A Single Layer

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?

It has been a week since my sister hopped on her plane back to California, taking the sun and shine back with her, and yet I still have not provided an update of our time together. She has been much better than me, in fact, posting pictures and anecdotes on her photoblog of each day here. I don't think I will be as thorough, mainly because she is one of my two best blog-fans and I will be stealing all the pictures from her anyway. Unless the photograph is of my sister, it is taken by her - all credit unto her. Commentary to come: Satisfying eight months of pent-up desire to see a 'hairy coo', our tour bus made its first stop at the well-touristed home of Hamish the Highland Cow. And what a Cow he is. Check out the emo-hair. Could there be anything more spectacular? Take a moment to gaze before scrolling down. Keens on the lawn outside of Dunkeld Cathedral! This particular loch is named for Scotland due to its remarkable likeness to the shape of that great nation. and from t...

My sister will be here in an hour and a half, meaning that I will have lost half my blog readership. Well, lost internetly, but found somewhere around baggage claim. Speaking of which, I probably ought to begin the hike to Waverley. Look for a full update on her time here in a week. [Spoiler: We'll be making a three-day tour of the western half of Scotland, replete with tourbus and guide. Also a small taste of Festival, Fringe. And a crash course in Edinburgh, mostly on foot, led by yours truly.]

I had a dream last night that I was bicycling around a park with this 13 year old boy. The park was off Fred Waring Drive, just before or just after the wash - I can't remember exactly. I fell alot, and tried to explain to the boy that I hadn't been on a bike for more than a few seconds since I was thirteen. I kept using the hand-brake whenever I wanted to accelerate, as though confused with the ways of motorcycles. Strangely, no doubt because it was a dream, sometimes the hand-brake would help me accelerate. None of this tells you anything about my life, of course. Mostly because it's been the same old thing as it has been for the last two months: 1. get up at an embarassingly late hour; eat some amazing cereal and drink coffee in my room while checking email and... oh my goodness, i just discovered the weirdest blister on my toe. Gotta go figure out what to do with it... false alarm. It was one of Flatmate Jess's contacts stuck to my foot. No wonder the 'blister...

It occurred to me recently that I have been unduly silent for a very long time in the pages of this blog as to my whereabouts and goings-on. That is mainly because I have been busy both in working on my dissertation and in studiously doing nothing. As proof of this, I am posting a copy of my most recent dissertation outline below. It is relatively uninteresting, and I would suggest that you skim or skip it if you are not widely interested in the topic of the intentional composition of mythology, tradition, and classical epic. Even if you are interested in such things, the outline may be a bore. I provide it only to show that I am doing something significant while I neglect the lot of you - though I doubt it will be much consolation. I apologize if the format of the post is a bit funky. The process of cutting and pasting this thing has proved more difficult than a simple series of right-clicks. argument: Macpherson’s Ossianic narratives were composed in the midst of changing definitions...

Aight! here's the dealio. My sister's visiting in three and a half weeks, which is the joy of my life, the sun of my summer, and I gotta be prepared. So this is how it's goin' down. There's gonna be a rough draft of this dissertation in my advisor's inbox by the time Emily gets here, or else . . . something fierce. I'm lookin' forward to her coming - we're gonna hunt us a Haggis, get the low-down on the Nessie situation, and hit up some of the more widely frequented apparel shops over in New Town. Be prepared.

Rounding out my year of dwelling in the Athens of the North, as Edinburgh was called during the Enlightenment, I have experienced the shortest night of my memory. Around eleven o'clock last night, I closed the curtains to a sky streaked with the dark blue of a finally setting sun. I fully intended to drop off to sleep immediately after, but as I usually do, found myself still putting around after two in the morning. Between the curtains, which I had not closed as well as I should have, I noticed something unusual. There was unnaturally natural light streaming through. I opened them wide only to find the sky streaked with the same blue they had been filled with but three hours before. Had there been any night at all? If so, I had closed my curtains to it, only to find morning rising just as sleep found me - morning in the middle of the night. Long live Scotland.

Not much has been happening, which is good for the dissertation, but bad for the blog. Yesterday, I went into Glasgow with Linsday and Jess in order to take the latter to a performance of some orchestral Russian stuff. Rachmaninov headlined with his second piano concerto, and it was good to hear it live. Almost as fun as being able to bust out my tweed heels, which replaced the tennies in a Burger King ten minutes before the performance. Short-lived posh, since the concert hall is literally right across the street from the bus stop. We didn't have far to go once the music had stopped. Other than that, the days have mostly consisted of scribbling notes down at the NLS only to come home again and type them all into my laptop. Next week will be organizing and preliminary writing - so much excitement! and perhaps I will plan myself some sort of Trip to break up the monotony.

The Stoic sage is willing to give some "preferred" thing, e.g., health, freedom, or life, because he sees it genuinely as without value since only the whole order of events which, as it happens, includes its negation or loss, is of value. The Christian martyr, in giving up health, freedom, or life, doesn't declare them to be of no value. On the contrary, the act would lose its sense if they were not of great worth. To say that greater love hath no man than this, that a man give up his life for his friends, implies that life is a great good. The sentence would lose its point in reference to someone who renounced life from a sense of detachment; it presupposes he's giving up something. Central to the Judaeo-Christian notion of martyrdom is that one gives up a good in order to follow God. What God is engaged in is the hallowing of life. God first called Israel to be a "holy nation" (Exodus 19.6). But the hallowing of life is not antithetical to its fulness. On...

When the fog hangs over the city like an opiate, it takes more strength of will than I possess to crawl out of my room and walk the fifty minute distance to the National Library of Scotland. I will do it, not by strength of will, but strength of shame: I have been talking about the NLS for the last week and a half, and have only been there once. Oh, the work not getting done all because of a little fog! (Strangely, it puts me in the mood for Narnia. Possibly because of the desire for escape coupled with a yearning for childhood tales round a warm hearth with a cup of tea.... Perhaps it's about time to visit Oxford.)

If you are a tourist in Edinburgh, the first thing to do when walking into the Elephant House is to go to the back and peer out the window. Perhaps it is the distant view of the castle between the buildings. Perhaps it is the depth of the street below, so out of synch with the street at the front - high and low. Whatever the reason, that is the rule. Or so I observed yesterday afternoon as I sat with my Ossian essays, fancy ink pen, and notebooks so full of quotations that they have ceased to be useful. I finished my latte and glass of water rather quickly in comparison with the three hours that I occupied the small table, and as it passed six o'clock, I couldn't help feeling remarkably in the way. Plenty of tourists were hoping for seats and unable to find them, and there I was without a bit of food or drink on the table. I took heart - the poet in the corner was still seated there with his laptops and Truman Capote, and he had been sitting there long before I arrived. Thought...

Two days back from Prague, and I am still not sure how to summarize the trip. A few exerpts from my journal, then, interspersed with explanations and such: (what you can't tell is that a vast and lovely night view of the city is stretched out behind us.) 18-05-07 the Amsterdam Airport, a layover I just finished an apple and almond tart which I shared with a beautiful sparrow - or some such bird - that seems to have made it his home in here. It did occur to me that it might not be wise to encourage dependent habits in the bird, but the thought came to me that it is my duty, or at least my role, as a daughter of Eve to give to those creatures of the wild as they have need. The bird was not unusually plump, and I did not give it more than two pinches of tart flakes. So I don't think it is any more spoiled from me than it would be from scavenging empty trays in the food court. When I arrived at the hostel, 'The Boathouse,' Courtney was waiting for me on the lawn next to the...

A quick update before I go on my way . . . 1. After about eight months of ridiculous inconvenience, I have finally purchased a belt. I'm pretty sure this is the first belt I've ever bought in my life, though it's only the second or third that I've owned. I've been wearing it for a grand total of ten minutes, and already I feel better. Note to self: do not purchase brand new jeans immediately before making radical changes in physical lifestyle (i.e. walking alot). 2. I got my hair cut again by a lovely professional named Lisa. She's a senior stylist at Mosco, but since I booked with a junior stylist who fell ill, I got the better experience for half the price. It looks more or less like it did last November, so there's no need to upload fashion photos or anything. Besides, there will be pictures enough when I return from my trip to . . . 3. Prague! On my way there sometime tomorrow morning. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision to go, but I'm glad ...

Here's a sampling of what I'm writing dissertation-wise: The clothing of socio-political concerns in a mythic narrative, or any narrative for that matter, is hardly the sole habit of the Enlightenment. Even Macpherson himself, in the dissertation with which he introduces the 1762 publication of Fingal , writes: ‘This is the true source of that divine inspiration, to which the poets of all ages pretended. When they found their themes inadequate to the warmth of their imaginations, they varnished them over with fables, supplied by their own fancy, or furnished by absurd traditions’ (xi). Whether Macpherson is subtly identifying Ossian’s own heroic tales as fables or accidentally giving us a hint towards his own manipulation of the epics might be too presumptuous to assume. Regardless of the specific applicability of the statement, the assertion remains – fables, myths, and all tales of more imaginative than realistic content serve the purpose of embodying those ideals which in p...

In case anyone wonders what I do every day here in Scotland, I swiped some photos from friends off of facebook to illustrate: Standing over the oven... Baking somewhat crazily... (the saucepan on the left serves as a mixing bowl, and yes, I am cracking the egg into a wine glass. you learn to be creative when resources are few.) Possibly one of the most attractive meals I've ever made, this could not have been completed without Courtney knowing just when the salmon and asparagus were done. And oooh, wasn't it tasty. That's a butter sauce with lemon, basil, red onions and garlic, topped with reduced balsamic vinegar and diced tomato. A variation on the scallops with kataifi served at our Greek dinner a year ago. I know, I know - that's a different outfit. And a different dessert, too. This strawberry shortcake (half a teaspoon more salt than there should have been, and not enough strawberries by half) was the featured dessert for my birthday, now weeks past. But since the...

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?

Yesterday we went to the Isle of May where dwell the puffins and enough lighthouses to satisfy even my eagerness for those beacons of safety, those harbingers of harbour. Here are some photos: View from the bus on the way there. These yellow fields are everywhere, filling the heart with the joy that only a field of yellow can give. The May Princess, our unweildy ferry. You'd think a ride in this thing would be enough to turn the stomach - but the worse for my insides was the work of award-winning fish and chips consumed on the rocky Stagecoach back to the city. Twenty-four hours later, I still have the bucket by my bed just in case. The Isle of May - one of the only semi-level photos I have of it from the view of the ferry. This photo was taken by flatmate Lindsay, who has offered her camera countless times to the service of my pictoral memory. I believe what you see in the distance is the south-end lighthouse perched atop the forbidden segment of island upon which the seabirds are...