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banished from an Eden of oscillation
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 08:46 amHmmm. Wayward brain, c'est moi. The last set of subject lines on this blog have referenced, from the bottom, Belle & Sebastian lyrics, heraldry humour, a weak and inexcusable pun, Crowded House lyrics, A. A. Milne, netspeak, Yoda, The Firm's "Star Trekking", and a quote from the Spike sexual-dysfunction scene in Buffy Season 4. Either I'm ridiculously well rounded or I have the attention span of a stunned herring.
In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.
The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.
However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:
In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.
The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.
However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:
The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot.Of course, he's China Miéville and therefore gets away with it, but any student who pulled that on me in an essay would acquire righteous quibbles in the margin in green pen, probably along the lines of "you're over-writing!", "somewhat prolix (look it up)", and "do you actually know what these words mean?" Also, probably, "aargh".
