avrelia

I have a very pleasant problem to solve - what to spend a $100 for. I can buy something useful, but something useful is not something you want to spend your windfall money on, right? For something useful money are already put aside. So, I want to buy shoes, even though I don't need shoes, but need winter boots. And yet... I cannot decide, really. Help? ;)

I found a really nice ones. except they are black - as half of my shoe wardrobe. I think I should throw away half of my old shoe wardrobe.

I wasn't really planning to writing any essay, but as it often happens I was inspired by molly_may and here it is. It is rather smallish but with pictures!

( So, why vampires make the best pets?  )

It is a rare pleasure to read a book and feel that you are having a conversation with its author. Such pleasure I've had reading Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris. It is a collection of essays on books and I felt an immediate affinity to the author from the very page, even if occasionally I violently disagreed with her.

Agreeing and disagreeing in each particular case is much less important than the feeling of belonging to the same nation of the book people and speaking the tongue in regards of the most important matters. ( Read more... )

Bwah! Angel & Jeeves = 4ever!

Or not.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here last. Sorry about that. I was nether to busy nor too angsty to post, I just… was lazy, I guess.

The life is going on and some stuff is happening, but it’s not too distracting, really – so far. I keep making LJ posts in my head, but by now I hardly remember what I wanted to say. Probably nothing of importance.

The spring is gone, and I am looking into the summer that greets me with the wicked heat. I was looking forward to summer, but now I am not that sure. Where is the nice mild weather? Or yes, not there. Anyway, watching the spring jumping over Toronto in May was a treat to eyes - I love all the May blossoming – tulips and daffodils, lilac and chestnuts… I wouldn’t mind it kept like for longer that one month. Except that last week I caught some nasty cold or something and was hiding at home and playing dead at work.

By now it almost disappeared. But during the “hiding at home phase I found an interesting place – 76_82 - Russian Lj community about our childhood – our generation’s weird childhood. It’s not blithely nostalgic –“look how good everything was” – it’s more of collecting the memories of that strange time – things, customs, rules of the games we played, movies and books, our fantasies and perceptions. Or course, for many the childhood was good just because it was childhood, never mind that we didn’t have a lot of things we can’t live without now.

What else I was wasting my time on:

1) Playing World of the Warcraft (too often)
2) Playing golf (twice)
3) Walking around
4) Reading
5) Watching movies and (occasionally) TV
6) seeing friends
7) thinking about Writercon a lot

I keep trying to write something important marking the year that passed – but then I would to think about it, and this is something that just doesn’t work for me right now.

So instead I think about Robin Hood. I was reading Robin McKinley’s Sherwood Outlaws and started thinking what the legend means to me.

I cannot get into the book – even though I like the characters (this incarnations of them) and the writing, they seem to be behind a glass wall that I cannot break, and don’t want to. I cannot start to care – and this feels to be of crucial importance in fiction for me lately. I don’t have to like everybody and everything in a book, but at least something must pull me into – even if it is a description of a sea, or beautiful style, or fancy ideas. Here it was nothing of the sort, and the only thing that elicit emotions was the marginalia on a page splattered with something brownish: “It is blood. Don’t lick it”.

I thought that may be the case is in the legend itself? That I grew disenchanted with Robin Hood and his merry band? I used to love the story and its heroes and heroines. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was always sure about the continuous existence of Robin Hood, Marion, Little John, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck, Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gizborne and others in the Sherwood forest and around. They add something to the world, some important tiny bit.

Why not to read a novel about them? I cannot say that the interpretation is too contrary to what I imagine – or any other interpretation, because I just don’t really imagine them at all. I have a vague picture that changes when I change or when my mood change. Robin can be young or grown man, blonde or black-haired, bearded or not, asshole or sweetie or both, of gentle birth or of common, just a robber or an idealist – none of it ever sit in stone. Same with Marion (though I like her more when she is not a damsel in distress) and everyone else. I probably have a more definite image of Friar Tuck – he is short and round, good with his staff, optimistic, and the only monastic vow he takes seriously is the one of poverty.

But maybe that was the reason – I prefer my vague image to the detailed and rooted in the time and place version. Plus I always get annoyed when Richard the Lionheart came and resolved the matter. Because he would never do that. But I got even more annoyed when he took all the band with him to Holy Land – even though he might do that, he really needed more troops, and his only reason to be in England was to get some (and get money). But Robin Hood cannot be outside of England! There mere idea of it destroys the Universe as we know it. Well, it can be before the story- but not after.

I remember the old British TV series about Robin Hood. I really loved it when I watched it as a child. The best bit was at the end, when Marion died – and there were some magical trees or fairies or whatnot, and she came back. It was very mysterious and cool. (When I caught this series on TV much later, it seemed just stupid, and I couldn’t remember what was cool there.)

( So I designed a poll about Robin Hood – and your image of the legend. )

The weather is nice, and so is life right now. I am sitting at home and watching naked Clark Kent on TV being tortured by evil girls in black leather. As far as I am concerned, this visual is the main point of the story.

The least probable question one can reasonably expect to hear from the guard at the US Consulate who is searching through one’s bag:

So, what do you think about the character of Jane?

(Jane in question is Jane Brailsford, from Caroline Stevermere’s The Scholar of Magics, the book I had with me.)

I had the most pleasant visit to US Consulate this morning. Surprise, surprise. And tomorrow I hope to have the visa!

What else to tell you?

I've always fascinated by time. "Big-time" time – astronomical and
geological, and the historical time, seemingly tamed by people. I used
to close my eyes and try to imagine the Universe - young, the stars I
can see – newly born, something that was before so long ago, that no
can really comprehend that distance.

I used to stand before dioramas in a geological museum, trying to
connect the Earth that is now with the Earth that was, with strange
continents that nobody put on map, where there was a deep sea in the
place where Moscow is now…

I used to look at the pictures of ruins, trying to imagine people that
build them, and how they lived, and how they thought. I felt history
and time as something tangible, alive in its own right, and
perpetually amazing. I remember the first time I saw a mummy of some
unfortunate Egyptian priest in a museum. I was ten, and he was dead
for more than four thousand years. I was standing for several minutes,
imagining his man alive, old, young, thinking about his future.
Whatever his ideas about after death were I was sure they didn't
include lying in the glass box four thousand years since, and me
staring at him.


For all my fascination with time I still haven't managed to use it properly.

Read in the today’s trash newspaper (Metro) from the movie review Stage Beauty:

"She" was Margaret Hughes, and "he" was Edward Kynaston, two 17th-century actors famous for performing Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, among others.

??? Even I would be famous if I performed Desdemona in Hamlet.

::is trying to imagine the performance::

People seen: a girl wearing
- pale pink crocheted hat
- fuzzy multicoloured scarf
- velvet jacket with faux-fur collar and flowery embroidery
- yellow+green skirt
- multicoloured purse

The amazing thing is that she really looked nice and not ridiculous in all that. I couldn’t pull it off like that. One of the things I love about Toronto is that no matter what you are wearing, you are not looking out of place on the street.

I found really cool blog: http://www.glosses.net/

I returned from the interview, and sitting here trying to compose a nice and gracious thank you letter. I am trying to do something to increase my chances of getting this job. Can I sacrifice some goats? After long enough time of unemployment a confident professional (can you believe I was one once upon a time?) starts to doubt seriously why anyone would ire me.

People seen today (employment unrelated):
- a mounted Mountie
- a cute snuggly Muslim couple
- a pharmacist who is, probably, a lost twin of the head of the Rome office of W&H (Ilona?) – well, slightly less flamboyant and not evil, but the way she talks – intonations, accent, gestures…

Studying English is fun. Sometimes. Again I found a bunch of words to show off.

Behold:

Alothen – to grow disgusting
Amplexus – a mating embrace of a toad or frog
Anaxiphilia – the act of falling in love with the wrong person
Baratress – a female quarreller
Bdelloid – resembling a leech
Cacozelot – an evil zealot
Callomaniac – a person under the delusion that he or she is beautiful
Circumstantiality – an inability to separate important from unimportant details when telling a story
Cockalorum – a self-important little man

Some more may be later. ::goes to memorize new words::