A Single Layer

This weekend, while wandering past the cheetah exhibit at the Living Desert , Martin and I learned some valuable life lessons: 1. 'Life is about experiences, not the things you pick up along the way' (spoken by a father to his five year old son). 2. 'Cheetah's don't cheat!' (spoken by the wife of speaker number one, to their three or four year old son). On top of all this, I have expanded my vocubulary. Almost. That is, I acquired this most fantastic word: ferruginous but have no idea what it means. It described a hawk that we saw - caged but happy - during our dusty tour of the L.D. According to their website, they also have a ferruginous pygmy owl, but this I don't remember coming across. I suppose I also ought to clarify that the image above is of a Harris's Hawk which, though may be many wonderful things besides, is not particularly ferruginous. More to follow.

According to Blogger, my computer is now located in Cathedral City. The change occured on November 13th. Where was I? or should I be asking, where AM I? The room looks the same...

In anticipation of many busy days ahead, I want to write something - anything - for the meanwhile. There is not much to tell at the moment, which is odd, since I feel as though much has happened. Like as not, the feeling is more from the books and movies I've been watching than the actual state of things. Life is decidedly simple. Tomorrow will be my first day working a good number of hours. That is, I might actually be earning enough to feed myself as well as pay off the creditors. Straight after work on Wednesday, I'll be driving to Long Beach to spend about 24 hours with my parents. I don't think I'll be there in time to serve Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless (they're serving it a night early, then a big breakfast the next morning), but there will be volunteers enough for that. Mom and I will wear our cornacopihats while making pumpkin pie and sneaking tastes of cranberry sauce. Were more people coming, I'd make the cranberry sauce Nick made last year in E...

It would seem that I have joined another blog. Sprung from my Edinburgh peeps, you will find it here: http://nwc-wcp.blogspot.com/ I am almost the only person to contribute, but I suppose that comes from the same impulse that makes me sit in the front of classrooms. If you're gonna do a thing, get it over with and do it with all you have. (I apply this impulse inconsistently; note the variation in my habits with regards to floor cleaning and phone calling.) The new blog relates mostly to our reading habits, so it will not steal me away too often, nor should it deflect too many posts from this noble forum (if I may call such a self-centred site a 'forum').

A minor correction and some additions to my previous post on the subject of the McCallum Theatre's choreography competition of last night. The Hero-like ballet which completed the competition was entitled 'Falling Petals', not 'Falling Leaves'. I was in error. There was clearly no connection between the two routines. Leaves, petals, fluttering colours and swishy movement - utterly unrelated. There were other observations that I wanted to make, however, before they slipped my mind. Years hence, no, even now, they may only be of use to jog my own memory of the actual event - of no interest to my readers at all - but I will put them here anyway. To begin with, the first dance (Nicole Haskins's 'Fading Shadows' from the Sacramento Ballet Company, featuring several couples dancing alternately in variations on more or less the same physical/aesthetic theme - forgive me for having no knowledge of the language used to describe or analyse dance as an art) reminde...

My eyes are foggy with sleep and strain - sleep I have not yet taken but need, and strain for vision... as I've just returned from the 10th annual choreography festival at the McCallum Theatre. There is much I could say that I have no will for. Above, I have tried to post a video of clips from the Backhaus Dance Company, whose choreographer - Jennifer Backhaus - arranged my favourite piece of the evening. It was... like life and love in a dance (it is so horribly incomplete to say such a thing!). Two people, interacting with an unseen world, interacting with each other, being one and yet two, acknowledging moments of intimacy in a pattern of distraction and yet never veering far from each other's skin. There were other beautiful dances which I cannot describe or give credit to (the grand prize winner looked remarkably like the falling leaves scene from Hero. it was called Falling Leaves. hmm...) due to the state of my eyes, the fuzz of my brain, and the distance between me and ...

I'm in the mood for lists. Lists of favourites and bests. Here's one, sprung from the moment. Add to it as you please. Favourite places to sit quietly: 1. the living room (not the family room), at the couch where no one can see you but where you can hear everything in the house just enough to know you are escaping it. 2. the tall tables by the windows in the French restaurant, reading Anna Karenina or talking to Tara about Jack. 3. the ledge outside St Giles Cathedral, particularly when escaping the flood and flow of tourists along the Royal Mile - watching them flood and flow, pleased in one's own stillness, with the fortress of Scottish Presbyterianism at one's back. 4. the fox bench at the park, where my Mom and I once fed Luke Carl's Jr. burgers at dusk and where, on a different nightfall, we thought the world was coming to an end. 'It can't be the rapture,' she said, only half-believing herself, 'because you're still here.' 5. underneath...

Things to hope for: 1. A photographic blog-account of the wedding of Tara and Spencer, as much as might be interesting those who were not in attendance, i.e. you. 2. Another somewhat-mindless minimum wage part-time job so that I can buy groceries. 3. My First Things subscription, ordered two months ago and still not arrived. 4. Protestant clarity. 5. The return of Harry the Mailman. Since his absence, I have declared my love for him shamelessly to so many. Come back so that I can return to my silent and sensible self. 6. Ceilidhs and kilts. 7. Finishing one book. Just one. And being able to afford a coffee date to discuss this book with my new friend who is still merely an aquaintance who used to sit behind me in church and whom I silently acknowledged and secretly admired for being one of the marrieds without seeming obnoxious. 8. 26 more pages. 9. Making this list go to ten. 10. Being able to pay my library fine, now at more than six dollars. Things no longer hoped for, but present a...

There is not much to say, but I feel obligated to give some sort of an update. I was at my sister's place in Ventura this weekend, where I bought two dresses, a pair of earings, and a faux something-skin clutch. All in the name of the wedding occuring this weekend. On the way home, I drove through fire-country. Though I saw no flames, the sky was eerily filled with smoke almost the entire three and a half hour journey. Two semis had jack-knifed into each other at the onramp from the 15 to the 10. The winds were so fierce, I had to slow to 70 mph in some parts - a concession to nature which I am rarely willing to make. On my way to my sister's, the fires had not yet begun. Or at least I had not heard of them. Trouble appeared on a smaller scale. At a stop light on my way into the city, I saw a group of men pushing a broken-down truck out of the way of traffic. For a moment, I felt sorry for their predicament, but then I looked in their faces, paused as I was with the red light,...

It occurs to me, now that my blog is in its second year, that I have offered no explanation for its address/title. Yes, 'astollat' and 'wanderlust' do go together. They both have significance and they both relate to myself. The address refers to the Arthurian heroine Elaine of Astollat, otherwise known as Shalott (that's an island, not an onion). In some stories, Elaine was cursed to dwell in her island bower unable to look out at the world outside her windows. In other stories, she was just a homebody, well-loved by her noble father and brave brothers. In both, she happens to fall in love with Lancelot who already loves Guinevere but admires Elaine more than all others regardless of his preference for married women. In all Elaine narratives, she dies of unrequited love - a mysterious illness that frequently infects poetic figures. Tennyson's two accounts of the story are my favourites. In his poem 'The Lady of Shalott', he implies that Elaine's dea...

Digging for snails in the heat of a silent afternoon all alone in the back of the backyard watching the sun slip behind the eucalyptus I dig too deep. Ankles first and then the knees the snails are forfeit to my predicament. Digging for snails in the heat after the rain my fingers smelling like the loam of the garden my shoulders itching from the roots of the crabgrass. I have dug myself a snail a snail without a shell till the sun on my skin makes me quiver in the soil. It has occurred to me that I'm afraid of snails of their formlessness and motion - in the shell a menace to the leaves planted so carefully out of the shell, a horror - but I cannot not become one for I have dug myself too deep. I begin to lose my toes, my fingers my brain which is gelling up my skull cannot find the Thing to Do the lever to extricate a rope or a branch to pull upon to remove my slugging self from the rain-wet soil (and even then, how would I remove the stink from ...

Note: I am changing the template of this blog because the previous one was just plain boring. Observe my slow and steady movement out of the world of Neutral and into the world of Colour. (Memories of Rainbow Wars on a dome-like screen, a gift shop with balloons of swirling reds and blues, photograph under a green tree over the green grass, wearing the straw hat with the polka dot ribbon...)

Looking back over some recent posts, I am feeling sort of smug and sick of myself. To temper that, I think I should note here that I recently watched 'She's the Man' with Amanda Bynes for the second time - and loved it just as much as I did the first.

I recently finished reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I like the way he writes, telling the story once and then telling it through all over again from a different perspective, and then returning to the first perspective with all the things he seemed to have forgotten the first time through. Then he takes into account the dog's view of things, elaborates some details left out of the first few go-throughs, and finally tells the whole thing over once more, recollecting everything from the beginning in light of everything since. But it's really the same story from the first thirty pages repeated over the course of three hundred pages. And it's a beautiful novel. Self-contradictory, and intentionally so, because he clearly states at the beginning that we only have one take at life. There are no practice rounds, he says. No trial runs or initial read-throughs. Not for the characters, but for the author the story can be repeated ad infinitum. As long ...

Faith is simple in Rome. You climb the Holy Steps on your knees and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. You stand before the Pieta and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. You kneel before the crucifix and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. Here, it is different. You take your Bible to Starbucks. You underline verses, write in the margins, refer to your sermon notes. Your Bible study meets you. They discuss the role of the Holy Spirit and how He lends a sense of peace to your decisions. On the way home, you stop to fill the tank of the Accord. Your radio is playing praise songs. The emcee interrupts to talk about donations and God is Good. The next day at work you try to share the Gospel with a coworker. You write it on a napkin during your lunch break. Afterwards, he uses it to wipe his hands from his microwaveable meal. What can you do but throw the Napkin Gospel in the trash? He agrees to join you on Sunday. You ra...

Back in town and somewhat uncertain about the future. Even so, not feeling much pressure thereby, but willing to let the days come as they must, knowing that I will be vigilant and God will be gracious. In Long Beach for an indefinite period of days - watching my parents do their thing and exerting last minute attempts to reform my brother before he returns to his naval duties and unsavoury bachelor ways. Do I misrepresent him on the internet? Perhaps, but in trust that all who read information withal are aware of its instability, its potential inaccuracy, its ungovernable subjectivity. Time to break fast and wake up the family with chortles and halloos.

singing Jolene at a karaoke bar meeting friends for a big-screen viewing of the recent Bourne update watching *!@"f! adolescents spray silly-string on shoulder-slumping loners in the Princes Street Gardens (i hate kids) watching eager youngsters run down the aisle to their 'Sunday's Cool' lessons while the choir sings 'Alleluia' (i love kids) watching an episode of 'Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction' in Flatmate Jess's room (i... uh....) defrosting Angela's fridge sipping a pot of tea in Kilimanjaro - for the last time? maneuvering tourists, trying not to dream of Toby Stephens, planning my future, organising my inbox...

I sort of jumped the gun in the comments of recent posts with this most fabulous of announcements: I have finished and turned in my dissertation for an MSc in English Literature: Nation, Writing and Culture from Edinburgh University (which noble institution I am presently advertising upon the soft navy hues of my first ever hoodie!!). My bags are mostly packed for the return home - even though I will not actually be leaving for another week. I needed to see if I would have to mail things or pay an overweight fee. One or the other will be necessary, since it seems that I have an inordinate number of books in my possession. Bother. Tomorrow, I will be meeting friends for post-dissertation drinks in the evening. Saturday, I am planning a trip to Newcastle and/or Durham with flatmate Jess. and Sunday boasts a most thrilling venture to the cinema for a showing of the Bourne Ultimatum - a film that I have been anticipating with unparalleled eagerness. Beyond that, my schedule is bare. I will...

I like the phrase 'sired of Vikings'; I'm glad I managed to use it in recent blogging.

The dissertation is more or less through and I am trying to figure out what to do with the next ten days. Any suggestions?