A Single Layer

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?

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...