Merry Easter.

Came back from a late night to find that my mama had cleaned my disgusting, unsightly, I-thought-that-I-was-leaving-Oxford-last-week sink. I am a very blessed woman, in many ways.

Happy Easter to all, and to all a good night. ( :

Film critic.

It’s hard to sleep when you regularly drink a lot of black tea, I’ve realized.

Also, I just realized that this paper has pre-empted the theory of the camera-stylo, before I ever realized that it was a thing. I think that I should be a film critic when I grow up.

Caroline Lamb on the face of Lord Byron:

“It was one of those faces which, having once beheld, we never afterwards forget. It seemed as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature. The eye beamed into life as it threw up its dark and ardent gaze, with a look nearly of inspiration, while the proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt; yet, even mixed with these fierce characteristic feelings, an air of melancholy and dejection shaded and softened every harsher expression. Such a countenance spoke to the heart, and filled it with one vague yet powerful interest – so strong, so undefinable, that it could not easily be overcome.” (120-21)

Kindred spirits.

When I find another blog, written by someone like me, whose trying to transcribe their experiences in a collage of bits and pieces and fragments, I feel like I’ve just found a kindred spirit. Never mind that I can’t always remember how to spell “kindred.”

And it gives me a new inspiration to write, to overcome the frenetic feeling that there’s too much to much to try to preserve all at once.

That’s why you write it in little pieces, because when you can’t hold all of your world in your hands, you can at least taste some of its flavour and smell the essence it gives off.

Morning strawberries.

Putting strawberries in your cereal in the morning and watching them turn the milk pink.

It’s very exciting.

I’m appreciating the little things more in the last few days as I finish up this paper.

You know that you truly love a place when you even love its bad places, because you can remember the time that you got lost there while on a run, or took an accidental shortcut that turned out to be a “long-cut,” or walked through a certain route to get a package and were stalked by a crazy homeless lady.

The days are staying light later here, now, and I’m glad of it – but the sun still goes no higher than it would around four at home. I miss the light.
However, I guess luckily, we’re in England, so the mist helps to cover for the sins of the weather.

I think that one of my favorite things about my classes is not what they teach me, but what I teach myself after them.

Something like Sontag’s idea of art being “an experience of the qualities or forms of human consciousness.” Academics, like art, gives us a framework for expanding our ways of seeing to give us an intensified way of experiencing whatever it is that we experience.

From the letter that I wrote to a dear friend when I decided on my topic for my final essay:

Dear Rachel,

Since my film tutorial for this term is for my junior seminar, it culminates in my writing a 20-page research paper. I just confirmed my topic with my tutor, and it looks like I’ll be writing the research project for my junior seminar on representations of the tragic hero in Gothic texts, citing as my three films Phantom of the Opera, Rebecca, and Casablanca.

I just thought that you would like to know.

Wish me luck, and love you and your family always.

Love,
Chelsey

P.s. Only you would understand how ridiculously excited I am right now. ( ;

“The more some of us read good literature the more cautious we become with generalizations about that literature or with the tags, the labels that are supposed to separate one era or one type of literature with another era or type. “Baroque,” “naturalism,” the “nouveau roman,” “picaresque,” — these are only four of the most unsatisfactory of such expressions, and they are not being destroyed easily. […] Zola inflicted “naturalism” on us, and we have not only been stuck with that completely illogical tag ever since; we are almost surely designed to keep it, as well as the Pandora’s box it brought with it. Furthermore, we all now know that those fascinating “nouveaux romans” of Saurraute and Butor and Robbe-Grillet are no newer than any other kind, that in fact they are not even like each other. And we know equally well that if we murmur “picaresque” for any story other than Lazarillo de Tormes — Huck Finn or even Moll Flanders — someone will quickly show us that it is not picaresque. […] Lately Hiram Hayden has shown us that “Renaissance” is unsuitable, since there was, he says, a “Renaissance” and a “Counter-Renaissance” that existed simultaneously, Luther and Machiavelli — no doubt uncomfortably — finding themselves together in the “Counter” movement. […] While critics and scholars have always quibbled over such expressions, the twentieth century seems particularly ready to coin, but then to discard, them.”

— Percy G. Adams, The Anti-Hero in Eighteenth Century Fiction

Realizing with a sudden burst of joy (the kind that can only be obtained after drinking coffee) that even though you’re sitting too close and crunched in with a lot of people in the library, you can’t possibly be as annoying as the girl whose computer keeps making random noises.

Also, in a pinch, if you don’t have any sticky notes but need to mark your place in a book, use a business  card. Preferably one of your own, although if you need it to, the card of a stranger will work just as well.