mhuzzell: (Default)
2011-09-30 11:56 am
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Book Meme, Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending

Well, shit, there's that book meme. I'd finally managed to sync up with the days of the month, and thought I might finish the thing in such a stylishly congruous flourish, but no -- instead I managed to forget about it, and here I am on the 30th feebly poking out an entry for the 27th. Ho-hum.

Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending

I'm gonna exclude mystery novels from this out of principle, since their surprise endings are usually totally expected. Also not mentioning the ones I proudly figured out before the end. Which leaves me with: Freeze Frames by Katharine Kerr. Brilliant twist, but that's all I'm gonna say.

Upcoming Days )

But hey, listen, meme, it could be worse. And at least the once-a-day answers, unlike those long-list style memes we all like to pretend we didn't do in high school, doesn't represent a total death of creativity ... I could be saying lots of Things About Books -- and have, in earlier instances. For now, though, we're having an unprecedented heatwave, after a wet, cold and miserable "summer", and I told some friends I'd meet them at the beach.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2011-09-16 09:25 am

Book Meme, Day 22

Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2011-08-31 10:40 am

Book Meme, Day 13 – Your favorite writer

Day 13 – Your favorite writer

As seems to be the case with most of my answers, I'm not sure I really have one. I like a lot of different authors a lot, and there are certainly some I could name as favourites in particular areas. David Foster Wallace has my favourite prose style. Katharine Kerr does my favourite world-building. Joseph Heller provided my favourite neologism / metaphor for my frequent angst. &c. But an overall favourite? That is tough.

I mean, should this be the person whose work I have most consistently enjoyed (the oft-mentioned David Whiteland), or the author of the book I like the most? And if the latter, how on earth do I pick from my full two-hands-ful of favourite books to select a favourite author? Well, I think I might have a guess. I'm gonna say: John Steinbeck. Even though I don't love, or even like, all the things of his I've read -- and, he having been so prolific, haven't read even close to everything he wrote -- but because:

a) He's the only author who has written more than one (fully two) of the books I consistently name when asked to list my favourite books

b) Looking ahead in the meme, those are going to be the books I'll want to name as answers to later questions, for consistency's sake. Because apparently I care about intra-meme consistency now.


Upcoming Days )

In non-book-meme news, it seems to have become autumn now. The festivals are over, Edinburgh is breathing a collective sigh of relief, the previously-mentioned buddlejas have retreated their pretty purple blossoms from their long brown fingers that poke (now ominously once more) over the walls of abandoned lots, and the weather has turned cold again. Not cold-cold, to be fair, but pretty damn nippy. And it is still August, at least for the rest of today. WTF, Scotland?

There are some ways in which central NC weather and east-coast lowland Scotland weather are not that different. In both cases, winter is short and changeable and generally only lasts from December to January. Autumn stays autumnal well through November, and the winter breaks and things start blooming in February. However, while NC summer lasts from about March through October, Scottish summer lasts from about July to July (if that). Just a long long spring and a long long autumn. Some years, the winter's so mild and the summer's so cool that it feels like the years just fade from spring to autumn and back again.

... I have more Thoughts about the weather, but I have to go to work -- lucky you!
mhuzzell: (Default)
2011-08-22 01:42 am
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Book Meme, Day "10" – Favorite classic book

Oh hey it's the book meme! But first, a riddle for you: What has eight fingers, two thumbs, and decided to do a page-a-day meme during the busiest month of the year? This guy lady! Now back to your regularly scheduled pontificating:

Day 10 – Favorite classic book

Apart from taking a rather literal meaning of 'books from ancient Greece or Rome' (in which I am woefully under-read), I have no idea what the boundaries are for the proposed set of 'classic books' from which I am supposed to select an answer. Indeed, although there's a great deal of overlap in proposed sets of 'the classics' of literature, the only thing that anyone really seems to agree on is that nobody agrees about what exactly makes a book a 'classic', and even on the rare occasions when a group of people agree on a definition, there's considerable disagreement about which books qualify. So I am a bit stuck. Also, it's 1:30 in the morning.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to answer "I reject the premise of this question", I'm gonna stick an imaginary pin in a mental card catalogue go with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, for what I assume are all the usual reasons. Good story, influential and important, deals with heavy shit while being actually quite lighthearted and funny, etc. (More importantly: unlike a few other possible candidates, it doesn't look likely to come up as an answer to later meme questions.)

Upcoming Days )

In non-book related news, it's been getting cold again, and the buddlejas have lost almost all their purple, and reverted to looking like long brown corpse-fingers poking over the sides of walls. What was that 'summer' I was talking about a few weeks ago?
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2011-08-08 12:18 am
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Come on in, everybody's doin' it!

So I guess there is this book meme that keeps cropping up lately, and I guess I will participate. It at least only asks me to answer one question at a time, and maybe that will be a way to make me actually make entries and put things in writing and stuff.

So, Book Meme! It looks like you are sort of supposed to do it over the course of a calendar month, but I'll start now anyway 'cause that's how I roll. Day 1: Best book you read last year )

In other news, it's been rainy and disgusting for two days straight now. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that now that I'm cycling everywhere it just makes everything sort of miserable. Like yesterday, it didn't feel worth it to shell out for the bus for a 4-hour shift at work, so I cycled in because it had apparently stopped raining, only it started again as I was leaving the house, and I made the unwise decision to carry on anyway rather than cut my losses and hop on a bus. And then today we had (free!) tickets to a play, but because of stupid Sunday timetables, couldn't get in on the bus for it, and so had to cycle. Fortunately, it turned out to be totally awesome and definitely worth cycling through the rain to see, so that was okay.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2010-11-21 05:42 pm

Indoor and Outdoor Beauty

After an overnight drive down from chilly Massachusetts, I am back in North Carolina for a week, and oh my goodness it is lovely. Not just because the weather right now is comparable to a warm summer day in Scotland, but to be back among the trees at what must be their most beautiful time of year. I've written at (possibly excessive) length, in the past, about how much I miss being around trees all the time. It's hard to describe most of the time, but with their added aspect of seasonal beauty, it suddenly seems easier.

Autumn trees are lovely everywhere you go, of course, but in many places they're a view you come upon exceptionally: pretty little stands of trees on suburban lanes and in city parks and gardens. The UK countryside is stripped almost bare. Here, though, you can look in any direction, anywhere you go, and unless you are looking at some particular human edifice, or the ocean, you will be met by a stunningly beautiful array of orange, yellow, and dark red leaves, picked out by the dark green of loblolly pines and the light green of deciduous leaves that have not yet turned. Everywhere you look. Even in the awful awful suburbs, most of the time.

Even in the awful awful suburbs, though, there are little forest parks. The city of Raleigh has exterminated nearly all of its woodlands, but on the grounds of its newly remodeled art museum, it has put down trails and interspersed art installations among some of its remaining trees. My dad and brother and I went and walked around them yesterday. It was very pretty, although most of the installations were unremarkable -- with two exceptions. In one, the artist had painted designs inspired by European floral patterns (as usually seen in cloth) onto the pavement of the paths, and according to the sign, beneath the final obscuring coat of paint they'd written out the names of all the invasive species of plants now local to the area.

The other was more remarkable, if somewhat less thought-provoking. Named the "Cloud Chamber", it was a low hut set under a fairly open stand of trees, small and round, with nothing inside except three benches set against the white-painted walls. We entered by ducking through a small door, and upon closing it found ourselves in what seemed like total darkness, but for a pinprick of light coming in from the peak of the roof. As our eyes adjusted, though, we began to see the shadowy impressions of leaves and branches on the walls, which brightened and sharpened as our pupils dilated further. They were the branches high above, refracted down through the tiny hole like the exposure in a pinhole camera. It was, to put it simply, really, really cool.

We had not intended to go into the museum itself, but ended up going in briefly, towards the end of our visit. I hadn't been in since it was remodelled, and it was weird to see the collections of paintings and statues I'd grown up visiting and was so accustomed to seeing in their older, more traditional settings set around the new, very modern, brightly lit, open-plan museum. I was also interested to see a new collection they'd added (a "generous donation from the Hearst family"), which consisted of several artifacts of various antiquity from western and central Africa -- interested not just in the objects themselves, but in how they were displayed.

It seems customary for most American and European museums, when displaying items whose specific origin is unkown, to merely list the geographic and temporal origins of the piece. These provided this information, but on every single piece, using the same format as the info cards accompanying the modern paintings and sculptures, in the space for the artist's name they'd written 'Artist Unknown'. Explicitly displaying each piece, then, not as a cultural artifact but as a piece of art, the work of an individual, albeit an uknown one.

I was reflecting happily on this* when I turned the corner to find a display of the museum's older collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues, and saw that they had not been similarly labelled -- their info cards merely stated the name of the statue and what was known of its geographic and temporal origins. This is, of course, quite usual, as mentioned, but in a museum that was making such and effort to mark out the forgotten artists in its other collections, the double standard was jarring. Is it simply that "everyone knows" that a marble statue will have been sculpted by an artist, and thus the fact of the artist's existence, and our ignorance of their identity, need not be mentioned -- yet the artists themselves are a forgotten element in the shaping of the captured artworks we've looted from the places we've conquered? Probably so. But I can't help but think the point would've been driven further home by including the 'artist unknown' label on the pieces of murky European antiquity, and not just African.

* Though with qualifying thoughts about the veneration of 'the artist' and concepts about "what makes art art". 'Art' as 'item produced by an artist' (as opposed to, e.g., and artisan or lay person), for example. But that is another story.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2010-10-23 02:45 pm

It is sunnier than predicted, after days of rain

I'm visiting the US in November, almost on a whim (or, on an urge as whim-like as a transatlantic trip can ever be, which except perhaps for the very rich is not very). I'm getting more and more excited the more I think about it. Not just to see my family, but also because I realised that I haven't been home in autumn in years.

It was always my favourite season, back home. Here, where there are few trees and the summer is bright but intermittent and cool, autumn feels like little more than a closing down of the most recent year's attempt at fecund verdancy -- and even that is confused by the fact that the grass, which accounts for a large part of the greenness, stays bright green all year 'round. Autumn is a season for bracing, for withdrawing, for sloping down the long dark hill of winter.

But in a temperate forest, autumn is glorious. Early autumn, in particular -- when the trees are just starting to turn and the summer berries are still left hanging, overripe or shrivelled on the bushes after a long hot summer -- feels restful and welcome, like lying down after a heavy meal. And the leaves are beautiful, and the woods smell wonderful.

Oddly enough, just thinking about how nice a forest autumn is has me focusing on the beauty of the few trees around me this year, and actually enjoying the season rather than dreading it as in past years. I'm going to miss the early autumn at home, but I can at least enjoy it here. There's a cycle path near my house that's set down in a shallow ravine, with trees on either side, where you can almost pretend you're in a forest. I find it immeasurably restorative; I miss forests so much.
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
2010-04-06 10:46 pm

And then so

Well. It's been a while.

I went to America and visited family, which was nice. Harry came too. Will expand this later (with actual thoughts), but that is not the point of this particular entry.

Right now I am back home again. I got off the bus yesterday evening to find a city that seemed made of air, and all of it moving. I pushed and fought and struggled home through it, dragging my suitcase, exhausted and sweaty and kind of needing to pee, and for that half hour hating everything and wondering why I live here. And then I came in and Jen was making salsa and Oli and Nice Daniel were holding some kind of band practice, and I remembered.

Then I went to work today and it was still light when I left at 7, and I felt all full of joy even though it was raining. And I've just had a shower and I even like this flat again, for a little while. It's icy cold in winter (and autumn and spring and I suspect also summer) and full of mice and surrounded by noisy neighbours, but it has the loveliest shower.

And I was thinking, while in that shower, about the heaps of work I need to do for my internship; about how when I got this internship I thought "hey, it's all work on the internet -- that'll be great, I spend loads of time on the internet already so it'll be super-easy!", but it turns out that work on the internet is still work; and have since come to the conclusion that it's an eminently bad idea to have work in the same medium as most of your leisure time, becuase (at least for me) they then get all blurred together and I procrastinate even more.

And then I thought "wait a minute: am I a Montessori kid or what?" -- maybe a cheesy way to put it, but it was all in my head because both my parents and like everybody on my mom's side of the family are Montessori teachers, so having just visited them it was all fresh in my mind -- anyway, the point is: there is no difference between work and play. Montessori intentionally blurs these boundaries, with many of the learning materials being collectively called 'works' and often individually called 'games' or something similar, and having a play-like structure (e.g. early math 'works' include things like 'the stamp game', 'racks and tubes', 'the binomial cube', etc.) It's not all perfect and rosy, of course, but at a basic level, it is pretty hard to train kids into self-directed learning if you can't get them to want to do stuff.

I used to be like that, always wanting to stay inside and play with the science kits or do more square root problems (on the 'pegboard') instead of playing outside where I would be obliged to run around in the uncomfortable heat. Then, somewhere along the way, all these external motivations started coming in. I got praised for my work, and then graded for it, and within a year I was doing it for the grades, and not for its own sake, and I discovered that I am actually a master procrastinator. Now I just have this pile of stuff that I need to get done, but I have managed to create a 'work' box in my head and I can't get it out of it.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2010-01-06 06:50 pm

Winter Mirages

I think it is one of the strangest of awkward everyday experiences -- though perhaps more 'everyday' for those of us who are near-sighted and dreamy-headed than for normal people -- when you are walking along and see someone walking towards you who you think you know, maybe, but you're not sure ... and so you stare at them and try not to stare at them, and look a bit furtive, for several paces, until you are close enough to see that you've been staring at a total stranger, and try to casually look away as you pass by, hoping they don't think you're some sort of psychopath. Or maybe it's just me.

In any case, I had an especially strange instance of the above situation yesterday. I was walking across a little park, covered in bright and glaring snow in the hour before twilight (in that cloudy wintery sort of light, where the sun hasn't set yet but you have no idea where it is) when a man turned onto the path who had a gait that was a precise match for Russell -- first love, turbulent ex and oldest friend -- and for ten or fifteen seconds, staring and not staring at this heavily bundled-up young man ambling through the snow, I had a flash of impossible recognition for my friend who is 4,000 miles across the Atlantic.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2009-11-26 07:48 pm

Thanksgiving

Growing up, the idea of this holiday always bothered me. Something about a day of feasting devoted, even according to its own mythology, to celebrating the initial generosity of a group of people who were later systematically exploited by the very people they'd helped just never sat quite right with me.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went to a hippie school who I thought might take a similar viewpoint to mine, and maybe boycott the whole affair, but instead they made an even bigger fuss over Thanksgiving than any other group I'd yet encountered. Their view of it was more abstract; not much to do with the history of the holiday, and a lot to do with being thankful for various things. It was essentially a harvest festival, which made a lot of sense for a community that grew most of its own vegetables.

My next school (which, incidentally, also produced a lot of food for itself) took a similar view, and by this time I was happy enough to go along with it -- but since graduating, I've slipped back into my old views of things. It helps that I've spent every Thanksgiving since graduation in the UK. I just can't separate the holiday's meaning from exploitation and genocidal wars in my mind, and so I've mostly done my best to ignore it.

All the same, I've been feeling the lack of a harvest festival. Especially here, where by November it gets SO DARK SO EARLY, and the sun rises so late. They say that mid-winter holidays like Christmas are important because of the light levels and the turning of the year and such -- and to keep people's spirits up through the cold dark winter -- but I find November far bleaker than December. Sure, December is the darkest month, but it's also the month when things start to turn and become light again. November is just a rapid decline into darkness.

That, and I'm homesick. I miss my family, and I miss the food of the US at this time. I've been having cravings for gourds that simply aren't available here -- the vast arrays of heirloom squashes and such that are so readily available back home. Pecans. Sweet potatoes. Sure, the latter are available here, but they're somehow not quite as nice when divorced from the context of family and feasting. It seems like there ought to be some sort of celebration happening to stave off the cold and darkness. Maybe not Thanksgiving, but something.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2009-10-06 02:09 pm

Rambles

I'm in London -- or rather, Loughton -- visiting Harry at East 15. He's in classes from 10-4, and for what feels like the first time in my life, I have literally nothing I need to be doing. (Apart from looking at jobs websites, of course, but I check those at least every other day anyway, and new vacancies are not going to disappear within 24 hours of being posted.) But no reading, no coursework, not even any activisty things, since I'm still new enough on the Edinburgh scene that I wasn't able to take on any of the recent tasks that needed doing, since they all required some local logistical knowledge I don't yet have.

Sadly, freeing though I suppose it is, I'm just a bit bored. Not that I haven't been feeling the same listlessness up in Edinburgh -- that's primarily why I haven't been posting much -- but at least up there there are always minor life details that need attending to, so I am seldom so completely at a loss. Here, I would walk in the forest (beautiful beautiful Epping Forest, old lovely REAL deciduous forest! Trees like I've missed with the whole of my being) but it's been too rainy. It was sunny on Sunday, and Harry and I took a little walk through the edge nearest his house, but we had to cut it short to head into London to catch a play.

I've a book I could read, too, but that feels lonely, and I crave at least imagined interaction. Hence my coming to the East 15 computer lab to suckle onto the warm breast of the internet. Such was my intention, anyway. In reality, as I write this, I'm sitting in Harry's room on his internetless laptop; I'll USB the file and upload it when I go, but for now I'm waiting for the rain to die down. For most of the morning, the sky had been clear-misting in that funny sort of way where it's not really raining but everything gets wet (there's a Scottish word for that -- of course there is -- but I've forgotten it), but about five minutes before I meant to set out, it started really pouring. I suppose it's a good thing, since otherwise I'd have been caught in it, but it still places me here and dry rather than wet and online (to be honest, I'm not sure which one I'd prefer).

The other option, of course, is to be writing something. I'm writing this, of course, but I mean writing creatively. Or at least thoughtfully, in some structured way and for more than a few paragraphs at a time. Lately the only writing I've done has been on message boards, and since that's usually spontaneous and discursive, it tends to be less structured and less well thought-out, and thus has only served to make me hyper-aware of all the flaws in my style, without necessarily highlighting any way by which I might improve it. That is, I can see what I'm doing wrong, or over-doing (and I can see it here!) but short of picking throuh every single sentence, I'm not sure how to improve it. I use far too many linking words; while I believe in beginning sentences with conjunctions where appropriate, I do it all the freaking time. I think I've been using it as a crutch, and I'm tiring of it. I also include far too many parenthetical asides, right there in the sentences rather than tidied away into their own sentences -- and I write, with or without these asides, such long and unweildy sentences. Seventeenth-century sentences, or maybe Eighteenth, sprawling out along the page, so over-gorged with clauses they can barely stand on their own twelve feet.

What, though, can I do to stop myself? (And you see that 'though' is another of those not-strictly-necessary linking words, stitching up my prose with a complex overlock, when all it really needs is a little tacking to hold it together. And there again is that unnecessary 'and', which is two faults in one; and there again, and here. And this whole three-sentence point is itself parenthetical.) Do you notice it, Dear Readers*? Or have you suddenly been made hyper-aware of my flawed prose, like I am? Are you now looking over this whole passage thinking 'oh yeah, I see what she meant there, oh and there she did it again'? Or am I just whinging into an overly self-critical void, and making myself boring in the process?

The sun's come out. Maybe I'll go take a walk in the forest after all.


* A pretentious (if ancient) convention in itself, though in this case a self-conscious one. I like it. It helps me to simultaneously imagine that vast numbers of unknown people are reading this (thus making it worthwhile) and, by its very over-the-top pretentiousness, that my entire audience is actually imaginary, despite all evidence to the contrary, thus making the whole exercise of writing this journal unintimidating enough for me to actually do it candidly.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2009-07-22 02:05 pm
Entry tags:

Like a Cactus Tree?

I guess I've fallen out of the habit of updating LiveJournal. I guess it's probably another of those lost habits that I never gave much thought to, but turns out to have been good for me, like reading for pleasure or eating regular meals. But... what do I write? My mind feels full and empty, like a dusty attic: piles of information all packed away in half-organised trunks and boxes. Overfull. Inaccessible. I stub my toes trying to get at things.

It has been raining for two days now. I've been living inside the internet, checking from the underside for the tendrils of What Next -- flats, jobs, internships. I've been hunting and hunting, but only applied for a few. I need to stop taking it so personally when they turn me down, to see each rejection it as a "learning experience". I'm reading Overqualified to console myself. It's helping, a little.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2009-07-02 10:52 am

Travelin's

I'm in Brugge, on a congratulations-on-graduating holiday with my mother (who also just graduated, finished her MBA), and my little brother. Enjoying the hell out of the weather. There's been a heat wave all across Europe, which in Scotland translates to t-shirt weather (mostly) during the days, and not-so-chilly-as-usual at night. But here in Belgium, it's actually properly hot, and I don't even need a coat at night! I have been trying to buy a pair of sandals; I've lived so long in the cold that I don't even own any anymore. Still haven't acquired them though, since as usual I fail at shopping.

I'm loving the sights as well. The medieval architecture, yes, and the canals, but also the cultural elements. I have seen several fantastic beards and moustaches, so many that I am wondering if there is some sort of convention happening. We took a touristy boat ride, and the French tourist across from us in the boat had an excellent handlebar moustache, and, as though to emphasise it, wore a shirt featuring a silhouetted longhorn steer. Yesterday we passed a sex shop on the high street, and then a few doors down saw an apparently unrelated chocolate shop whose window display featured three sets of life-sized chocolate breasts.

At the Groeninge Museum, they had a special exhibition about Charles the Bold and the 15th-Century Burgundian court, where I marvelled at the ideology in the information plaques as much as at the displays and artifacts themselves. The descriptions of the extravagant clothes and jewelry were almost more anthropological than historical, describing how the nobles used extravagant displays of wealth to 'legitimise' their power. Most of the descriptions were subtly critical of the legitimacy of monarchal rule in principle, though I'm not sure I could explain precisely how. In a way it seems like that's what one should expect from any modern display of late medieval artifacts, but most that I've seen have simply celebrated the splendour.

The whole thing reminded me of a D&D campaign I've been playing lately, in which the DM is a medieval history scholar and has set our party in Eastern Europe in the same period. We are a party of nobles, and our character alignments ranged from Neutral to Lawful Good (I am playing a Paladin) -- but the whole campaign has emphasised that the life of the nobility is inherently characterised by evil acts. Our characters have been sent out on campaigns to sack towns (on Christmas Eve!) and murder whole monasteries, and thus have grown steadily more Evil until we were railroaded into becoming vampires. In our splendid clothes and shining armour. Oh yes.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2009-04-27 05:29 pm

Lilacs and Ducklings

I turned in my dissertation on the 17th. I turned in my final essay last Wednesday. So while I am not quite free as a bird -- I still have classes and tutorial readings, of course, and later there will be exams -- I am not nearly so stressed as I have been most of the year. Also, my sister is visiting, and we've been going to Halfcut and plays and things for the last few days of the On the Rocks festival.

The days have been gorgeous, too -- today is chilly, but I will forgive it. The weather is always a bit changeable at this time of year. Spring here seems almost as long as winter, brimming up in fits and starts in late February then dipping and wandering up and up until we pass the equinox, and the weather begins a slow but steadier warming turn. Right now we're entering yet another phase of blossoming. In our scruffy little garden this means another flush of daisies, along with phlox and something thick little bell-shaped things that may or may not be some sort of bluebell. Elsewhere, lilacs have started blooming, joining azaleas and violets and big red tulips, and several other garden flowers I can't identify. Along the burn, the trees have all turned white with blossoms and are dropping petals everwhere. Yesterday morning I saw a pair of ducklings nestling under their mother, the first I've seen all year.

On which note, you should all check out this comic, which is the sweetest thing I've read in a long while.
mhuzzell: (Default)
2009-03-21 12:23 pm
Entry tags:

On the unfurling of flowers, and windows, and overcoats

I haven't written much here lately. My life has been as busy as the insects and the swelling buds; we are entering the yellow phase of spring.

The snowdrops are over, as are the purple crocuses, and are replaced by loud, triumphant daffodils, clusters of daisies and ardent dandelions. Also broom is blooming, at the convergence of our neighbour's fence and ours, under the rowan which had been so red all winter, and now is greeny-yellow-tipped itself.

I think I have about a million and one things to do, every single day. But the days are getting longer, incrementally; and the sun is not so firmly in the south; and the houseplants do not press their leaves quite so desperately against the glass.
mhuzzell: (Trace)
2008-10-23 05:19 pm

Well, I've been down so goddamn long that it looks like up to me

I cannot abide a heavy wind. Not a wind like today, with all the little trees and bushes blown halfway upside-down, and smaller plants and grasses just holding their roots for dear life. It's terrible to try to move in it, having to fight all the time just to keep going on your own trajectory -- like you're swimming through the air, but without any of the grace of actual buoyancy. Even inside, it drives me crazy. It gets into my head, whooshing and buzzing around the corners of the house, creeping into all the cracks. I can't concentrate with all this hollow, sibilant, constant but erratic noise rushing around the house all the time. It sets my nerves on edge.

Too, I can't seem to figure this wind out. It's actually fairly common, here, to have these driving winds that go on for hours and often days at a time. But while, back home, a heavy wind was an almost certain indicator of Big storm a-comin' -- or, indeed, simply occured during said storm -- around here it seems to indicate nothing at all. Just that it is windy. I've been trying to figure out the weather patterns here for the last three years, and I am about ready to give up.

I suppose that, despite my 3 years of paying attention to the local weather and learning its ways, something in me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, in a wind like this. It keeps me uneasy, anyway, and I hesitate to go out lest I get caught in it. Or possibly that's just an excuse for my increasing reclusiveness. It was certainly a factor in my decision not to go to Dundee today, after all, where I had planned to attend a philosophy talk that may or may not have pertained to my dissertation. Then it was all of my reason, having decided against leaving town, not to go to our local campaign group meeting instead. I am spending more and more of my life secluded in my house. And I am okay with that. But I am not sure if I am okay with being okay with that.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2008-10-03 09:34 pm

Strap yourself to the tree with roots

I came to a realisation today, cycling to town in the bright autumn of penetrating sunshine and dazzling cold: this is not my place.

This time three years ago, I was so happy to finally be out of the US that I fell utterly in love with Scotland, and was sure that I would want to live here forever. For most of the last three years I hadn't even considered that I might return. Now I'm so homesick I can't stop thinking about North America.

The tricky thing is that I don't miss the US in the slightest. It's the land itself that tugs me like a magnet. The flora and fauna. I miss forests, and individual trees. I miss whole species: cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, hummingbirds; sweetgums, red maples, tulip poplars, even fucking loblolly pines. Someone on our road has planted goldenrod in their front garden, and when I first noticed it, I actually stopped dead in my tracks just to touch it. Even the air here seems foreign to me, sometimes, for all that I'm actually pretty acclimatised. I can feel it deep in my core; I miss my homeland with my whole body.

Then, of course, there's my family. I guess I was lucky, in this century, to have grown up so close (geographically and emotionally) to such a large extended family. But that kind of strength of 'home' really gets into your bones. I think the idea of it sustained me, somewhat, when I first left. But these days, I just want to get back to my family, my forests, my roots. Except that I really, really don't want to return to the United States.
mhuzzell: (Trace)
2008-06-17 12:01 am

Three Days Before the Solstice

It's midnight: the witching hour. It feels like it, too, since we've just watched a David Lynch film, all cuddled up on the floor, propped up on giant hippie pillows and nuzzling under the Our Lady of Batik sarong. I like this house.

It's Kalea's place, technically -- a top-floor flat in one of the taller buildings in town -- but she just got back yesterday. Harry and I have been living here for two weeks already, pottering around in a weird sort of domesticity. He's been my housewife, asking me about my day and offering me cups of tea when I come home from work, making me dinner. He even showed me how to use the washing machine.

From the windows in the kitchen and living room, I can see the roof of the top-floor flat I lived in last summer. It's very close, if one were to fly, but by the roads it's a few minutes' walk, separated by several flights of stairs. Down and then up again. Last summer, when Kalea lived alone in this flat, and I lived mostly alone, or with a succession of mostly-absent, transient flatmates, I thought of us as two eagles, or similar great solitary birds, nesting above the town in its eastern curve (the social and architectural 'top' of the old city, nearest the castle and ruined cathedral), surveying it from our lofty aeries.

In reality, it's only this flat that actually surveys the rooftops of the town. Last year my view was of a sweet little garden on one side, and Younger Hall -- the ugliest building in town, a great hulking monolith chiseled into painfully clashing chunky-victorian and neo-classical styles; the Reichstag of St Andrews -- on the other. It blocked the north side, so, it being summer, we never got to see the sun rise or set.

It does both of these in the north at this time of year. It comes up early in the northeast, swoops up around the southern peak of the sky and then back down into the northwest. Dusk lasts for hours, slowly tapering from a pale blue-grey to a dark one. Looking south, there is some illusion of night, especially if it is cloudy. But looking north, the horizon moves imperceptibly from the last gloom of twilight to the first stirrings of the pre-dawn glow. Even now, in the darkest part of the almost-night, I can see the yellow salvo of the coming morning.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2008-02-26 02:04 pm
Entry tags:

I guess I'll have to settle for a few brief moments / and watch it all dissolve into a single second

Damn. I knew there was something I was going to do today. Spotlight is having a poetry workshop focusing on sonnets--Laila even said she'd thought of me when she set it up--but I'd forgotten about it until just now. It will have ended about five minutes ago.

But, y'know, maybe it's just as well. I've been breaking away from formal poetry, anyway. Fuck sonnets. I wrote a piece of prose today. I was sitting in the Philosophy library, trying to read about language, when out flowed a short story about a toad on a quest. It's the first piece of fictional prose I've written in six or seven years. It's quite short, but it feels significant and momentous.

Speaking of things I haven't done in six or seven years,* yesterday I signed a lease to rent a house from September to the end of next June. I'll most likely live there this summer, too, which means that for the first time since I left home at 14, I'll be living in the same place for a full year, unbroken. When I move in I can move in all the way, really get myself settled, knowing that I won't have to pack it all away again in four months, or six, or even nine. A full year. Glory.


*I can link anything to anything. Y'all should let me MC the Open Mic some time :-P

P.S. To any of you who might've been worried: I think I'm okay. I'm not 'better', I'm not 'fine', but I've stopped the downward spiral without hitting absolute bottom. I'm... coasting. Look up at the sky today. I'm like those clouds.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
2007-12-27 11:41 am

The Long Way Home: Meditations through Hell

Friends, Comrades. Another year gone. Another year, another year, another year, spinning on and on in the constant, subtle decay of the Earth's orbit, slowly slowly dwindling out on a scale so huge that to any being on its surface it seems infinite.

In this cosmological spirit I decided--around the time of the Autumnal Equinox, when I was buying my tickets home for the end of this year--that I ought to stay in Scotland for the Winter Solstice. My friend was planning a party, and I haven't properly celebrated a solstice in years. So I came to be in that frozen darkness, admiring the frost-sparkling ground and the intoxicated, sparkling company. Left at 7 am with a sleepy Daniel, and (at 8:46) finished watching the sun rise in magnificent, magnanimous red splendour from the window of the train, rushing off to Edinburgh to fly into those pinkening clouds.

Where, after wheeling through the new-morning-wet, Sunday-empty little grey city, trying and failing to find an open cafe and feeling a bit ridiculous dragging a floppy, wheeled duffel bag, florid inner monologue turned to panicked terror upon reading the departures screen: BD57 to Heathrow, Cancelled. A heavy Scrooge of a fog had settled over the city of London, and planes were having trouble landing; all flights either delayed or cancelled.

How I got home. Cut for length and frustration. )

My one solace throughout all of this was my book, read openly in the hours-long queues and endless waiting in terminals: The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel by rockstar-mountain-man eco-Anarchist Edward Abbey about a small troupe of dynamite jockeys harrying industrial "progress" in the American Southwest. I took great comfort, through all the indignity of the airport, the bag searches, the stroking and groping of the Female Security Officer, the shouting and shoving and the disorderly queues, that somewhere, somewhere out there, there might be (there are) people, flesh-and-blood-and-heart people, fighting the good fight, clawing the machine for all they're worth, getting in under the skin of the great complex organism of industry.

I thought about this a lot, because when you're alone for that long, surrounded by strangers, you have a lot of time to think. I thought about beaurocracy, and the breakdown of The System. (The trouble with Heathrow is mostly that it's poorly organised, but also that it's simply too damn big. And they want to expand that monstrosity?) Watching men and boys die at Branagh's Agincourt, I thought about war and technology and futility, the skewed priorities of men, that fierce loyalty which is so admirable and yet so damning; those poor noble fools. 'The Shawshank Redemption'? I thought about Anarchy. That great Ideal. But how are we ever to get there? I've always thought it was one of those things that people could handle just fine if they were raised in it--never bought those bullshit 'human nature' arguments claiming it's impossible--but, of course, we're not raised in it. We are born, we live, we die in the prison of the state. We are all 'institutionalised men'. And if we get out, what then? Will we die like Brooks, despairing and alone, in a brutal world of all against all, or will we gang together, supportive, and feel "the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain"?

Roll on, 2008.