3...2...1...

And I'm back in the room.

Sorry.

Much better now!

Full-on panic

This is NOT the time to suffer from writer's block...and yet, here I am, sitting for the fifth hour in a ROW in front of my computer monitor which is showing me the product of the afternoon's work. Namely, three sentences that I have re-arranged, rephrased, and recycled for five hours.

I have found 7 different quotations - ranging from Edward Coke to Carole Pateman. Have re-arranged them at the beginning of this chapter chronologically, thematically, and alphabetically. I have started with 'put simply' - and stopped there. I have returned to my notes. I have used the work 'mythopoetic' - correctly! - in the first sentence. And 'hermeneutic' in the second. I have skimmed paragraphs from my finished chapters. I have thought seriously about starting and finishing my introduction with 'please turn the page'. I have considered slamming my hand in the door to provide an excuse for an extension. I have curled up on the floor of my office and tried to have a hysterical fit.

I've also tried coffee.

I'm still staring at those three sentences. And the longer I stare, the less sense they make. I spent yesterday afternoon moving my things from my library office to my teaching office - conveniently, the library is closed this weekend until Wednesday. You'd think no body worked around here! Now I've moved from my teaching office into the PG cluster. Still nothing. But it is warmer.

Surely, I'm getting warmer.

the headlines today

I thought I'd read the Guardian today while working at the library to take my mind off of my thesis. I really shouldn't have - haedlines today:

[Gordon] Brown condemns 'henious' killing of 11-year old boy
WHO predicts more global epidemics
Texas executes 400th inmate in 25 years
Three held after street shootout

And my personal favourite - the one that made me seek out alternative news sources: Hotel Katajanokka, Helsinki - a prison-themed hotel.

So I typed 'good news' into Google - and waded through the Christian and gospel sites for awhile. Then I found the Good News Network International. It's a bit cheesy - but isn't anything happy just a bit cheesy? and isn't that just a reaction stemming from cynicism and bitterness - bred of reading too much 'news'. I mean I suppose I'm just used to shaking my head at the newspaper - I don't even read the stories anymore, generally I can just see the paper and shake my head at the stupidity, ingratidude, brutality, and short-sightedness of 'the world'.

And then I found The Happiness Project. And I got even more cynical - and jaded - and ready to find fault.

But I really like it. It's funny. It's silly in many ways and it's neither breath-takingly new or original. But then, happiness isn't either, I suppose. And the really neat thing about happiness is that it doesn't care if you are miserable. It's happy. Nothing like a resolutely chipper attitude to just put the finishing touches on a foul mood, right?

Being happy takes resolution though. Finding good news takes time and some digging. Getting used to reading and hearing good news - that takes even longer, I find. But for some reason, there is a cultural attitude that happiness is slightly embarassing. I mean, we're all supposed to want 'happiness' - we (in the West anyway) spend a fortune on the merest whiff of happiness: hair products, clothing, food, vacations, gadgets, gear...pills, self-help, 'happiness coaches'. I'm pretty sure I've gone on before about the pressure such a concept of happiness can exert - if we're not happy (happy, mind you, not merely content), we're failures somehow. But being a failure is always easier than 'winning'; it's much easier to be miserable because it requires nothing - as I say, don't even open the paper, just start the daily mutters. Happiness gets lumped in with dippy smiles, 'sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops', pastel colours, and some kind of new age, soft-edges spirituality. It's easy to kill that by congratulating myself on my irresolute ability to see the real - to cut through the crap - to take it on the chin.

I think I'll find a new newspaper. Here for you, reader, I present another alternative, or supplemental, media: Positive News. Here's to a balanced breakfast.

And after all that

...Fab was closed. So we didn't go dancing - I still looked great. We ended up back at ours with pizza and wine until wee hours.

Now there is a steak seasoned and waiting for the grill, potatoes for mash, green salad, a swiss roll for afters...and friends on their way. Farmers' market provides so well. There was an article in The Observer food monthly on freeganism again - there was one about a year and a half ago (I'm sure you can do this in Canada as well, but I've noticed the cycle of topics in the weekend supplements). I love this movement - and 'freecycling' as well - Go, dear reader, read the article. I'll get back later - I just can't think of anything else right now...

Gone dancin'

So we're gearing up to go dancing tonight. I understand that in some people's lives this is a common occurence that doesn't bring on the slightly awkward teenage fluttery feeling of going properly 'out'. But to me, dancing has all of the potential for disaster as a blind date but without the benefit of being seated most of the time. It's not that I'm sedentary - okay, actually, I am pretty sedentary. I do run. I will play frisbee in the park or get down to some serious back-breaking work in the garden. But enjoying time with friends and a delicious drink, to me, has never really included throwing myself about the dancefloor. Likely because I'm just not so graceful up there. Seriously, those few years of dance lessons had absolutely no impact on my ability to co-ordinate arms and legs in any approximation of 'dancing'. I vaguely recall 'dancing' during my undergrad in Kingston - but dancing in Kingston in the 1990s involved a lot of swaying and arm-work with little actual movement (usually because of a packed dance floor) - a kind of variation on the white-man-shuffle. It was a bit ethnic, a bit hippie, and, when sufficient units of alcohol were consumed, definitely alluring...I think.

Of course, we're going to the Fab Cafe - which isn't even quite in the city. It's a film and television themed club and is honestly quite relaxed and definitely (decor-wise) stuck somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980's idea of the 1960s. Which is handy as my dancing is firmly stuck somewhere in the 1980s.

I'm thinking of wearing sequins. But I'm remembering that the last time I wore my sequined top, I'd overestimated how 'willowy' my frame was and cut my under-upper-arms to shreds on my shirt. I think I used to have the kind of wardrobe that might indicate that I went out dancing regularly - oh my gold and silver lame shirts...red velvet pants...black shiny pants that required me to lie down to zip them up...

Anyway, I'm just milking the situation really. It'll be great. I should take pictures. At least that way, there won't be any pictures of me.

What started off as a description of my weekend and became this...

Just back from another London-break - had a blast as usual. This time, more friends from Canada were over, crossing paths on their various travels. Though I left my jogging gear at home, I don't feel too bad about it as we must've walked for at least 5 hours each day. Our wonderful and generous friend living in London was her wonderful and generous self - putting up with four different house-guests (two of them family!) in two schedules...

On Sunday we got slightly lost around the East End but eventually found our way back to something recognisable - in this case the Square Mile. Monday, my friend and I played at being wealthy and walked through Knightbridge - had gelato at Harrods and lunch in Kensington Gardens. Harrods was fun - in that kind of peering into another world kind of fun - the world of £110/kg morrels and Bvlgari watches... I even secretly kept an eye out for celebrities... (didn't see anyone but in truth, I'm bad with faces...).

Two of our friends were on their way to Poland - which is my introduction to why we went to the Imperial War Museum. The Holocaust exhibit seemed like an appropriate testing ground for her reaction to Auschwitz - though I suppose no safe and sterile exhibit, regardless of how well done, could match seeing the actual place. Nonetheless, it was a very moving experience - okay, I was glad of the low lighting - though mine weren't the only strategic coughs and throat clearings. It's always funny to walk out of exhibits like that back into the rest of the museum with its bright lights, white walls, and helpful employees. Particularly jarring I think when the first thing you are confronted with is more guns, tanks, fighter planes, and replica missiles. But of course, these are the weapons of the good guys...

It was interesting (maybe only to me) - one of the quotes evocatively displayed in the Holocaust exhibit was 'all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing'. I hate that quotation. I really really do. To paraphrase Pilate, what is 'good'? Who are these good men? What is the 'evil' they will protect me from? Of course, we're expected to digest these 'wise sayings' like pablum - the good men are good and they are so because they are good; evil, concomitantly, is evil and it is so because it is evil. The problem as I see it - and I also recognize the problematically reductive potential of this argument - is that 'evil' and 'good' are just words we use to make monsters and heroes. Quite frankly, anyone convinced of their own righteousness and the manifest destiny of that righteousness is someone to run from - quickly. Though I suppose my problem is that such comments are generally deployed in the service of some 'common good'. Which isn't to say that I'm advocating that we all sit down and let evil get on with it over my particular semantic tics. It's just frustrating: these wise old sayings that we parrot at each other as though they have any meaning - any applicability; as though we can see evil and know it as always that which is not us.

Ooh I can hear it...'come on, everyone knows what it means...yer over-analysing again'- but does everyone know? Really? Cause come on, evil doesn't start off all blustery and scary, red smoke and heat, horns an' all - good doesn't pop out of the egg all shiny and strong. It just too binary - too simple.

Although, thinking about it - I kinda like it as it was used in that particular exhibit. Because I think it was accusatory - challenging - Not the smug and always already remorseful, exculpatory declaration of some politician or prelate - something more desperate and powerful: not 'all it takes blah blah blah' but 'good men did nothing and evil flourished here and here and here'. Which is, I think, more accurate because it is specific - no one can combat EVIL on some abstract plane. Looking at those awful pictures, I didn't see EVIL - just people. If we're all waiting for EVIL to announce itself, we're not going to get far as 'good men'. It's also interestingly provocative in that particular situation because the viewer there in that museum is always 'good' - this is how people think of themselves, right? Or at least, this is how we're supposed to think of ourselves - we're basically good. Maybe not great - not saints, but really deep down, we're alright. But to be confronted with that familiar quotation in that place - in a dark room surrounded by those particularly present images of suffering that cannot be comforted - suddenly that darkness and murkiness seep into things - between words and intentions. To be a viewer on this particular history, to be outside, confronted with things that cannot be changed - that have not changed (Stalin in Russia, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Rwanda...) - is always to wonder what would I have done? and never be satisfied.

***

I fear than I'm falling into soapboxing on this blog...

It was so great to see my family friends - though I find it funny sometimes how conflicted I get about my role with them. I've known them both since they were born and now they are beautiful, kind, generous, and intelligent young women - and I sometimes get stuck acting like a 'big sister' of the most annoying sort when all I really want to do is be their friend. This is why I generally think myself unfit for motherhood - I'm a bit of a control freak. I'm terrified of something hurting the people I love - when my brother came to visit and went to Whitby by himself for a night, I spent a good deal of time worrying - not about his physical safety but his psychological safety: what if someone was rude to him? What if they hurt his feelings? What if he felt alone or scared or upset? Keeping in mind my brother was 23, over 6 feet, and more travelled than I am... But there it is. Sometimes I just feel too big - like I'm taking up too much space, being too agressive, too prescriptive - all the things I hate when I see them in other people.

Huh.

I need to change that.

And all that was to say - I had a great weekend in London. And I want to say thank you to Marina and Micaela and Jim - I am rested and well-fed - spiritually and physically. And it's nice to have friends who love me anyway... cause I'm alright really!

We are a police state

I've always thought there was something rather pretentious in the title of Paul Langford's A Polite and Commercial People. It seems to conjure that sepia-tinted image of the upstanding middle-class entrepreneur, gruff, apologetic, full of integrity, and always slightly embarassed. Polite commerciality...harumph, as my friend would say (expostulate? well, visualise in writing anyway). Is there such a thing?

This week will see another clash between the police and environmental activists: it's the second Camp for Climate Action. It's becoming, increasingly, a question of when not if something will happen: all sides holding their breath for the next clash, all media posed for the next martyr.

All of my sympathies are with Climate Action and the protestors. British police have been given permission to use 'terror laws' to "deal robustly" with any 'threat' to Heathrow. This includes indiscriminate use of 'stop and search', holding suspects without charge, searching people's homes... Why? And this I love: 'confrontations threaten to bring major delays to the already overstretched airport'. (Guardian, Saturday 11 August)

That. Is. Disgusting. An airport is not a cause.

(Also disgusting me right now is the rude little scally I'm having to deal with at the library. My mother-in-law wants us to have children - if I could bottle this one just to show anyone who asks me That Question again, I would. But I digress...)

We need, and I speak socially and politically, to redress this bifucation between protestors and protectors. I'm swayed by Curtis White's latest essay in Harper's Magazine: 'The Idols of Environmentalism'. Not entirely pursuaded, mind you, but convinced that he is right in essence. We need to replace the language of confrontation, of war, of terrorism with what he calls a 'language of care'. To do this is to begin to heal the rift not between multinational CEO and frontline activist - both of whom are little more than cartoon figures (Curis White) - but between protestor and protector. Not to do this - to fear the enemies and impossibilities we construct out of language, the monsters we create in order to have something to flee - is to risk falling irretrievably into the chasms of 'us' and 'them'.

And if this is a warning - I've no intention of turning prophet - then it is most clearly to the government that dares to separate itself from the people. Continuing to turn us into them -they will have something to fear. And this is not to invoke the WWII piece - moving though it is - I do not mean that 'we' (who? We who care.) should stand up now for fear that 'when they come for us, there will be no one left' but to turn that address around: one day, we will come calling for the government - we will demand accountability, responsibility, our rights - and there will be no one to stop us.

blue skies

Just for the record: it's been absolutely gorgeous outside for a whole week. The garden actually needed watering - for the first time in nearly two months. I needed my sunglasses yesterday cause my eyes hurt from the glare of the sunshine off of the pavement.

I love the British summer - it's so rare that I feel I must appreciate it fully while it lasts.

Justifying my collection of cookbooks

Now I am just procrastinating. It's a lovely day outside, the house is clean, dishes done, laundry laundering... I've managed to read the first chapter in the new book by my external examiner. I'm debating going up to the Bollywood film in an hour.

And as always happens when I'm looking for distraction, I've started pulling down my cookbooks and feasting on imaginary dinners. I'm quite as good as Peter Pan at eating pretend food. And I'm quite happy with my collection these days. While I am still seduced by the gastro-porn style of food writing - more pictures than text - I'm more and more attracted to good writing. Our last purchase - a lucky find in the Oxfam shop in the city - was Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. For the record, and because I'm curious, the entire collection is as follows:

How to Eat - Nigella Lawson
Larousse Gastronomique
The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater
New Food Fast - Donna Hay
The New Cook - Donna Hay
German Cooking Today - Dr. Oetker
The Family Cookbook - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
The Silver Spoon
The River Cottage Year - Hugh Fearnley - Whittingstall
Cooking from an Italian Garden
The Vegetarian Chef
Lighten Up
Best Recipes: German Cooking and Baking - Dr. Oetker
Soup - Sandler and Acton
Curries and Indian Foods - Linda Fraser
Fondue - Loraine Turner
various old Canadian Living magazines
my ratty old spiral notebook with recipes from various people and sources

Huh. Written out like that, I do have rather a lot of cookbooks. I think I left some in Canada as well. I think I likely read them more than actually use them on any kind of daily basis - which isn't to say that I never use them. Lawson and Slater I just enjoy reading - hell, I've taken both to bed with me in the hopes of inspiring some flights of dreamy gastronomy. My collection does run the gamut from straightforward food preparation (German Cooking Today and The Silver Spoon tie for the most stripped down writing) to philosophical treatises on eating ethically (Slater) or the wickedly onanistic pleasures of cooking for one's self (Lawson).

Is feeding the body feeding the soul? I have no idea. But I love food - I love preparing it, I love feeding people (a genetic predisposition - thanks gran!), and I love eating. But not just the mechanics of eating, the whole socio-cultural ritual of the thing. On my own, food simply doesn't taste quite as good or as satisfying than when taken in good company. I'm fascinated by table manners, by eating disorders, by images of consumption and expulsion - maybe it's a Catholic thing? How we devour our world, are devoured by our world - by each other. We are fed with ideas, eat up words, get 'fed up', are glutted by consumer culture, digest bad news, sink our teeth into new things, worry at something 'like a dog with a bone', lap up information... We are part of a body - we're taught in Catholic school that God has laid a feast for us - we obsess about the Last Supper - we play games of describing our perfect 'last meal'. Food is desire; it signals belonging and strangeness, continuity and change. It is, in the end, all that we are.

Chew on that.

Pride

There are few things more annoying (or embarassing) than switching handbags, leaving the house, getting to a destination, and realising that the handbag smells of cat pee.

So I emptied it, distributed my belongings amongst friends, and threw out the bag. Which was a shame - it served me well. Luckily, it was an older bag that I mostly use for travelling and such. Nonetheless, a practical, versatile purse - ah, Roots bag, you will be missed...

Last night me and my friend saw Grow Your Own - it's set on allotments. It's completely PG and so uplifting that I think I floated to the pub on a cloud of general well-being and satisfaction with humanity in general (or at least, that part of humanity that recognises the awesome personal and community healing power of allotments). Then another group of us went into the city to celebrate Leeds Pride 2007. That morning, Nas and I had caught the parade as we came home from the the farmers' market. A friend's band played the main event at a bar down by the river. I always forget how lovely Leeds can be down there. Anyway, the band was great - our friend rocked out on the keyboard and played some mighty mighty power chords. We danced, and swayed, and cheered, and a generally, again, felt pretty at home and at peace with the world.

The more I think about it, the more I realise what a great weekend it was. On Saturday night, we went into Ilkley to celebrate a birthday - with much pizza, wine, good beer and better conversation (and we didn't manage to empty the restaurant like last time!). Sunday morning we went for a long run with the Fleet, followed by the farmers' market, then the movie, then the band. Tonight, we're going to watch some Bollywood - cheaper and likely healthier than a beer at the end of the day! We are so unbelievably fortunate to be part of this brilliant, creative, generous group of friends. I suppose everyone thinks their gang is the coolest - but really, ours is. And damn, we're a sexy bunch too.