Quotes From the Throes of Finals III

Why are these all from Trainspotting? I didn’t even like the book much. The second quote I posted was one of the few redeeming statements from the book. I enclosed this following paragraph because I think it is funny to see it in print; it’s like a scrawl from childhood. I disagree with the statements; drugs have the potential to give you a synthesized experience of life. We're meant to experience things a certain way - why let it be mediated? Certainly, there are proponents who say that such activities enhance the quality and experience of life, but as with many things in life, I reserve my judgment but also my skepticism.

‘Whin yir oan junk, aw ye worry aboot is scorin. Oaf the gear, ye worry aboot loads ay things. Nae money, cannae git pished. Goat money, drinkin too much. Cannae git a burd, ane chance ay a ride. Git a burd, too much hassle, cannae breathe without her gittin oan yir case. Either that, or ye blow it, and feel aw guilty. Ye worry aboot bills, food, bailiffs, these Jambo Nazi scum beatin us, aw the things that he couldnae gie a fuck aboot whin yuv goat a real junk habit. Uv just goat one thing tae worry aboot. The simplicity ay it aw. Ken whit ah mean?’ – Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Quotes From the Throes of Finals II

'That night, back at my flat, I heard the buzzer go. Assuming it to be Donna, who had been out, I opened the stair and house doors. A few minutes later, my auld man stood in the doorway with tears in his eyes. It was the first time he'd ever been to my flat. He moved over to me and held me in a crushing grip, sobbing, and repeating - Ma laddie. It felt a world or two better than: "Well, there's nothing tae say."

‘I cried loudly and unselfconsciously. As with Donna, so with my family. We have found an intimacy which may have otherwise elduded us. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to become a human being. Better late than never, though, believe you me.

‘There’s some kids playing out in the back, the strip of grass laminated an electric green by the brilliant sunlight. The sky is a delicious clear blue. Life is beautiful. I’m going to enjoy it, and I’m going to have a long life. I’ll be what the medical staff call a long-term survivor. I just know that I will.’ – Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Quotes From the Throes of Finals I

‘Ah hate it the wey Mark’s intae hurtin animals… it’s wrong man. Ye cannae love yirsel if ye want tae hurt things like that… ah mean… what hope is thir. The squirrel’s likes lovely. He’s dain his ain thing. He’s free. That’s mibbe what Rents cannae stand. The squirrel’s free, man.’ –Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Reading the City as a Sign

Yes, it's exam time. Isn't this interesting, though?! It's from an article about academically reading the city. She doesn't quite talk about understanding a city or a location through the body, rather than simply 'knowing' it academically/spiritually, but she gets dang close.

Moving about the city is not a passive activity. On the contrary, it stimulates our capcity to perceive, which enables Karl Gottlob Schelle to consider this activity 'non comme un simple mouvement du corps mai bein comme une action dans laquelle quelque chose de l'esprit est engagee' (not as a simple motion of the body but rather as an action in which something spiritual is engaged). It creates awareness of way that motion continually builds and rebuilds the world around us. The action of walking changes or usual or habitual view of the world, opens it up and helps us to reconsider the everyday.

-- Genevieve Quebriac, 'The City: A Space for Event-Related Encounters'

Note to La: Sorry I didn't put in the accents; I don't have the motivation.

Americans in Edinburgh

Happy birthday to my friend Claudia! She turned 21 tonight, and she wanted to do the typical American rituals. A big group of us gathered at her flat, ate cake, made sure we were liquidated, and then set out for Koko, a shnazzy little bar-restaurant near George Square, where most of us students hang out. I'd never been there before, and it was nice being in a bit of a more upscale place than places like the Montague, the Library Bar, the Southsider, Newington Fish and Chips, or even Iman's and - heaven forbid - Globetrotters.

There were lots of shots around, and people drinking absinthe. I was content with my lemon and lime bitters :) We sat, we chatted, a group of us even played pool with a billiard set (because we didn't know how to play billiards).

It was a good night. Pictures to come later. Tomorrow, more writing exam essays and studying for exams. Onwards! Less than a week until I'm done with all my exams, and then a few more days and I'll be on my way home.

Home. I'm feeling ambivalent about it right now. Static. I'm going to miss this place, and the people I've met here, but it will be so, so good to be back home.

You Know You've Been Researching Too Long When...

You 1) can't find any secondary articles and criticism on the text you're evaluating, and 2) find secondary reading entitled 'American Heroes: On Frivolity and Horror in 2008's Summer Superhero Movies: "The Dark Knight, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man"'. The abstract reads

An analysis of 2008 Hollywood superhero blockbusters. Iron Mon and The Incredible Hulk are humorous and often light-hearted; but the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, which reinvents The Joker in Heath Ledger's performance, is much more grim and morally complex—a dark entertainment for pessimistic times.

I'm torn when I see an article entitled thus. It means that popular culture is coming under scrutiny, which is good - but as I sit typing here it's only two years after these films came out. The article was published in the Spring of 2009. I think there needs to be a bit more time before we start examining our current culture. If we immediately start dissecting cultural indicators like films, then it takes away some of the creative potential for further movement and posits one reading of the meaning of said film. It's like Justin Bieber writing a memoir of his life when he's sixteen years old, or tweens updating their Twitter every half hour, or - heaven forbid - a twentysomething woman who just happens to blog about life abroad.

I am aware that finding alternative meanings is the work for subsequent critics, and that merely because all three of these films were major blockbusters they do not lack valid artistic and political statements and reflections of contemporary society. Indeed, 'The Dark Knight' was pretty incredible, and one o' my dear brothers said it was 'almost a perfect film.' But these movies still seem so fresh on the cultural stage. I remember watching 'The Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man' in theaters (I never saw 'The Incredible Hulk'), and perhaps my reaction against the article comes because I feel co-opted into criticism that tries to analyse and impose a reading on me, as a participant in the blockbustering films of that summer.

We all remember these films, don't we?

On further reflection, with the rate that movies are churned out of Hollywood, 'The Dark Knight' does feel like it has come out long ago. When I compare it to other films, though, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 'The Dark Knight' seems to follow right on its heels. (I have to keep reminding myself that Lord of the Rings came out in 2001, 2002, and 2003). Maybe in cultural history, there is only 'the past,' which can be subdivided into 'the recent past' which includes things that happened in one's lifetime and then 'the distant past' which happened before one was born or memory formed. That is overly simplistic, and a cultural historian would probably go at me with one of Gimli's war axes.

Thank You, La-La

I'm slowly working through A Life of One's Own. I'm not sure, quite yet, what to make of it. I think there is some great advice there, and it's interesting to hear the psychology behind some of Woolf's work. But, as always, I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to be the person who is making these discoveries for myself, experiencing Virginia Woolf's writing myself. I want to be the one writing about it and mediating other people's experiences of her, not being on the receiving end of such a process.

I feel I have a bit more growing up to do.

"If someone was once interesting to you but has since moved on, subdue your impulse to blame her for some total or damnable duplicity. I have to try to sit tight as I admit my former friends are complicated, that they range between interests, and that no interesting and lasting friend is utterly consistent."

-- Ilana Simons, A Life of One's Own

Examining

It's the midst of exams and being busy, which means that I will be posting a lot of quotations that I come across in my reading, researching, and studying. Putting quotes up is not unique to exam-time, but rather a lovely side effect. I'm not doing anything interesting to friends and family back home at the moment, but I thought I'd share a bit of what's going on inside my head.

'"From our inns," returned the gentleman, "a stranger might imagine that we were a nation of poets; machines at least containing poetry, which the notion of a journey emptied of their contents: is it from the vanity of being thought geniuses, or a mere mechanical imitation of the custom of others, that we are tempted to scrawl rhime upon such places?"'

--Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling

We Have Found It....

...the secret tunnel. Through the mountains. To the Sheep's Heid Inn and Duddingston Loch.

Video Blogging, Take One

It worked, it worked! At least for me - I put the video settings on private, so you might have trouble viewing it via Youtube. And here comes the confession where I hate the sound of my voice - it sounds high-pitched, nasally, and annoying. Especially when I trail off and finish a sentence weakly. 

Anyway, I'm afraid of heights.

Featured in this video: Claudia, Lindsey, Chelsea, and Lauren!

The Top of a Ferris Wheel is a Bad Place to Remember You're Afraid of Heights

Do you know what this is? This is my 200th post! And what better way than to celebrate it than with a video on a ferris wheel? First up for the evening (Friday night, yesh) was the Christmas Market, in which I got a free sweet mince pie and a ride on the ferris wheel, and where I filmed this video:

Apparently the video refuses to upload properly, so here are a few pictures:

Fire Punch makes fire lasers launch from your eyes.

Lindsey in front of the Ferris Wheel.

Blurry view of the festivities.

Claudia and Lindsey being themselves.

You'll just have to take my word for it until the video loads properly that the top of a ferris wheel is a very bad place to remember suddenly that you're afraid of heights.

Afterwards, I went to the cinema with some friends and saw the best worst Christmas-horror film imaginable. It's called Rare Export. Let me take a minute, just sit right there, I'll tell you why it's better than 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air'. First of all, it was made in Finland. That earns this film points for being foreign, and the country is just  random enough without being obscure: Finland's status as one of the countries with the happiest overall population, good educational system, etc., means that they should know how to pull off a reasonably good film.

Secondly, it was about Santa being a gigantic horned demon, frozen and buried beneath a mountain. Of course, the wealthy Americans had to go and dig it up for prophet, and then the Finns must save the day by blowing up the thawing Santa-demon. The first half of the movie is quite jumpy, really, until halfway through the film when you begin to have armies of old, nude men ('elves') running through Finnish forests, the film evokes a whole new type of fear.

However, they do end up producing a line of Santas from the old men. What makes this gold is that they have an assembly line of Santas, perfecting their Santa-ness under Bolshevik-like surveillance. Take my word - hilarious.

'Come, my blossoming tree, this evening we'll turn out the light and I'll lay your spectacles to rest on two swelling buds that promise to bring forth leaves. You'll score the celestial vault with the tips of your branches, and shake your invisible trunk as it props up the moon. New dreams will fall back down like warm snow at our feet. You'll plant your high-heeled roots firmly in the earth. Let me climb over your bamboo heart, I want to sleep by your side.'

- Mathias Malzieu, The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart


I don't understand this book, other than it is a static exploration of young love. The images here are lovely, they just don't make sense to me. Perhaps I have to draw my own conclusions (parataxis).

Pair o' taxis.