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lobelia321In fact, I've been so relaxed that I haven't even read LJ!
Provence
Provence was absolutely wonderful. T'h wants to buy a house in Cucuron! Except all our money is currently being sunk into the elder son's private schooling because the f**** government cannot seem to provide, with the taxes we pay, adequate secondary education but prefers to pay OUR TAXES on such jaunts as getting people killed in Iraq, grr £@&*()()%$. Anyway, back to Provence.
The light was lambent. There were two thunderstorms. The skies were so clear we saw the Milky Way and I learned 10 new constellations (beyond the two standard stand-bys, Big Dipper and Orion) but now I can't see most of them in the UK, they are so faint. We saw masses of shooting stars, some of them streaking across the entire sky!
We stayed with friends in a farmhouse near Bonnieux. We spoke French and Italian and German and even Chinese (!). There were French children, and the kids just all ran about together.
I feel so healthy! I didn't sit at a desk for two whole weeks! I moved and walked and did a lot of swimming, in a pool nearby (whose pump we didn't know how to work and which thus went progressively greener and slimier day by day) and in the Mediterranean (*sigh*) and in a lake, and t'h and t'kids went tennis playing. We are all nut brown and we ate fresh fruit and salad and olives every day.
Provence is so beautiful! Why isn't the town I live in more beautiful? And it's got the reputation of being one of the prettiest in the UK! Argh. I just had the feeling that for two weeks my eyes could relax. Everything I saw, natural and human-made, was balm for the eyes. Things just caressed my vision. Here, I have to expend energy on cancelling things out, on pretending all the ugly things away, on fending off the assault on my eyes!
Holiday reading
We had such wonderful dreamy siestas and I read, sitting in a recliner under some plane trees, listening to the cicadas. I read Aeschylus's play Agamemnon and Sophocles's Ajax. These are the first Greek tragedies I've ever read. I bought them in these new snazzy Cambridge University Press editions, fabulous covers, excellent notes, nice paper and pics. I love them! I really got into them. I now want to read loads more. They are very weird at first and take some getting used to but I love the stylised format and the artificialness and the language and the powerful rawness and violence. Agamemnon, especially, was impressive. It has got two amazingly strong woman characters in it, Cassandra and Clytemnestra, and it must be fantastic for actresses to play these. And they have this weird thing called the chorus; 12 or so men who are fishermen or soldiers or old geezers or even women and who sing: it's just like Bollywood!
Then I read Andrea de Carlo's Giro di vento. It's okay but the best thing was that I read it in Italian, and it wasn't difficult at all. When reading a foreign language, even an indifferent novel is redeemed because there is an intrinsic interest in deciphering the language. Also, he writes in the present tense so that makes it very pleasant for the foreigner who may otherwise struggle with all those preterites.
We went to a fantastic bookshop in Isle sur la Sorgue, it was like drinking wine - not a chain, not Borders or Waterstone's, not thousands of bestsellers stacked on tables but a real bookshop. There was a huge section on world literature, so I could update my list and have already borrowed two of them from the library (Tabucchi's Requiem and an Icelandic crime novel, Jar City). They had loads of Chinese literature, especially, and Arabic literature, lots of Iraqi novels. I'm not even sure they're translated into English; I will try German. They had a wonderful edition of Abu-Nuwas, that homosexual poet from the Persian Middle Ages. I should have bought it in the French translation. But I did buy Theophile Gautier's short stories and am reading one in French. It does have the preterite but it's not so hard! With patience, I am managing to decode most words without recourse to a dictionary, and am managing to parse nearly every sentence.
There is a certain something about reading literature in a foreign language. I hope I can keep this up.
Marital relations
The holiday was so idyllic it is strange to recall that it was actually also marked by marital distance and crisis. This came from me, and has more to do, perhaps, with my own sense of self than with t'h. I feel I have a very weak sense of self and often feel dissed and dismissed by others. I also often don't know what I want instead. I have now downloaded stuff from the internet about 'How to be assertive'. It is actually really liberating. I keep thinking about the formula for 'empathetic assertiveness': "I understand that you are feeling blah but when you do that, it makes me feel blah, and I would prefer it if we did blah." I've been using it tentatively. Why did my therapist never give me such formulae?
Anyway, a crisis now and again can blow the cobwebs away, so my happiness currently is also due to increased marital mutual understanding (post-holiday!).
Book
I'm even feeling better about my book. I'm not beating myself up about it at the moment. I just work on it until lunch time and then I do something else.
Well, Demelza![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badgermonkey txted me when I was lounging about on pebbles at the beach (disadvantage of pebbles: not as comfy as sand; advantage: clean; no sand in your food and bag and up your vaginal orifices) with the news that Domfever was back and that Lost was on Channel 4. So I taped the double episode that was shown last Saturday (strangely, there is no follow-up this Sat...?) and watched the first ep the next day. I find it incredibly stupid!! And ideologically problematic. But Dom is, admittedly, cute. Also, I had a strange sensation. A sort of post-fandom sensation. I didn't get an excited flurry of the kind I used to get at the height of lotrips lust. It was more like seeing a kid brother on TV. A sort of familiar, protective feeling. Funnily, the first Dom that came to mind was the Convergence-Dom who subbed under Bill, and not one of my own Doms.
There are a dozen more things I want to write about but my fingers are hurting and it's late and, as I discovered during my holiday, sitting at a desk is truly bad for one's health. It makes your neck ache and fucks your back and makes you sleep restlessly and gives you all manner of dis-ease, I'm sure of it. I also get repetitive stress syndrome from repeated mouse use and delete-button-pressing. In Provence, I felt fantastic in my body! Not a single time at a desk!
So I won't write down the other dozen things. And maybe within the next few days I will actually get to read the Flist once again. I'm almost afraid of it.
*smoochypoochy*
Provence
Provence was absolutely wonderful. T'h wants to buy a house in Cucuron! Except all our money is currently being sunk into the elder son's private schooling because the f**** government cannot seem to provide, with the taxes we pay, adequate secondary education but prefers to pay OUR TAXES on such jaunts as getting people killed in Iraq, grr £@&*()()%$. Anyway, back to Provence.
The light was lambent. There were two thunderstorms. The skies were so clear we saw the Milky Way and I learned 10 new constellations (beyond the two standard stand-bys, Big Dipper and Orion) but now I can't see most of them in the UK, they are so faint. We saw masses of shooting stars, some of them streaking across the entire sky!
We stayed with friends in a farmhouse near Bonnieux. We spoke French and Italian and German and even Chinese (!). There were French children, and the kids just all ran about together.
I feel so healthy! I didn't sit at a desk for two whole weeks! I moved and walked and did a lot of swimming, in a pool nearby (whose pump we didn't know how to work and which thus went progressively greener and slimier day by day) and in the Mediterranean (*sigh*) and in a lake, and t'h and t'kids went tennis playing. We are all nut brown and we ate fresh fruit and salad and olives every day.
Provence is so beautiful! Why isn't the town I live in more beautiful? And it's got the reputation of being one of the prettiest in the UK! Argh. I just had the feeling that for two weeks my eyes could relax. Everything I saw, natural and human-made, was balm for the eyes. Things just caressed my vision. Here, I have to expend energy on cancelling things out, on pretending all the ugly things away, on fending off the assault on my eyes!
Holiday reading
We had such wonderful dreamy siestas and I read, sitting in a recliner under some plane trees, listening to the cicadas. I read Aeschylus's play Agamemnon and Sophocles's Ajax. These are the first Greek tragedies I've ever read. I bought them in these new snazzy Cambridge University Press editions, fabulous covers, excellent notes, nice paper and pics. I love them! I really got into them. I now want to read loads more. They are very weird at first and take some getting used to but I love the stylised format and the artificialness and the language and the powerful rawness and violence. Agamemnon, especially, was impressive. It has got two amazingly strong woman characters in it, Cassandra and Clytemnestra, and it must be fantastic for actresses to play these. And they have this weird thing called the chorus; 12 or so men who are fishermen or soldiers or old geezers or even women and who sing: it's just like Bollywood!
Then I read Andrea de Carlo's Giro di vento. It's okay but the best thing was that I read it in Italian, and it wasn't difficult at all. When reading a foreign language, even an indifferent novel is redeemed because there is an intrinsic interest in deciphering the language. Also, he writes in the present tense so that makes it very pleasant for the foreigner who may otherwise struggle with all those preterites.
We went to a fantastic bookshop in Isle sur la Sorgue, it was like drinking wine - not a chain, not Borders or Waterstone's, not thousands of bestsellers stacked on tables but a real bookshop. There was a huge section on world literature, so I could update my list and have already borrowed two of them from the library (Tabucchi's Requiem and an Icelandic crime novel, Jar City). They had loads of Chinese literature, especially, and Arabic literature, lots of Iraqi novels. I'm not even sure they're translated into English; I will try German. They had a wonderful edition of Abu-Nuwas, that homosexual poet from the Persian Middle Ages. I should have bought it in the French translation. But I did buy Theophile Gautier's short stories and am reading one in French. It does have the preterite but it's not so hard! With patience, I am managing to decode most words without recourse to a dictionary, and am managing to parse nearly every sentence.
There is a certain something about reading literature in a foreign language. I hope I can keep this up.
Marital relations
The holiday was so idyllic it is strange to recall that it was actually also marked by marital distance and crisis. This came from me, and has more to do, perhaps, with my own sense of self than with t'h. I feel I have a very weak sense of self and often feel dissed and dismissed by others. I also often don't know what I want instead. I have now downloaded stuff from the internet about 'How to be assertive'. It is actually really liberating. I keep thinking about the formula for 'empathetic assertiveness': "I understand that you are feeling blah but when you do that, it makes me feel blah, and I would prefer it if we did blah." I've been using it tentatively. Why did my therapist never give me such formulae?
Anyway, a crisis now and again can blow the cobwebs away, so my happiness currently is also due to increased marital mutual understanding (post-holiday!).
Book
I'm even feeling better about my book. I'm not beating myself up about it at the moment. I just work on it until lunch time and then I do something else.
Well, Demelza
badgermonkey txted me when I was lounging about on pebbles at the beach (disadvantage of pebbles: not as comfy as sand; advantage: clean; no sand in your food and bag and up your vaginal orifices) with the news that Domfever was back and that Lost was on Channel 4. So I taped the double episode that was shown last Saturday (strangely, there is no follow-up this Sat...?) and watched the first ep the next day. I find it incredibly stupid!! And ideologically problematic. But Dom is, admittedly, cute. Also, I had a strange sensation. A sort of post-fandom sensation. I didn't get an excited flurry of the kind I used to get at the height of lotrips lust. It was more like seeing a kid brother on TV. A sort of familiar, protective feeling. Funnily, the first Dom that came to mind was the Convergence-Dom who subbed under Bill, and not one of my own Doms.There are a dozen more things I want to write about but my fingers are hurting and it's late and, as I discovered during my holiday, sitting at a desk is truly bad for one's health. It makes your neck ache and fucks your back and makes you sleep restlessly and gives you all manner of dis-ease, I'm sure of it. I also get repetitive stress syndrome from repeated mouse use and delete-button-pressing. In Provence, I felt fantastic in my body! Not a single time at a desk!
So I won't write down the other dozen things. And maybe within the next few days I will actually get to read the Flist once again. I'm almost afraid of it.
*smoochypoochy*
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:22 am (UTC)and yeah, it's so hard being assertive. i'm resigned to be a doormat.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 09:58 pm (UTC)Today I practised on a shop assistant (apparently, it works well if you start on people you don't know) and it worked! I did the three-step sentence: 'I know you're busy' (empathy, acknowledging her situation) 'but I don't know what the school uniforms look like' (what effect her ignoring us had on me) 'so could you please go over with me and show me where they are?' (specific request) And it worked! She walked on over!! And I felt good!
This three-step sentence thing helps me to identify what I want (this I find very hard; the doormat approach is not even daring to want anything) and then to couch it in nice empathetic language (doormats pride themselves upon being understanding!).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:31 am (UTC)If this isn't the opening line of something, it should be.
Ah, Provence. Me likes.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 02:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 09:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 09:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 08:52 am (UTC)Of course 'Lost' is stupid! That's why I like it. It fills the preposterous plot gap left by the departure of 24 from our screens.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 10:02 pm (UTC)Lost kept me watching, so that's something: the lowest common denominator of trashy page-turning. But I also find it ideologically evil. It says that when catastrophe strikes people do not automatically cleave to one another and try to help but run in all different directions in a selfish and mindless panic and need to be corralled by a He-Man Hero. 90 percent of American film fare seems to be perpetuating this ideology. I think Americans fear each other and have no faith in community. This is kind of sick.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 10:14 pm (UTC)You clearly did not learn to type on a typewriter. Typewriting involves a steady rhythm. If you go too fast, you will get the keys tangled up and jammed. This is what reading a foreign-language novel is like: steady, not speedy. Hitting each word with the same calm force, and then parsing. I find it helps if I adore the language so much that I don't care if the content is a bit crappy, and this is what I feel towards Italian. French is a bit harder going for me.