think it's time to put myself away...

 I’ve been back at university for five weeks now. How this happened, I’m not quite sure. I feel like I just started back yesterday and now, here I am, halfway through the first semester (and already feeling extremely behind).

I have not written much on here recently as I am currently suffering from noun-poisoning. It’s a rare condition which manifests itself as incompetence when it comes to all things grammatical. The symptoms include: equal measures of interest and bewilderment in Stylistics lectures; mind-blanks when it comes to trying to write essays; and a tendency to speak out in class with silly answers (such as answering the question: ‘What is the verb in this sentence?’ with the word: ‘Over’. Over is not a verb).

I was looking through a few of my journals recently for a quote I had copied down. While I was flicking through the pages, I noticed a lot of little doodles. Not just any old doodles – I noticed a lot of little harassed-looking doodles. I noticed that these doodles seemed to increase in number around the times of intense coursework. It seems that doodling these doodles has a sort of cathartic effect. I thought I’d share a few of them on here because the melodrama of them made me laugh a bit:

(ha ha... a bit depressing, eh? I do love my course, but it can be incredibly stressful to keep up all the work that is squeezed into ten week semesters!)

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(Title from: this song)

to tremble.

‘...to sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion it stirs in us rather than the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise is to savour rather than suffer the sadness of it, it is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.’

~ 'Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale' by Fredrick Buchner (1977)

I thought this was an interesting idea, and I want to be careful of sentimentalising things and missing their meaning. This book is absolutely beautiful. I’ve been reading it slowly, in between Dickens, Bronte, Tennyson and all the other Victorian writers that we’re looking at this semester. It is worth reading, whatever your philosophy on life, purely because he writes such wonderful sentences (about silence, about loneliness, about laughing). And he quotes Shakespeare, and he is insightful and intelligent, and he writes about ideas through stories, and... and... ah, it’s brilliant.

(Picture from: here).

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[insert horse related pun]

I saw a lady passing our house this evening... on a horse. Not only was she on a horse, she was also on her mobile. Are you allowed to be on the phone while riding a horse? Or does that part of the Highway Code only apply to inanimate vehicles?

Odd. I guess we’ll neigh-ver know!

(Picture from: here.)

exciting news!

I am a Features columnist for my university newspaper this year (the Strathclyde Telegraph)! Very exciting! I’m writing a 650 word column every month along the ‘something I noticed’ theme. The first edition is out tomorrow... just thought I’d pass the news on!

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(picture from: here.)

proud of ma' shelf.

I rearranged the bookcase in my room this summer. I realised that it is very easy to take the books out of the bookcase – to slide them off, to stack them into piles on the floor, to dust the shelves that haven’t seen sunlight for years.



However! Once the books are strewn across your floor, all in a muddle, it is incredibly difficult to know how to put them back in.  



First: it is tricky to start anything that resembles tidying when the books are distracting you by calling out, ‘Helloo! Remember me? Read me!’

Also! there are a lot of tricky genre questions that need answering. Questions like: 'Is the novel Jane Eyre simply: fiction? Or is it classic fiction? Or gothic fiction? Or romantic fiction? And should it go on the shelf beside Pride and Prejudice and Emma? Would Charlotte Brontë be annoyed by this, seeing as how she apparently had such a low opinion of Jane Austen? Would they squabble with each other in the middle of the night making it difficult to get to sleep?'

  

 

And so on. You get the picture.

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Anyway! Here is what they look like now. (Cue the the bright, naturally-lit photographs which emphasise the shelves’ gloriousness in their rearranged state).

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Much better, eh?