce
Cover Her Face - P.D. James

A Comedian's Tale (on his website, here) is a disjointed look back at his career, from the first gig to the latest, with notable successes and failures (mostly failures) along the way. Probably only interesting if you are already interested in the history of UK stand-up.

I am rather stalled on Dimsie now, as I have reached Grows Up, which is BORING. Although to be fair it did start with someone nicking a car at gun-point, but she's an adult now and there is no more trying on corsets in the lower music room (what? there's no rule, that I've ever heard, against trying on new corsets in the lower music-room)), rescuing poetry from a burning shed or suddenly finding that an escaped bear has leapt into your sports-car.

Toby Young is not exactly meant to be likeable in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, but I don't think he was intending to come across as boringly irritating as I found him. He kept banging on about how in the US women judged him on what he did, and in the UK women judged him on what he was like, and it seemed that not being judged on what he was like could only be a bonus.

Cover Her Face is the first PD James I've ever read. I enjoyed it - it took me a while to get into it, because no-one died for ages. But good.

Tags: books, girlsown
Current Mood: bookish

Last week Jen took me to see ( Surrogates. )

Last weekend I went to Manchester to see notmarcie, chiasmata and irrtum. We went to the Royal Exchange to see ( Punk Rock. )

On Sunday I went with Jen to see Jon Richardson. He is from Lancaster, though he lives in the south, and this was his first proper show up here (other than uni gigs), and all his family were there. He was worried about saying "spunk" in front of them. He was supported by Matt Forde, who is very genial and I've liked various group shows I've seen him do, but I simply don't think he should do stand-up. It wasn't actively bad, just sort of dull, and he seemed quite lost without other people with him.


I am off to London. This includes the threat of outdoor swimming, the promise of museums and whatever else I can fit in before I come back on Wednesday.

Tags: comedy, film, theatre

The coil is not the agony I had feared it might be - I have one day where it is quite painful, but even if I don't have any painkillers to hand it is not actually incapacitating. However, it has changed my periods, so I have a few days of small amounts of blood in discharge (enough to need a liner), and then about four days of actual bleeding, including two nights where I overflow my larger capacity cup and need back-up, and then about three/four days of bleeding gradually tailing off. I've only just started using an online tracker to work out when things happen, but this currently only leaves me with about a week in the middle where I don't bleed at all. I am mildly grumpy about this. According to monthlyinfo I'll be rageous about it in about two days.

Tags: body, not blue-blooded

( Icon meme from cellador. )

Tags: lj, meme

( LUSU comedy. )

( The Clink, Tower Bridge, Ripper walk. )

( Matt Tiller. )

( Simon Bird. )

( It's Debateable, Ragged School Museum. )

Also recently I had two Nicola Marlow connections that I forgot to mention. In the Royal London Hospital there is an invitation to Nelson's funeral that she could have wrapped with her other Nelson things, and one of the songs in Cymbeline is Fear No More, though I think that Dr Herrick would scarcely have approved of the new setting.

Tags: comedy, museum, theatre

Friday
( Royal London Hospital Museum. )

2 museums down, 199 to go! I had intended to get the tube back from Whitechapel, but it was so nice talking to khalinche that we kept walking until we got to Mile End.

( Comedians - lots of spoilers. )

Tags: comedy, museum, theatre

It's National Poetry Day! And lots of people on my flist have also been talking specifically about women poets. I combine the two with this extract from Dimsie Among the Prefects. One of the original rules of the Anti-Soppist League was that no member should write poetry (poetry being dreadfully soppy, of course). The ASL was formed when they were juniors, but there is no less need for watchfulness in Div 1. Jean Gordon, however, was found out at the beginning of term to be a secretly budding poet. This was reluctantly allowed to pass, so long as she kept to suitable subjects like the dear old school. However, later in the term, she is discovered deviating from these clear rules:

( What's the matter with Jean's poetry? )

My bathroom book at the moment is Germaine Greer's collection 101 Poems by 101 Women, which is arranged chronologically, and I'm up to Christina Rossetti. Unfortunately the poems have got longer than I like, and since I am thankfully currently free from intestinal difficulty I am not managing to get through them so easily. I mostly like poems rather than poets, but here are my ten:

( Ten women poets. )

I don't care if the last one's a cheat, I think of it as an entity, and it's the first book of poetry I ever bought myself. I was 15/16 and on holiday in Wales with my family and my childhood best friend Chloe and her family. I had blue hair and I was sulking because if I hadn't been on holiday I would have been going to see Dinosaur Jr with my soon-to-be-boyfriend Daniel. We went to the bookshop in Machynlleth, where I spent all my holiday money on my book, and Chloe bought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because she loved the line "when you wet the bed first it is warm and then it is cold". We read our respective books when we went to bed that night huddled under blankets because it was technically summer but we were in a damp cottage up what might have been a mountain with no heating.

Tags: books, girlsown, poetry

I always think of Dorita Fairlie Bruce as the sensible one of the Big Three, lacking as she does a surfeit of either avalanches or titled gentlemen. And of course the presence of the Anti-Soppist League. But I have just finished Dimsie Moves Up Again, and so far in the series they've discovered a secret maze of passages cut of of rock through the back of a wardrobe, found a Vandyck, had it stolen, chased after the thieves in a stolen car driven by an underage schoolgirl, seized it back and made their getaway in a rowing boat on the sea. And I haven't even started the book with the bear leaping into the backseat of the car yet.

At least these do happen to indivdual girls, or groups of girls, though. You can quite see that the whole thing could be explained away as one-off events triggered by the unique nature of Dimsie Maitland*. Much more difficult to convince parents that there is no inherent institutional health and safety problem when the whole school may at any moment be flooded out, trapped in a shed by an snow/heavy fog/inadequate foresight by mistresses, felled by a flying bookend, or married off to a passing member of the medical profession.

I love girls' school stories.

'Meg saddled her horse and rode eight miles across country in the dark - Irish country, mind - to fetch a doctor for a man who had been shot in the rioting.'

'Then she'll marry that man,' declared Pam, with conviction. 'I don't see what else she can do. It was splendid of her though. Meg was always a sport.'

What else indeed!


*Is this not an early example of RAS syndrome? I dearly love that the entry takes care to point out the humour in the name in case anyone missed it.

Tags: girlsown
Current Mood: nerdy

Chocolate cake, yes. (I have just made one and had a breakfast of bowl scrapings.) Chocolate and orange cake, ooh! But chocolate and orange POTATO cake, I do not think.

(I mean, I would totally try some if the opportunity arose. But potato cakes are those savoury fried things in breakfasts sometimes - they are NOT for chocolate.)

Tags: food