i use my life as a game of chicken

I spent Sunday with Alex Turton, or Alex Le Clezio as I call him, and it was lovely. I get uneasy when people actually just like me, as a person, with no ulterior motives, because it's unbelievable, but he apparently does. We went dusty book-shop finding, and only found oxfam, bu he did not know how much of a fail that was and happily brought books and I then found Mervyn Peake's 'A Book of Nonsense', and as anyone who knows me well would expect, I got entirely over excited about it. It was only 99p and is now joining a ticket to watch Ani Difranco in london this January in the pile of presents for my brother. I'm just uncertain whether to give it to him this weekend as his 21st birthday present (the ticket is definitely being given) or to keep the book back for Christmas. I might have to do that, it's much more sensible, but it's irritating because it would have been a nice suprise as he already knows about the ticket. Meh.

And then after I had danced for joy we walked to the quay. The Quay in Exeter has these big stony man made walls after a couple of pubs and they have these big old cellary things at the bottom of them, presumably previously used for boats (I thought maybe for horses but apparently people wouldn't need horses there. I think they would for barges.), but they've all been gentrified and lovelyfied and most of them are little shops but one of them is a cafe which is all nooks and cushions and Alice in Wonderland tea pots and amazing cushions and fabric roofs and the bathrooms have sparkly purple paint on the walls and there are beautiful pictures everywhere.

Alex brought us coffees and a slice of cake to share and I tried to take really small bites but that ended up with me eating very small amounts very quickly so I don't know if I achieved my aim of making him eat more with his very big bites eaten slowly. Hm.

We then went outside and Alex got cold and it was shivery and cold cold cold so we linked arms and huddled our way past the Cathedral and to Sainsburies where we got overexcited on the innocent smoothie deals (2 for 1!!!! on the big boxes! this meant that you could get TWO for 2.97ish when normally it's 2 for a fiver, annnnnnnd, that's even better a deal than Sainsbury own brand which is two for three pounds. Yay.) and then about the cider and whisky/port (me/him) deals. It waas awesome. We scared everyone by going crazy over certain brands - someone walked around the corner and I was singing a lullaby to a bottle of Highland Park and he was stroking a bottle of Port. Apparently it was nice port.

Then we had to carry all this liquid home and it hurt our backs and he put on my coat because he only had a t-shirt and a scarf whereas I had a scarf, hat, gloves, jumper and coat. He looked funny in my coat.

When I got home as I was trying to open the door a bottle fell out of my bag and broke on the concrete and it was one of the nicer ciders I had brought and I remembered that I have no money and I felt like crying.

Then I cleaned it up and went and practised for the open mic night with Matt and Emma. It was good. We're now called Matt Blythe and The Mob. I guess I'm The Mob. I'm okay with that.

On a final note, the open mic night went well, and afterwards one of the waiters gave me a free brownie and I had a moment of pure joy and mentioned that it was better than sex.

Apparently this could be taken as being offensive to various menfolk.

Woops.

Cuckoo, cuckoo

Watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, I realised that my corridor and the inmates of the mental asylum were far too similar for peace of mind. Not specifically, but in the interactions as a group. When I got back last night I even figured out which one was which but I couldn't remember the characters' names, and it's not always a perfect fit. And we definitely do not have a nurse character because she is a biatch.

And wierdly enough, the bedrooms in the movie's asylum were rather similar to the ones in Moberly. I don't mind, it simply confirms my belief that I am living life to the full.

So, CHICKEN.

9am, somewhere between town and university

rusted railings
a woman pushing an empty pram
white flowers
fallen leaves
a tescos bag in a well-tended garden

GOOD NIGHT LAST NIGHT
face hurts. mouth hurts. sinuses hurt.

I DON'T THINK PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO VIRTUES SHOULD BE MODEST. I think we should be rebellious and stubborn and filled until the seems burst with laughter. I think modesty is something people who are presumptiously full of 'virtues' need a good helping of. What does someone lacking everything have to be modest about? Once you have nothing everyone can see that, so why bother being virtuous.

Fair and True by Festival. Song for today.

Things I am sorry for.

Only being able to think about things as they relate to me.
Being so forgetful,
Worrying you,
Forgetting your name.
Not trying harder.
Not knowing what to expect -
Not living up to your expectations,
Not caring enough.
Not being ready.
Being scatterbrained;
Being disorganised.
Hating.
Forgetting.
Loving.
Forgiving.
Not forgiving.
Drawing attention to myself.
Wanting attention.
Not keeping secrets,
Talking too much,
Loving too much,
Not knowing what I want.
Not knowing who I am.
Eating.
Not being happy.
Being too happy.
Being mad.
Forgetting that every moment counts.
Not being there for you,
Not reassuring you.
Being less than what I need to be.
Not saving you.

valuable?

1. What has attracted you to this job opportunity and why do you think you’ll be a valuable member of the Lair staff this summer?

I have been a Lair camper from birth, and my Grandparents have been going pretty much since it was started, so we have a big family tradition surrounding the Lair. We’re the kind of campers in which every member of our huge family knows all the traditions (sometimes better than the staffers themselves), who spend their year waiting for the Sunday bbq, and who are shocked every time anything changes. When I was a kid my answer to ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ was always a Lair staffer or a forest ranger so that I could live up at the Lair the whole time.
Aside from my enthusiasm for the Lair, I was attracted to the job for the physicality of the role, the people relations involved and the shows. I really like the mix of capacities involved, and feel that they would suit me as I have always split my life into a multitude of contrasting activities. I’m used to living in close proximity to others not only from university life, but also from a trip I took last summer on a Green Tortoise bus, where all 35 or so of us slept on the big bed which covered the bus’s insides; cooked and ate together and spent every waking minute as a group.
I think I’ll be a valuable member of the Lair staff this summer because I cannot imagine anyone who is more enthusiastic, more excited or more entrenched in Lair tradition than I am. As I have two younger sisters (ages 7 and 14), I’m used to being a role model for children, and also working with and looking after them.

gel

Chaos = Life
Order = Habit.

Got it.

Will's still with the girl. So far. Yay.

I really miss Maya. -waves at- I say this not only because I've realised I could possibly see her within a month or so. Also because I'm listening to songs from Once and sobbing. Not sure why. Maybe because I feel like I meet people every day. Maybe because I keep forgetting I have a choice in anything I wish to have a choice in.



They put electrodes all over my head and fixed them on with gel which they inserted between the scary cap and my skull with a needle. It felt like they were squirting aliens onto my brain. It felt like they were disecting me. It felt like a head massage done by the dead. Then I sat at the screen and pressed buttons until the grey made my eyes go funny so that there were different shades all over it and the green and the yellow were one and nothing had any meaning.

Then I washed my hair and thought about the collapse of consciousness.

Investigating 'Eels', the band. Because I listened to them for half an hour through the wall. I wonder what it would be like to be tied to the earth by a rope, to be floating away... I think I know. It would feel like when you don't know whether to take that pill to make your headache go away. When you walk away from someone's eyes. When you smile at the exchange student and realise he's not up his own ass. When someone runs after you. When you pour tea from a teapot into your friend's teacup with its own chipped saucer.

Behind on all work.

Dropped a melted dark chocolate digestive on my presentation notes.

Face eating snot.

Amazing hyper moment earlier. Felt like I was back at Christian groups in Canford when the hot guy would try to show how Christian he was by talking to wierdo old me and then someone would pass the cookie tray and the smiley face sandwich one on it and I would get squeaky and jump around and he'd look painfully constipated or just embarrassed.

Which leads naturally onto someone who I'm going to call 'Guy', because that's his name. He always looks terrified of me. Unless he's completely drunk in which case he's about to leap on me. In which case he looks slightly less terrified and more determined. Not that he's done that recently, of course, but still... I've spoken about him before, and I'm still concerned about him. If only because people ask me how we're doing when we're clearly not 'we'...

Could we be?

No.

Maybe.

'Ever looked across a room and seen somone and been like, wow? Complete physical amazement. And then have you looked again and realised that's the person you're with? The one you're going to be going home with that night?'

I look over at her. She smiles. My mouth smiles back without me making it do so, and I tell her I know what she means.

velvet and stripes

in on and about this round planet of ours
and she wrote, she wrote this monolithic poem
called, a woman is talking to death, which i can't
read to you, because it'll take all night,
course - ahh.
this one... i found this poem and it reminded me
of me, sitting in kennedy airport with my little
shaved head and my carry on, you know...
'i'm going where they're nice'

(ani difranco)

THE GOOD-MORROW.
by John Donne


I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

semi-colon.

His words cry out like rats in a plague
discovering the basic lies behind tea cigarettes;
he sits on grey steps covered in
the foam of reality. The orange of the moon
grinning like whisky; the sky is full of goldfish

weeds drift between the lights, it all kaleidoscopes
in the lobster clouds, stopping desire
with corks of frozen rain, pressing
downwards, escaping, until it floods
like waves, down every road.

The cartoon of round golden apples on the kansas
of bare branches, moss dripping its loss
across the descent of the light, purple in his hands...
convinced that those who do not
change water into wine are static, are statues

he drinks from the clustered grapes -
of dank twigs against his crashing lips. He sees
the trees spread in thick silver threads
his environment evaporating in sugary smoke
curling upwards in clouds.

perhaps i'll be a bird one day, if i'm good enough

Sheesha (shisha. hookah. bong.) with Eva and Will is rediculously relaxing. I wouldn't mind going invisible now. While I'm in this mood.

We walked on the other side of the valley and I got covered in burrs and it was lovely having you down, Alice. You deserve more intensty than I had on me, but scribbled on a scrap, stuck in the hem of my wallet, is the reminder that at least my friends are there for that. I like us as a group, and I like you being here with us so that I can be in and out and like a double reflection but at the same time just, me.

Can still taste sheesha in my hair, in my clothes, in the back of my throat. There's something like haze in my pores. It's rather chilly. Laura Marling cold.

In the works read so far, women have played a marginal role in the stories. Yet, some critics would argue that the impact of such marginal roles is crucial to the overall development of the plot in such works. Choose one or two of the female characters in ONE or more of the works studied and explain why the role(s) in question is crucial to the story.

I accept chaos. I just don't know if it accepts me.

Aha.
'I lost my virginity to a shoe'
'my Dad ejaculated a whale'
'whoever heard of a fatalistic farmer'
'yeah I saw the christmas lights when we ran down the streets last night... dressed as smurfs...'

YAY ALICE IS COMING DOWNN.

NO I HAVEN'T FINISHED THIS GODDAM ESSAY.

Changed it to be about Bob Dylan. Seeing how I'm in love with him. Perhaps foolish at 1am the day it's due, but it's done now.

'He who is not busy being born is busy dying.'

Were you born today? I think I was. Can meeting someone count?

Liv Torc stands at the front trying to hype us up a bit. 'Who likes kissing?' I think my hand shot up faster than anyone elses. I do! It's like running supermarket trollies into each other! C O L L I S I O N.

Smurf? Where?!

First time out sober whilst here.

Knew Will would need me, I was FREAKIN RIGHT, poor kid. But I got bored. Didn't say man up but thought it, loudly. He's sopping when he's drunk, believes he's unconditionally in love... Do all drunks dramatise their lives. I think I probably do. 'OH but YOU DON'T KNOW my storyyyyyy'.

Another funny thing about not being drunk is that I found myself looking for people I know more than I would otherwise. And, being overtired, I was pretty out of it anyway. Amusement. 'ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE NOT DRINKING?'

I love appletisers and J2Os. Especially Appletiser. So cheap! So apple-y! So bubbly! Imagine this, me walking through the club with a full glass of lovely soda WITH SOME STILL LEFT IN THE BOTTLE because - yes - it was more than could fit in the glass. When would this happen whilst sober?

On the other hand, no one believes in my resolutions.

And, I'm dressed as a smurf and this blue paint is starting to itch. Except apparently I look more like an avatar. SHOWAHHH TIMES. at 2am.

When I was three

I wanted to be a forest ranger like in the Smokey the Bear books. But that was never enough, I wanted to be a chef, I wanted to be a farmer, I wanted to ...

What animal would you like to be?

Black bear.

She stops, looks at the pictures on the wall. Where did that poster come from? Why were there naked people and old women and movie stars and movement all mixed up on it? She stares at the edges of the paper, her ears soaked in songs. How to adapt to brick walls and hard floors? Someone asked her how she lives like a tramp, like this, but she thinks it's luxury, heck there's a mini-fridge in the corner! You can't ask for much more than that. She daydreams in place of drinking, remembers how to go on midnight walks. Different dangers, maybe.

She walks to the stairs which go up. Up is just an idea some fool had. And we shall make fools of men. She feels as if she is wrapped tight, suffocated in her duvet, even though she's outside with the patting hands of the rain. People are like trees around her, even when they're all asleep. They say society is like a tree, politics in the trunk, arts in the leaves. She wouldn't know, because who knows the bigger picture when they're a dot in the corner, falling off the edges of the paper.

She thinks of the world as something to hide in, to avoid everything which is outside. To blind yourself by snuggling into it. She always loved the word 'snuggery'; always loved the idea of a room of pillows. When she was a child she bounced in a room of mattresses and they told her she was warm.

Nowadays there are ashes in her hair and she trails her fingers in the pools of people as if she can make a difference to lives through ripples. She leaves stains on them all, but she doesn't think they notice. She kisses to say that she is alive and lovable, although separate from those she kisses, kisses them because she recognises the loneliness in them, because they're hurt.

Detroit Annie, Hitchiking by Judy Grahn (once beautifully read by Ani Difranco)

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handled.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel, she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fisherman think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. She figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind.
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine

smoking.

no alcohol.
except when Alice comes down...
for two weeks.
unless Will's girlfriend and him really split,
in which case it's for a month.
and even if they don't,
no more than 5 units per occasion.

AND

no one's getting any fun little things off me except a nice chat and a cup of tea. They can go wank themselves off. Or something.

ANI DIFRACO'S BACK... Red Letter Year >>>> POSITIVE THINKING.

words and monkeys

incredible like iced imps inspecting imperial indians igloos in incredibly interrant interest.

non-crack-smoking, rent-paying, rectum-clenching mouth-breather (is breathing through one's mouth really that bad? I apologise for my existence, everyone.); baggy-pants-wearin’, ghetto-fashioned bozo; Snoop-Dogg-emulating Dollar-Menu-splurging pustule.

I wonder what the worst things I do are.

Most of the time I presume I'm having fun, but not right now. First time so far that I've felt utterly down. I need to keep my jabberwockery retarded lunchbox of a mouth shut.

What's the answer?

CAMUS... THE PLAGUE.

Rob. Who I find ridiculously hard to understand due to the way he speaks. Who travelled all over the middle east this summer. Who has brilliant taste. Who understands my passions. Who kissed me when very drunk and who didn't, to my surprise, manage to forget it. Who knows more about me than I'd expect.

Is this a good person to take chocolate fudge from?

Will and my friendship is strained. Breaking down like a heart shattering you know, when you feel it disintegrate but sharp and fractured.

My heart hits the ceiling every time anything even mildly unexpected happens. The door opens. Someone walks past. I seize up like a chicken waiting for the axe to hit.

Trembling

Put The Rural Alberta Advantage's 'Don't Haunt This Place' on.

There are too many things which have happened in my life for me to be able to write them all down, but I think I have comunicated almost all of them at one point or another, because I am a veracious story teller. The story doesn't always have to be true, it just has to interest me.

This one's true though, and it's horrific, but I have to set it out clearly and if you're following my blog you'll already know how screwed up I am so you'll have to forgive me. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Drugs being tea. Rock and roll being clubbing. Sex being un-wished for.

What happened last thursday:

A couple of friends and I had decided to go on a 'Harry Potter' themed pub crawl. The university charity group has organised it and their themed pub crawls are always hilarious. So we got tickets, and then on the night, they all chickened out. So I called my friend Jess who had been looking for tickets after they sold out, and her and Cain, the guy who ought to be gay but gets with girls, were overjoyed to take the spare tickets. We predrank a bottle of whisky and a good amount of jager, and headed out.

(Mistakes 1 and 2 of the night - not sticking with my flat mates, and, pre-drinking, then bringing drinks in plastic bottles with us so that we wouldn't sober up on the walk there.)

We were late onto the crawl so we joined up with them on their third 'pub' - the downstairs of Timepiece, which has a club upstairs which wasn't open yet, and which is kind of dark and wooden and I rather like it. I had some nice neat whisky and realised I knew hella people on the crawl, so started chatting with various groups, one of which involved my friend Rob from my old school, which was funny to me in the state I was in.

(Mistake 3 - not sticking with one group of friends.)

We then hit the last bar (Pitcher and Piano) before running off to the club. I cannot actually remember the walk between them aside from standing on a bench with the folks from B1.

(Mistake 4 - hanging out with people I had already gotten off with.)

Once I was there I didn't even bother getting a drink, I was that gone. I went up to the smoking area and felt upset that there was no one there I really knew. The next thing I remember is this dark south-african guy putting his hands down my pants but not kissing me. Intriguing.

(Mistake 5 - allowing that to happen.)

He then drags me off the dance floor and I agree that I want to go home as WOW he lives just up the hill from me so maybe we could just share a taxi back. As we exit the club I realise I don't want to leave but his arm's around me and we're in a cab and he's doing unmentionable things to me and then we're in his room and he's on facebook. I'm serious. He said something like, don't you always check facebook when you get home from a night out. I say no. He gets me naked, has a rather large dick (terrifyingly large) and I tell him I don't think I can do this. I feel absolutely horrified at the idea of anything that large approaching my delicate self. His friend calls him and he holds me down with one hand whilst answering the phone. He then gets me all het up and so on, and it ends up with us having sex. I don't say 'no' until about half way through when I'm in major pain and he either doesn't hear me or pretends not to. I don't say it that forcefully.

(Mistake 6 - not making myself clear. The words I wanted were, 'I'm saying no, and if you keep going, that will be classed as rape.')

He keeps going on about wanting to make me come, but I don't and I eventually manage to slide out of bed and lock myself in his bathroom. I come out and ask why he didn't kiss me at all, whilst I get dressed. He says he only kisses his girlfriend. I tell him I don't think my boyfriend would be too impressed with me (you expect me to tell him the truth about anything?) and run out the door, ask someone down his hall for the way out. Yes I was too drunk to remember which door was which.

Once outside, I run down the hill crying my eyes out and thinking 'I'm going to go cry on everyone in my flat and then Will won't be mad at me.' I don't know why this is the thought I'm thinking, but I was mainly worried about Will being mad at me as I'd told his friend something I shouldn't have earlier (see post before this one). I notice a guy in a big coat ahead of me, am half terrified but then the hill gets really steep and he's concerned and I end up holding his arm. He's french. He says, What happened? I say, Someone had sex with me, and, I didn't want them to, and, I'm all wrong, and, look, I'm even doing this wrong.

He says he's going back to his room. I ask if I could come and have tea. He says yes. I go and have tea and he has posters of John Lennon and Spiderman cartoons around his room and two left handed guitars and his room is just perfectly messy enough.

(This ought to have been a mistake but it wasn't. Hurrah.)

I leave and run home.

I get here, go into my room, get scared, wonder where everyone is, put on a hoody, go into Reshi's room, that's where a load of people are, and collapse crying. They take notes on the details and tell me I should report him. I go sleep in Eva's spare bed.

I don't think I want to report him. What if they don't believe me? What if he gets deported? What if he really did think I wanted to do stuff? I just hope to god I didn't imagine the bit where he put on a condom.

And I have two massive hickeys.

Afraid of everyone.

well.

Positives: Crying and running home, I bumped into a random french guy called something like Jean-something. Who had a big coat and glasses. Who I immediately fell deeply in love with. Who likes John Lennon. Who has a spiderman poster. Who has perfect glasses and hair. Who has heard of J M G Le Clezio, even read some of him. So what I was hysterical and forced him to let me go to his room and drink tea without milk or sugar. So what I can't remember if I was awful. He was amazing.
And, the pub crawl was fun. Saw Jack of the curly red hair who was wearing a green hat and dancing like an elf. Why is he always in my life? Why can I never decide what he's thinking? Freekin drama students.


Negatives: Will's mad with me for mentioning about his girlfriend to anyone else. He didn't say it was private but I guess I should have known it was his news to tell. I was drunk and someone who has really personal conversations with him and has known him since he was six asked me how he was. 'Not so good.' 'why not? I thought his girlfriend came down?' 'Well, exactly. Don't think that panned out quite right.' 'Oh... I should call him.' 'Okay.' And then he's mad with me!
And, I am bruised and have huge marks on my neck and sobbed all over my flat mates. I don't know I don't know 'report him for rape' 'no he's south african'.

Fuck's sake.

THE NATIONAL. hide in them.

Had a bath. The ceiling seemed really far away. Bath's don't make me feel clean unless I have two of them. One to get grime off, one to get soap off. First rediculously hot. Second comfortable temperature, or just below it. The room is freaky coloured, made me feel like in The Yellow Wallpaper. Or like the scary woman in the bath in The Shining.

I wonder if Will hates me now.

This would be a love song, if the sky wasn't on fire.

That essay was rediculously bad.
I'm starting the next one NOW. not the morning it's due. NOW.

Falling for The Low Anthem. And The Tallest Man on Earth.

Will's girlfriend's told him they're on a break. He comes into my room (without knocking, as usual, if he'd been a few seconds earlier he could have seen my sexyful victoria's secret underwear which I'm only wearing because I've run out of the boring stuff. This makes me sad. I don't like wearing it if no one's going to see it. Ho. Ho. Ho.) and says 'She pecked me on the cheek, hugged me as a friend, and got on the bus. She's gone.'
-She told me she was going to do this. Why did I not yell at her and scream protestations. Look at him. Is this my fault? How could this be my fault?
'Are you okay?'
'No I'm fucking not okay.'
-He's not okay, stupid question. Stop talking. Maybe he needs to rant.
He rants.
He apologises for ranting. I wish he wouldn't aplogise. I like being here for him. I suddenly think of Alice and Paddy.


Gemma sits between the stone walls outside the club, her shadow-slick eyelids lowered to gaze into her phone. There's nothing on it, but you look rediculous if you sit alone outside a club and aren't smoking or looking at your phone, and she's run out of fags. Her legs are stretched before her and her mind is elsewhere, examining the reflected stars in her phone screen, wondering where her friends have gone, what she's going to do now. She doesn't know the answers any more.

She stands up unsteadily, wanders towards the door to the club. A guy with short, blonde hair and stubble stretches a hand towards her. She stares at it. Someone did that earlier, put out their hand towards her. She hesitantly takes it, wondering if this is shaking hands or what. Within seconds he's kissing her. She's shuddering inside but she was alone before and she's not now so she lets him.

did i tell you about the cushion?

'Rorty, writing in the introduction to the aptly-named Everyman Library edition of Pale Fire, traces the way “we readers” experience the novel: the way “we” become immediately seduced by Kinbote, experience mild irritation at the poem’s interruption of his narrative, reconnect with our hero in the commentary as the dazzling story of Zembla unfolds, only gradually apprehend that we are in the company of a madman, and then realize, with guilt and remorse, that we’ve too hastily overlooked the novel’s central event, Hazel’s tragic death. Through a timed-release reaction, the novel’s meaning lodges itself in the reader’s psyche, “for there is now a small dent in the real world, right at the place where we forgot about Hazel,” and we finish the book “worrying about whether we are all right, wondering whether we like ourselves” (Introduction xii–xiii). Rorty believes that for Nabokov, as for Shade, the password is pity.'

WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER WE ARE ALL RIGHT, WONDERING WHETHER WE LIKE OURSELVES.

obsolete venacular

my brand of freedom
falls through roofs;
spins in rain splattered spirals,
like blowing bubbles;
finds death in the flower beds.
you'll never understand
why a teddy's torn skull
equates to liberty,
but you'll take advantage
of the alternate colours on my
nails like shells - will explode
my jaw simply because you thought you knew
what independence meant.

you'll never drain sense into me
through all those shots twisted on my tongue,
and i will fly away
away from your certain face.

listened to Carla Bruni all day. think i have conjunctivitis.

'Nabokov's art grows out of Romanticism in the Platonic tradition; because
he sees this world as a pale reflection of another, his novels abound in
doublings, mirrorings and inversions. 4 The glimmerings of another existence
beyond our own may occasionally be discerned in nature, in fate's workings,
and in art; the puzzles and rich referentiality of Nabokov's texts are designed
to send the reader on a quest for the transcendent.'

'beyond the 'real', a word Nabokov said must always be used with quotation marks'

'structured on the idea that reality has an infinite succession
of false bottoms.'

'If we consider Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an allegory - the
struggle between Good and Evil within every man - then this allegory is
tasteless and childish.' - Nabokov

'the double theme began to be popularized in ways that trivialized the real/ideal opposition, reducing it to an allegory of Good/ Evil. Double tales illustrating German Romantic philosophy depict the dilemma of the impossibility of embodying the ideal in the real world; characters go mad attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable'

'The varieties of doubling convey how difficult it is to discern the ideal through the veil of the everyday; Nabokov uses them to show art and reality intertwine. The mirrors reflect a succession of (illusory?) images of eternity barely perceptible from the shifting vantage points of our world. Zemblan, the "tongue of the mirror" (note to line 678), reflects these resemblances.'

...cross referencing makes into further hall of mirrors.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALICE

once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice who invited Florence to her Bat Mitzvah. They had really shiny apples there.

Once upon a time there was a girl called Alice who went to school with Florence for eight years, which is the longest anyone's ever gone to school with her (and still talked to her at the end of it all!).

Once upon a time Alice and Florence went to a folky festival and were a little retarded but it's all good.

Once upon a time there was someone called Alice who was best friends with Florence and they dated two best friends and even sometimes double dated and it was funny while it lasted.

Once upon a time Alice and Florence when clubbing at Alice's university and got a little bit trashed and Alice threw up.

Once upon a time there were two people who shared too many experiences to write into a single blog post.