Okay, so everybody knows that something you like and feel like you shouldn't like (e.g., in my case at least, Pokemon *cringe* shut up shut up it has some interesting character dynamics okay?) is a "guilty pleasure", but is there a term for the reverse? Something you don't like and feel you should? Like Ulysses, for instance, which I struggled to finish, didn't really enjoy, but am hesitant to criticise because it's been so thoroughly canonised as The Great Irish Novel that I can't help believing that I must be missing something?

This one's done the rounds a few times, hasn't it? Well, let's give it another try:

The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about one another. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

Juno -- The first 20 minutes of this are a mixture of the adorable and the godawful. The film is a visual treat throughout and the cast are fantastic, but the dialogue in the opening scenes is so arch and knowing and self-consciously cute and hipsterish that I had to keep pausing the DVD to make growling noises and mutter to myself. Fortunately, that tapered off, and the rest of the film was just a rather sweet, charming comedy about a 16-year-old girl who is not quite as mature or as wise as she thinks she is, and who grows wiser and learns in the time-honoured fashion. Ellen Page is particularly charming as the lead, but props also go to JK Simmons and Allison Janney as Juno's father and stepmother.

Julie & Julia -- Mmmm, food. Everyone says that the trouble with this movie is that the Julia Child bits are better and more interesting than the Julie Powell bits. Everyone's right. Julia Child was an immensely interesting person (and Meryl Streep plays her wonderfully here as the kind of gawky and childishly enthusiastic person who makes you want to follow along), and maybe Julie Powell is interesting if you know her better, but here she comes across as a slightly bland and generic contemporary-movie-heroine type -- a little bit lost, a little bit self-absorbed, a little bit too inclined to doubt herself. So she has to do the predictable thing and Learn To Believe In Herself, which is the most trite and banal of moral messages for a movie to send, not least because it's been done to death. But then again, she does seem to be a rather good cook, and the cooking sequences are lovingly shot, and Amy Adams is a delightful actress to watch even when she doesn't have much material to work with (see also: Enchanted), so the movie's never actually bad; it's just that the Julie sections are less good. NB: do not watch this movie on an empty stomach.

Away We Go -- Ah, lovely. A couple expecting a baby decide to go on a trip to suss out potential new places to live, and rub up against different ways of being parents on the way. I don't have much to say about this film except that it is utterly lovely, not the slightest bit saccharine, very funny, and made me cry. And it features Allison Janney, which is always good.

Repo! The Genetic Opera -- From the sublime to the ridiculous... Look, it's a camp gory Gothy futuristic science fiction rock opera: since it's hitting that many id-buttons, it has to be pretty bad for me not to like it. And I liked bits of it, I guess, but it's so messy, and not in a fun way. The worldbuilding doesn't really make sense. (So, the Grave Robber extracts Zydrate from corpses? Exactly how does that work? Not to mention that the whole premise of organ repossession is just silly -- there's no way that could possibly be saving or making money for GeneCo.) The storytelling is distinctly lopsided -- the device of shoving all the exposition into comic-book flashbacks complete with narrative captions is cool in theory, but it's so overused that it becomes tedious. Why didn't they just simplify the backstory rather than cramming it all in like that? It's not as if the backstory is so amazingly brilliant that we couldn't have missed any of it.

The music isn't brilliant either, though it has its moments. Really, if you have a burning urge to see Anthony Stuart Head singing and cutting people open, you might as well just watch the "Legal Assassin" video (warning: gore) on YouTube; and if you check out "Chase the Morning" and "Zydrate Anatomy" (warning: gore) while you're there, you've seen the best bits of Repo! and the only bits really worth watching.

("Zydrate Anatomy" is ridiculously earwormy. "The Zydrate comes in a little glass vial." "A little glass vial?" "A little glass vial!")

This seemed relevant to certain recent events:

"In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth tomorrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear... an artist is also a citizen and a human being."

(George Orwell, "Benefit of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dalí", 1944)

[Note: I'm not sure what he means by pregnant women being "allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility". If that was ever true, I don't think it's true today. I toyed with cutting that bit out, but I couldn't see how to preserve the sense of what he was saying without it.]

I'm going to be on RTE Radio One's Arena tonight, at 19.30, talking about comics with Richie Beirne. See the RTE website if you're reading this after the show's over and want to listen to it online.

So I have been watching Glee. A lot of people have made complaints about Glee -- that it's sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic, deals in stereotypes, isn't even trying to have original plots or characters, and is unjustly unpleasant about cheerleaders -- and those complaints are valid, and it's kind of amazing how little I care. As far as I'm concerned, the show is well-named, because it makes me gleeful every time. And it's not even the musical numbers... okay, it's not only the musical numbers (because, awesome fun as they are, they are mostly the kind of music that I don't normally listen to and forget instantly as soon as they're over). Mostly it's the humour, because Glee is a terrifically funny show.

I had a revelation at some point in the second episode, as to why the 2-Dness of the characters didn't bother me: it's like The Simpsons. The characters on The Simpsons are anything but well-rounded; even the Simpson clan themselves, who can sometimes show hidden qualities or unpredictable facets of their characters, are still basically cardboard cutouts: Homer the stupid, lazy drunk; Marge the über-domesticated naive housewife; Bart the tearaway; Lisa the know-it-all. Even if they do appear to grow a third dimension, by the start of the next episode it's all been conveniently forgotten. And this is not a flaw: the series wouldn't work without it. It seems to me that Ryan Murphy's taking a cue from the inherent artificiality of the musical as a medium and deliberately creating somewhat unreal over-the-top characters so that we don't bat an eyelash when they burst into song.

As to the various flavours of Fail: I'm sure some of it is unintentional and thus revealing of the writers' prejudices, but a lot of it strikes me as having been put in deliberately as characterization (when the person saying that a boy in a wheelchair is "half a person" is the EEEEEEEEEEVIL coach of the cheerleading team, I'd happily chance my arm that we're not supposed to think this is an admirable or even acceptable thing to say). And I keep getting the sense that seeds are being sown for later developments; if the Asian girl and the disabled boy don't get storylines (or just, you know, lines) within a few episodes, I will get annoyed, but I have a feeling they will and that Murphy & company are rolling out the characters gradually.

And for all their 2D-ness, and for all that despite the cast including numerous PoC, one gay teenager, a disabled teenager, and a woman with a serious mental health issue, the straight white able-bodied characters get more screen time than all of the others put together, I do actually like the straight white able-bodied characters. Mr Shuester is so adorably earnest, and Finn is so sweet in his cluelessness, and Rachel's a little powerhouse, and Terri is... okay, for the first episode-and-a-half I found Terri to be stupidly offensively written, but then a certain thing happened, and I raised an eyebrow and thought "huh", and I actually kind of like her now. I'm certainly intrigued to see what happens next.

One thing that's wonderful about Glee is that it's pretty cynical and harsh but it's also a real feelgood show. It makes me laugh; more than that, it makes me smile. I'm glad it exists, and I hope it keeps going for a while.

I just saw 500 Days of Summer, which I found profoundly irritating and also kind of touching; it was very pleased with itself, very self-consciously ~quirky~. There were many points, especially early on, where I was gnashing my teeth and inches away from yelling out "Argh! Stop patting yourselves on the back! This is why people hate hipsters!" But then something sort of clicked at the point where ( a spoilery thing happened ), and I found the rest of the film quite enjoyable. But it never rose above the "quite enjoyable" level, and it does not in any way warrant the high praises it's been receiving. (Five stars, entertainment.ie? Five freaking stars? What is wrong with you?)

It's an interesting film, though, and I have to give the filmmakers credit for a couple of things. ( Which are also spoilers. )

I do not recommend this film, I have to say. I don't think it's quite "Manic Pixie Dream Girl", although it's certainly close. Related. In the same general territory. There is enough focus on Tom's own insecurity and neuroticism that Summer comes across as relatively well-adjusted, but Annie Hall it ain't.

I am back from Greenbelt! As usual, I had an awesome time. I laughed, I cried, I ate pork burgers with onion marmalade (om nom nom), I got given an olive seed to plant and tend; also people tied string around my wrist and said "Jesus loves you!" and I did the same for them, which was nice.

And I caught a nasty cold, which is stuffing up my brain as well as my sinuses, so I won't say much more. Only, here are some things I jotted down in my notebook:

Overheard at Greenbelt 09

"There is nothing funnier than a vicar chasing a gazebo."
(Stand-up comic, didn't catch his name, noting the fact that it was a teeeeeeeeeeensy bit windy on the opening day.)

"The only time I ever got high was at Spring Harvest."
(The other person in the conversation was boggling at this as much as I was.)

"Sex is dirty. Save it for someone you love!"
(His Grace the Bishop of New Hampshire, aka Gene Robinson, summarising English-speaking Christian culture's bizarre attitude to sex.)

"A clean toilet at Greenbelt is kind of like the Higgs-Boson particle: scientists are convinced it exists, but nobody can find it."
(Kester Brewin, in the course of giving an excellent talk on the weirdness of quantum physics and its relevance for theology.)

~~

ARGH my nose hates me and I've run out of Sudafed ARGH ARGH ARGH

I've had this hamster-in-a-wheel feeling lately; not all the time, but often enough that it's been frustrating and irritating, and I've had to take a moment nearly every day to say to myself "Self, it's okay. You have plenty of time to do all the things you need to do, and some of the things you think you need to do are actually optional. Plus, you've been busier than this before and coped with it." It is mostly working; and then, too, there are some things that I want to do, and I say despairingly to myself "But I don't have tiiiiiiiiiiiiime!" and then pull myself up short and say "Wait, do I really not have time? Or is that just an excuse because this thing I want to do is expensive/troublesome/would require making phone calls?"

Anyway. Part of the reason for feeling like I'm in a wheel is that I'm going to Greenbelt this weekend, which is going to be AWESOME because it always is, and I want to get certain boxes ticked and loose ends tied off before then. And the funny thing is that it's not that stressful, not like it has been in the past. It's a little frustrating and a little annoying, but that's all. I haven't had that feeling I used to get of the back of my head being scraped raw from all the undone things. (That sounds strange, but that is honestly how I feel when I get stressed out: I feel the tension in the back of my head, and the more it gathers, the more it feels like the membranes of my skull are scraping together like sandpaper.) I know this is down to my recent changes in attitude, and I hope it sticks.

That said, at some point fairly soon I am going to have to have a holiday because arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

~~

I have been watching The Tudors, on account of how I figured it would be good to know what the show I'm in is actually like. It's certainly pretty (the costumes! the sets! the jewellery! the cinematography!) and the acting is mostly very good. (Especially in the first series, where we got Sam Neill as Cardinal Wolsey and Jeremy Northam as Sir Thomas More. I love Jeremy Northam, and he got some of the most interesting scenes. Incidentally, holy crap there were a lot of guys named "Thomas" in Henry VIII's circle. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Tallis, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and a couple of others I've forgotten. Clearly "Thomas" was to that cohort what "David" was to mine: the default male name that was so popular that shouting "Hey, Thomas!" to a random crowd would get you responses from a dozen guys.) But the writing is... patchy. There are moments that work really well, and the plot barrels along at a reasonable pace... most of the time, and the times when it doesn't are mostly down to history being lumpy and hard to fit into a neat narrative structure rather than the writer falling down on the job. But a lot of the dialogue is slightly ridiculous, there are far too many sex scenes, some of the fantasy/dream sequences are inserted in a jarring and incongruous way, and most of the characters are utterly unlikeable.

Also, when I said the acting was "mostly very good", I wasn't including Jonathon Rhys-Myers in that, and since he plays the main character that's kind of a problem.

The one thing I do think the scripts manage quite well is the unfathomably alien mindset of the times; the sheer weirdness of the way people thought. The starkness of the sexual double standard (it's fine if the King has mistresses and sires children by them! But a woman who looks at a man the wrong way is a WHORE); the unswerving loyalty people bore towards kings and queens and the Church; the combination of surprising moments of humanity and decency with shocking brutality. Like, for instance, Sir Thomas More, who is one of the few likeable characters on the show, simply because he has consistent principles and isn't constantly screwing other people to further his own interests, deciding that what the Church in England really needs is to burn some heretics alive.

I was pleasantly surprised at the presence of some actual genuine queer characters, who get to have sex and everything. I love seeing queerness in historical fictions; it helps to remind people that we didn't spontaneously spring into existence in the 20th century.

I like the politicking and plotting; I love the visuals; I fast-forward through the sex scenes when I can and I laugh when the director is obviously trying too hard with the Important! Symbolism! Did! You! Catch! That? See, cos the cross, and the blood, and then Henry throwing the cross into the -- oh, you did catch that? Okay, I was just checking.

Anyway. I give you:

Things I Have Shouted At The Television: Tudors Edition

"Brother! Be more discreet about all the gay sex you're having with that musician. It's hurting your wife's feelings!"

"Wow, Henry's kind of a sociopath." (early series 1; after a certain point it didn't seem worth remarking on)

"...is he having sex with his mistress? Cos that's what 'indisposed' usually means on this show."

"Ooooh, SYMBOLISM!" (when Sir Thomas More goes to be beheaded, he has a cross in his hand and at the moment of beheading, he drops the cross! Which is very swiftly covered with a thick flow of blood! Get it? Get it? Then they make it worse by having Henry keep the cross! And stare at it broodingly when religious matters come up! And then throw it into a pond! My God, it's so subtle, I have no idea what it could mean!)

~~

Also, I have been knitting. radegund taught me the basics, and mollydot taught me some more, and I think I'm in the process of becoming addicted to buying yarn. And I got a crochet hook to weave in ends with, and now I'm pondering learning crochet as well.

So all of you are getting knitwear for Christmas! I just thought I should warn you.

~~

Oh, and: I am starting a year-long part-time drama course in October at the Gaiety School of Acting. *\o/**\o/**\o/**\o/**\o/**\o/**\o/*<-------cheerleader squad celebrating the awesomeness of this fact.

I just came up with a concept I haven't seen elsewhere: functional forgetfulness. This is when you know that [X], where [X] is something like "I get queasy if I eat sweet things before noon" or "I can change the music on my iPod if I get sick of it" or "my eMusic subscription rolls over at the beginning of the month, so if I don't download the tracks I'm entitled to before the last day of the month, I've just wasted the price of that month's subscription"...

...and yet strangely [X] completely fails to affect your behaviour in any way whatsoever.

It's not that you've forgotten! You know. You do know. But you act as if you don't know, because acting that way is an old habit lodged deep in the recesses of your mind, and the knowledge hasn't sunk in that deep.

You haven't forgotten. But you've functionally forgotten, in that you function as if you have forgotten.

I'm not sure what can be done about this, other than constantly reminding yourself of the things you tend to functionally forget.

It has been so long since my last entry that I've been having trouble choosing what to say here, other than I ATEN'T DEAD. Edited highlights of Stuff What I Have Done:

1) therapy! therapy is awesome and while, as my therapist put it, "it's not like pulling a tooth", I do feel I've turned a corner and will never be quite so helpless or unarmed against the Black Dog of depression again. Also, Dorothy Rowe knows the score.
2) drama! I've finished a three-week beginners' drama course at the Gaiety School of Acting and am starting another one in a couple of weeks, and have applied for a year-long part time course. This has been something I've been planning for a while and keeping shtum about, because it's an ambition and an aspiration so close to my heart that I stopped letting myself want it a long time ago, because I thought that the disappointment -- if I let myself reach for it and didn't get it -- would be too much for me. I am now saying "fuck it" and going for it anyway. There are only two forms of work that I've loved enough to consider them to be not just work, not just career, but vocation, the things I was put on Earth to do: writing and acting. I want both of them to be part of my life.
3) yet more yoga, and also I have bought an exercise bike. And a teapot. And I have been drinking a lot of green tea lately, and rooibos tea as well; there's a spiced blend available from Palais des Thés which is just heavenly. Thé des Amants Rouge, it's called: rooibos with cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, almond and apple. (There's a version with black tea, if you prefer black tea to roobios; I don't, and the rooibos version is caffeine-free and suitable for evening quaffing.) Om nom nom.
4) I have also joined Facebook, after much footdragging. I seem to spend most of my time on Facebook playing either Bejeweled Blitz or Mafia Wars. I'm not entirely sure I see the point of it, given that I already have an LJ and a Twitter and a bunch of casual games installed on my computer (current favourite: Plants Vs Zombies), but what the hell.
5) pursuant to 3), I have discovered a cool new fact: a salty taste in the mouth is a symptom of dehydration. It's quite striking how quickly the taste arises after doing something that dehydrates me (like a yoga session, or drinking coffee), and how easy it is to make the taste go away by just drinking water.

Well, that's all I can think of. I may have to do some memes to get myself back into the blogging groove, because this update-once-in-a-blue-moon thing is not working for me.

Edit: Wait, one more thing: I did another day of extras work for The Tudors. This was less fun than the last time because I had to get up at 5:00 to get the special bus at 6:00, and for most of the bit where I was actually being filmed as opposed to waiting to be filmed, I was walking back and forth in the deep background. Oh, the glamour!

I am bone-tired because I got up early (for me, anyway) this morning and took the 18 bus to Drimnagh Castle, where I filled out a form, joined a group of similarly anticipatory people, sat down in front of a mirror, had my hair teased and sprayed and stuffed under a cap, had my face and hands daubed with cosmetic dirt, got dressed in a white petticoat, long, thick, heavy black skirt, white blouse and grey shawl (which proved on closer examination to be half of a towel that had been ripped along the diagonal), and spent several hours nattering with the others who were there, eating lunch (spaghetti and meatballs, and chocolate cake), and reading...

...and then we all got herded to where the cameras and crew were set up, and we spent (I think -- I didn't have my watch) two and a half hours standing in the general vicinity of some cameras, under rain and sunshine, nattering to each other for most of it and standing and/or moving in our set positions when we were told to.

All of which is to say: I have spent a day as an extra on The Tudors! It was rather fun. There was a lot of hanging about doing nothing in particular, but when it came time for me to take up my position, the extras-wrangler[1] said to me, "Okay, you're a butcher's wife," and led me to a waist-high treestump with a pig's head[2] on it, set up next to a barrow that held four baskets of offal[3]. And having said over and over again to the other extras that of course the shot you're in might not get used, and if it does get used you might not be visible, and if you are visible it might just be your elbow or the edge of your skirt or some other non-identifiable part of yourself -- in sum, having reconciled myself to the idea that all of the palaver might not result in my being visible on screen, I was now going to be able to say "look for the woman with the cleaver and the pig's head! that's me!" Result.

(Also, I was standing behind some severed human heads[4] on pikes, and the main bit of business while I was cleaving the pig's head[5] was two young girls staring at the heads and being hastily drawn away by their mother, and I thought the director might be making a Point by having a butcher cleaving a pig's head in the same shot as two children staring at human heads. I thought that was quite clever, though of course it remains to be seen whether it comes across that way in the episode.)

Everyone involved was very nice, brisk and business-like; I sometimes had the disconcerting impression from the hair and make-up people that they were treating us like furniture, and it wasn't because they were rude or offhand, but because our own opinions were irrelevant; we had to look the way other people -- people we weren't even going to meet -- wanted us to look. This is not my typical experience of people who do my hair, and it was a slightly odd experience.

All in all, a good day. Tiring, though. I'm going to sleep for about fifteen hours now.


[1] probably not his official title
[2] real!
[3] also real! and very smelly! and got smellier as the day wore on!
[4] not real, and not very convincing-looking from where I was standing, but maybe they'll pass muster on TV
[5] but not too vigorously, because a) I didn't want to endanger my fingers and b) there was only one pig's head available for cleaving, so it was pretty important that the head should never actually get cleft.

Since my last entry, I have:

-been interviewed by the Evening Herald about Dublin on a Shoestring; the piece appeared in the paper on Thursday the 25th of June. It went well, I think, though in the course of moving from my mouth to the journalist's notebook, the things I said lost some of their flavour, but I suppose that's inevitable.

-also been interviewed for City Channel's Dublin Today programme, to be broadcast on Tuesday the 14th of the July. The nervewracking part of this was the anticipation; the actual interview was very pleasant. My co-author couldn't be there (he was at the hospital), but I pulled it off pretty well by myself.

-sent my CV to Penguin Ireland, who are looking for freelance editors to add to their database (fingers crossed).

-celebrated my 30th birthday with a nice dinner with my parents and brother. I have some pretty painful inner conflicts around being 30, so I didn't want to make a big deal of it. At some point, if those conflicts get resolved or at least lessened, I may have a big fuck-off party to celebrate entering my fourth decade. But not right now.

-borrowed the vocal score of Follies from the ILAC Centre library, in preparation for the musical theatre workshop I'm going to this weekend at the Gaiety School of Acting. They have lots of sheet music there, but very little Sondheim (and, as far as I can tell, pretty much no musicals from the 80s or later, unless I was looking in the wrong place). Still, Follies has some truly amazing songs, so it's enough by itself. I'm thinking of working on "Losing My Mind" and "Could I Leave You?".

-wrote and filed a review of Skim by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki for the Irish Times. Skim is unbelievably good. I hope I did it justice.

-been to a lot more yoga classes. I'm definitely going to keep up with it after the one-month special offer expires. It's expensive (€99 a month, eep), but for what you get, and the benefits I've been getting, it's worth every penny.

-lost 4 pounds without consciously changing my diet. I attribute this to the fact that I've been going to yoga three times a week; my intake of food hasn't increased much, if at all (actually, I've noticed that the yoga seems to have cut down on my cravings for junk food), but my activity level has increased. I'm pretty happy with it, because I do have weight to lose; BMI charts tell me my "medically ideal" weight is somewhere around 11 stone, and I can't even imagine being that thin. But I'm a long way away from that, and weight loss isn't my primary goal in doing the yoga, just a beneficial side effect. If it ever gets to the point where I'm still losing weight beyond a level I'm comfortable with, I can cut down to twice or once a week, or increase my food intake. I think it's likely that my metabolism will adjust before I reach that point, though.

Now I'm going to yoga one more time, and then this weekend I have the musical theatre workshop, and then I would like to have a rest, please, universe...

So, inspired by the latest post at Slacktivist, a perennial favourite discussion topic:

Moments From Movies, TV Episodes, Books (et cetera) That Make You Weep Like A Child

1. "This is my family. I found it, all by myself. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yes, still good." (Lilo & Stitch)

2. "You understand... It is too far. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy." (The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

3. "I want us to stay together. I want us to last." (David to Keith, Six Feet Under)

4. "Isn't she beautiful? There she is! There she is! There she is! There she is!
Mama is everywhere! He must have loved her so much." (Sunday in the Park with George)

5. "I'm a human being, dammit! You can deny me all you want, but you can't deny Ben Sisko! He exists! That space station - those people, that future - they exist! In here. In my mind. You hear what I'm telling you? You can destroy the story, but you cannot destroy an idea. That's ancient knowledge! That future is real - I made it real! You hear me - it's real!" (okay, I cheated on this one and looked up the exact wording because it's been too long since I've seen the episode, which may be the best episode of any sf TV show ever: Deep Space Nine, "Far Beyond the Stars")

6. [That moment in the first Pokémon movie when Ash has turned to stone and Pikachu keeps trying to shock him back to life with increasingly desperate cries of "Pikachuuuuuuu!" And then all the gathered Pokémon, including the clones, weep solitary silver tears that float towards Ash's body and magically revive him and SHUT UP DON'T JUDGE ME IT'S VERY MOVING.]

7. "You are a child, not a weapon. You are my child. You are my daughter, and I love you." (X-23: Innocence Lost, written by Kyle & Yost)

8. "What home?" "Home... is run no more." (WE3, written by Grant Morrison)

9. "Grace-ya, you have our love for two daughters all to yourself. And that's not only because of Lily's death. We're that proud of you." (Good as Lily, written by Derek Kirk Kim)

10. "I'll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I'll be on my holidays
They'll be doing the rounds
They'll ask me how I got her, I'll say
'I saved my money'
And say 'Isn't she pretty, that ship called Dignity?'" ("Dignity" by Deacon Blue. No, I don't know why this makes me cry, but it does.)

Since my last entry, I have:

-been to the Bikram Yoga studio five more times. It does actually get easier, which is encouraging, but I've had good sessions and bad sessions. I can feel that it is doing me good: my muscles growing stronger, my body growing trimmer, my old cravings for comfort foods that are bad for me abating. For a good while now, I've been in the difficult position of wanting to lose weight, but not wanting to diet because experience has taught me that while I can lose weight on diets, it never stays off, and what's the point of that? But I seem to have found a form of vigorous exercise that I'm likely to stick to, and that makes me feel good; and so far I haven't felt the urge to eat more than I normally do. (Less, if anything.) All else being equal, burning 4,000+ extra calories a week should have the same effect as dieting in terms of weight loss, as well as bringing all the other benefits of regular exercise.

(The posture I like best is standing bow pose, because it's one of those postures you see an expert doing and say to yourself "no fucking way can I do that", and then you try it, and it's... actually not as hard as you think it is. It's not easy, but it can be done by a non-expert.)

-been to Edinburgh. And the funny thing is that my time away had allowed me to forget how charming Edinburgh is; how old and twisty and full of hidden-away crannies and dark corners; how very much like a city that might have been built by fairies or vampires.

-been to see Peer Gynt at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. A very modernised version, and the second half was all over the shop until the very end, but I think that's a defect of the play rather than the production. Overall I loved it, and now I want to track down an early English translation to see where it was changed.

-been to the wedding of dryad_wombat and grahamb, a small and delightful affair, at which I met a friend of dryad_wombat's who took over her class on vampire fiction and turned out to be a former resident of Rathgar (practically my neighbour!) and a former writer for the GCN back when it was still called the Gay Community News and didn't have glossy covers or masses of advertising. A lovely fellow, and he made what was already a lovely day even lovelier.

-visited the two shops I always visit when I'm in Edinburgh: Coda Records and TransReal sf bookshop. Bought 3 CDs and 3 books. Good haul.

-watched the live-action Charlotte's Web at the free outdoor cinema in Grassmarket. It was... pretty good, I guess, although: 1) I kept being reminded of Babe (which was better); 2) I was reading Let The Right One In at the same time, which made for some odd juxtapositions; 3) at some point I thought to myself huh, this is basically a story about a talented and compassionate woman working like mad for the sake of a not-particularly-special man who gets all the benefits from her work while contributing, essentially, nothing. And that kind of took the shine off it.

-got the abstract I sent to this conference accepted (the abstract, for the interest, is ( behind the cut )

-got an email from the London Review of Books saying that while they don't have anything suitable for me at the moment, they will be in touch if anything comes up. I am super pleased by this, not least because the LRB does lovely long essays and reviews, and the prospect of getting 2,000 words or more in which to talk seriously about comics in a major publication makes me want to bounce up and down like a giddy schoolgirl on a pogo stick.

-was told that a chap from the Evening Herald will be phoning tomorrow morning to talk to me about Dublin on a Shoestring.

Blimey, it's a busy life I lead.

So I went to a Bikram yoga session today, because a former co-worker of mine goes there and she always looks svelte and apple-cheeked, so I thought it might do me good. And I think it probably has done me good, and will continue to do me more good, but holy shit. I was not prepared.

Here is a Beginner's Guide to Bikram Yoga, so that if any of you want to try it, you will be better prepared than I was.

1. The big deal thing about Bikram yoga, the thing that makes it different from all other forms of yoga, is that it takes place in a heated room, the idea being that the heat keeps the muscles relaxed and thus makes it possible to go further with the poses. So far so nice, but what you may not realise is that this, combined with the higher-than-average intensity of Bikram practice, means that you will sweat. You will sweat like a very nervous pig on a very hot day. You will sweat more than you thought it possible for a human being to sweat. You will, quite likely, sweat more than you sweated the last time you were in a sauna. This is okay! It's part of the process. Everyone else is sweating as much as you are. That's why it tells you on the website that you need to bring two towels (one for during the session and one for a shower afterwards), and a litre of water. You mostly have to use your towel to cover your yoga mat and stop it from getting slippy, but you might also want to use it to wipe your face or various other body parts, especially during the poses when you have to hold onto your feet or your calves.

2. The sweat also means that by the end of the session, your exercise gear will be completely soaked through, which means you need to bring a full change of clothes -- including underwear. This is the bit that I didn't realise, which meant that I had to go commando and braless on the journey from Harolds Cross to Ranelagh. I will not make that mistake twice.

3. Do not forget to bring soap and shampoo! You really, really don't want to change into your other outfit without showering first, and your hair will get soaked with sweat during the class. Ewwwww.

4. Also, the bit on the website where it says you need to drink a litre of water during the class? They are not kidding. Holy fuck they are not kidding. The teacher won't like it if you drink while the others are doing poses, but there are lots of breaks in between when you'll have a chance to desperately try and replace all the fluid you're losing through sweat. Fortunately they sell water at the studio (at least they do at the Harolds Cross studio).

5. The class is hard work. Really hard work. As a beginner, you are not expected to keep up with everybody else and do everything as the teacher says it; your aim is to get through to the end of the class without leaving the room and doing as many of the poses as you can manage. Halfway through the class, I figured out that since every pose was gone through twice, I could go through the first and sit out the second (or vice versa) if I was feeling stretched beyond my capabilities, which would mean I'd still get through all the poses but wouldn't kill myself in the process. I plan to use this technique again in future until I'm strong enough to do everything twice.

6. Take breaks! Any time you feel like you can't go any further, sit down and get back up when you feel up to it. It says this on the website, and seriously, listen to them, because they are wise.

7. Give yourself a pat on the back when you finish, because you did a hard thing that will do you good!

~~
In other news: I now have proper non-knockoff Converse for the first time since my teenage years. Low-tops rather than my usual high-tops, because I am no longer as enamoured of ankle boots as I once was; now I'm fonder of shoes with laces of a length that I can actually find in the shops when I need to replace them.

Dublin people: I have just ordered a monitor-not-included desktop computer from Dell, and I was rather hoping one of ye would have a monitor to spare. I'll ask Freecycle or actually, you know, buy one if I have to, but I'd rather help a friend out by taking unwanted clutter off their hands. That is, if any of ye do have a monitor that you're not using. *looks around hopefully*

ITEM: I went to see the Handsome Family at Whelan's last night! They were awesome, my friends. Their songs have the dark and morbid beauty of a raven bleeding on a snowdrift, and Rennie Sparks is hilarious. I want to be her when I grow up.

(It occurred to me while I was there that there are advantages to being into relatively small, relatively un-well-known bands. [Rennie: "This next song got banned on three radio stations!" Brett: "It was played on three radio stations."] Discounting the hipster factor of liking to be in the chosen elite that Knows, there's something really delightful about small, intimate gigs where the lead singer has to "excuse me" his way through the audience to get to the stage, where you can sit or stand an arm's-length from the stage without getting crushed, where the band can make jokes as if to a group of friends without it seeming ridiculous. I saw the Handsome Family at Greenbelt years ago, and they were wonderful, but the venue wasn't really suited to their style of music. It was much too large and open, and even at the time [not being all that familiar with them] I could tell that the Handsome Family needed a small space, somewhere dark and maybe a little old and worn, with a worn-down wooden floor and inexplicable decorations on the walls.)

ITEM: Dublin on a Shoestring has come back from the printers and will soon be available in a bookshop near you! (...if you live in Ireland, that is. If you don't, but you'd like a copy, drop me a comment and I can get you one with a 25% discount -- you pay €7.50 rather than the usual RRP of €10! In fact, this offer is also available to Irish-based people.)

It's weird looking at the book, now, because I feel relatively little excitement. I had a squirmy oh-God-can't-look feeling when I first saw the sample copy, and then I steeled my nerves and flipped through it, and... it looked pretty much exactly like the proofs I'd carefully pored over a few weeks before. It hadn't undergone a magical transformation in the mean time. Which was a bit of a letdown! I'm not sure what I was expecting, exactly. Maybe that I would at least feel different about it... but it's all so familiar to me by now that my eyes sort of skate over it. Anyway, less than 50% of the text is mine -- the other portions being either written by my co-author or by other people delegated by him or by me, or else unchanged from previous editions. Maybe that contributes to it. Anyway anyway, I HAS A BOOK! WITH MY NAME ON IT! WOOHOO!

ITEM: Today is my last day at my crappy job that I hate! Sweet freedom beckons! Everyone in the office is very envious of me.

ITEM: I'm going to see Cirque du Cabaret tomorrow night, after vaguely meaning to for over a year!

ITEM: Life is good!

Hello there, LJ! And how are you doing? I'm doing fine, myself. Today I cleared out my room, got rid of two pairs of shoes that let in water and a pile of clothes that I don't wear any more, as well as a lot of random crap that I'd forgotten about and don't want any more. I still have a lot of random crap in my room, but I've made a good start. I cleared out enough storage space that the two boxes of old British comics that were sitting in the middle of floor have now been relocated onto shelves!

Of course, having cleared out a lot of old stuff, I naturally immediately went into town to buy some new stuff. It's the circle of stuff, don'tcha know. I bought some cheap & cheerful staple garments from Top Shop (ribbed vests and leggings), a pair of incredibly gorgeous shoes from Camper (YEAH BABY CAMPER SHOES! I have been craving Camper shoes for so long, my dear flist, you have no idea) that cost more than I have ever spent on any shoes ever (totally worth it, though), a necklace from A*Wear, a new bag (sturdy wine-red canvas, roomy enough to hold a good dozen or so paperback books, properly arranged), a second pair of shoes of which more later, and a pair of black-and-grey striped fisherman's trousers from Tambuli.

There was a dog at Tambuli, a little black-and-white mongrel bitch, who pattered round the counter at the sound of coins clinking in a wallet and open her mouth expectantly. "Put the money in her mouth," said the man behind the counter, and I did, and she pattered back behind the counter and delivered it to him, and he put the receipt into her mouth, and she pattered around the counter again and delivered it to me. If someone had described this to me, I wouldn't have believed them, but I saw it with my own eyes and it is absolutely true. The dog did this trick for the customers who were there before me, and then she did it again for me. It was quite possibly the most adorable thing ever.

The second pair of shoes were black high-heeled T-strap types. Me, wear heels? I KNOW. It is most uncharacteristic! But I am trying to get in touch with my inner femme. So, following the advice of Jem and the Holograms ("She wears what she wears with pride/It reflects how she feels inside!" -- wise words), I am trying out things like high-heeled shoes and depilation. I'm not going to start wearing make-up or anything -- hey, let's not go crazy! -- but the shoes, well, they were on sale (a mere €25!) and they were cute and the heels were broad enough that I thought they'd be relatively easy to walk in, for someone who's new to heels. I tried them out on a brief trip to the local Spar and back, and had to give in and go barefoot for the last 100 metres or so. (Fortunately the pavements round here are pretty clean.) But I think that was mostly because I'd been walking around all day so my feet were already tired. Anyway, I didn't wobble much, but I was pretty slow. But that's normal, right? I mean, nobody runs in heels, right?

Anyway anyway. I have a mere 4 days left in my job, and the sun has been shining, and I'm going to see the Handsome Family on Thursday and to Cirque du Cabaret on Saturday, and my parents are getting me a computer for my birthday (...a proper one, that is; not a teeny little EEE PC that works fine for travel but has shit-all processing power and/or memory), and there is lots of good fanfic for the new Star Trek movie, and I have lots of good books to read, and. Well. Life is good. Right now, for me, life is very good.

This morning on my way to work, I passed a busker singing "The Rare Auld Times", which made me think. When I was working on the Dublin guide, there was a section on "Dublin in books, films and music" which ended up being "Dublin in books and films" because I couldn't get the music section worked out to my satisfaction. I did some research for it, and it struck me that most of the songs about Dublin that I could find were nostalgic or elegaic, or sad in some other way. I couldn't find any Dublin songs that were cheerful. (But that might just have been me and my super-depressing taste in music. I blame my brother for hooking me on the Cure when I was all of 8 years old.)

So now I'm thinking about Dublin songs, and city songs in general. What songs are there about Dublin, or songs that even mention Dublin? "The Rare Auld Times", obvs, which is corny as hell and kinda vaguely racist[1] but it makes me go misty-eyed, perhaps because I learned it in primary school. And it's a sad song, any way you look at it; an old man, his wits scrambled by age and alcohol, his trade made obsolete by improved technology, the city that was his home transforming until it's unrecognisable. Then you have "Summer in Dublin" by Bagatelle, which is more cheerful ("and young people walking down Grafton Street/everyone looking so well"), but still sadly nostalgic, since it's about saying goodbye to a lover. "City Full of Ghosts" by Mike Scott is similar, but more celebratory; even though the thrust of the song is about the singer looking back at his life and being haunted by what once was, it's a cheerful kind of haunting without much regret in it, and along the way there's so much "yay Dublin!" that it doesn't feel like a sad song. ("Dublin is a city full of humour/Dublin is a city full of wit/Dublin is a city full of buskers/Playing old Waterboys hits" -- not as true as it used to be; now it's full of buskers playing "Cannonball" and "Falling Slowly".)

Hm, what else? "Running to Stand Still" refers to Ballymun, albeit obliquely ("I see seven towers but I only see one way out"). "How To Disappear Completely" name-drops the Liffey ("I go where I please/I walk through walls/I float down the Liffey"). Can't think of any more. Anyone else?

Then there's London songs... there are two that always come to my mind when I'm in London, and I've talked about them before: "Waterloo Sunset" by the Kinks and "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty. "Waterloo Sunset" is about how nice the city can be when you're not in a rush ("But I am so lazy/don't want to wander/I stay at home at night") while "Baker Street" is about the loneliness and stress of someone who's moved to the city from elsewhere and is desperately trying to "make it" ("This city desert makes you feel so cold/It's got so many people but it's got no soul/And it's taken you so long/To find out you were wrong/When you thought it held everything"). Blur have a bunch of songs relating to London one way or another; "London Loves", "Parklife" et cetera. I have a vague feeling that Suede sang about London as well, but I'm not sure they were explicit about it; I may just have been assuming that the urban landscapes in their songs were London landscapes.

Now, New York songs... "New York, New York" goes without saying and I'm sure there are lots of others but I'm drawing a blank on what they are. Bah.

Any other city songs you know?

[1] At least, this verse makes me go "huh?":

And I courted Peggy Duignan, as pretty as you please,
A rogue and a child of Mary, from the rebel Liberties.
I lost her to a student chap, with skin as black as coal.
When he took her off to Birmingham, he stole away my soul.

Because: apart from needing a word to rhyme with "soul", why does it matter that he was black? Is it somehow worse to lose your girlfriend to a black guy than a white guy?

Hey, Dublin folks! I'm leaving my job on the 5th of June, which is very good news because I don't like my job. To celebrate, I would like to go to Cirque du Cabaret at Vicar Street on the 6th of June. Anyone care to join me?

I had my second ballet class today, and now I am all floppy. But! I was able to do relevés without falling over, even without having my hand on the barre. So I am making progress, even if it's exhausting.

The timing is awkward; I finish work on Mondays at 15:30, and the class starts at 18:15, which means I have two and a half hours or so to kill -- and I really do mean "kill"; it's much too long to just sit in a cafe and read, but not long enough to go home and come back, or to go to the movies. I've ended up doing desultory browsing in nearby shops and lurking in the internet centre on Liffey Street.

This is one of those things that I was going to link to before, but then I thought "nah, everyone who reads my journal will already have seen it", but... maybe not? Anyway.

In response to the continuing cluelessness of white SF/F authors and fans with regard to issues of race, and in particular the continued astonishment that people who are not middle-class white Americans like sf and fantasy (and comics and RPGs and video games and... well, you get the picture), there has been a roll call. I quote:

"If you identify as a POC/nonwhite person and you read or watch scifi or fantasy, give yourself a name check in this thread... I'm tired of people trying to render us invisible unless they have been given a memo about our existences."

Last I checked, that post had 902 comments. If you haven't already, I urge you to read them; they're wonderful. (NB: if you're white, don't comment, even to say "omg this is so awesome!". That post is not for us.)

I bought ballet shoes today. No, really! Plain leather practice shoes, a pale beigey-pink with elastic rather than ribbon. I'm starting ballet classes on Monday, you see, and while the nice man from CoisCéim said I'd only need to wear gym-suitable clothes and "thick socks or indoor shoes", I believe in the importance of wearing the right kit in getting you into the right mindset. And, frankly, if you're going to do ballet lessons, why wouldn't you buy ballet shoes? I mean, when else are you going to have an excuse?

(I am so horribly out of practice. I was doing pliés and ronds de jambes today, just to prepare myself, and the strain in my calf muscles was so bad it was embarrassing. But this is why I'm taking the class: I want to get fitter, and to re-learn some of the movements I learned as a kid and have mostly forgotten through disuse.)

~~

In two completely different contexts today I have seen people criticising a novel they found unsatisfactory and then hastily saying "but of course I mustn't criticise the author for not having written a different book from the one she wrote, because that is Bad and Wrong". Of course, if somebody has written a spy thriller, it would be missing the point to complain that there aren't enough space battles, but I don't actually think it is always illegitimate to say of a novel "wow, this really would have been a better book if it had been completely different".

By which I mean: sometimes a novel is okay, not great but okay, and by reading between the lines of the novel that was actually written you can discern a potential novel, a novel that takes paths the author didn't take because that would have turned the novel she was writing into something other than what she originally intended to write; and sometimes the potential novel is very much better than the actual novel. Sometimes you get the feeling that the author could have written the potential novel, and chose not to, and that was the wrong choice.

I've said before (and I was probably echoing somebody else, whether consciously or not) that a critic has to consider three questions when assessing the merit of a book:
1) What is it trying to do?
2) Does it succeed at what it's trying to do?
3) Is what it's trying to do something that is worth the attempt?

I think that "the author should have written a completely different book"-type observations are answers to question 3 -- the answer being either "no, but if the author'd done things differently in this particular way, that would have been worth doing" or "yes, but this novel hints at the possibility of a different novel that would have been more worthy".

The thing is -- the thing is, you can be writing a perfectly solid genre spy thriller and then halfway through you're doing some research about oil wells in Venezuela and you come across some fascinating and enraging information about colonialism in Latin America, and it's seizing your imagination like nobody's business, and you end up shoehorning a lot of the information you find into the novel even though it's only marginally relevant, and the spy thriller plot starts looking a bit dull compared to all the stuff you've discovered about the Conquista and the indigenous South Americans and Bartolomé de las Casas and the Spanish-American War and the War on Drugs and so on and so forth; and you keep plugging away at it because you said you'd write a spy thriller and so your novel is going to bloody well be a spy thriller; and you do manage to fit in a brief scene where your hero lands in Chiapas and spends time among the EZLN, but the rest of the novel's set in Prague and London and Washington DC, so it sticks out a bit...

...and if that happens (or anything like it happens), the end result is a novel whose ostensible main purpose for existing (the spy thriller plot) was less interesting to the author than the tangential stuff she found along the way, and it shows. The Chiapas sequence is the best in the book. And the readers scratch their heads and say "but why did she bother with the Prague/London/Washington plot when the Latin America stuff is so much more interesting?" And it's not exactly that the Latin America stuff is inherently more interesting, but the author certainly thought it was, and conveyed that interest in her writing. And if this happens, I think the reader is perfectly justified in wondering why the author didn't just write the book about colonialism in Latin America that she clearly wanted to write, because in its current form, the author's interest in the subject is parasitic on the rest of the novel and is draining it of life.

And that's just one example of how the book the author didn't write can overshadow the reader's reactions to the book the author did write. Maybe the premise is inherently dodgy, but could have worked if it had been tweaked. Maybe the premise is good, but has implications that the author doesn't follow up on because that would have required [lots of research/a much longer book/more confidence in her plotting skills/the willingness to confront her own prejudices/a shift in genres]; an attentive reader might enjoy the book for what it is and still think longingly of the unwritten book that would have followed through on the premise. Et cetera.

I mean, all mockery of Anne Rice aside, I do think it's right, more often than not, for an author to say "you are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective; that is not the book I wrote, and I would thank you to consider the book I did actually write". But I don't think that makes the act of saying "you should have written a different book" inherently without merit.

Operation Go To The Theatre At Least Once A Month During 2009 goes well; towards the end of April I suddenly realised I hadn't been yet, and bought myself a ticket for ( Love & Money, reviewed herein; spoilers abound. )

I also went to see All My Sons on Tuesday at the Gate, starring Broadway legend Len Cariou and Dublin legend Barbara Brennan. It was a splendid bit of drama, though it took a while to get moving, and I blame Arthur Miller for that. Too much leisurely scene-setting in the first act. Once it got going, though, it was terrific.