delga | { you'll be the first to spin your story. }

So yesterday, in-between spamming y'all and appearing as though I was spending the day counter-productively (which, I'll cop, mostly true), I also managed to do all my reading for Experimental Writing, and do a bit of narrative-related research, all whilst The Flatmate sat on my bed and read two hellish pieces for Globalisation. Then I read two poems for her by Jeff Derksen which were both about the state of post-modernism, or something. I don't know, I just read them aloud for her so that she could see if the words made any more sense read out loud.

Then we had a nostalgia trip by sitting in the dark and watching the first two episodes of Supernatural (Pilot, Wendigo). We said many things like, "Hmm, is it me, or is his voice higher than I remember?" or "I knew that was coming, but it still made me scream like a girl-child." Good times.

Life looks like it's going to take forever today, although CSI: NY is going pretty quickly. Sigh, sigh. I didn't finish NCIS yesterday so I'm going to aim for that now.

I finished reading No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. Generally speaking I like short stories, and I like the format, and what you can do with them, but whilst July's stories were funny, and - surface-wise - interesting, I ultimately didn't take to them the way I did Atkinson's Not The End of the World. Later this week I should be getting a copy of Aamer Hussein' Insomnia which will be good for comparison. Also: hahaha, he's the Writing Fellow at our uni. Which is sort of weird, seeing as he has his own wiki page, but also fairly awesome.

Next to read, though, are two texts I bought at Asda, lolz. One is The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan who I thought was the author of The Last Empress but that turned out to be Anchee Min, so, I don't really know what I'm going to make of Tan's work anymore. The other book is Watch Me Disappear by Jill Dawson. The blurb reads:

A ten-year-old girl disappears without a trace from a Fenland village, her body never found. Thirty years on, she comes sharply back to life in the mind's eye of her childhood friend, Tina Humber, who has done her best to put the past behind her. But now, as Tina returns home for a family wedding she replays her memories in search of what happened, fearing that deep down she has always known who killed Mandy Baker.

I really feel like Sheila Kohler's Cracks has ruined me for books like this because I think I've worked out the plot just from the damn blurb. But it looks interesting for two reasons - one, because I'll read re-writes any day (even if they're unintentional), and two, because it's set in the Fen which, you know, I call home.

A few weeks ago the KCRW top tune was Laura Gibson's Hands in Pocket which is just wonderful to listen to. You should check it out if you can.