Summer finally came and with it, a month entirely free of thesis. My brain knew summer was coming, and went on holiday early. Unlike Benjamin, I haven’t written a line for weeks, let alone every day, and it may be months til the next.
In the meantime, this is what I’ll be doing: making things out of wood. MC’ing the inaugural Melbourne Tranny Awards. Sleeping in tents. Drinking beers at the bottom of the garden. Playing with small silver men in dresses. Finishing off the entire works of Diana Wynne Jones. Seeing CSS. Eating. A lot of eating.
Til then, hiatus.
DWJ! that’s a noble aim; a lot to read. (did i just use a semi-colon? incorrectly?) what’s your favourite series/book? favourite character/s? the firs book of hers i ever read was ‘the homeward bounders’, and i absolutely loved it. i got it either in the town library or from a second-hand shop when i was about 12 or 13, and it had a pencil drawing on the cover like all those 70s/80s kids paperbacks, and i read it through three times in under a week. it’s one of those books i don’t really want to read again, because i don’t want to be disappointed! … and then (after a few others) there was howl (howell!). *fans self* need i go on? have you seen the film? what did you think of it?
Comment by nix — December 8, 2006 @ 12:40 pm
DWJ is a really recent discovery for me. In fact, I can’t quite believe I didn’t know about her before. But I’ve been reading DWJ almost exclusively as far as fiction goes since late September, so I’ve got a bit of a headstart. (It’s been pretty much the only fiction I can read lately.) Haven’t found the Homeward Bounders yet.
Comment by Az — December 9, 2006 @ 1:23 am
You Southern Hemispherians suck, what with your suspicious reverse climate and unnatural Coriolis effect. Bad enough having to deal with winter, but seeing as how in 10 days I’ll be moving to a much colder part of Canada, I say nyaah to your summer vacation. (Actually, northern Ontario is the same latitude as the French Riviera, but my jealous rant over Europeans’ Gulf Stream bounty is for another time)
And I actually have Benjy’s line on a Post-it over my laptop. It turns out that making a commitment to write a line everyday means that a lot of the time a line is all that I write. And since I usually write just before I go to bed, that line is almost always crap. I wonder what the parallel universe me who went into English lit would think of my abundant use of cliches and excessive use of compound sentences. Yesterday’s sentence, for instance: “However, one of the videos associated with the song includes what Filipino bloggers have called a stereotypical portrayal of older Filipina women as loud and screeching nags, and most of its portrayal of younger Filipino American women operates under a virgin/whore dichotomy, with younger Filipinas objectified either as sexual scenery or things to be protected by their male relatives.”
Ye gods, it’s barely above a blog post in its construction. “Nags”? “Things”? The thesaurus was too far away, that’s my excuse. And I’m not sure I even still remember how to write concisely.
Comment by Sarapen — December 9, 2006 @ 6:33 am
My writing has become really muddled since starting thesis. I think it has something to do with how little pressure I’m under to get marked, or have my writing read by anyone but my supervisor. My solution is to give up writing altogether for a couple of weeks and then try to wean myself back through some kind of intensive “good writing” reading program: Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion.
The ironies of climate, eh…. The weather’s been so hot and dry here that the whole city is covered in smoke from numerous bushfires, and will be for days. The grass in Melbourne’s parks is all dead and yellow from water restrictions. At this point I could do with some northern hemisphere snow.
Comment by Az — December 10, 2006 @ 12:24 pm