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

I often don't understand everyday type clothes, and am pretty suspicious of garments in general, let alone actual fashion, but (or, perhaps, therefore?), I really like the dresses in this collection. Especially this one:

( Picture. )

Tags: clothes

September
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown - Jennifer Scanlon
The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell
Spinster - Sylvia Ashton-Warner
The Best of Myles - Flann O'Brien
The Ionian Mission - Patrick O'Brien
The Reverse of the Medal - Patrick O'Brien
The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell
No More Saturday Nights - Norma Klein
Dimsie Goes to School - Dorita Fairlie Bruce

( As ever. )

Tags: books, girlsown
Current Mood: bookish

( A slightly disgusting poll. )

I'm not teaching this year, and now the freshers are here I'm rather sorry. I was sitting outside the new "Learning Zone" next to a girl who was leaving a phone message for her friend: "Uh, sorry about last night, I'm fine, really I am - I met some of my flatmates, and I'm going out tonight, and it was just a bit much, but I'm fine, it's okay. Um, I hope your lectures are going okay, um, it's fine, bye", which made me feel rather tragic. I hope it is okay for her, I'm sure it will be.

Tags: body, poll

I don't seem to have done this for about two years. I think I stopped having pen and paper near me when I read as a matter of course, I can assure you that it's not that I knew all the words that I read.

aetiology - the study of causation (of disease)
hieratic - priestly/cursive form of ancient Egyptian writing/highly restrained and formal (I think the last one was my context)
grobian - crude, sloppy person, fron the fictional patron saint of vulgar and coarse people, Saint Grobian, thought up by the satirist Sebastian Brant
cachexy/cachexia - loss of vitality and strength
cholegogue - agent that promotes the discharge of bile, "purging it downward"
fulvous - brownish yellow
tabes - wasting/atrophy of the body during disease
gleet - thin discharge, often from gonorrhea
strake - a plank in the hull of a boat
levinflash - lightning
peculation - embezzlement
spoom - frothy sorbet
toping - excessive drinking
costive - constipated
concupiscence - sexual desire
anent - regarding/concerning

And other things I looked up:
Podilarius and Machaon - legendary healers
Paracelsus - botanist in the 1500s who named zinc
Bartholomew Fair - summer fair in London from 1133-1855, suppressed for encouraging debauchery

And penguin apparently tastes like a gamey fish.

Tags: words

On the train back I went to the shop. This was to buy water to soothe my SORE THROAT IT HURTS, spurred on by the shop manager's announcement, which I think was trying to be funny and make slightly out-dated pop culture references, but came across more as being held hostage by the onboard computer and trying not to let her fear show lest others be made to suffer.

My way there was blocked by two men who were sitting across the aisle from each other chatting. One moved his legs very politely, and the other "grinned" up at me and said I could only get past if I said "excuse me, please". When I pointed out that I already had, he grudgingly moved.

On the way back to my seat, the same man got up and blocked my path, moving backwards between the seats in front of me leering at me. When he eventually stood to the side to let me past he muttered "you're a little tease" as I went past. I informed him that he was a fucking dickhead, and went through to my carriage.

UGH. I don't actually encounter very much sexist harrassment in my day to day life, and it's still really unsettling when it happens. I found myself pulling my vest top up higher on my breasts when he came through my carriage, because of course there must be some reason why he called me a tease, and if he'd gotten angry when I'd called him a dickhead then that would have been my fault too because you shouldn't provoke men if they're arseholes to you, just placate them. Stupid horrible man.

You know catechism? Is that a current thing for Christians, the question and answer things? If it's not a current thing, when did it stop?

(Have been reading The Best of Myles and the cliche catechism made me wonder.)

Tags: questions

I watched an episode of Ruby and the Rockits because it keeps being advertised during Make It Or Break It, and they had a father-daughter dance. Is that something that actually happens in America?? It was INCREDIBLY creepy. It wasn't just a school dance where girls brought their fathers, but a dance where the girls took it in turns to dance soppy formal dances ONE AT A TIME with their fathers in a sort of spotlight while everyone else watched. It was not a good show.

( Television I actually like. Neither spoilers nor insight. )

What else is going to be coming back? What's new that I don't know about especially in the US? What's oldish that I should find and see?

Tags: comedy, tv

Another "thoughtful" article from Abbey O'Reilly on the f-word, this time explaining why Katie Price is "downright irresponsible" for refusing to name the man who raped her. The f-word already have an article challenging this by Anji Capes, but for fuck's sake.

ETA: I removed a bit of this post because it was more mean-spirited than I wanted to be. Basically, I don't think that her f-word posts are doing what she thinks they're doing.

Oh, and:

Ken & Em (biography of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson)
Humphrey Carpenter - That was Satire That Was: The Sature Boom of the 1960s (but it's a heavy hardback so I'd either need postage or to be seeing you in person at some point)

Free:

Molly Hughes - A London Child of the 1870s
Molly Hughes - A London Home in the 1890s
Virginia Graham - Say Please (1940s humour about etiquette)
Dorita Fairlie Bruce - Nancy in the Sixth (comb bound photocopy)

£8
Elinor Brent-Dyer - Lorna At Wynyards (GGBP reprint)

I was in a charity shop and the women behind the till were talking about Canada. One of them's father had grown up on Prince Edward Island, and the other woman had never heard of Anne of Green Gables. She had, however, been to Canada:

"We desperately wanted to see a Mountie, but we only saw one the entire time, and that was a woman."
"Oh dear. Well, I suppose they have to let them, nowadays."
"Yes, but I've never been so disappointed."


Oh my god I don't have a Due South icon.</i>

Tags: other people amuse me