May Things

Favorite food:

Summer fruit and vegetables! I've been stubbornly eating mediocre, early berries for months now, but just this week the blueberries acquired that shocking sweet kick that means summer is actually here. It feels so great to be eating more things raw, more cucumbers, fruit, bell peppers, lettuce. I even discovered a new kind of lettuce that I'd never had before (me, a Californian!) - lamb's lettuce, a really delicate little baby green.


Favorite book(s):

This month I've been re-reading all of David Mitchell's books and also discovering contemporary novels that are part of the same orbit. Books with multiple storylines, global awareness, and certain recurring themes, including Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. Both were very interesting, although not some of my favorite novels. Most interesting has been to really dive into a pocket of contemporary literature and see novelists overlapping so much. You really can see that they're writing about the same world, breathing in the same air, as it were, but producing different words on the outbreath. The sense of cities as places where people and events collide like molecules (or is it atoms? I'm forgetting my science), the idea of non-corporeal life forms floating around us, the exploration of where our current, globalized, mechanized, capitalized world might take us in the future - all keep emerging from these different novels, so much that they're starting to blur in my mind. Suddenly reading novels seems less like an escape from the world and more like another, slant way into it.


Favorite movie:

 I actually haven't been watching much of anything, which is unusual for me. I've been so busy seeing shows at the local arts festival and so often arriving home just in time to collapse into bed, that I haven't even finished re-watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I got half-way through about two weeks ago...
I did see Gatsby, which I may write a review of. We'll see. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't qualify as a favorite.


Favorite fashion:

I've tentatively decided to grow out my hair again, and I've been experimenting with braids as a way to keep slightly awkward-length hair out of my face. And I'm looking forward to the day when I can do fancy stuff with braids, like wrapping them around my head. It's nice to play with hair now that it's not tucked under a hat or scarf most of the time, although I have been thinking about making or finding a light, crocheted maybe, summery, slouchy hat. That would mean mastering the art of knitting hats.


Favorite music:

I discovered two new bands, who played a show during the festival I've been going to. They are Emily Portman, who plays traditional and original songs based on fairy tale and myth, and Sam Lee & Friends, who play traditional songs from the British Isles, but with very unique and exciting arrangements for an international assortment of instruments. They both played fantastic concerts in an beautiful old church, and their music just glowed (if that's the right word). It was such a treat to hear an old Scottish ballad, for example, sung to the accompaniment of a tabla, a violin, a cello, and a horn - who would've thunk? And the best part about it was seeing how old treasures like these songs or the myths Portman's songs are based on, can be turned to such new and wonderful forms without losing any of their original power.


Favorite experience:

The past two weeks have brought their fair share of memorable, magical experiences with all the circus and music shows I've seen. Impossible to put down in words, of course, but wonderful nonetheless. Great live performance can really transport you, and I love that. I'm grateful that festivals like this one make it possible to experience so much transportation and inspiration without traveling far or spending much. This definitely inspires me to pursue the idea of working for arts festivals, making them happen. They're such great experiences.

Lights!

It's that time of year...

 When the reindeer start showing up in all the shop windows...

And all the mannequins start wearing scarves with their pyjamas.

So by special request from the lovely Sunnie, here are some photos of the lovely lights and holiday decorations that went up all over town a couple of weeks ago. Happy December!

Scrapbook II: Grey Days

Some more photos I didn't have a place for but wanted to share. This time around it's the grey days pictures, shading into night.

Scrapbook I: Sunny Days

 I've been going through my photos from the past few months and wanted to share a few that I liked particularly but that don't really fit together into any particular theme. So I grouped them into sunny-day pictures and grey-day pictures.

I threw this one into B&W just because I thought it looked nicer that way.

The same statue from two angles.

 

The one on the left has odd framing, but I like the impression of a stag just pausing on its way through London.

Books to the power of wonderful

I suppose I could have written this post a few weeks ago, but I was busy and I forgot, and then I was reading what one of my good friends wrote about her experience reading Eat, Pray, Love after moving to a new state, and that made me want to catch up with my life and write down some thoughts about books and the people who write them and the people who read them.

When I first moved to England, knowing no one, starting courses at a new university in a new country, feeling generally both excited and terrified, there were a few days of odd limbo. Classes hadn't started yet, although I had gotten all settled into my new house and was attending various orientation events and trying to meet a lot of new people at once. But when I needed a break from introducing myself and playing the names and faces game, I was pretty lonely, so I bought a book.

It happened to be Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan's latest novel, and it happened to be wonderful and a romantic spy story that was equally indulgent and inspiring, a good story packaged as good literature (that rare combination that McEwan creates so brilliantly). But what's funny is that this scenario had all happened to me before, two years ago, when I arrived for my semester abroad in France. Equally, if not more, alienated and confused and excited-but-terrified, I looked for refuge in the small collection of books sitting in the common room of where I was living. I picked up the only book in English I saw: The Innocent by Ian McEwan.

To make this parallel even more bizarre, The Innocent is also a spy story, less romantic and more gruesome. I remember lying in bed late at night reading to the end, utterly caught up in the story and the suspense, and being so grateful for the little respite it offered me from the challenge of learning a new city/country/world.

Both books were particularly suited to my need because both are about young people entering new and unfamiliar worlds as they try to define themselves and their lives - in The Innocent, Leonard Marnham arrives in Cold War Berlin from England and gets embroiled in love and some very challenging ethics questions; in Sweet Tooth, Serena Frome graduates from Cambridge only to find herself recruited by MI5 and whisked into a world of secret money, assumed identities, and very high stakes love affairs. OK, so I was just going to school in other countries, but still, it was nice to read about their adventures as a break from my own.

So here I was, smiling to myself over the odd coincidence and the very great pleasure which a pair of fine novels in the face of difficulty can bestow. And then Ian McEwan turned up at my university to give an interview and sign books, and I got the chance to tell him how much his books meant to me and why. This was incredibly important for me, and I'm so lucky to have had that chance. It made me realize how little we get to express our thanks to people who inspire us in a manner more personal than a standing ovation or a high number of sales of a book. And I got to stand face to face with one of my favorite authors and thank him for his work, got to express my feelings (if briefly and very nervously) about a book to the person who wrote it.

So yeah, it's not often the people who read books and who write them get to meet, but it's all the more wonderful maybe for being rare and special. I saw another example of this when I went to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer and crowded into tents with other book-lovers to hear authors talk about their work and answer audience questions and the body heat generated by a bunch of people squeezed into that special space seemed to be charged with a massive energy of excitement and thrilled-to-be-here-ment that was infectious. Reading a book may be a pretty solitary, quiet activity most of the time, but it can generate big emotions, and sometimes it's just awesome to share that bigness out loud.

P.S. Speaking of books and talking about them with others, I know I said I would do a lot of reviews of/posts about the books I've been reading for my course, and I haven't much at all. But I'm going to try to do more of that because I love writing about books and I want to write down some of my thoughts about the ones I've liked best or learned the most from this semester before I settle into new books and the old ones fly out of my head. So stay tuned.

London: The Burrough Market

Here are some pictures...

 ...from Londonnnnnn!

 

Among other things last weekend, I visited the incredible Burrough Market, a haven of deliciousness. It was a bit difficult to capture it in pictures because I was too busy eating and gawking and it was really crowded, but I tried to get a little of the flavor (no pun intended...actually, who am I kidding, the pun is always intended) of the place.

I didn't even notice the wonderful names on these jars until I looked back at this picture. It was the labels that caught my eye.