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the thin men stalk the streets
Tuesday, 5 February 2008 11:12 amGods dammit, I'm losing weight. I had to take in the waistbands of all my skirts a couple of weeks ago, and the wretched things are all down round my hips again. Clearly I need to package the combination of reg week, kitchen renovations and my gym routine, and sell it for millyuns as a diet plan. Either that, or I'm pining for the fjords. Taking suggestions as to which particular fjords.
I spent most of the weekend wrestling with Gaiman and Miéville, which is not quite as sexy as it sounds (although, given that at heart I'm an academic, it's still pretty darned sexy). Really, I'm an organic writer: I feel my way through an argument more or less intuitively, which might explain why I've driven a select array of argumentative ex-boyfriends nearly demented over the years. This paper has fought me desperately for several months, and only really started to take shape this weekend: the secret was to delete all the careful plans I'd hammered out, since they weren't working, and simply allow my thoughts to develop from paragraph to paragraph. As a result I am actually managing to synthesise my take on urban fantasy with a nice constellation of buzz-words, including metropolitanism, alienation, subaltern cultures, hybridity and quite possibly, if I can beat it into shape, Foucault's notion of heterotopia. I feel ... well, intellectually pretentious, actually. Also slightly smug, since what I'm really doing is shoehorning a discussion of fantastic/alternative Londons into a postcolonial journal. Go me. At this rate I may submit the paper only a week or so late.
Last Night I Dreamed: werewolf dreams! Family home in the country, occupied by a large family comprising five or six kids between the ages of 8 and 22; lots of dogs, cats, big garden. The unstable bachelor uncle, who was this sort of blonde James Marsters-style number with long hair and bad teeth, turned out to be the werewolf; he spent a lot of the dream rampaging round the house in hairy man-beast form, howling and trying to talk in slurred and thickened monosyllables severely hampered by fangs. I don't think he ever actually ate anyone, although one of the cats might have been bitten, but there was a great deal of barricading of frightened people in rooms and general, unlocalised menace. In the end he went to ground in the basement of a girls' residence and was offed by a janitor with a torch. I diagnose way too much X-Files.
I spent most of the weekend wrestling with Gaiman and Miéville, which is not quite as sexy as it sounds (although, given that at heart I'm an academic, it's still pretty darned sexy). Really, I'm an organic writer: I feel my way through an argument more or less intuitively, which might explain why I've driven a select array of argumentative ex-boyfriends nearly demented over the years. This paper has fought me desperately for several months, and only really started to take shape this weekend: the secret was to delete all the careful plans I'd hammered out, since they weren't working, and simply allow my thoughts to develop from paragraph to paragraph. As a result I am actually managing to synthesise my take on urban fantasy with a nice constellation of buzz-words, including metropolitanism, alienation, subaltern cultures, hybridity and quite possibly, if I can beat it into shape, Foucault's notion of heterotopia. I feel ... well, intellectually pretentious, actually. Also slightly smug, since what I'm really doing is shoehorning a discussion of fantastic/alternative Londons into a postcolonial journal. Go me. At this rate I may submit the paper only a week or so late.
Last Night I Dreamed: werewolf dreams! Family home in the country, occupied by a large family comprising five or six kids between the ages of 8 and 22; lots of dogs, cats, big garden. The unstable bachelor uncle, who was this sort of blonde James Marsters-style number with long hair and bad teeth, turned out to be the werewolf; he spent a lot of the dream rampaging round the house in hairy man-beast form, howling and trying to talk in slurred and thickened monosyllables severely hampered by fangs. I don't think he ever actually ate anyone, although one of the cats might have been bitten, but there was a great deal of barricading of frightened people in rooms and general, unlocalised menace. In the end he went to ground in the basement of a girls' residence and was offed by a janitor with a torch. I diagnose way too much X-Files.
