Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.

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Monday, December 7th, 2009
oursin	9:46p	Whatever happened to train timetables? Am currently being irritated by train travel sites where you have to put in some specific date and time for a particular journey to get any information. What I want to know is: Do trains run directly between X and Y, or do you have to change at Z? How frequent is the service? How long does it take? Will concede that working out the fare-scale applicable to any given itinerary has always been opaque. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143953.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	8:35p	Noel Streatfield writing as 'Susan Scarlett', Pirouette I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that the wonderful Greyladies have been republishing several of these 'light romances' which Streatfield wrote pseudonymously to boil the pot, for serialisation in women's magazines and then to come out as books. They're delightful. Admittedly, they are probably delightful for reasons other than the actual romances. Once does rather feel that Streatfield's own feelings were that it was a generic requirement to have boy meet girl, various difficulties arise, and eventually overcome to the prospect of wedding-bells, but that she wasn't entirely interested in the trope. As opposed to giving a vivid picture of the settings she uses and in particular work of various kinds. Her male heroes are very nice - they are sensible, rational, kind, sensitive, supportive and protective. They do not brood angrily, nurture secret sorrows or dark secrets, insult the heroine, become violent; and this is surely not just changing times and styles because, Desert Romances! Ethel M Dell! and the romances by that woman (Violet Winspear?) who gave a wonderful description somewhere of how she wrote a hero (brooding, passionate, concealed hurt and vulnerability, etc). Okay, there is one moody creative type in Poppies for England, but even he has a protective and supportive streak. And they do mostly expect the young women involved to give up their careers on marriage, though there is a male character, also in Poppies for England, who presents himself to the ambitious performer as an ideal candidate for marriage to an ambitious woman of temperament such as herself. The issues of conflict that arise tend to operate around class difference (surely another generic requirement) or career/marriage issues, but we do strongly get the sense that Streatfield is not so keen on draaaaaama. Anyway, Pirouette. I didn't relax into this in the same warm-bath way as the others, largely because it felt like an entirely different novel, possibly the sort that Streatfield wrote for adults under her own name (actually, it wasn't, was it? Don't I recall that she had changed it when initially going on the stage to avoid embarrassing her family?) was struggling to get out, or at least that the story could have been a whole lot darker without a lot of effort. Judith is a nice docile young girl and a talented dancer in a ballet company, not yet doing solo roles, but starts getting picked for these during the course of the story. What we discover is that her mother is living out through her her own thwarted dreams of being a dancer, and we get both the pathos of this, and the absolute toxicity of the situation for all concerned, Judith herself, and her brothers who are deprived of the attention their mother focuses on their sister, the younger of whom slides into juvenile delinquency. This wouldn't, of course, work as a light romance, but the story could quite easily have become one of a young girl who is dancing to the tune of her mother and Madame Tania, the head of the ballet company, and almost unconsciously falls in love - or responds to a man's interest in her - as a means of getting out from under: because even if her mother and Madame T think marriage is a trap and not to be considered weighed against her career, her father and society at large would consider marriage a perfectly legitimate reason for abandoning the dance. It doesn't quite go there but there's a sort of shadow of it. There's also, more explicitly, the shadow of what happens to the girls who gave up their young lives to the discipline of ballet and then find that their talent is not enough or their bodies develop in the wrong way - too tall, too curvy, etc. One of the excellent things about these books is the extent to which 'Chloe likes Olivia': there are friendships between women, mutual support, mentoring, etc, even if there is also the generic female rival for the hero. I am not sure whether one could detect hints of Madame Tania being a lesbian, or whether she is just consciously and deliberately encouraging young women in the hothouse environment of the ballet company to crush on her. We are a bit bothered by the assumption that going out to Rhodesia is just the thing for young men who cannot settle into a conventional career in post-war Britain... though I do see that the plot rather demands that The Hero is likely to be going a long way away on a permanent basis, just to ratchet up some tension and make the choice acute. But a good read, and raising these various questions as a result. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143644.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
oursin	9:43p	Culinary No breakfast rolls because I was working yesterday. Today's lunch: defrosted 2 venison steaks. Partner had hunted and gathered some Romano peppers and some asparagus tips. Stirfried the venison with the peppers, healthy grilled the asparagus with walnut oil, and served with Thai sticky rice. This week's bread: Greenstein's 'Psomi' loaf, but made with Waitrose 5-seed mix instead of toasted sesame seeds - delicious. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143332.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	5:19p	Linkerama Search fails at finding the piece in The Observer Review anent this: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which is happening at the Bloomsbury Theatre (which is, of course, within the Student Union building of the godless institution in Gower St). This aroused in me the question of whether there would be any George Eliot, in particular 'O May I Join The Choir Invisible' and whether there are musical settings of same (there is at least one, by someone who also composed an -?unproduced - opera version of Silas Marner). Haven't I seen Tim Adams going WOEZ about evil computerz and teh intanetz and their malign effects on creativity, sociability, etc, before? Someone who spends most of their time hanging out in Comment is Free is bound to get a v distorted picture of what is going on. I am perhaps a little more persuaded by Rachel Cooke in Jeremiah mood about public libraries. Which does seem to imply that yet again the debate is shooting right past the actual core constituency (or what would be, if so much wasn't wrong with them). A lengthy piece on 'mash-up' novels, e.g. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - and are there any of these which are not based on something by J Austen (and we haven't, have we? yet seen Emma and the Evil Undead?). In which case, is it not simply about brand recognition but the contrast element? (The Brontes already having teh gothique up the wazoo.) Without ever having read any of them, the whole idea does strike me, as it does the author of this article, that the joke quickly grows old - and would perhaps be better as shorter jeux d'esprit than whole novels. Biography of the apparently somewhat elusive Dorothea Lange (which after all is plausible for someone whose stance appears to have been 'I am a camera'). Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph is also... one of America's most famous photographs. It is her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker who, like countless others, had journeyed west from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. For a long time, it was known simply as Migrant Mother and, like many of Lange's images from the 1930s, it is stark and beautiful. It is also problematic, because of its contested context and the issues it raises about the morality of documentary photography. .... In 1958, Thompson made herself, and her frustration with Lange, known though a powerfully inarticulate letter to a photography magazine in which she demanded that her portrait no longer be used without her permission. By then, of course, it was too late. The photograph had long since floated free of its subject, and of its creator, becoming a symbol of something greater than either of them could have imagined. .... Gordon rebuts Thompson's claim that Lange had told her the image would not be published. Her case for the defence is a strong one: FSA photographers knew that their images would be widely disseminated for the common good so it is unlikely that Lange would have said otherwise. Likewise, Thompson's long anonymity was decided not by Lange but by the project's guidelines that instructed photographers contracted to the FSA not to record the names of their subjects. Nevertheless, one's sympathies lie with Florence Owens Thompson who, it transpires, was not a white American but a Cherokee. She had lived on the margins of American society while Lange's portrait of her was reproduced around the globe, becoming an icon of American suffering and stoicism. "Its reputation grew," writes Gordon, "because it symbolised white motherhood and white dustbowl refugees… Would the photograph have had such popularity if viewers had known its subject was a woman of colour?" The ironies that attend this single image, then, echo the contradictions that attend America's collective – and revisionist – notion of nationhood. Why readers crave the risk factor. From Hemingway to war heroes, there's a romance in writers who put themselves in their own story. And there's a danger in it too. While I am entirely there with Mr McCrum's suggestion that 'It does no favours to the powers of the imagination to perpetuate the romantic myth of authorship, however much unconsciously we subscribe to it', I feel he undercuts his own argument when he writes dismissively that 'The worst of the literary scene today is that so many of its protagonists, far from waving a standard for the darker side of human experience, resemble nothing so much as dentists, accountants and public-relations executives'. Given that Alaa el-Aswany, author of the internationally critically-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building was, and maybe still is, a dentist, and that it is conceivable that even a public-relations executive might write a good novel, this seems the kind of banal assumption he intends to subvert. Euan Ferguson, WHUT??, Kingsley Amis was a 'splendidly humane old chuffpot' and women were one of the areas of life 'to which he brought grand amateur enthusiasm'. I find it hard to read those as simply coded ways of expressing 'curmudgeonly and misogynistic misanthrope alcoholic'. To its supporters, the beaver is a keystone species. To others, it's a rodent with a huge appetite for deforestation. As these "charismatic beasties" are released into their new Scottish home, many are predicting trouble in the Highlands. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143170.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	12:20p	Happy birthday, gillo! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1142979.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
oursin	7:28p	Memeage 5 questions from twistedchick. I'm feeling a bit lethargic about the 'ask me for 5 questions' bit of the meme, but if you would really really like 5 questions from a somewhat tired brayne (don't know why I'm so tired today), speak up in the comments. 1. Imagine that something you wrote has been chosen by the director of that series to be turned into an episode. What story is it? Well, I haven't actually written it, but this is the one. It's Adam Adamant, and it's Georgina, quite elderly by now, being invested as a Dame of the British Empire, for services to the nation, and talking about how the first great challenge of her career was as AA's handler - because a) he was delusional, so if you wanted him to do something, you had to work it so that it fitted in with his delusional system, and pretend he was in charge, and b) his minder (Simms) was an old-school type not at all keen at taking orders from 'a girl' - their canonical bickering and hostility was not exactly feigned. With flashbacks to the various adventures of AA to demonstrate how she was really in charge and what the threat to the nation's security really was and how she defeated it. 2. What is your favorite sound? Rushing water is very soothing. But cellos are lovely and so are oboes. 3. If you could live anywhere (and afford it) where would it be? I find it very hard to envisage living anywhere but London, but if I could afford it I would love to live in Hampstead. Or in some moods, Chelsea. And I was wondering about a pied a terre somewhere in Greece, but I think I'll settle for a yacht to cruise around the islands. And being able to afford nice hotel rooms in other places. 4. What would you like to do that you haven't done yet? Publish fiction. Get back into writing fiction. Write several academic articles that I have in my head but I need to do more research on. See the Northern Lights. 5. What would you tell someone who is younger about life? Apart from 'It's Always More Complicated'.... something about not needing to Do It All before you're 30, and not needing to Have It All at any age, and sometimes life and oneself can surprise one. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1142735.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Friday, December 4th, 2009
oursin	4:09p	This shouldn't , perhaps, be any cause for remark But everything today that I had on my to-do list of life-admin is *Mission Accomplished* with extra-shiny transport experiences included. My list went: - Sleep in to catch up on last night's lost sleep and prepare for tomorrow's work-day rising time. Check. - Take in dry-cleaning. Check, with added bonus that they can have it ready for collection tomorrow afternoon. - Take watchstrap into jewellers' where I got it to be mended. They couldn't do it immediately, but I was able to pick it up on return leg of the expotition. Check. - Pick up repeat prescription from doctors' surgery. Check. - Trek out to DHL Depot in Hertfordshire and pick up parcel. Check. - Get prescription filled. Check. But the added glory was: getting trains to and from Elstree & Borehamwood which were actually in the platform as I arrived, thus saving what might have been extended waits; finding a taxi at once at the station; nice driver offering to wait while I collected parcel; bus that stops practically on the chemists' doorstep arriving just as I came out from picking up my fixed watch. Additional commendation for the Kentish Town Community Loos scheme. Feel that this is both amazing and in some sense payback for a week which was full of frustrating moments, averaging it out to a more or less normal week. Though I did arrive back to find that the postman had tried to deliver a parcel, sigh, while I was out. (Can't think what it might be, either.) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1142401.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	11:00a	O the irony Does it strike anyone else as deeply ironic that the people who sell items as utterly Now and On the Move as this, nevertheless have a delivery system that assumes that someone is going to be sitting around at the home address of the person who ordered it (because they won't send it anywhere but the address to which their credit card is registered) between 9 am and 5.30 pm on a normal working day? Welcome to the 1950s... As I have the day off, am contemplating the long trek out to Zone 6* and the DHL delivery depot to collect the damn thing. (This is particularly annoying since their acknowledgement messages indicated that they were sending it Royal Mail, which is still a hassle for collection purposes, but not to the same extent.) *Having said which, the relevant overground train service stops at a local station and the journey is about 20 minutes, so it could be a great deal more arduous. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1142175.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	10:12a	Happy birthday, gchick! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1141847.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
oursin	8:01p	More Grayshott pics Taken around the grounds. One of these days when I am there I will take my camera out on to the common (because the walks are not really suitable for doing photo-ops). ( Cut for consideration ) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1141680.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	12:52p	That day was a day and half's worth, at least Still recovering from yesterday. Morning at work involved 2 meetings, one the Weds am regular, and one about exciting new project, which involves me getting my act together to have it ready by Feb. Went away in some excitement to surf catalogues and start ordering stuff for possible copying/inclusion. Then off to Paddington to catch a train for Bristol. I had had some qualms about retrieving my tickets via the self-service machine but with one boss shot this actually worked. The train was delayed but by only a few minutes and made up the time en route. I had a table seat with power socket - and no-one else in the other three seats even though they were booked - and spent a profitable journey reading and doing a referee report on a journal article, reading through the paper I was giving, reading through the almost finished chapter for edited volume (damn near there), and made a start on a letter of recommendation for promotion. Arriving at Bristol, was met by ankaret and went for coffee and chat, which was extremely pleasurable. Then took a taxi out to the campus at which I was speaking. Got there, fortunately, with some time in hand, as although there are detailed instructions on their website as to how to reach the campus, there was a serious lack of directions about getting to the actual, you know, room in which seminar was happening, because the reference I was given, though doubtless perfectly clear to the locals, was not particularly intuitive, even once I found the right building. The audience was on the sparse side, but at least there was a good discussion, which went on on a one-to-one basis after the formal proceedings were over. Got a lift to station - Bath Spa as that was direction they were going rather than into centre of Bristol. Had just missed the earlier train (which I would have risked non-validity of ticket and caught had I had the chance), and - o desastre! o desespoir! the Upper Crust on the station had just closed. However, the hotel on the opposite corner had a bar in which they were serving food, so I managed to grab something there in the time I had to wait. The coach in which my reservation was supposed to be was not included in the train as it actually turned up, but I found a nice table seat with power socket in another one, before they announced that the reservations were valid in Some Other Carriage. Managed to get online via rather on-again off-again dongle (far too many times when it claimed to be connected but either wasn't or signal was too weak to be viable), check email, DW, LJ etc as brane 2 ded for intellectual effort. Taxi from Paddington took rather odd route - at such a late hour, why not cut through Regent's Park to Camden Town, unlikely to be bottlenecks in Kentish Town, rather than pootle along Euston Road all the way to York Way? but got me home within reasonable time. Had a not particularly good night, but had to be up at usual time this morning as I had an appointment to talk to a meedja person apropos of sifilis. Found last night that I had lost a doctor's prescription I had been carrying round all week in the hopes that at some point I might actually get to a chemist during their opening hours, which was v irritating: however managed to get through to the surgery this am and they are doing me a duplicate. Tomorrow, which I had taken off to have some down-time before working Saturday, looks as though it's going to be a flurry of personal admin stuff (pick up prescription, get it filled, get watchstrap fixed, and very possibly go to PO sorting office in an entirely different direction to pick up parcel which the senders informed me could not be sent to any address but that to which credit card was registered, chiz chiz). I was hoping to get to a seminar in the evening but think I may just flop, it's been that kind of week. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1141301.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
oursin	10:12a	Oh, Amazon, nevair, evair... Appended to the page for one of my works this morning: Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links Evolution is a lie www.prophecyandtruth.com - What does science evidence prove? Is evolution in the bible? I suppose these are automatically generated somehow, but I would love to know if there is some mechanism for complaining. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1141151.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	8:19a	Happy birthday, nineweaving and commodorified! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1140872.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
oursin	6:02p	Ham-spam Received this afternoon: Create your personal Vaccination Profile You have received this e-mail because of the launching of State Vaccination H1N1 Program. You need to create your personal H1N1 (swine flu) Vaccination Profile on the cdc.gov website. The Vaccination is not obligatory, but every person that has reached the age of 18 has to have his personal Vaccination Profile on the cdc.gov site. This profile has to be created both for the vaccinated people and the not-vaccinated ones. This profile is used for the registering system of vaccinated and not-vaccinated people. Create your Personal H1N1 Vaccination Profile using the link: create personal profile This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1140669.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	3:06p	Hedjogz luv linkspam Interesting piece in yesterday's Guardian G2 about books and movies that are the odd ones out in their maker's oeuvre, But are they always minor works 'that bear little or no resemblance to the works that made the authors famous'? I could make a case that it is the rather atypical Provincial Lady books and Cold Comfort Farm that are the works for which EM Delafield and Stella Gibbons respectively are famous, but which differ in significant respects from the rest of their oeuvres, which are, in both cases, interesting and worthy of attention but pretty much overlooked. She's baaaaaaaaack. Lionel Shriver feared her older brother's weight problem would kill him. Days after she wrote this, he died. Okay, one is sorry for anyone who has lost a loved sibling, and send not to know for whom the bell tolls, etc: but is this just possibly over-making the case that it was all about obesity? When we read that it was not just that he had diabetes, but that there was an episode of congestive heart failure, that he had emphysema, and following several accidents was in chronic pain? And does 'accept[ing] the high-calorie habit as a defensible lifestyle choice' have anything to do with the fat acceptance movement, which is surely saying that there is no necessary correlation between being careless or reckless about eating and exercise, and obesity. Or possibly pointing out the issues to do with the marketing and availability of high-calorie foods. Article in the New York Times about approaches to dealing with problems of female desire - in particular, women who want to feel urgent desire but don't. This may, of course, be due to pervasive cultural tropes of what desire is actually like and how it manifests tending to occlude how they actually experience it. I am very Always More Complicated about the findings on desire following arousal - because I think it may well be true for some but not others, &/or, as darling Stella Browne remarked 'in the same woman as at different times'. And HAI ELEFANT IN ROOM! okay, the assumed male model of desire doesn't necessarily apply to female arousal and desire, but: can we possibly ask? how far is it 100% true for Teh Menz? Is it even possible that they may be influenced, as women, or some women, seem to be, by relationship and general life issues. From young Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society go online. Probably omitting too much about the 262 years during which they eschewed having any icky gurlyz among their number: except for a couple of C19th ladies who with exquisite tact were willing to let their marble busts actually represent them. Audio slide show of AIDS posters for World AIDS Day What's red, black, and online? The Stendhal Manuscripts project. In the course of which, we discover, Madame Bovary is now in cyberspace. (O for someone to do the Bovary facebook or tweets...) [F]requently described as Weston's great muse and the model of his middle/late years, she was also his driver, secretary, business manager and accountant, and wrote many of the texts that accompanied his photography books from the mid-1930s to 1940s. We also discover that Charis Wilson 'was also immensely practical, working as a secretary, delivering mail or in a fish cannery when they needed funds, and handling his picture sales'. She also appears to have helped out in the darkroom. But that, and later with second husband 'working as a union secretary and a creative writing tutor', will not get a woman remembered like nude photoportraits. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1140356.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Monday, November 30th, 2009
oursin	9:46p	Fungi photos ( Some of the extremely colourful toadstools observed last week ) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1140044.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	8:19a	Happy birthday, legionseagle! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1139579.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
oursin	9:14p	Culinary No breakfast rolls, as I was still at Grayshott on Saturday morning (mmmmm homemade muesli with blueberries....) Today's lunch (partner did the hunting and gathering): wild Alaskan salmon fillets, baked in foil with a brushing of maple syrup and a sprinkle of crushed Bristol blend peppers and crushed chillies (I try not to assume salt as a default in any recipe, but I think that this would have been better with a little: the last time I made something similar, it was lightly smoked salmon and turned out rather better because of that, I think), served with gingery grilled halved baby courgettes, and mini-Portabello mushrooms, cut into quarter-inch slices and stirfried for 4-5 minutes, adding a sugar-salt-five spice powder mix approximately halfway through. Also some garlic bread, which partner had intended to go with last night's meal, but as that already came with rosti I thought it would be a bit much. This week's bread: the Greenstein 100% wholemeal loaf, which for the mad variety I made half and half strong wholemeal and stoneground organic wholegrain spelt, v tasty. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1139398.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	5:18p	Linkety Virago reissues The Group by Mary McCarthy. The original critical responses ticked an awful lot of Russ boxes in their dismissal of women's writing. I am, yay, but totally boggled by this: It was the women's submissiveness that most enraged Norman Mailer, who claimed that McCarthy's novel was fatally diminished by the fact that none of her characters has "the power or dedication to wish to force events", while conspicuously missing the point that it was precisely this enforced passivity that McCarthy wished to highlight. My impression of Mr Mailer is that he may have preferred feisty women but only so that he could master and humiliate them, but I really have not read much of his oeuvre, srsly. And on another novel building up a picture out of things to an even greater extent than The Group this sounds tricksy but the reviewer thinks it works. Nostalgia for the Hovis world that never was, by R McCrum: Most years produce an unexpected Christmas hit. Roy Mayall's rhapsody to the beleaguered postie could be the one for 2009. Up for a 4-something am start, out in all weathers, carrying a heavy sack... oh ye goode olde dayze. McCrum is also less than golden-glowy about the good oldfashioned independent bookseller: My memory of old-style bookselling is of dingy, cramped premises, redolent of boiled cabbage, unable to supply the book you actually wanted in less than a month. High-street book chains get a bad press, but the inconvenient truth is that they provide an excellent service for most of their customers. Long article here on the demise of Borders and the prospects of bookselling but lacks the talking heads of the print edition including L Shriver claiming that she just pops onto Amazon, buys a book and is not tempted into buying another one and someone praising the 'handselling' of books by independents, which thicks my blood with cold ('No, you can not help me. I'm browsing.' Is nowhere safe from this intrusive salespersonship?). but rejoices at the new foray of Slightly Foxed into secondhand bookselling. A nice counter-nostalgic history of the development of railways worldwide. Nice piece on friends by Kathryn Flett: Maybe in the end the love you take really is equal to the love you make, and perhaps having such extraordinary friends isn't just some miraculous happy-lucky accident of fate. Maybe – sod it – you really do make your own luck just a little bit, in which case perhaps I actually deserve my awesome friends. In which case… how incredibly bloody lucky am I? And there's absolutely no need to answer that one, because I already know. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1139029.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
oursin	5:55p	Home agin, home agin After pleasing period of rest + physical activity (6 x walkies on the Common, 4 sessions in the gym, 1 Pilates class, 1 Core Conditioning Class) + delicious treatments (I want my home dry-float apparatus!), back home. There were a few crumpled rose-leaves, but the overall experience was so pleasant I could treat these with relative equanimity (where is oursin and what have I done with the hedgehog?) - indeed, the wonky tap in the ladies' loo next to the gym is becoming an old familiar friend, rather like the wonkinesses in one's own home that one has learnt to deal with. Discovered, from the taxi driver picking me up, that there was a replacement bus service between Haslemere and Guildford - something which had not been entirely manifest on the National Rail site when I checked - so I decided to take the taxi to Guildford rather than hoick self and luggage on and off taxi, bus and train. The drive went past the Devil's Punchbowl, which I hadn't realised was there - the setting of Monica Edwards' 'Punchbowl Farm' series? (I preferred the Romney Marsh ones.) *** Review of Lived in London: Blue Plaques and the Stories Behind Them edited by Emily Cole by Kathryn Hughes. Qu: surely the name of Flinders Petrie is still relatively well-remembered? Or do I think that because I work more or less round the corner from the UCL Museum of Egyptology that bears his name? Some novels never quite recover from the brilliance of their opening chapters. WORD. No, not really: Geoffrey Moorhouse, who died this week, was a great travel writer, but had also been one of the last gentleman reporters. He was adventurous in many ways: he had one of the first vasectomies, which went wrong, and he gave a hilarious description of phoning London from a bar in rural Ireland to describe the symptoms to his surgeon, while drinkers gave pennies to small boys to fetch their fathers so they could hear it too. Well, no, Simon Hoggart, actually: vasectomies had been being performed since around the mid-C19th, originally in the belief that they alleviated the evils of self-abuse and spermatorrhoea, from 1899 for purposes of sterilisation, and during the interwar period in the belief that they were a means of rejuvenation (HAI! W B Yeats). I.e. it is a rather simple operation that you'd think surgeons would have managed to get right by the time it became a relatively popular, or at least discussed, method of birth control in the late 1960s. I will concede that 'methods of birth control' (and 'weird operations performed for bizarre reasons'?) just possibly might be one of my Mastermind special subjects. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1138864.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Friday, November 27th, 2009
oursin	1:23p	Hmmm, fantasy adventure.... Recently purchased, off my Amazon recs list (where it waspresumably 'because you bought Farscape &/or Neverwhere) a boxed set (v cheap) 'Fantasy Adventure Collection', containing Labyrinth, Mirrormask, and The Dark Crystal. I enjoyed Labyrinth, because of stroppy bolshie female figure in quest fantasy, although also the 'be kind to passing creatures and they will help you in your quest) element, lots of allusions to classic works, and David Bowie as camp as a row of pink frilly tents. Plus, it seemed to me to focus on the plot and less on the cool design stuff. (Not that some of the design stuff wasn't cool.) I liked Mirrormask rather less, although I appreciated the reverse-Persephone motif. Except - Queen of Light/Queen of Shadows - HAI MY KLEINIAN PARANOID-SCHIZOID POSITION, LET ME SHOW U IT - a binarism I never like much, and this one had the Queen of Light in a coma. Also, was ambiguous male sidekick being set up as Romantic Interest? - eeeuuuwww. Also, a lot of this did seem driven by Cool Stuff We Can Do, some of which was, I admit, v effective. Both of these, interestingly, had episode in which protag was sent to sleep/put into a trance/given amnesia, and this was associated with trappings of conventional femininity. (I have some problems with this - I'd like to see a narrative in which the girl deliberately and knowing chooses these with some particular purpose.) The Dark Crystal was pretty but pretty terrible. I am so over any narrative that focuses on Dim Male Chosen One - in this, the female gelfing had more in the way of natural talents and general nous (even with the markings of conventional femininity and fairy wings) but Dim Male Gelfling still gets to Heal The Crystal (I'm sorry if that's a spoiler...). Okay, we did have a female mad or at least eccentric scientist or seer, but distinctly non-humanoid and apparently the only one of her species. Also, the Mystics? They were adowwable cute, I want a stuffed plushy one to hug and pet and call George, but while they might have been Good, they were pretty dumb. You have an impending End of All Things and a Prophesied One Among You. Wouldn't it be a good idea to inform the Prophesied One and give him some degree of Cloo rather than the Oldest and Wisest Mystic, on his/her/its deathbed, going 'O HAI U B CHOSEN 1. TIEM 2 FULFIL PROPHICI B NAO'. Duh. Not even that scenario where Prophesied One has been lost or too well-hidden, they'd had him around since they found him as a wee baby gelfling. And I'm not sure that any society as all-out EEEEEvil as the Skeksies (?sp) could survive 1000 years or whatever it was, with everyone's talon against everyone else. (And didn't they, or something v similar, turn up in an episode of Farscape?) And the narrative was bog-standard straightforward quest with clear good v evil: at least the other two had ambiguous sidekicks with shifting allegiances. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1138535.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
oursin	7:26p	The potency of cheap music... Or at least, the popular music of one's youth. A thought generated by finding a spring in my step, even a skip, as I moved towards the step machine in the gym this morning to the opening bars of the Monkees, 'A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You': It often seems implied that the power of the popular music of one's youth is because it brings back those happy memories of one's younger days when life spread out before one - Except, okay, we may have an imaginary younger day in our minds, and perhaps the music taps into that? because a lot of the music I love is nonetheless associated with times of misery, depression and adolescent/student years/early adulthood angst. I.e. I was not happy and carefree, although perhaps I was, temporarily, as I bopped to the beat. *** In other news, in spite of a few crumpled rose-leaves (the lack of a Guardian, the way the spa, although open, didn't really seem to be geared up for early morning sybarites this particular morning, the breaking of a watchstrap that I only bought and had fitted a few weeks ago), this has been a pretty good day. I managed to reschedule my facial so that I could go to the Core Conditioning class (intense but good). It was beautifully sunny this morning and I managed to take some photos, several of the toadstools previously mentioned and of the grounds more generally, though I think the camera is trying to tell me that the battery is getting low. Glorious walk this afternoon even if it did get showered on partway through and I was in a but of a rush at the end to make sure I actually got to the Core Conditioning. Wallowing in the jacuzzi (my only complaint that it runs on rather a short cycle, chiz). Working out in the gym. So, pretty good day. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1138370.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	4:08p	Plz 2 B mindin them prepositionz Seriously aaaaargh subheading in the Guardian G2 online version (I haven't seen the dead tree version today, some delivery problem): Why it's simplistic to blame government cuts on students turning to prostitution, says Deborah Orr We discover, on reading the actual article, that she doesn't believe that it is just cuts in funding that are driving students to sex work, NOT that government cuts are the result of students turning to selling their bodies. Duh. I'm not sure who gets the codfish across the chops here, though: presumably Orr doesn't write her own subheadings? I don't think this is a question of sheer pedantry, really, but of gross misuse of language to convey an entirely opposite meaning to what was intended. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1138083.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	9:47a	Happy birthday, londonkds! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1137771.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
oursin	3:03p	Haunts of coot and hern Well, I did spot a moorhen dashing into the bushes by the pond as we returned. The weather today has been immensely changeable, as in oscillating between bright sunlight and downpours, but the rain held off, though it was a bit overcast, for this afternoon's walk. A bit squishy in parts but nothing like Monday. I am trying to decide whether the sun is about to come out or whether it's about to start chucking it down again, depending on which, I might pop out with my camera for a few shots, e.g. of the many-coloured toadstools adorning the lawn in the grounds. Though see above re changeable - might well be doing something different by the time I get down there. I have essayed a few shots from my room window. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1137546.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.

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