 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
the Hellenic ideal
So this is the first released picture from the new film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray (called, pithily, Dorian Gray; why the filmmakers think it necessary to excise “The Picture of” I have no idea), due in fall 2009 and starring Ben Barnes as Dorian, Colin Firth as Lord Henry, and Rachel Hurd-Wood (Wendy in the 2003 Peter Pan) as Sybil Vane.
I don’t really know what to think of it. On the one hand, I do think Barnes is absolutely mouth-droppingly droolworthily gorgeous (easily out-prettying everyone else in Prince Caspian), and I don’t really have a problem with his acting. On the other hand… I simply can’t see him as Dorian. Dorian is blond-haired, blue-eyed, ivory-skinned, charming and beautiful; I will always, always remember him as having “rose-red youth and rose-white boyhood”, which is so suggestive of a delicacy and sensuality that I’m just not feeling from this picture or from Barnes in general.
It just baffles me how the perfect Dorian still hasn’t surfaced after multiple TV and film adaptations. I mean, Stuart Townsend? Really? And is it all that hard to find a blond actor to play him? I readily confess to being a bit of an overzealous stickler for book details when it comes to adaptations, where said details may not be not all that relevant (e.g. Dan Radcliffe having blue eyes rather than green), but I really think Dorian’s colouring is very important to the way his character comes across. I just can’t see brunettes doing the corrupted beautiful innocent thing so well.
Having expended 2 paragraphs ranting about Dorian, I should end by saying, in fairness to the filmmakers, that I think Colin Firth will do well as Lord Henry. Though I see him more as Basil, somehow - and this guy who’s playing Basil, Ben Chaplin? He could be Lord Henry, in my book. Go figure.
laptop humming
still sniffly
hushOn Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.
“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - “
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”
Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.
“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”
It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.
Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.
So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.
I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.
SKY.FM New Age station
sniffly
hubristicThere really isn’t anything for deflating pride quite like receiving your dissertation draft back from your supervisor, with “rubbish” scrawled in the margin next to one of your paragraphs. It wasn’t all bad; there were some ticks, some “good”s, but still. Even when you know that bit was kind of rubbish, that’s just harsh. And heartbreaking. And shattering. Ah, the time-honoured slap in the face tactic…
Courage, a trawl through JSTOR, a thorough reread of Alice and a visit to the USyd library - all long, long overdue. I really have to get it together.
Loreena McKennitt - The Lady of Shalott
indescribable
back where it’s cold…or not, really. It isn’t that cold here in Sydney - an average of 12 to 14°C during the daytime, dipping down to maybe 9°C or so during the night; significantly colder than currently-summery York but nowhere near the frigid depths of northern English winters, and nothing I can’t take (wait a couple of weeks and I’ll be complaining about not being able to type my dissertation because my fingers are freezing off).
The last couple of weeks in York were whirlwind - drinks, pub quizzing and suffering random harrassment from a creepy American chap with Mander; Red Chilli with Susanna, where we had to order fish to share because she doesn’t take any other meat and I discovered for the first time that York sometimes does have very decent fish indeed; Eleena’s visit and the first proper cooked breakfast I’ve had in York all year, with scrambled eggs, baked potato and bacon; a frenzy of Railway Children activity at the Theatre Royal which involved the filing of a million press clippings and reviews and 1.5 hours of standing at the National Railway Museum giving out flyers; yummy Garden of India takeout and plenty of random chitchat with Kevin and Rokey, thinking this might be the last time for a long time that I see either of them boys; lots and lots and lots of packing and moving, and of course the dissertation final draft (here a misleading term which actually means only about half the thing has been written, and mostly crappily).
All of that, plus passing through Singapore and meeting up with my lovely, lovely friends there, and finally touching down here after two solid days of travelling has stirred up in me that old feeling of being pulled in a million different directions, that question of… how do I balance all this? How do I portion out my time and myself for all these different places and people when I love them all, when I don’t want to leave any of them, when I just wish foolishly that I could pack everything and everyone with me in a bottomless suitcase, have it all in one place? Just when I thought I had it sorted, I find again that I haven’t a clue, I don’t have any answers.
Now that I’m finally here with my family after nearly 10 months of being away, all I really want to do is catch a breather, sleep in for a week and recover properly from jetlag… but I know I’ve not done anything for a week, dissertation-wise, and if I want to knock out another 10,000 words before September 22nd I have to hustle soon.
breathe, just breathe, I keep telling myself.
Clint Mansell - Summer Overture (Requiem for a Dream OST)
sniffly
another suitcase in another hallThe endless cycle of emptying a house, throwing all my things in boxes and bags and piling them on a vehicle to be chucked somewhere else, does get less painful and less emotionally taxing every year - I barely feel very much, strangely enough, at leaving this house which has been such a home to me over the past year - but (of course there’s a caveat - that’s life) it doesn’t get any less annoying! Every year without fail I wonder anew how I accumulated so much STUFF - every year I throw away two garbage bags full of junk and still have too much to fit into the boxes I own.
I think, this is ridiculous, I should just throw out the entire contents of my drawers without even looking at them, since I haven’t actually looked at them all year and I’ve got on just fine. Then I paw through the pile of stuff, and I find myself slowing down, I find a card or an envelope catching my eye… I open letters, I reread them, I flip through old diaries. And I think, no, I could never throw all this out.
I just realised you never wrote me anything. In your own writing, that is; emails there’ve been, but never a card, never a letter, never a note, never a sentence - never a line to accompany gifts, never a word otherwise. I’ve almost forgotten what your handwriting looks like. It’s weird, isn’t it, when you think back on all the years we’ve known each other?
Another year, another shoebox, another bridge to cross.
Matchbox Twenty - Cold
busy
sleepless beautySo I don’t normally embed media in my posts… but this, this piano remix of a song from Gravitation, is amazing. Perhaps my reaction to it was so much greater because I’ve just wasted a good 6.5 hours of dissertating time over the past two days marathoning the entire Gravitation series (♥) - maybe because I really like piano - maybe because I love the original song, and the contrast between the two is awesome. Have a listen and then have a listen to the piano version again:
Just… so much love.
Gravitation - Shining Collection
packy
welcome to your life…ever had one of those days where there are so, so many things on your mind, so many things spinning round your head, so many things you know you’ve got to do, but the paralysis from knowing there’s that much to tackle just freezes you and you end up spending all your time randomly gaming and watching telly and uselessly surfing the net instead?
Yeah. It’s been one of those days.
Tears for Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World
frustrated
can’t take it ini’ve got to make room for this feeling
so much bigger than me
it couldn’t be any more beautiful
and i can’t take it in
- imogen heap, “can’t take it in”
Lin popped by today for a chat this afternoon, because she’s leaving for Cali tomorrow and who knows when we’ll get to see each other again. And the more we talked, about our experiences, our post-graduation dreams and aspirations, the more I realised that I really don’t want to go back quite just yet. There’s so much more here waiting for me to discover outside my academic bubble, there’s so many more opportunities, not just here in the UK but in the rest of the world, and I can’t shake the feeling that this is the time to take advantage of it all. I’m ideally poised, on the cusp of leaving uni behind me, I have a good degree, the next two years are a sprawling, empty landscape to be filled in. I can’t help feeling that it’ll just be so unfulfilling if I go back to Singapore now, take a safe desk job that earns me S$2.5K a month, get an apartment, maybe a secondhand car, settle back into life there. I’ll go back, after a couple of years - that’s as long as the post-study work visa will let me stay, at any rate - but not now. I’m not ready yet.
And it’s just that much more aggravating, thinking of all this, that the only job prospect for me right now is back at home. I’ve got till the end of September for something really magical to pop up here in the UK… and oh, how I hope it does. I’ve always - whenever people asked - expressed a vague interest in staying here to work for a few years, but now I genuinely do feel it. I really do want it to happen. I feel like there’s something more for me in the future besides going home right away to a government-prescribed path of stable job and sheltered existence… and I can’t even explain it, because it’s not like I’ve had a particularly exciting life so far, certainly not anything to make me think that something special should be waiting for me. But - this is the point in my life, isn’t it, when I can do anything? And I’m gonna do it, somehow, whatever it turns out to be. Fingers crossed.
Jay Chou - Ju Hua Tai
hopeful
hide and seek“Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”
It occurs to me, chillingly, that the older I grow the better I get at goodbyes - not because of any laudatory emotional control I’ve developed, or because I’ve learned that precious skill of letting go gracefully - but because a part of me just doesn’t get as attached anymore. Whether it’s a self-defence mechanism against a long string of farewells or the inevitable conclusion to an over-nostalgic youth, I don’t know. Everyone has graduated, everyone is leaving, tomorrow there’ll be an empty house, and where I would have been a nervous ball of tears a few years ago I find myself now fluctuating wildly between a silent, throbbing sorrow and a firm faith that this isn’t goodbye, just a hiatus till the next time we meet again. It’s really the latter that’s anchoring me right now, but I don’t think I’d have been able to find that anchor back when I first came here.
Daddy told me a few years back that I ought to be happier about moving out and moving on, throwing away the old, leaving the past behind, because it meant that we were on the cusp of a shiny new future. I hope, perhaps unreasonably, that I’ve managed to learn that lesson; but I know somehow inside that this new alacrity with goodbyes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I almost wish I was a nervous ball of tears, because my emotions felt so much more real then. I wonder where this clinical, rational thinking came from, I wonder if it’s a cold, icy self-preservation to keep the ball-of-tears version of me from wasting away after the millionth farewell, I wonder if I haven’t lost something in gaining the new calm.
It’s strange, isn’t it? I spend almost three years trying to get over goodbyes, to get used to the idea that everything comes to an end, and the day I find I’ve finally done so, I want nothing more than to undo it all and just cry like a child again.
Matchbox Twenty - 3 A. M.
melancholy
