|
drive_in_saturday
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Tori
Country: United Kingdom
Metro: Birmingham
Birthday: 6/4/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: MUSIC!!! ROCK N ROLL!!! The Beatles, Bowie, Led Zep, Queen to name a few; literature- Wilde, Eliot, Plath, Ishiguro, lots more; The Arts; movies; Asia, especially Thailand; travel; human rights; animal rights; religion; optimism; mythology; the love that dare not speak its name.
Expertise: ... writing I suppose. Not that I'm brilliant but I am passionate about it.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/3/2005
|
|
| *tumbleweed* Ain't been no body 'round this here blog for some time...
Sorry guys. I just can't keep it up. The only thing I'm really keen on blogging about is writing, and that's probably not what my subscribers here want to read. This was a keep-up-with-schoolfriends type manouvre, but now there's facebook for that.
There is, for anyone who is interested in reading the things I write, or my ramblings on the subject of writing, a writing-themed blog at http://amagiclantern.livejournal.com
Thanks for all the fish, and so forth.
| | |
| Please remove your boots, madam, we fear they may be a threatJust a quick one from the airport before I go off to ski in Austria- Airport security is getting ridiculous. I had to take my shoes off and put them through a shoe-scanning machine. As Mum said- heaven help us the day they catch the Bra Bomber. | | |
| No place like home...Merry day-after-boxing-day, kids! I am at my auntie Anne's house (incidentally, 'Auntie Anne's' is also a pretzel shop in Bangkok... this causes much amusement for the family in the way many unfunny things can be hilarious family in-jokes) recovering from recent turkey-and-wine excess. All is jolly and good. Well, mostly. Family is an odd, odd thing. So vital and central to life yet so screamingly infuriating. I love coming home and being a daughter again, getting all that food and warmth and security for absolutely nothing- but however grateful I am I inevitably get annoyed at people and end up snapping and arguing and sulking and being disgusted at myself for it but somehow unable to stop. And then there's The Boyfriend Thing. Oh what fun that is. My sister, love her to bits as I do, is fifteen and difficult and quite violently hates my boyfriend, whose only crimes seem to be having long, sometimes scruffy, hair and coming from a place she doesn't deem 'cool'. That's as much information as I can get out of her anyway- I know its psykerlogickally a lot deeper and complicateder than that, but it's got to the point where if I mention his name she walks out of the room, so I can't really get any further. Diplomacy is not her thing. Punishing me by glaring and not talking and never telling me how I can make things better is her thing. Seriously. Some of my queer(er) friends have described situations where they've come out to their parents but weren't recieved very well AT ALL, so the whole subject, that whole significant part of their life, has become taboo. I feel like that. Izzi and I are getting on quite well this Christmas, but only as long as I act as if Sacha in no way exists. Which hurts, not just because I love him but because he's so much a part of my uni life that I can't be honest about the things I do at Warwick, I constantly have to censor him out of all my anecdotes. And at the same time I have to play the Awesome Caring Big Sister who listens to all her boy stuff and never, ever snaps and shakes her and cries 'but what about me? Can't you get your head around the fact that however much I love anyone, I'll never love you any less? I'll never love anyone more than you!' - I've tried that one before, and all it gets me is silence. I just have to shut up and tell myself that I'm supposed to be the mature one. Except I'm not really very mature at all. I'm just a bit confused and lost and good-intentional but almost constantly unmeaningly selfish, so no wonder I can't get anything right. | | |
| Grass Child Sad In Neal's Yard in London, there's a metal board up on a brick wall between two shops, with magentic poetry on it. I randomly decided to write down all the best phrases that passers-by had arranged, and have now tried to gather them into a whole poem, with minimal editing. I like this. It's not my poem, it's London's, it belongs to a city and to whatever kind of collective consciouness goes with that, and to a handful of people who probably don't know anything about each other, but are connected through this.
Mmm, I love the smell of pretentiousness in the morning... Here it is: As fast as a cloud of easy dancing memories
He, like she
Must have an ocean.
Though potion bouquets boil, we
Frolic through haunting compassion,
Run our watery household beneath that
Deep red heart-
A flutter heard in man.
Plot the perfumed chain of sun-self flow~
Underplay this epic
Grass-child sad
Up
Where
We
Surrender
Time two
Sustain
s. | | |
| Creative death and literal small-mindedness...You know how we apparently only use ten percent of our brains?
I really felt that today. It was odd. I was sitting in my creative writing seminar, talking about some short stories- 'Intimacy' by Raymond Carver and 'Architect' and 'The Crossing' by Rachel Seiffert. 'Architect' was my favourite, it's about an architect who suddenly loses his ability to understand buildings like he used to. The idea of losing the creativity you've taken for granted all your life was quite terrifying. In my case, in a parallel situation, that wouldn't mean just having writer's block, or being unable to get the words right (that's almost always the way it is for me, anyway). It would mean not even thinking in terms of stories any more, which I do- see something, make it into a story in my head, pick out things in the world around me like cloud shapes and people with interesting quirks, and come up with random descriptive lines (that I usually forget to write down). "Some time later, he realises he has been walking in and out of buildings without even thinking about them." Wouldn't that be awful, for the singular way your mind works to suddenly alter?
And woah, how much digression was that? None of the above is relevant to what I started out saying. We didn't even discuss 'Architect' in the seminar, we focussed on the other two.
What I was saying, then. We were talking about some short stories. And the tutor kept posing interesting questions, and I had that lots-of-ideas-buzzing-in-my-head feeling, but I was struggling to connect and articulate them all. And at that moment I really felt how small my mind was, too small and inadequate to turn the way my thoughts engaged with the stories into something concrete that I could write down or say. I could literally feel all my thoughts stuck in what seemed to be a tiny part of my head, surrounded by something impenetrable, and I thought, if only I could explode those thoughts out to fill the whole of my head, if only I could use my mind to its full potential- how amazing that would be. But I can't, and it leaves me feeling frustrated, intellectually impotent.
I don't expect that makes much sense. Oh well.
| | |
|
|
