The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Despite hearing wonderful things about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from various British bloggers, I blithely assumed that as a Contemporary Novel it was not for me. But loot, only to have my mother-in-law stare bemusedly at The Parson's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim (in Virago reprint, of course) and say, "by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden? That's a real book, then? I thought they just made it up to put the Nazis off the trail -- in the book I just read, I mean, the one I was telling you about yesterday..."

I assured her it was in fact a real book, and one that I thought she'd really like, and then when I got back home again I immediately requested the Guernsey etc. from the library -- and when it came I read it all in one long sitting, something I hardly ever do these days. It may be a contemporary novel but it has all the things I usually find in older fiction, most importantly people who actually behave like human beings as I know them, rather than the tortured souls which seem to inhabit so many books nowadays... but that rant must wait for another time.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (mostly written by Mary Anne Shaffer, and then finished by her niece Annie Barrows after Shaffer's untimely death) is an epistolary novel, set in 1946 Britain. The central character is Juliet Ashton, a successful writer of non-fiction who is rather taken aback by her own success, a book-lover who feels herself a little outside of the world she's been so good at writing about. While coping with her daily life she receives a letter from a Guernsey farmer who has a book of Juliet's -- not, that is to say, a book by her, but rather a Charles Lamb book with her name & address in it that he picked up used. There are no bookshops on Guernsey since the Occupation, he writes, so he's imposing on her by letter to ask if there are more books by Lamb, and if so where he might get them.

This is one of those set-ups for a novel that is so palpably artificial that it ought not to work, and yet at the same time it is exactly the sort of thing that I (and many of my friends) might do, should the Internet disappear from the earth and our only way of finding out about books be to write random strangers. So artificial, yes, and yet I believed it -- and that's a fine summary of the rest of the novel. I could see what was coming in terms of the relationships, the revelations, the developments of intimacy, and I had the nagging knowledge that it was all too predictable, but at the same time it came together in ways that I not only understood but desired, which made it a very satisfying read all the way through.

(This is the point at which My Friend Carl would ask, "So was it a phatic novel?" and I would think about it and say that while it wasn't a content-free book, it certainly reinforced some of my own beliefs about people and literature and friendship.)

What I loved most about this novel, though, was its celebration of reading as an activity which is simultaneously intensely individual and yet capable of creating communities. The readers in the book read different texts for very different reasons, and their relationships to their readings are very personal, but in coming together to share what they've found they become deeply involved in one another's lives. Rather than developing friendships through a similarity of tastes, they find it in their willingness to listen and respond to each other's literary passions. Not that Shaffer envisions this as a simple process; I think it's key that this fictional literary society is created from the stresses of living in an occupied territory during WW2. It's only under such an enormous burden of silence and suffering can these people are willing to dive into books in the first place, much less come together to speak their authentic experience of literature.

I strongly suspect this book will be one of my comfort reads for years to come.

currently reading: Schama, Arlen, Phillips

I suspect the baby has been growing by leaps and bounds the last ten days, because I've been too tired to do anything except for read, watch the swimming competitions in Rome, and sleep. In a way this has been peaceful, even satisfying, but I was very glad to wake up this morning with a lot more energy, as my list of things to do pre-baby (which includes items both necessary and fun) has been nudging at me.

So today -- a few book posts (one hopes), some dishes (one promises, as one's husband has been patiently doing them but with the workload that is about to hit him at his paid job it really is time to take back over), and almost certainly some more reading. Right now I'm working on:

• Simon Schama: A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500 B.C.-1603 A.D -- Yes, sometimes I do read books written recently! I stumbled across this at the library & picked it up because years and years ago an editor who I respect mentioned how much he loved Schama's Landscape and Memory (which, being me, I own and haven't read). Anyway, I finally started this and I am loving it; I know a great deal of the history already, but Schama's voice is incredibly engaging and funny and occasionally provocative, and the full-colour illustrations are not only beautiful but very well-chosen. I may have to ask for this as a birthday or Christmas present...
  
• David Graham Phillips: The Great God Success -- one of the unknown-to-me early 20th century authors I discovered by reading the advertisements in the back of May Sinclair's Superseded. I am so very glad I picked this up, because I'm really enjoying it, even though I think it's going to end badly for the main characters.
  
• Michael Arlen: The Green Hat -- I've been meaning to read this absolutely forever, as innumerable other books from the 20s mention it, but it's taken me forever to pick it up. I was expecting it to be a quick, light read, but instead I'm finding myself wanting to linger over certain scenes; Arlen is very good at the little moments which develop relationships between two characters, and those are the moments I like to daydream on before continuing.
  

Time for ablutions and physical fortification involving apples and multi-grain toast with Boursin, and then I will try my best to write proper posts for the books I've finished in the last few weeks.

BBC proms & current reading

I am delighted that it is Proms season once more, and that I realised it this time right before it started, so that I have been able to listen to some of the broadcasts on the BBC website. I don't really understand instrumental music -- I often can't even recognise repeated themes, much less hear the differences in various interpretations of a piece -- but I enjoy listening to it, and keep hoping that with enough exposure my brain may eventually develop the proper neural pathways for real appreciation. Thanks to my husband (who grew up in a very musical family) I'm at least able to tell if I'm not enjoying something, which is a start!

Vocal music, fortunately, is another story, and thus I'm currently listening to last Saturday's performance of Haydn's Creation oratorio and loving every moment of it. What a gorgeous, gorgeous piece; I must get my own copy.

I finished quite a few books this week -- more on that in my next post -- and am still slogging through the Sinclair. Every time I think I'm going to give up on it in frustration I hit a chapter that I really enjoy, only to bog down again 10 or 15 pages later due to the exceptional unpleasantness of the heroine. The library will want it back soon, though, so I'd best get through it this weekend! There are entrancing books on the English Civil War awaiting me, as well as those aforementioned novels by unknown (to me) early 20th century authors. New authors are always so tantalising...

currently reading: still more Bagnold & Sinclair!

I'm still working on the Davidson, which is interesting and dense and going to take a while. Meanwhile, I'm reading...

• Enid Bagnold: A Diary Without Dates -- I've been meaning to read this forever, and I finally picked it up. I don't plan to go on a huge Bagnold spree, this will be the last for a while, but oh it's interesting. There are some tonal similarities to The Happy Foreigner, but it's definitely it's own thing. Non-fiction.
  
  
• May Sinclair: The Helpmate -- Sinclair always seems to write with such a didactic agenda, and this novel is so far no exception. Just what is the agenda here, though? Something about true spirituality, true companionship, versus the workings of the ego and the sort of pride that makes a person judge others. I know from her WWI work (this is earlier, from 1907) that she was very into Freud and psycho-analytic thought... I wonder just when that happened? Yet another call for a biography, as all I really know about her real life is that Charlotte Mew was fonder of her than she was comfortable with.
  

A huge stack of novels are on my horizon, mostly by authors I've never heard of before, but the Sinclair is slowing me down!

Bagnold, Sinclair, and a Dorothy Whipple surprise

Lying in front of the fan on Tuesday afternoon I tore through both the Bagnold and Sinclair I mentioned in my earlier post, as well as a novel by Dorothy Whipple that was just too appealing to ignore.

May Sinclair's Superseded was a very short book (ah, shades of the Provincial Lady), taking a rather pessimistic view of the "Woman Question." Superseded suggests that most women will be destroyed by competition in a labour market, and that education merely unfits them for experiencing the emotional side of life as wives and mothers. As it was published with another short novel in a volume titled Two Sides of the Question I can only assume that the other half of the novel gave the other half of the argument.

The focus of the book is Miss Juliana Quincey, an "old maid" teacher at a school for girls. At forty-five Miss Quincey's emotions have never been truly engaged, and she expects little from her thankless students, her fault-finding aunt, and her critical peers. The Head of the school would love to replace Miss Quincey with someone younger and more intelligent, which poses some of the tension in the book, but the real conflict comes as she encounters for the first time both a man and a woman who treat her with kindness and respect. Her stifled emotions blossom into attachment to each of them, but the environment she's in is unforgiving of emotional development in a woman of forty-five. It's a painful book, probably all too realistic for its time, and made me grateful to be living in urban Northern California where a woman is never too old to discover herself.

Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner was an entirely different experience, and to be honest I'm not really sure what to make of it. The prose is beautifully vague... perhaps impressionistic is the right word? Despite the novel being entirely from the perspective of Fanny, the young Englishwoman who goes to France to drive for the French Army immediately after the first World War, I never really understood who Fanny was. Bagnold details Fanny's immediate emotional reactions to events, but never describes her past or her hope for the future, which gives the novel a very dream-like sense to it. I see the art in that, the way that a woman after the war might feel like all she had was the present, both past and future irrelevant, but it meant that I was never able to connect with Fanny emotionally, and thus I didn't really care what happened to her.

Now that I think about it, the title is even more appropriate than I realised; Fanny really is the happy foreigner, the woman whose past does not haunt her, whose future does not trouble her, who can visit a devastated, desolate France and then leave again, seemingly untouched by the experience. How much of that was Bagnold's own self, and how much a wish for integrity so complete that she is completely unscathed by the war? Perhaps I should find a biography of Bagnold...

My final Tuesday novel was High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and oh it was a pleasant surprise. I rarely find a book I can just sink into without my terrible page-counting habit interfering, but this was one. The heroine, Jane, makes her way in the world through determination and intelligence, discovers her avocation in selling clothing, and manages to make a vocation of it. She is shown as paying for her success, both through hard work and difficult personal relationships, but the overall tone of the novel is so optimisitc that I never doubted for a moment that Jane would make it through. Objectively speaking the novel has plenty of painful and depressing moments, but I still finished the book feeling pleased with the world and convinced that Jane would be all right. This is the fourth of Whipple's novels I've read, and they've neatly divided up into two which were heart-rending (Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr. Knight), and two which left me happy -- this one and The Priory. It makes me nervous to read a fifth, since my all rights it ought to be another upsetting one!

self-indulgence, Du Maurier, Goudge

As anticipated, a Wednesday filled with appointments does not leave much energy or clarity for writing. But things got done, and it's hard to complain about that!

Today I am going out with my wonderful friend Carl, whose conversation is always so stimulating that I end the day with a much expanded TBR list, not to mention piles of ideas for writing. After lunch I plan to do the Very Important Errand of taking a bag of books rejected by the first-line bookstore to the second-line bookstore in the hopes that they will keep them, and incidentally checking their shelves for books by Elizabeth Goudge and Daphne du Maurier that I don't already have. I am perhaps being foolish to collect such piles of both of these authors without really knowing what I'm getting into, but so many people with tastes similar to mine like du Maurier -- and I did adore Rebecca back when I was 15 (and have been meaning to reread it since) -- so I'm indulging in the fun of collecting. With Goudge it's a somewhat different story; I loved Linnets and Valerians but found The Valley of Song too twee -- and had no idea that she wrote for adults -- so when I stumbled across some of her adult novels visiting my in-laws in San Diego I had to scoop them up, and now even without having read them (yet) I really want more.

Tueday turned out to be a marvelous reading day in which I tore through a three novels, but that will have to wait until later, or else I shan't be ready when Carl comes to pick me up!

reading right now: bagnold, davidson, sinclair

I am always reading four or five books at once, usually a mix of non-fiction that's going slowly and poetry or drama that's going really slowly, and fiction that's going quickly... although sometimes the fiction slows to a crawl and the non-fiction is brisk.

Right now the books are:

• Enid Bagnold: The Happy Foreigner, my own copy in its 1987 Virago Modern Classics edition. It can be hard to find Virago books in the US, so I was delighted to come across this at a used bookstore. It's about an English female driver for the French army right after WWI, based on Bagnold's own experiences, and is so far a mix of fascinating and frustrating; I love the content, but the style is often so vague that I feel like I'm not quite understanding the book. But I'm only about 1/3 through, so this may improve over time.
  
  
• James Davidson: Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, which E. loaned me at least a year or two ago but I'm only just getting around to. I'm only 10 pages in, but so far it's a fascinating look at the Athenian preoccupation with sensual pleasures. I tend to forget that the ancient Greeks were breathing people, not just Victorian images of white marble, but I think this book is going to go a long way towards correcting that.
  
  
• May Sinclair: Superseded. From 1906 and thus requested from the library, this is one of her earlier novels, about a minimally competent middle-aged teacher at a girl's school who is, as the titled indicates, superseded by the younger, smarter, more competent generation of women who have had better education and more encouragement to develop their intellects. I'm not sure I'm going to like this, but it's pretty short so I see no harm in finding out!
  

Both Sinclair and Bagnold are authors I learned about from some combination of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, two books I have read over & over again for their insight into a sort of fiction I discovered by accident & now adore. But my stumbling across women's middlebrow fiction and/or interwar fiction is, I think, a tale for a later post.

brief biographical update

I am such an explainy person. It's impossible to launch into writing about what I am doing without writing about who I am right now; it just feels far too rude. Not when other people do it, mind... when other people do it I enjoy the puzzle of piecing together the biography from the books and knitting and opera and food and pictures of lovely scenery. But it feels very uncomfortable to do it that way myself.

So as I said back in April, I'm pregnant; the baby is due in October, and we have mostly certainly reached the phase in which I can feel her kicking! She kicks a lot, and I am already besotted with her, and am just keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes well in the future. I have no reason to think it won't, mind; I'm having an astonishingly normal pregnancy, especially compared to many of my dear friends who had rough times all through. But still, there's always that knowledge that something could go awry between now & October, or during the delivery itself, and so I cross my fingers and mentally write Deo Volente after everything, which I think I picked up from an E. M. Delafield novel, but that's how I feel about it.

Also back in April we (me, husband, two adored cats) moved into a new rental home, and I am still dizzy with delight over it. After years of apartment living it's wonderful having a little bit of garden in front, which garden is currently growing many vegetables, thanks to husband's hard work, and also some agapanthus and two kinds of lavender and lanteria and two lemon bushes, thanks to previous tenants or maybe the landlords. And yes, lemon bushes, they are trees growing right up against the front of the house that have been pruned so they don't get too tall, and they have been producing massive amounts of lemons every since we moved in. It's also wonderful being in a neighbourhood that's exclusively residential, so I see people walking dogs and strolling with children and am occasionally visited by a neighbourhood cat. Inside there's more space, more closets, nicer smells coming in through the windows, and it stays cooler in summer, although my pregnant bulk is more than making up for that. All in all this is a wonderful home, and I hope we can stay here until we finally buy a place somewhere and settle down for the truly long term.

So there, now I've set the scene properly, and can actually write about books in the two or three hours before it gets so warm outside I have to turn off the computer!

at least my fickleness entertains me

Once upon a very long time ago, in the mid-90s, I kept an online journal that I wrote in almost every day, certainly many times a week, and found great joy in doing so. Now, despite my best intentions, I forget that this blog even exists for months on end! I blame my lack of a corporate 9-to-5 (or as it actually was, about 10ish until 7ish) job; when I was chained to my desk all day every day I ended up writing in online fora as a break from doing the work I was supposed to be doing. But when I was in school I was too busy turning out masses of academic writing to blog (except for those occasional moments when I had so many papers to write I was irresistably tempted to write here instead...), and now that I am a full-time homemaker it hardly ever occurs to me to put my thoughts down, and often when it does I am busily trying to fall asleep, or chatting with my husband, or otherwise doing things which preclude putting intention into action.

Reading lovely lovely book blogs from a year ago, though (which I can do because bloglines has been patiently archiving posts for me all this time) -- that really makes me want to write, especially about my reading. I'm sure tomorrow I'll forget all about this again, or be too tired, or too hot, or too busy running errands (tomorrow is going to be a terrible day for appointments) -- but right now I feel like writing, and so here I am.

changes afoot

Oh, my, how things have changed. Good changes, all of them, but my head is spinning from the differences I keep finding, and the differences still to come.

First of all, I am gestating, which is my slightly uncomfortable way of saying that I'm pregnant with my first child. Even though I've known that I wanted children since I was about 13, and even though I've spent the last few years intensely physically longing to have a child, I find myself often terrified by the fact that in October I am going to be responsible for another human being. I'm also not enjoying the physical experience of pregnancy; none of my symptoms are unusual or noteworthy or (thank goodness) dangerous, but I'd somehow thought I'd like being pregnant, and (so far, at least) I really don't.

It'll be nice when I get to the part where I can feel the baby move and perhaps start to realise more than intellectually that there's going to be a payoff at the end of all of this.

Secondly... will have to wait for tomorrow, as dishes and laundry and exhaustion have caught up with me.

E. M. Delafield: Zella Sees Herself

It was only last autumn, towards the end of my penultimate semester of university, that I suddenly realised that I could use the library's free inter-library loan to hunt down all of the E. M. Delafield novels that can't be found in my library system -- which is most of them, as despite a lovely regional network of libraries that stretches from Nevada to the depths of Southern California, we only have a very few titles which aren't modern reprints. Aside from her justly beloved Provincial Lady books, Delafield wrote 25 other novels, plus 3 volumes of short stories and at least one play. I have made it my quest to finish all of her out of print work before I lose library access (which fortunately doesn't happen until the end of August), and have been happily reading my way through the novels chronologically, skipping the ones which are in print or otherwise locally available with the intention of going back to them later, after my ILL access ends.

Most of Delafield's early novels are studies in egotism; she's fascinated with the generation of egotistical authority figures who came of age in the 1890s and raised the children who suffered during WWI. Her novels study both how such tyrannically selfish adults came to exist, and the ways in which their absolute confidence in their own (usually mistaken) judgement leads them to create traumatised children who often replicate the damage in their own post-war families. Because of this, I find a lot of her novels uncomfortable to read; I like neither being inside the head of an egotist as they destroy others, nor being inside the head of an indvidual whose sense of identity is being hammered at, and Delafield excels at doing both.

Her first novel, published in 1917, is Zella Sees Herself. Along with the egotism strands, it also touches on another of her themes; the way in which girls raised by late Victorian & Edwardian standards end up unable to find happiness as adults. Zella is in a particularly bad way; when her mother dies she finds herself pulled between her conventionally sentimental aunt, who insists that Zella must display an appropriate set of reactions, and her authentically emotional father who bursts into rage at any sign of insincerity. Zella, already dreamy and given to dramatising her experience rather than simply feeling it, ends up unable to tell the difference between her true emotions and the sentiments she's expected to perform due to her class and gender. She makes bad decision after bad decision, basing her choices on brief emotional surges which she takes for the reality of her heart, and only narrowly avoids a number of personal catastrophes. She's contrasted with a number of characters; her father's devoutly Catholic French relatives, students at a convent school, a painfully affected young Spiritualist, and most directly with her cousin Muriel (who has internalised the conventions of her sentimental mother to the point that she has no thoughts of her own), and her intellectually ruthless cousin James, the only person in her life willing to speak the truth. It's an engaging book, but a painful one, because Zella's struggles are simultaneously so heartbreaking and so infuriating; I wanted to shake her and console her in equal measure. The ending leaves quite a bit of room for hope, which made me grateful; I think the book would have been too unpleasant otherwise.

interwar novelists everywhere!

I have sorted out the theoretical framework of my paper as much as it's likely to ever be sorted out, and I've started my analysis of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, so now I really ought to go to bed. In spite of the tantalising world of book blogs I've been browsing through all afternoon, with their challenges and... well, mostly the challenges; I love making lists and I love making plans and I already have my own set of reading scheduled for this summer -- I'm going to do author studies of speculative fiction authors I used to be fond of & see how they hold up with my new critical appartuses (apparati?) and hopefully fall in love with the genre again. And I'm going to do some structured non-fiction reading about subjects that I'm interested, and I'm going to schedule both of these things so that during any two-week period I know what I'm reading, because otherwise I will be overwhelmed by all the possibilities and spend the summer unfocused and dismayed. So that is my plan, and I should probably avoid taking on any of the challenges I've come across and just enjoy the fact that there are other people out there in the world who, like me, feel the desire to structure & organise their reading, preferably as part of a community.

Also, I am excited to find that there are other human beings out there who overlap with my taste in books! I mean, I knew there had to be, or otherwise Virago & Persephone wouldn't exist, but it's still amazing to come across a post like this one by Danielle at A Work in Progress in which she lists not only one of my all-time favourite novels (The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, which I did my first reread of during my trip to London last autumn), but also some of the critical work I've spent the last few years obsessing over. And that obsession was to good result, as I managed my best paper for my Women in 20th Century Literature class last semester by drawing on Humble to analyse a particular scene in Orlando.

But I digress... which is the point, actually; I'm excited and enthused and wanting to write about my own reading, which is as it should be. I long to tell you, gentle reader, about my love for E. M. Delafield and Stella Gibbons, my enormous pile of unread Rosamund Lehmann, my problematic relationship to Noel Streatfeild, and my surprised adoration for Jane Duncan. Plus there is much to be said about the Victorians; I'm sure that once I'm done with this paper I'll start thinking nice things about Braddon again.

But now, to bed.

only one paper remains

A marvelous (as always) lunch today with Susan, in which we wandered aimlessly up & down Castro until I discovered that the restaurant which has been remodelling for a while is now open, and that my predictions were right -- dim sum! (I don't know how I could tell, but it just looked like a dim sum place from the outside while they were getting it in order.) So we had a very nice dim sum lunch, with mostly excellent food (the slippery noodles were a little bland, and the sticky rice ditto, but the taro balls and the shrimp dumplings were great, and they had mushrooms stuffed with shrimp in a black bean sauce that was phenomenal) and good conversation, and finished up afterwards at our usual coffee shop downtown. All of these places had air conditioning, which is a blessing, since it is once again Far Too Hot. I've retreated to the back room with the fan and the closed blinds and ice water, but since it didn't get cool enough during the night for my apartment to dump all of its excess heat, things are considerably worse than yesterday.

In spite of this, I've finished my Chinese history paper -- it's 2 pages too long, but I'm not going to spend the time editing it down, as it will certainly be sufficient in its current condition to get a good great. Now I must gather together all the books for my last paper and pile them up near my computer and start the terrifying process of doing my literary analysis and plugging it into the cultural-historical framework I constructed earlier in the month. And all while resisting the pile of Noel Streatfeild novels that inter-library loan has been acquiring for me...

too hot for cats

Today has been a day of record-breaking heat, which means that my apartment has been transformed into an oven. I've spent the day cocooned in the back bedroom, sitting in front of the computer with a fan (for me) and an ice pack (for the older of my two cats, who doesn't handle extreme heat well) trying to put an end to my history paper so that I can pour the rest of my free time into my study of sensation novels. For most of the day things went relatively well, but my apartment holds heat in irriating ways, so now that it's finally cooled off outside things inside have reached a peak of stuffy warm doom. I have fans blowing cool air in, but my body and brain are both complaining about how warm it is, which makes it hard to focus on the paper.

I did have lovely bacon & tomato sandwiches for dinner though, with gammon bacon, which my husband brought home because the butcher was so enthuasistic about it. It seems to be bacon made from leg instead of belly, and cured using more spices than typical American bacon, and is quite tasty on sandwiches, although I think regular slab bacon will still be my choice for wrapping around dates. Clearly I should do a test run of bacon-wrapped dates with all the different types of bacon I have access to? Yes, but later, when I have finished my papers and gotten through graduation and it is less hot.

Fortunately for my brain and my kitties, it's supposed to cool off marginally tomorrow. Every little bit helps.

my inclusive nature manifests itself

I have been browsing book blogs (while I should be writing my paper, yes, I know, but I can't write constantly or my brain turns into something rather gloopy) and thinking about what I'm going to do with this space starting right now because if I plan and then wait until I have free time I'm much less likely to get around to it.

I don't think it will ever suit to me to write the beautifully crafted sort of blog in which I carefully present certain aspects of my life and leave all the rest out. Not to say that I don't edit -- I do, of course -- and not to say that such blogs are problematic, because I think they're they gorgeous. But I don't tend to know what I want to do with a thing until I think out loud about it, and if I were going to make a life-as-art sort of blog I would need to decide how to do it in some other space -- hide the process away as it were -- and simply present the finished results here. And that's just... not me.

So this is the post in which I muse about how I am going to start using this space, and then (one hopes) the next post is the one in which I start using the space in that way. But the musing must happen first, and it must happen visibly or somehow I am not satisfied.

What, then, do I want to do? I seem to have two goals:
1. Post close to every day; probably 4 out of 7, since it's hard to write coherently on the weekends, and I usually need one day a week to precolate.

2. Write about what I've been doing as well as what I've been thinking; I lean towards the latter to an almost absurd extent. Thus, book reviews (probably not super-formal ones), reports on knitting, cooking, & baking (maybe with pictures), Shakespearean picnics, library trips, lunch with Susan and so forth.

Thus, this is not going to be an X blog (X being 'books' or 'knitting' or whatever). In a way I regret that decision; I really enjoy reading blogs that focus on a single interesting aspect of the world -- but again, it's just not my style. I am more of an inclusive person than an exclusive one, the sort of woman who will often order three beverages at a restaurant because I want to try everything that looks interesting. (Which reminds me of a very happy memory: on the morning of my wedding I said Very Seriously to the site coordinator, "Could I have water and coffee with cream and orange juice?" and he oh so kindly and smilingly said, "Yes, of course," and I was presented with all three, which seemed in the moment to be a sure sign that everything would be perfect. Which it was!). So while I admire the sort of blog which digs really deep into one topic -- and while I suspect that my blog might be more interesting to readers if it only looked at one or two things -- once again, it's just not who I am.

I seem to know myself better and better each year, after my first few decades of learned obliviousness. How strange and delightful, knowing who I am.

guess what time of the semester it is?

If, Gentle Reader, you have guessed that it is the time of the semester in which I frantically write papers, you are quite correct, and should treat yourself to a nice cup of tea as a reward.

This semester, however, is different from others, because:

a. I have only two papers to finish, as my biology class & my literature survey class got theirs out of the way early. (However, they have in-class finals, so I cannot simply forget about them as I am longing to do.)

b. Of my two papers, one is a history paper, which means a lot of research but little original thought, since I don't know how to do original historical thought, not being a history major. The other paper, however, is a frightening many-tentacled monster; a 15-pg in-depth analysis of the representation of patriarchy in a trio of sensation novels, backed up by quite a bit of research. I am simultaneously impressed by the work I've done so far and aware that I could do so much more and better work if only I was, say, writing a thesis instead of a final undergraduate paper. Which is a strange place to be, because I both want to be done done done with this semester, and am sad that I'm running out of time to make this piece of work as perfect as possible. To be honest, though, the need to be done is winning out handily.

This semester is also different because 'done' now has a different meaning; when I turn in my two papers and take my two final exams, I will be done with my undergraduate career, and will be the proud recipient of a BA in English Literature.

And then? Well, my parents are visiting for the graduation ceremony, and my in-laws also, and after they leave I have a fundraiser to work at, and then my dear friend Susan is throwing me a graduation party. But after all of that, time stretches out before me in which to develop home-making skills, volunteer at the local library, investigate graduate school options (an epic undertaking in itself) and do a lot of writing for my own pleasure rather than for grades. I am ready and eager to start reinventing my daily life all over again.

But first the papers -- and that is why I am really, truly ready to be done, hand-in-hand with a sort of wistful knowledge that, as always, my papers would be Even Better if I only had more time.

Done!

Hah! Done at last! Nothing remains but to print out the papers at the computer lab tomorrow morning & hand them over to their respective professors.

I'm going to bed, but really, it's too fantastic of a moment not to celebrate!

daydreaming of the weekend

As I continue to wrestle with the Jane Austen paper (three more paragraphs, I think, and then a good editing pass in the lab between classes tonight), I am relieving tension by daydreaming in spare moments about what I'm going to do with this, my first 100% paper-free weekend since the September trip to London.

There are, of course, some obvious necessities; I need to catch up on all the reading I should be doing right now, as well as accomplish the reading for the following week. I should, perhaps, do some laundry, as my kiss and a promise loads every Friday are not really making a substantial dent in the pile -- and as my husband & I are leaving for Orycon in Portland on Friday week, it would behoove me to have created a lot of clean clothing before then.

But that's all the necesities, and daydreaming about those is rather counter-productive. The real question is: what shall I do to enjoy myself? I am considering a wide variety of options; for instance, I could bake cookies (peanut butter, perhaps, or buttermilk, or chocolate chip, or something unexpected out of the nifty reprint of a 1960s Betty Crocker cookbook my mother-in-law bought me a few years back). Or take a trip to dim sum with friends on Saturday morning -- certainly luxurious, but perhaps not as satisfying to my lingering creative itch. Or I could finally get down to business with my baby blanket and weave in the ends so that it can be put through a washing machine and blocked if necessary and photographed for Ravelry and then finally handed off to the baby of choice before he graduates to toddling.

Or all three! The glory of daydreaming is that it doesn't have to take into account the limitations of time and energy, the need to run to the grocery for buttermilk, the fact of my husband being out very late Friday night (with the possible resultant difficulties in arranging dim sum the next morning), nor the time committment we already have on Sunday evening.

I am very fond of daydreaming, but alas, duty calls -- I must drive to campus and attend classes and finish up this paper in the spaces between.

the other half of the paper-writing picture

When describing in my last post how papers fill up the vast majority of my time, I concentrated on my writing process to the exclusion of the vital other half of the formula: reading the assigned texts in the first place! Which I do, always; I'm not the sort of person who could write a paper about something from online summaries or a quick skim of the opening and closing chapters. (Whether or not I read the texts I don't have to write upon is a different story entirely, of course, depending greatly on whether or not they seem interesting. Usually they do, since I'm picky about my classes.)

So what have I read recently? Mansfield Park for my Austen class, which class is to my joy going in chronological order. It's one of the two Austen novels I hadn't read any of before (the other being Emma, which I'm slogging through now), and I was absolutely delighted with it. Fanny and Edmund, Mary and Henry, the terrible Maria and even worse Mrs. Norris... I should really like to see a crisp, clear movie of it, without all the political implications spelled out for modern audiences. Just people in old-fashioned clothes speaking meaningfully to one another, letting the beautiful weight of the story propel itself forward. I wonder if the 1983 BBC version is at all satisfying? It looks like my local library has a DVD re-release of it...

For my women in 20th century literature class I just read Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which was also a delight and a treasure -- so much so that I'm planning to write my long paper on it, although I'm a little afraid that I'll end up sick of the book in the process. But how can one end up sick of "a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds"? I think the real danger is that I'll dive into the beauty of the language and never remember to come up for air. As it turns out, the professor for my Austen class is teaching Woolf next semester, and I'm going to take it, unless his reaction to this midterm I'm even now working on demonstrates him to have unbearable grading twitches.

My counselling class, bless its practical little heart, has no required reading, so next we turn to Shakespeare, in which I have recently read "Measure for Measure" and am about (tomorrow) to read "Othello." While I'm sure the latter has some merits I have not discovered through reading ample criticism of it, I doubt it can compare to the utter strangeness of the former, in which after many manipulations on the part of various characters everyone's punished for their flaws by... being forced into marriage. I see why those who like to categorise things call it a problem play; I found it pretty fascinating.

Finally we come to Literature and Psychology, in which the last few texts have been movies, so there hasn't been any reading for me to do. (We shall leave aside, for the moment, whether or not I actually watched said movies.) The lack of books is about to change, however, with a Henry James short story and a Ralph Ellision essay both on the table for this Thursday. Unfortunately, what with the two papers due Thursday morning, I'm not going to have a chance to start on these until Thursday afternoon. I anticipate some hours of quick reading over Chinese food (mmm, eggplant and brown rice) in the student union.

Other books on the horizon (aside from the aforementioned Austen) include The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, plays by Terence McNally and Caryl Churchill, a piece by Gertrude Stein that I may just pretend isn't on the agenda, and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Not to mention two ten page papers, two five page papers, and the final counselling project -- all of which will be wrapped up by 19 December or so, and then I can settle into lovely holiday baking, knitting, cooking, cleaning, reading (if my brain permits) and game-playing while building up my stamina for the next set of classes. I'm very seriously thinking of taking a class on Wordsworth and Keats during the winter session; an entire 3-hour class in 12 4-hour days is awfully frightening, but I've heard good things about the professor, and it would mean that I only have to take 12 hours during my final semester, which seems a blessing.

Austen paper is progressing nicely! Time for bed, so I can get in a few more hours before I go to campus tomorrow for my counselling extravaganza.

last two papers of the month!

As the subject line suggests, I'm working on my last two papers for this month -- well, the last two due this month, but still, that's something! I'm not counting my final counselling project (even though it's due 11/28), because it doesn't have to have a thesis.

Why, then, am I posting here? Because, gentle reader, my earlier theory (from the days of the Lamentable Midterm) has proven to be true; when I am attempting to compose my thoughts to write about my personal life, suddenly the logic necessary to compare Jane Austen novels comes easily to my fingertips and I find myself writing paragraphs of academic prose without a hitch, while here I struggle for half an hour to find the proper description for how I'm writing over there. I'd rather have a writing muse that didn't require these bait-and-switch techniques to get going on the necessary work, but for the moment I am going to take what I can get.

While not bewailing the difficulty of enticing my muse to apply herself, things here have been quite pleasant. I had a lovely birthday, a few weeks back, with chocolate mousse and other wonderful things to eat, and just this past weekend I went for tapas with some friends and consumed (amongst many other things still delicious but not quite as memorable):

• vast quantities of devilled dates, which are dates stuffed with mild chorizo, then wrapped in bacon -- sweet and savory all in one bite


• vinegared smelt filets, clean in flavour and pleasantly chewy


• little pieces of octopus, covered in paprika and eaten on top of slices of boiled potato


• tiny meat balls in a sweet, slightly thick sauce of saffron and onions and perhaps sherry


• meltingly soft scallop sashimi in a squid ink vinegarette


• tiny half-bites of crab mixed with something velvety and then breaded and fried; I had been going to call them crab cakes, but that conjures up entirely the wrong impression, although I do love traditional crab cakes as well.

I also had a lovely, lovely dessert of figs stuffed with chocolate and nuts, drizzled with a port wine reduction, as well as bites of the amazing chocolate-studded bread pudding my husband got. All in all, a very successful visit; as this was the 2nd year that C. and I held a mutual birthday dinner there it's well on its way to becoming a tradition, and I certainly intend to arrange for us to go back next year.

Aside from that brief excursion into the realm of gastronomy, life has really been 95% composed of papers -- the writing of them, the waiting to receive grades, and the constant low-level anxiety of knowing that more papers are imminent. I do manage moments -- even entire days -- of non-paper related activities, usually after having just turned one in, but they're constrained by my post-writing exhaustion and the haunting knowledge that I really ought to get to work on the next one.

Does this make me sound miserable? Am I miserable? I don't think so, really. When the writing is going well (as it still is in the other window, knock on wood) I enjoy it immensely. I love learning, real learning, the sudden realisation that I know something that I didn't know before, the chance to take my own ideas and check them against the texts and then put them through the slow process of detailed development and revision until I have an argument that stands up to examination. What I'm finding so painful is the need to do it constantly; I am such a slow writer, and I need so much time to accrete my ideas, and with so many deadlines in rapid succession I'm not always happy with the work I'm turning in. But deadlines must be met, so the papers are turned in even if I know that I could have done more, and only time will tell how they've been received.

Wonderful smells are coming from the other end of the apartment, so I will break here to go have dinner, and doubtless return afterwards to confuse my muse once again so that I can finish the Austen paper tonight.