A Single Layer

i'll be back...

merry christmas. http://www.asthmatickitty.com/mp3/sufjan_stevens_-_Peace_-_Sister_Winter.mp3

the semester is over, and i am doing what people generally refer to as 'chillin'.' it's quite enjoyable. on wednesday, i will be heading to roma. there, i will meet up with chaeli and st teresa. to begin the annals of my journey (which will all probably have to be recorded in retrospect, as i will ignore the internet as much as possible during my stay there), i have made reservations at the E & S hostel through bootsnall.com, a travel site suggested by reknowned traveler daniel white, whose own adventures can be found on his blog under the name danielwwhite.blogspot.com. a much more reasonable web address than my own. the hostel is just a bit east of the Colosseum, provides cheap private rooms (so we can pray without disturbing anyone), and ...well, that's really all i know about it. i have opened some of the gifts which i received from my mother and sister, and am now listening to the Blessed Sufjan Stevens May He Live Forever, thanks to Emily. i am also perusi...

Somewhere outside my window lives a playful pair of birds with the most striking coloring of white and black. They fly with the grace and swiftness of kingfishers, but they are not kingfishers. In fact, I may only be comparing them to that beautiful bird because I like the word--kingfisher. I wish I knew what kind of bird they are. The human instinct to Name nature was not left in the Garden.

Christmas at Jenners... ice skating and kitsch... at the German market... These photos are a bit late in coming, but papers tend to interrupt blogging in the same way that blogging interrupts papers.

can anyone explain subjectivity?

At long last, I have completed a paper as a postgraduate student. What was it about? Something to do with time and history in Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' posted left, and John Berger's novel G. It is a good paper in that I know what I'm talking about. It is a bad paper in that no one reading it will know what I'm talking about unless... well, unless they already know what I'm talking about. Now I can get down to the business of paper number two, alongside the final preparations for a Roman Christmas. Oh yes, and there is a Christmas party tonight, to which I am bringing bread. Of course, I made the dough just now with Liesl, and... it's not doing what it's supposed to do. At all. Like, not by a long shot. It is both too dense and too crumbly. What is together lets nothing else in. What is not together refuses to connect. And will it rise? I am having serious doubts. 10:30 will tell.

I do not want to be valued for what I do and do not know or what I have and have not done any more than I want to be valued for what I do or do not look like, sound like, walk like, or any number of impressions which are, essentially, superficial to myself. What I have done is not always in my own power—I did not choose to live in the suburbs any more than I chose to live in the jungle. And though I chose Edinburgh and this course, I did so in more ignorance than preference. Though I chose my clothes, I did not choose the money in the pocketbook which limits or allows what I buy. Though I have chosen my dinner, I did not choose the selection of the market. I did not choose this skin, though I enjoy its privileges and suffer under its shame. Who then am I, and why should I be loved or hated or held or pushed away?

readings and class meetings are over till January. two weeks of writing papers, one, on narrative ending the other on subject and subjection... or subjectivity also, reserving accomodations unearthing quotations browsing in the German market fighting wind and rain eating porridge drinking tea burrowing in the library with literary criticism and Marxist theory I could not get this song imbedded in my blog, and so I am going to post the link below and let you listen to it on your own. It has been in my head for days, and I think it strangely expresses all that i ever want to say... http://profile.imeem.com/3VODl/music/2qlxTYKC/from_a_shell/ , at least, for now. (also reminds me of driving with foggy windows 'round wheaton, windshield wipers keeping time, jacket to the chin.)

And the hair is gone:

Tuesday, 1:45, hair appointment. It's coming off.

let me take your hand like a landmine and lead you to the edge of the void. let me drag you to the brink show you the black you think so distant. I will show you the dust-- we will wait for the stone to sound-- wait in the oubliette you know i can't create, and (strangely) hope. 241106

Somehow, Thanksgiving away from home always holds an extra and unusual sense of gratitude. Here I am in Scotland at Thanksgiving, miles away from family, miles away... from Thanksgiving. And yet, upon the table, six plates are piled with all the right things: turkey, sweet potatoes (yes! with marshmallows!), mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, yum, and even stuffing! The bread I baked was done just in time for everyone to leave without having tasted it. A shame that they did not get to share in its warm goodness (my own bad timing), and a pleasure that we of flat 5 are able to consume it all on our own. One cannot forget the homemade cranberry sauce, so amazing that I filched the recipe right out from Nick's back pocket, and the homemade cranberry and apple pie--also amazing. And yes, Sarah left the remaining pie in our kitchen. For us. To eat. In one light, this sounds like gluttony. I am rejoicing in the presence of excessive amounts of food. But it is not the mere taste, not ...

Oh my. It's been over a week since I've written anything, and that was not very interesting. So perhaps my life has been drab. Perhaps I have done little but read read read for the past two weeks. Who can blame me? That's what I'm here for, after all. I have done one lovely thing, though. Yesterday. I went to the Tea Room on the east end of the Royal Mile and had cream tea. (photo above, provided by www.edinburgh-royalmile.com) Heaven, your name is clotted cream. Next to ceilidh dancing, one of the favoriter things I've done in Scotland. Although I must admit a certain sense of self-consciousness, being there with an actual British person who apparently hails from the cream tea capital of England. And I should have been self-conscious. I earned such tension the moment I licked a spot of cream off my finger. Proper people don't do that! ah... but who can let such beauty go to waste? Another thing I have done: wandered for an hour or so in the National Museum of S...

Since the morning broke, we were afraid. It's pieces hit us slowly like glassdrops from the sky. I cried for you, then, and wished I could take your place under the evening as it fell. 041205

I am eager for the day when I will be settled enough to own a cat or a dog. That will be good.

Saturday afternoon--the sky is clear, but the wind is blustering. A siren passes; a Harley over at the dealership revs its engine. My head feels thick, and small wonder. I have been hit with a cold right across the face. This week has not been the most eventful. Just reading, reading, more reading. My reading list for this next week is as follows: Humphrey Clinker (by Tobias Smollett) V (by Thomas Pynchon) Lanark (by... whoever wrote Lanark) and another book which I don't know 'cause I haven't checked the syllabus in a while. And where's the syllabus? What have I done with it? As well as reading the above books (V, Lanark, and the last don't really have to be read till the week after, but they're long, so I need a head start), I need to compile my dissertation bibliography by which my advisor will be chosen. This will take some time. And I want to feel better so I can make cookies (I will not make them when I cannot taste them), and perhaps I will also make some...

...For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. —Foucault, Society Must be Defended , 7th January 1976, tr. David Macey

I am back a second time from the second wedding of the month. The travel was less eventful this time around, which is a blessing. I am more tired than before, and I feel that I have eaten more food. I have also come home to find that the three long lost boxes which my mother sent me two months ago have finally arrived. After long and tiresome journeying over the Atlantic by fishing boat, followed by a slight detour through a bit of the Sahara, a few nights in a Bedouin tent, and finally a backpacking trek across the Continent (perhaps even round about through Norway)... the boxes have arrived. Unless they came from the other direction. Perhaps it was a rickshaw through China, over the mountains of Tibet, etc. Regardless, they are here. Which means that I presently have at my disposal Herodotus' Histories, my Greek cookbook, and a smattering of Christmas reading material. Very exciting. As with my sister's wedding, I hesitate to summarize the wedding of Stuart and Nicole of whi...