{ I hitched a ride with a vending-machine repair man. }

[delga]

Driving lesson wasn't a complete bomb. I spent the rest of the day watching the Aragorn &/or Ent parts of The Two Towers and then a beautiful, beautiful film called Sukkar Banat (Caramel). The stories, the direction, the music: all delicious, all delightful. I'm tempted to watch it again before I go to sleep, especially since my insomnia is kicking up again.

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Meme: Reply to this meme by yelling "words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. Got mine from fallapartagain.

.poetry I don't know what it is about poetry but in the past year or two I've really come to love it. I've always enjoyed it in one form or another - nursery rhymes, song lyrics, epic form, experimental verse - but most recently I have an especial love for continuous free verse, huge stanzas that build up momentum and then throw you off a cliff at the end. My god. I feel like my first year university class (and most of my English classes before that) was wasted on me because I hadn't read enough poetry to set me alight on the subject, and I blame schools for that. We don't read enough poetry at school - we don't read a wide enough range, and we don't talk about it in a productive way. Schools talk about poems in a hide&seek format, using them to highlight examples of literary/poetic devices, and we rarely cohere those things. And because in studying poetry there is such an emphasis (in schools) on subjectivity, we don't talk about how a poem makes you feel. There wasn't a single moment in my education where I felt comfortable saying that Imtiaz Dharker's This Room spoke to my experience, or that the closing lines of Philip Larkin's Broadcast are absolutely perfect. Plus: I don't have a memory for lines the way a lot of lit students do and I've always felt that was my weakness.


.books Books alternately excite me and frustrate me. Sometimes all I want to do is read. Sometimes I absolutely cannot be bothered. Also, my approach to genres and classics &c. are haphazard to say the least. I used to feel somewhat fraudulent in a lot of my university classes. I have been reading books/novels for a very long time, from quite a young age, but I have thus far avoided reading a lot of traditional canonical works. I've never read Dickens, I hate Austen, and I would much rather read Chaucer than Blake or Donne or Defoe or whoever else there is. In a lot of ways I'm a popularist: Shakespeare over Marlowe, Chaucer over Monmouth. In a lot of other ways, I'm really, really not. If I was able to take my degree all over again, I'd take a lot more drama, a lot less poetry (or different to what I actually took) and more overseas literature. I've said this many times before but I truly believe that the English undergrad degree should be a four year course, where the final year is for the dissertation and specialisation.

In non-academic terms, I love me a good mystery novel. Hit me up PD James, whoop whoop.


.semi-colons lols, what? LEARN TO USE THEM. Learn to use them correctly, but don't do what I do and overuse them. I'd much rather see a semi-colon than an Oxford comma, to be honest, but that's not really how that's supposed to work. You use semi-colons to juxtaposed linked/contrasting clauses, but you also use them to indicate prolonged pauses. I wish that grammar of this ilk was covered more accurately in schools. I lucked out: my year 8-9 English tutor was an old-school grammarian (hence my hatred of the Oxford comma; I use it begrudgingly) and I worked that shit out pretty early, but I hate that there were people at uni who didn't even know what the damn thing did. That is fucked up.


.music I love music. I love a whole range of music, actually, and I love performing as much as I love listening. I grew up listening to my mum sing songs and making up the lyrics; I grew up listening to the radio and to Bollywood tapes. I grew up singing hymns in school, and songs in the choir, and playing the recorder and flute. I love drums. I love lyricism. I love string quartets and music from the Baroque period. I pick music to suit my mood; music can set my mood. Most recently I have fallen for acoustic sounds in the biggest way - my entire university experience is about acoustic music (except for The Killers; they're a different sort of soundtrack but equally important). I don't understand people who are indifferent to music but it has always touched me, and I don't ever take it for granted. True story.

Relatedly, the reason why that Florence/Machines song has got me wound so tight is that every time I listen to it I hit a zone. I can't verbalise it. It's such an amazing sound.


.Mac&Stella (cheat!) What can I say about this couple that I haven't said before? Not a great deal. The Greece episode was immensely satisfying to me and I don't really care that others found it ludicrous because I think it's about time something came right for Stella, and it was good to hear Mac be vocal about their friendship. I used to compare Mac & Stella to an old-school CJ & Toby, but these days I find them quite different to that. Their love is so complete, to my mind. I don't mean romantically; I think their friendship has developed to the point where their affections for one another are concrete. They have love for each other. And fuck you, tptb, if you mess with that dynamic again. I DON'T FORGIVE.

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Ooh, full moon? It's a little red/orange tonight. Gorgeous. You'd never be able to tell we had torrential rain in the middle of the day.