A Whole Lot of Stuff Plus Some Bond

You can't see this but I'm typing onto a new monitor which is flat and doesn't resemble a space station. Thing is, it's freed up so much room on my desk and is consequently so far away from my face that I'm having to look at it through binoculars. Sigh.

Well this is the classic 'It's The End Of The Year And There Are Multiple Deadlines Looming But Instead Of Meeting Them I'm Procrastinating ... Well, Yeah, Procrastinating' post. Ah, good times. I've now been useless for about a week and a half, although it feels longer. And hey, it IS the end of 2012, so how's everyone dealing with all the crazies in their life who believe that come the new year, the four horses of the apocalypse are gonna charge around earth lassoing us all up like cattle? Also, on a hopefully unrelated note, anyone's atheist father just decided that evolution no longer cuts the mustard as a scientific theory? No? Just mine? Okay, then.

So since I last posted here 2 months ago, a lot has changed here on Walton Mountain, but my habit of starting every new paragraph with either 'Well' or 'So' is still going strong. Let's see,

• I turned 20, and felt it. Like, my teen years are officially behind me. I will never again get the chance to sneak into an 18 or use a fake ID or be featured on Underage & Pregnant. Unless I'm the kid's mother, of course, cause I'm now in that decade where you have to start thinking about careers and houses and bills and... urgh... contributing to the species *shudder*. You know what was really nasty? Around the same time I had to renew my passport and you know when it's going to expire? The day before I turn 30. THIRTY!!!! i.e., the day my life stops.
• I passed my theory test first time phew, which means I'm now an official theoretical driver, which I reckon in turn means I could take on the Matrix. Please place your bets.
• Uni is HARD. For the first few weeks coming out of the zombiefication of summer this was a good thing, but fast forward to week 9 or something and I'm just slacking along cause I've become a slacker. It's Lit Theory that's doing it. I love Victorian Lit and even though I haven't exactly kept up with my reading (hey, Victorian novels are long! It's like a fact and everything!) I feel confident enough in it. Maybe that's just in contrast to Lit Theory, cause man, I'm struggling to remember why I picked the damn course in the first place. I know it had something to do with psychoanalysis and feminism, but after a while you just get sick of everything being compared to the loss of the phallus and angry lesbians ranting about how much they hate men and trying to justify it. And then there's all the isms. Post-colonialism, deconstructionism, new historicism (is an oxymoron), pretentious pointlessism. The thing is, I wish someone had warned me that it's basically the same course they have in the Philosophy department called 'Philosophy of English' except apparently this is less 'esoteric' (dumbdumbdumb). I think on some level I knew this and that's why I picked it, despite the fact I have proven I am pish at the theoretical side of philosophy that involves Descartes and scholars arguing back and forth about God knows what in horribly constructed sentences with words like 'subjectivated' shoved in. There's a part of me that's really interested in philosophy and discussing concepts, but then there's another part that just finds it really frustrating because all it does is go around in circles talking about shit and never actually gets to the bottom of anything. RAAAAA. When I'm in a Lit Theory tutorial I have to periodically look down to remind myself I am on a chair and not in fact floating ten feet above the ground, because it totally feels like we start off tethered to the floor and gradually levitate and drift up toward the ceiling while smoking colourful carcinogenic substances from a hookah and waiting for the enlightening transformation. Except I'm Alice, and everyone else is a caterpillar. Well, except the two girls I was lucky enough to sit next to in the first tutorial and subsequently got grouped with for the rest of the semester. They're great and NORMAL and we all don't get the week's reading together which is hilarious on no breakfast. Alice & the Caterpillars sounds like a good band name too.

• Life has been weirdly framed by fairy-tales lately. It started with me renting and then buying The Company of Wolves, and then devouring the source material, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, this gorgeously sumptuous delicious anthology of fairy-tales and legends with a twist (kind of like Coke with lemon). You know when a book or a film or a piece of music just seems to describe a piece of your soul or something? (If that sounds totally loopy, sorry, I'm a little tipsy right now.) And then I decided to go as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, a proper one not a slutty one, and I even ran into my own wolf, who was dressed as nothing and/or James Bond, because the most dangerous wolves are hairy on the inside. And then that seemed the perfect way to teach a kid about concepts and symbols and connotations in literature. And I decided to do my mid-term Victorian Lit essay on 'The Lady of Shalott' because I'm completely enamoured with and haunted by that poem, and this led to me and my mother dissecting it at the kitchen table until the wee hours of the morning. And then I watched Pan's Labyrinth (I know, a thousand miles behind as usual) and Freeway in which Reese Witherspoon knows how to say motherfucker. A lot. Tangled up somewhere in the beginning of this is a European English-dubbed version of Snow White my dad recorded off the tv when I was little and once I remembered it I had to find it. You know how vague things from childhood that resurface all of a sudden have this urgency because you think you have a limited time to remember before it submerges again and is lost forever? Youtube sorted me out, and I rediscovered the least annoying and most endearing version of Snow White I've seen yet. The relationship between Snow White and the Jester is really sweet, and the dwarves wear these little suits reminiscent of E.T.'s neck. Let me know if you've seen it! Apparently when I was little my favourite Disney movie was Snow White & the Seven Dwarves which I don't really get because MAN is her voice irritating. And the Kristen Stewart version was just...dissatisfying. I swear you could have shaken twenty minutes out of that thing just by deleting shots of her pulling her patented angsty face over and over again. (Can I just note here that I'm actually a fan of K-Stew, just not of that film and the subsequent adultery that came out of it?) I think part of my coolness toward Snow White is the fact that I don't really get it. Like, this is my understanding: the evil stepmother wants to be the most beautiful woman in the land, and when her mirror tells her that Snow White is the fairest, she wants her dead. So far, cool. But what redeeming features does Snow White have in order not to be killed? I'm not saying she should be killed just because she's beautiful, but she has lips red as blood, skin white as snow, and hair black as night. That's her whole shtick. Therefore her redemption is her beauty... WHAT? How can her redemption be the same thing that the queen's being condemned for? Fair enough the queen's sinning through extreme vanity and jealousy blah, but her vanity is kind of pitiful and desperate because she's clinging onto her beauty whereas Snow White is just this stupid naive little TWIT who sails through purely on her looks and befriending furry animals and baking pies. I don't. Get. It. Can anyone explain the merits of the story to me? I'm sure there are some. Personally I think the story would work better if Snow White was actually Mousy Brown or Sarah Plain & Tall, but whatever.
• After an unwelcome dearth in the cinematic aspect of my life, me and Maz, Maz and I, decided enough was enough, our friends suck, and so we took ourselves off to see James Bond. Different as we are in our tastes, we seem to have a mutual interest in Smart Action Thrillers. P.S., spoilers ahoy! So Bond is Amazing and Scottish and Albert Finney Bourne Connection YAY! And Bond girls are impossibly gorgeous. And death by komodo dragon ouch. This sequence disturbed me because aside from the fact I have a pathological problem with sympathizing with Bad Guys, and that my imagination runs away with me, I have also seen documentaries on these large scaly beasts and recalled that their jaws are so crawling in gross bacteria that one bite apparently paralyses prey so that dude was ALIVE when he was EATEN by a KOMODO DRAGON in a CASINO. Bad bad bad way to go. The cinematography was STUNNING. Javier Bardem is SCARY. Glen Coe is GORGEOUS and NEAR. And the whole Jason Bourne/James Bond debate is STUPID because they exist in two totally different universes. Don't lie, you know it's true. Also, I think I initially wanted to see this because Sam Mendes was directing and I've been in love with him ever since American Beauty. Such a good choice. Also-also, I now do this thing in movies where I like cruise the credits to see if Thomas Newman's scoring, and to my surprise and delight, he scored this. That man gets around. Since I haven't seen much of the Bond oeuvre I can't really comment, but I thought the whole Oedipal theme between M, Bond and Silva was fantastically messed up. And the homoeroticism just made total sense because I've always thought of Daniel Craig's interpretation of Bond as bringing that element to the table. Like, for me Bond is so closed off he's almost asexual, but finds more emotional comfort in homosexual activity and uses women as distracting instruments of release. And then there was that shot in the last third of Bond's parents' gravestones and his mother's name is very pointedly foreign (was it French? I can't remember) and I took this as suggesting that Bond's predilection for impossibly gorgeous European women is bound up in the loss of his mother at such a young age...which again ties in with the Oedipal theme...and Silva laughs when he notices the graves, as if he knows. My mother on the other hand took this to mean that Bond and Silva were long-lost brothers, so. Anyone have any thoughts? And do people think Daniel Craig is in fact the best Bond? I know a lot of...ahem...middle-aged people think he has nothing on Sean Connery because that guy is the epitome of 60's cool, or in the case of my mother they also thought Daniel Craig looks like a pug or a monkey or something. I can't say whether he's the best Bond or not because I haven't seen all of the films and I've never read any of the books, but I do think he is the best Bond for our time. I think the key thing about the character is that he evolves with culture, he isn't still stuck in the 60's. He absorbs cinematic and social movements and reflects them back out to us. I don't think people would embrace the character as much nowadays if--and I'm sorry to harp on about this, but it's true--Bourne hadn't come along and set new standards for the action genre. I actually saw Casino Royale before I was ever aware of Bourne and the most vivid thing I remember is feeling in the cinema like I was the one being beat up because the violence was so gritty and visceral, in a totally amazing way. In the post-Bourne phase, Bond was actually allowed to get hurt, and when physical injury appears, it opens up a window for emotional injury. I think that's what our time needed, a hero who was also human. Now people are talking about how we've moved onto the post-Christopher Nolan Bond and maaaaaaan, am I excited for where the story goes next!
• I was out with the other two thirds tonight, and we were sitting in Wetherspoons sipping our cheap alcohol and wondering...when did our lives get so complicated? It's so nice that we're all going through kind of similar jackhole things at the same time because we can all relate and sympathize and advise, but it's just weird. I feel pretty content in my life right now, I feel like I'm over it, but the line between good and bad seems to be getting blurrier. Or, not even that, but like I'm leaving it behind, because maybe I have to explore the limits of my own character and I want to do a particular something to prove to myself I can do it even though it is wrong. But the thing I'm realizing more and more is that barriers aren't physical, they won't sound alarms if you run up against them, or repel you back like a force field. They are choices, and not foolproof ones; you keep making that choice every day, because there will always be temptations or distractions. I guess what I'm trying to say is that nothing is ever really off limits, and that is weird. Things seem so much simpler when you're a kid.
• I'm enjoying the hell out of Friday Night Dinner series 2. Every time I watch this show there's an influx in my vocabulary of phrases like 'SHIT ON THE SHITTING THING' and all its merry variants. Also, I fancy Jonny. He actually has such a sweet smile. It's like when Judd Nelson smiles in The Breakfast Club, it's so fleeting and you've been waiting so long to see it that it's astoundingly beautiful and kind of takes your breath away for a minute.
• I don't mean to sound like an arse here cause I'm genuinely curious and quite out of the loop, but when did M83 become popular, as in, Top 40 Radio 2 popular? I knew it was them (him? I don't know, this always confuses me. Formerly them and now him, I think) a couple of months ago when I heard the 80's tribute music in the background in work, and then I checked the other day and yeah, Midnight City by M83. Like, I remember saying to people three years ago that I liked them and they gave me funny looks like I was saying I had a thing for a chemistry equation or something, and even back then I felt like a doof for not knowing who they were before. I don't think they were ever particularly obscure or niche, but TOP 40?! Blows my mind. And now I feel really old. My favourite song of theirs/his will always be Skin of the Night because oh yum. I was thinking today of how I got into them, and I remembered it was because I was watching Donkey Punch on C4 one night (shut up) and IMing a friend who was also watching it at the same time (seriously, you'll break a rib if you don't quit laughing). I know my friend and I weren't the only losers who did this instead of actually watching things together in the same room. Anyway, during the... scene of a sexual nature, there was this really cool song in the background, like listening to the underground or something, and I HAD TO HAVE IT. Everyone right now is going, seriously, there was a scene in which people are all kinds of naked and a girl gets punched in the back of the neck and DIES and you paid attention to the SOUNDTRACK? Yes, that is correct. The song--a remix of Don't Save Us From the Flames--was unbuyable so I made my friend download and send it to me and thus an M83 fan was born. I guess this is kind of redundant now since everyone probably knows who they are, but if you like John Hughes movies and feel nostalgic about the 80's chances are you'll like M83. 

Speaking of music, my current Playlist of Life is:

Sea of Love by Cat Power which of course being the awkward creature I am I heard first in a gay Belgian film called North Sea Texas (it's adorable) instead of in Juno or whatever else is inevitably more popular than that.

White Horse by Taylor Swift because it's grown on me.

Ho Hey by the Lumineers who my friend in uni just saw and now I'm well jell!

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift which reminds me of the joke Meejin told tonight: Taylor Swift waved at a guy across the street and he didn't wave back. The new album will be out next month. IT'S FUNNY CAUSE IT'S TRUE.

Skyfall by Adele because...is a reason really necessary?

Ride by Lana Del Rey because Simon Mayo is a genius and I love how it's kind of melancholy and how she reminds me a little of Kate Bush near the end with all her high notes.

Titanium by David Guetta ft. Sia because I am a thousand miles behind everyone else.

And The Bourne Ultimatum soundtrack <3. John Powell can come score me any day. I don't even know what that means. 

What's everyone else listening tooooooooooo :)? My mother had SmoothXMAS on all day, so I'm in a pretty holly jolly mood!

Hope everyone's well and not succumbing to frostbite/exam stress! 

A Not-Summer Post

Oh my holy goblin, it's been so long since I wrote a 'personal' blog post I've kinda forgotten how to do it O_O.

I did have another version of this all typed up and ready to go, but it felt a little too personal, plus it was long  and largely incoherent (I'm just as shocked as you), so it's been absorbed into my diary instead. It was my first day back at uni today, and I was in for a total of forty minutes, which was sufficient enough time to completely freak out, Lose All Faith in Self, and feel defeated before I'd even begun. I suppose it didn't help that I'd had very little sleep, no breakfast, it was raining, I was cold, a guy in a lilac hoody practically walked through me, and etc. A couple of days ago, on the other side of summer, I had this kind of affected superstition that if I didn't do a 'My Summer' post then summer wouldn't officially end and everything in it would kind of bleed into the next chapter, like this:

But like I said, the intended post was too personal, maybe because I was panicking and when I panic I tend to spill my guts a little too messily all over the keyboard (ew), and I was super tired and just really not in the mood to do anything except watch The Horse Whisperer and go to bed early. And you know what? On the other side of summer, it is so obvious that bookending that period of time doesn't change things one iota. A few days ago my friend and I were browsing through some old photographs and we kept noticing how the seasons were very well established. The summers were hot and sunny, the autumns were rich and gold, and the winters were icy blue and mystical. Of course, retrospect is a deceptive thing, and probably those pictures were taken on days when the weather was particularly paradigmatic, but still. The weather has definitely changed over the past couple of years; the seasons kind of blend and smudge together. And I guess that's the way life is too. No matter how many little traditions or exorcisms I perform, like chopping off my hair at the start of term, or setting goals by the expiration dates of bus passes, I cannot compartmentalise the things that happen and how I feel about them. As much as I am resistant to the let things flow/come what may philosophy, it is probably healthier and more natural than to stanch and divide and suppress. I think. I can't force myself to jumpstart the getting over it process if I'm not quite there yet; that would be deleterious in the long-run. The restless part of me is impatient and eager for it to begin, but for the wrong reasons. Since I seem to express myself better in images, I suppose what I have to do right now is wade out into the water, and let my heels sink into the sand, and let the waves flow over and around me, and keep standing up. I'm not sure why these images are always to do with the ocean. I'm also not sure why in my head it is night time and I'm near an old harbour and I'm wearing torn raggedy scraps for clothes. Must be the Victorian Lit course seeping into my brain already. But yeah, I guess not actually being ready to move on.org is why I've been having these conflicting thoughts of "I want to move on because I don't want to still be here when I'm 21" (prescriptive) and "but I also don't want to move on, because that means it's really over and I can't...hope about it anymore, and I'm not quite ready to let go of that yet" (descriptive). I guess I'll be ready when I'm ready and the impatient part of me is just going to have to deal with that, because better this than dragging all that crap around and dumping it on someone else's lap. Or something. I think I'm still in the shell-shocked stage, but I've grown accustomed to being shell-shocked...does that make sense? 

And now I'm going to devolve into bullet points recounting life over the past few months cause I'm a waster:

·         The summer was begun by returning to North Berwick, this time with Meejin's little sister who I kind of want to adopt because we both love movies, she makes organised dance cool, and has the common sense that neither me nor Meejin possess. Which is an asset when you're going to stay in a demonically possessed house for five days. Except she was leaving after three. When we arrived at said house, the attic was lying open with the pulley stairs kind of hanging down into the hall. On the last night Meejin and I discovered that not only can we run for twenty minutes straight along a beach, we can also do it again five minutes later when we think we are being stalked. Seriously, that town is just Wickerman creepy at night. And here's a tip from me to you: 'zinc', when placed appropriately, is a v. good word in Scrabble. Thank me later ;).

·         I went to the cinema six times to see five different films; I spied Kevin Bridges in an ice cream parlour; Limmy came into my work and I bought his copy of Se7en; I took many driving lessons and clipped off one hubcap; I went on four ostensible not-dates; and read exactly eight books. I also did so little that I had time to enumerate what little I did do. Neat, huh?

·         Meejin spontaneously appeared at my door one evening and we ended up gutting my room until two thirty in the morning. It is frightening how much crap I had unknowingly accumulated. I can now see my desk once more, and my floor is no longer the site of the Two Towers (of DVDs).

·         I am embroiled, or partaking, or something, in A Situation. It is an indication of my lack of self-esteem that it took me most of the summer to recognise this fact, and from the outside I could justifiably be accused of being a bitch for appearing to allow it to go as far as it has. But I had to really know it before I knew, you know? Anyways, I never would have thought I'd be involved in something like this and while I'm surprised at myself, I feel intrigue rather than guilt. I'm not quite sure what that says about me but if I scrutinize anymore I will be struck permamently cross-eyed. If nothing else, it is interesting research for a book that I never could have gotten second-hand. Which got me to thinking, how far are writers willing to go in the name of research?

·         Speaking of writing, I done practically none, and I think I might expand on this later because I rarely talk about it to anyone, in reality or virtuality (is it bad that I totally smiled at that word?). To cut a long story short, I reckon this dearth of creativity was due in large part to...

·         ...my experiencing something of an identity crisis. In fact, crisis is the wrong word because it implies immediacy, and this is a sprawling languorous thing which is still going on. (This would be one of the things I was attempting to contain in summer.) The only way I can explain it is that I really really wanted to write, and I knew what I wanted to write because I'd planned it all out, but when it came to actually writing I just couldn't. There were other niggling little things like setting, format, the overwhelming choice of words in the English language, but the centrifugal problem seems to be that I have forgotten how to write like me. And I'm not quite sure how to fix that.

·         The Eglish teacher I had for four years in high school moved to Thailand with his family in August, and I'm feeling increasingly...not sad, just kind of oh about it. I kind of can't begin to describe the nebulous significance of his presence in my life, and how he always believed in and supported me even after I'd left school and I was no longer his responsibility. In a selfish way, because so many aspects of this summer have felt unfamiliar, and I'm embarking on something now even more unfamiliar, it kind of feels like I've lost an ally or a pillar of support. But mostly I'm just happy he's getting this amazing opportunity, and I hope his new students appreciate him as much as we all did.

·         And then this is the really frilly bit of news at the end of the bulletin: I'm taking on a couple of students to tutor them in English for Reasons which are mostly but not all to do with money. Also: there are some weird fuckers on Gumtree.

And here are some pictures to commemorate:

(This is what a not-date looks like.)

And this signifies making time for friends around busy schedules, 

not the fact that we are Total Losers.

I may have had a total slo-mo writing summer, but I was the co-creator of this.

Also, this is the sound of life right now:

Thanks for reading :) x

Snowtown

So here's the first of what I hope will be at least a few review-themed posts. They won't all be as long as this but I guess I just had a lot to say about this film... Next time I'm going to do a 'recommendations' post with bulletpoints and general quickness! Enjoy :)!

Snowtown, a 2010 film directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, really is based on true events—those of the ‘Snowtown murders’ which occurred in Southern Australia between 1992 and 1999. This is a fascinating if utterly repellent study of the relationships between the ‘gang’ of murderers which developed and ultimately influenced the outcome of one of Australia’s most notorious serial murder cases. I’m not really informed enough about the case to discuss it here, but it’s definitely worth a little internet research if you’re going to watch the film. As far as I know the entire cast, excluding the actor who plays John Bunting, are all non-actors who were residents of the Adelaide suburb ravaged by the murders. If you do watch it look out for Louise Harris who plays the protagonist's mother--there's something very tragic about her performance, and it's my favourite of the bunch, although they're all fantastic! Also, snaps for being an independent low-budget movie.

So I watched Snowtown right off the back of Wolf Creek because I think I was a little enthralled by the possibilities of Australian horror, but also because I’d heard really great things about the film. And man alive, if I thought Wolf Creek was terrifying because it was realistic, was I in for an ungodly wake-up call with Snowtown. Snowtown is terrifying, but in a totally different way to Wolf Creek, which feels hyper-kinetic and steeped in melodrama (the good kind) by comparison. That’s saying something since many people criticize Wolf Creek for being ‘dull’ due to its forty-minute let’s get to know the characters before we shish kabob them technique (I loved it, audience cruelty and all) and ‘obscene’ because of its cinema verite depiction of sadistic violence. Really the only things the two films have in common is the fact they’re both set in Australia and based on true murder cases in the country’s history (with varying degrees of verisimilitude). Apart from that, there’s really nothing of the relative fictitious safety of Wolf Creek to cling onto. Sure, there’s no astounding geographical isolation, no Mick Dundee outback psychopath running around with a Bowie hunting knife and a borderline torture-porn mentality when it comes to offing his victims. But the inverted horror of Snowtown is what makes it, for me, so terrifying.

At 119 minutes and with an emphasis on the nuances of the characters’ relationships and psychology, Snowtown is what I’d call a simmering pot. Calling it a slow burner would imply there’s some kind of climactic explosion at the conclusion, which there isn’t. It’s more a very chilling period, or a punch in the solar plexus that makes you bend double to muffle the pain of the impact. When the film closes and the credits roll, with a disconcertingly jaunty piece of music, you are left feeling cold and kind of derelict—something like the abandoned bank vault where all the bodies were stored alone and forgotten for so many years.

You know, thinking about it now I don’t even know if I would call Snowtown a ‘horror’ movie, because it certainly isn’t a conventional one. There is very little gore aside from some severed kangaroo limbs (the noise that accompanies the image is even more disturbing) and a particularly gruelling torture scene which plays a pivotal part in the narrative—and it’s because the film is not exploring body horror (despite the grisly subject matter), but psychological horror. Or, if this doesn’t sound too pretentious, the many shifting faces of horror. The real achievement of Wolf Creek was its exploitation of the landscape, the unforgivingness of nature. The vastness and desolation of the outback crushed any possibility of hope in that movie. The characters were stranded out in the middle of nowhere and nobody was looking for them. The thing with Snowtown is that it all takes place in this densely populated and moribund suburb of a major Australian city where crime is rife and the authorities don’t care. In steps John Bunting, who in its despair and abandonment, the community scraping by on government benefits looks to as a leader, a dispenser of justice, and to the main character, a father figure. Charming and charismatic, John soon ingratiates himself into the heart of the community scarred by paedophilia and drug abuse. He champions ideologies which border on hypothetical lynch mob operations against those deemed morally corrupt. It becomes increasingly apparent, however, that John does not discriminate between paedophiles and homosexuals, obese people, drug addicts and the mentally handicapped. His highly amiable facade begins to crack and splinter, or maybe he’s choosing to slip the mask off himself, giving glimpses of something truly monstrous lurking just below the surface. It is the insidiousness, the perniciousness, the snake-like perversion of domesticity which is truly horrifying. John is like a black hole; as soon as he walks into the room you are sucked into him with a force beyond human reckoning, no matter how much you resist. He reflects no light, he is merciless, and yet he seems to seek approval from the 16 year old protagonist—the transformation of whom from timid victim to casual murderer is almost unpalatable. 

I’m always fascinated in situations like this when there is a pack of killers—because it definitely feels predatory and calculated in the extreme—by the bonds formed between them. Aren’t they afraid of one another? Are they so removed from humanity they believe they are outside it, that they don’t suspect they could fall victim to the same atrocities they are committing? How can they trust each other so? How does one get to that point where killing one’s friend or brother or neighbour is second nature, is so callous it’s almost banal?

The horror of it is the banality of the horror itself. Does that make sense? The fact that an entire community was aware to varying degrees of the horror unfolding, that so many people were complicit and did nothing, didn’t question the abrupt messages left on answering machines by loved ones? There’s a scene which sums up this centrifugal theme of evil finding its place in the home when the complicit characters walk twenty yards from a living room where a child sits watching TV to the backyard and a shed which contains corpses stuffed into bin bags.

There were a couple of points in the film when I thought ‘I can’t watch this, I have to get out’ because the level of reality was so claustrophobic and intense, the pervading grimness so unrelenting. But I persevered, stamping my feet and whimpering to compensate for the brutality of what I was witnessing, and the end left me utterly drained. It is an exceptional piece of cinema.

As an addendum to the review, the score for Snowtown, composed by the director’s brother, truly carries the film. That is not to understate the film’s power in any measure, but simply to say that the music so encapsulates the film that when the director first heard it he altered the beginning and end of the script. It is the beating heart of the film, in the same note both seductive and disturbingly insidious.

Predictably, as soon as I bought the album it became available on YouTube, so go have a listen! My favourite track is ‘The Dance’.

Your Opinion Matters! (No, Seriously.)

Kaliméra bloggers!

So, school's out for summer, as they say. I'm off for at least the next 123 days (yes, I worked it out)! Exams went pretty smoothly, and I've had a busy few days off shopping, going to the cinema, exploring weekend huts behind the Carbeth Inn and saying Happy Birthday! The 1st of May is always busy for me because it's not only my mother's birthday, but also one of my best friend's and her mother's birthday. It's great because it always falls right when I'm finishing up with exams, so it doubles as an I'M FREE celebration. Tonight a whole big bunch of us are going out to give Madeleine an encouraging shove into her 20's. Well, better her than us.

It's so weird to have free time again and be able to do anything I want, or nothing O_O. I've performed the ritualistic chucking out of revision notes and rounded up all the uni books I want to either sell or get rid of (41). Which leaves 15 I'm keeping. Among my favourites are: Homer's Odyssey, On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius because it has one of the most excruciatingly beautiful verses on love and sex I've ever read, Paradise Lost, Great Expectations, The Picture of Dorian Gray and a book of essays on different ethical issues as well as two huuuuge anthologies of poems, essays & short stories specially compiled by the English Lit department. I think I got off with a pretty good haul :).

So now that I've got all this free time I have to figure out what I'm going to do with it. Driving lessons, reading the 24 or so books lurking in various orifices around my room, going to the cinema cause hello it's blockbuster season (!!), relaxing in North Berwick aaaaaaaaaaand I've got a post up my sleeve about various writing projects that hopefully won't induce a mass narcoleptic trance.

But first of all I need your advice on two things:

1) If any of you have ever sold anything (specifically books) (specifically textbooks or informational type books) on Amazon, do share your experience. Was it positive or negative? Did you make any profit or did the cost of postage burn a big ole hole in your back pocket?

2) Okay, so I mentioned in the last post that I was thinking of posting a couple of pages with book & movie reviews, not because I'm a savant in any way shape or form but cause I enjoy it :). But a further foray into this venture has revealed the fundamental messiness of pages with lists and text and pictures. Plus the fact I'm technologically inept. SO, I'm either going to acquire a new blog specifically for posting reviews of fings, or I'm just going to incorporate it here. My question is, dear readers or internet nomads, which would you prefer? I have a backlog of 29 films and 8 books (I read slow), but I could probably get them out of the way in a maximum of ten posts since some of the reviews will be pretty short. I mean 'short' by normal standards, not by mine, so they will actually be short. But what do you guys think?

In the spirit of work hard/play hard:

And I know it's probably not 'cool' but seriously, is there anyone with a heart and a camera who doesn't kind of love this song?

HAPPY SUMMER GUYS :D!

Back By Popular Demand!

Well, less of a demand and more of a prompt. And a growing sense of undocumented life events building up. And unreplied-to emails... *points to self* I suck. Man, it's a good thing overdue blogposts aren't like overdue library books or I'd be looking at a hefty fine along the same lines as Meejin's (£10.35). 

So.

Life has been rather charming recently. I’ve met some really inspiring people and lovely seeing-eye dogs called Milo and experienced lots of quirk with cherries on top. Sure this year has thrown some curve balls, but everyone is dealing with them with lots of fortitude and optimism and moxy. I like it. I like this year’s vibe. I was going to try to describe it in words, but I’d be describing a picture that I could much more easily show you, so:

(I like piers.)

Anyway, I apologise in advance for the total lack of cohesion in this post. It’s just as though I inhaled the heavens and spat the stars back out onto your screen in the form of a paragraphed summary of Life, right?

So, second year drawing to a close this week (yikes) means exam season is right around the metaphorical corner (fuck). And I SURVIVED Reading & Writing Week. Reading & Writing Week? you ask. Yeah, you know, the twice annual 5-day extravaganza wherein I misplace my sanity, have multiple meltdowns and generally end up sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth, eating my hair? What can I say, it’s a tradition. But I lived to tell the tale, so it’s not all bad. Also, remember when I compared double English to running a marathon with weights, and the added onus of Classics to a fat man on my back whilst I ran said marathon? (Just nod.) Well, happily I am still running the marathon and either through endurance or littering I have ceased to notice the weights. The fat man that is Classics is still on my back, but he has awoken from his slumber and now tells me interesting facts about Imperial Rome in an Italian accent, so it’s all good.

Another dollop of good news is that my formerly ill Nanny is no more! Ill, that is. Turns out her brain has super spongy powers and like sucked all of the leakage back in. And after a looooooong hospitalization she’s finally been allowed to go back home. Catch is, she has very bad (read: zero) short term memory, so after 75 days of my dad and uncles reciting over and over WHY she was in hospital in the first place, she still can’t remember, and they have gone slightly doolally. Ironic, eh? One good thing that came out of that whole episode was that my uncle came over from Australia for a month and he’s kind of legendary to me. The highlight of his trip had to be getting to second base with a marble statue of some naked chick in the Art Galleries (picture to come).

Know what’s really nice about life right now? That every time I run into someone from high school one of the first questions that comes up in the conversation is ‘SO HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING THAT KEVIN BRIDGES THING?!’ And then we jump up and down and squeal and generally gloat over the fact the guy went to our school (both if you’re one of the St. Mary’s crew like moi!) and that our little town and our little school which no longer exists has national recognition. Seriously, everyone is so proud to be Scottish right now, and more specifically Clydebankian.

And now for magical bulletpoints because I’m bored of trying to paragraph my nonsense:

v  I have given up Coke for Lent, and possibly for life.

v  Lying in bed with someone at 3am whilst dancing to Mambo Number 5 is one of The Funnest Things Ever.

v  I officially began reading The Hunger Games in a hotel room in Coventry*, and so far I love it! It’s kind of nice to be on this side of a phenomenon as opposed to the other more feral side that comes with the bastardization of something you are unhealthily possessive of and obsessed with love passionately *cough* Twilght.

v  Because uni turns me into a vegetating zombie for 22 weeks of the year, I have taken to renting lots of movies so that my vegetation time holds some approximation of purpose. The highlights so far have been United 93, The Road, Tyrannosaur and Peeping Tom with a special shout-out to A Single Man.

v  Also, I think I have become a little obsessed with Wolf Creek. Texting your nocturnal friend during all hours of the day about it seems to suggest so (sorry David). In fact, I have to confess, I am watching it even as I type. BUT IT IS JUST SO DAMN GOOD.

v  My favourite lecturer for English Lit was giving only one lecture this entire semester so I was determined to go because he like, blows my mind. (It was a great lecture.) But at the end he shocked me by giving a valedictory speech. I couldn’t believe he was retiring and wouldn’t be there for Honours to inspire me about Victorian literature and Shakespeare and all those things I don’t really get but love to dig my teeth and my nails and my everything into! Paraphrased, he said ‘I’ve so enjoyed teaching you and watching you go from 1A to 2B and I wish you all the best in the future. And if I may be so unpolitically correct as to tell you my favourite book, I will tell you it is the Bible.’ And then my heart broke in two. Seriously, I think all 400 of us were choked up.

v  Speaking of, yesterday Dr Fox gave the final Classics lecture on the beginnings of Christianity in Rome, and I kind of had to restrain myself from jumping him the whole time. You know those people who just have natural magnetism? Yeah. Describing him will do no justice to his potent sexual allure, but FUCK. < And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.

v  And last but not least, I have A Purpose in life. Starting in May I’m going to be volunteering a few shifts a week at the Save the Children charity shop in Partick along with Possibly Gay Josh & Gandhi and some others whose names I don’t remember but who are all SWELL. Also: tea.

So, that’s life recently, in a nut shell. The last thing I want to say is this: it’s an incredibly satisfying and liberating thing to be able to say that last year, and the year before, and for the tail-end of 2009 I was deeply, deeply unhappy (I liked the way Nicole Kidman said this in an interview relating to her part in The Hours!). But I’m not anymore. I had this strange notion that in order to be legitimately unhappy, I had to commit to it, or I didn’t deserve that description. Which is bullshit. People are changing all the time—that’s part of what makes them so beautiful, that you can never really define them. Sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are really genuinely unhappy and they need help. Just because someone is able to pull through something shouldn’t diminish or invalidate whatever unhappiness they were previously experiencing. It seems like a really obvious thing, but it’s something I had to learn. I don’t feel indebted to that unhappiness anymore. I am ALLOWED to feel good, and I do :). And so should everyone.

*I fucking want a double bed.

Word of the day: smirr (it’s different from ‘drizzle’ – rescue the Scots language by dropping it into awkward weather oriented conversations!)

Catch yeez x

Book Ends;

Alright, so this post is about endings and beginnings, arrivals and departures.

Endings & Departures; summer, my nineteenth year of life (by which I mean I will be turning nineteen soon—this whole thing is like the eighteenth century and the seventeen hundreds being the same thing), leisure time, The Extended Short Story, and a four-year friendship.

Beginnings & Arrivals; autumn!, my twentieth year of life, my mother-to-be cousin, second year of uni, and possibilities.

Summers are significant to me the way I suppose New Year ought to be. It’s this weird interim from normal life where the rules you’ve been abiding by the rest of the year invert themselves and you never really know quite what to expect. Maybe it’s because one year and the next are separated by not even a second, and summer spans at least six weeks. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in the southern hemisphere, so the end of a school year always coincides with the summer holidays. Or maybe it’s because the formative years of my adolescence were infused with The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants books and I totally wanted to be Tibby. Whatever the reason, that’s the way it is. I always look forward to summer with the anticipation of change. It is a pivotal time, quite literally.

Now, the completion of my novel, the end of a friendship, and the expanse of possibilities on the horizon are all integral to one another. And I kind of want to chronicle why. Because I have a funny feeling that, in ten years time, I will look back and I will think that the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2011 were bookends to a very significant period of my life.

Timeline;

March 2007 – Rosie meets friend. They click.

July 13^th 2007 – Rosie stamps on the object of her infatuation’s hand because she hates him. He drags her back in the grass and tickles her. She hates that. He asks to go for a walk. Rosie says no. Tears spring to her eyes. She doesn’t understand why, but she has the distinct feeling something significant has just occurred. Nothing is going to be quite the same again. She needs to feel in control, so she takes her friends to the top of the car park from which you can see everything. She takes a lot of pictures.

October 2007 – Rosie’s erratic behaviour has alienated most of her friends and she cannot find the words to explain or apologize. This is when she needs to check-out the most. She picks up a book and rediscovers her love for reading. She remembers her childhood dream of wanting to write. Her fingers itch. The cogs of her imagination begin to turn.

April 23^rd 2008 – Rosie scraps the thing she was writing before and embarks on something new. She has become increasingly taciturn and introverted. Her mood swings are violent. Enough is enough. She begins writing with the sole intention of exorcising the inner angst monster. It’s in diary form, through someone else’s proxy, because she was never brave enough to keep her own diary.

October 2009 – Rosie takes off to Australia for a gap year. She returns eight months early after realizing that what she was trying to get away from was not everyone else, but herself. Which is impossible. Friend expresses his happiness at her return.

January 2010 – Rosie unwittingly embroils herself in The Most Stupid Fall Out in the History of Mankind, resulting in the hiatus and death of several friendships, for which she is later extremely grateful and realizes had to happen.

February 2010 – Rosie becomes an unconscious adherent of Descartes’ first Meditation. Strip back to the fundamental basics. Trust nothing. Rebuild.

June 2010 – Rosie laments the unstable nature of her friendship.

July 2010 – Rosie experiences a series of epiphanies. She breaks the surface of the water. She stands on the beach. She looks back. She’s exhausted, but she’s made it.

August 2010 – Friend suddenly gets back in touch. It is always like this. He always starts it. He always stops it. And each time it is like starting from scratch and being strangers all over again. She tells herself not to get attached, have no expectations, and to go with the flow.

August 22^nd 2010 – Rosie finishes first draft of novel and runs into the inspiration, having not seen him for two years, and in a place he has never been before. Rosie tells him their old school has been demolished. They talk about toilet paper.

September 2010 – Rosie is unsatisfied with the first draft which has the inspiration’s blessing. She thinks there’s more to come.

October 3^rd 2010 – Rosie’s eighteenth birthday sucks. Okay, she gets a lot of money from her parents, but it’s pity money, and she doesn’t spend any of it. She also gets a set of knives from her dad. To cheer herself up, she and the friend decide to go see Ludovico Einaudi in Edinburgh. He is one of their sacrosanct and exclusive commonalities. Rosie feels victorious.

October 2010 – Glasgow Uni art students have a reading & writing week off classes. Rosie has thirteen mini breakdowns about her Descartes essay. Her parents are genuinely scared for her health. Unbeknownst to them, however, she stays off most of the following week because she is simply paralysed by emotional exhaustion. Her paranoia and insecurity surrounding the friend are giving her nightmares about falling. Her guilt over a previous transgression, for which she tried to apologize many times but couldn’t because she never understood why she did it, is poisoning her rationality. She makes herself go out on Tuesday but physically cannot get off the bus. She makes it to Waterstone’s and gently the horrifying truth she’s been fighting for a week dawns on her: she needs her friend to save her. Her worst fear is losing control, and she has lost it. By some miracle, her friend asks her to meet him for coffee. She doesn’t like coffee, but she goes anyway. Later on he remarks she was ‘reserved’. Hearing this from someone she cares about makes her listen.

November 10^th 2010 – Rosie and the friend go to Edinburgh to see Ludovico. They both bring their winter hats and the friend says Rosie is back to her usual self. Ludovico is amazing. Rosie should be happy, but she is only allowed to feel content. Her friend cannot tell the time. On the train ride home they stay awake by playing Trivial Pursuit.

Christmas 2010 – Rosie spills her guts in a letter, but unlike all the other times she has tried with other people, this does not feel contrived. It feels right. The friend responds with an equally intimate letter. Rosie issues a reluctant but necessary ultimatum; the friend must be in her life, or be out of it. In spite of all her self-destructive bullshit, he says “Well it would be pretty stupid to let go of four years of friendship.” Rosie cannot believe someone is actually sticking around. And yet it is not enough. She wants him to lie on the floor with her, but he’s too luminous for that.

January 2011 – Rosie has failed Philosophy.

May 2011 – Rosie goes to the friend’s house with his birthday present and another letter. She feels guilty inflicting it, but she has to. She has spent four months trying to escape the inevitable, and she can’t do it anymore. She gives him the letter and she runs. The letter expounds the cartography of her psyche; how she has steadily lost control to him ever since he waltzed back into her life, how she sometimes wishes she had never known him, how she sometimes genuinely hates him, and how she is terrified of regressing to that numb place again. He comes to her house to sort it out. She says “I don’t trust you because I don’t trust myself”, meaning, she has too little confidence in herself. He says “But you know me, you know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you” and she says “But I don’t really know you, do I?” And the irony of him once calling her reserved laps at her conscious now. He is just as reserved. He says “I don’t know what to do.” She says “Just tell me that you’ll be there, if I need you.” He nods, says “You know I will.” She says “Then say it out loud.” He does, and now he runs.

Summer 2011 – Rosie takes this time to distance herself from the mania of the past few months and gain perspective again. She writes tirelessly. She makes a promise to herself that when she has finished writing, she will contact her friend again. And so the final paragraphs are postponed and postponed. Her favourite phrase becomes “I don’t want to talk about it”. She has never seen a hedgehog here, but she sees one now, again and again, and she can’t help thinking it’s a sign that she is reverting into that defensive, numb place once more.

August 2011 – Rosie notices a conspicuous influx in the number of spiders.

September 2^nd 2011 – Rosie runs into the inspiration almost a year to the day since she last saw him. It’s much less awkward now, and she cannot help marvelling at the timing. They talk about the last time they met. They laugh about the toilet paper.

September 11^th 2011 – Rosie has come to the conclusion that she had it wrong; in order to finish her novel, she must first resolve things with her friend, not the other way around. They have not spoken for three months, apart from when he said well done for passing Philosophy. The entire summer has passed, and the tectonic plates of their friendship have inevitably changed. It is raining heavily and the sky is dark. This type of weather always makes Rosie feel safe. It’s as though something benevolent is hugging her, and reassuring her that everything will be okay. It is a good sign. Just as she is about to make contact, the friend does. Except it’s not him, it is someone from his work. Pushing down the ominous feeling in her stomach, she strives to reconcile. She hates texting. She cannot tell his tone, his manner. She cannot read his expression, which is always so telling, even when he is not saying anything. He calls her “my love” and she finds this endlessly patronizing. He is going, she can feel it.

September 13^th 2011 – She gives it one more shot. She says they should meet for a “catch up” even though she detests the term. He “completely agrees. When does she think?” They set aside the following Friday, time undetermined.

September 17^th 2011 – At one minute and forty-three seconds past two in the morning, Rosie writes ‘The End’ to a continuous loop of See You Soon. She smiles. She’s happy. She’s done.

September 20^th 2011 – On her way to the bus stop in the morning Rosie sees a magpie. One for sorrow. She makes a mental note to keep track of her bad luck in the following week.

September 22^nd 2011 – The cosmos is telling Rosie tomorrow will be a good day. One of her favourite childhood movies, Jurassic Park, is being rereleased in the cinema, her mother tells her that Ludovico Einaudi’s album is about to top the charts (this isn’t strictly good since Rosie cannot listen to his music anymore without feeling sad, but it is a connection) and her friend Stephie, whose Friday is also shaping up to be significant, tells Rosie that us Libras are to be bestowed with luck on the 23^rd. The cosmos is telling her, but she is not wont to believe it.

September 22^nd 2011 – Later that day Rosie finishes uni and texts her friend on the bus journey home to fix a time for tomorrow. She is not at all surprised when he says he couldn’t get the time off work. Ironically it is his apology which rankles her the most. Flippant, off-hand, piteous. She detests pity. And she feels it, the undeniable truth that this is it, this is the point at which she loses him. She barely holds the tears in. She wants to scream. She’s mad and she’s hurt and she doesn’t understand what she did. She thinks of all the other times she sat silently crying on buses or in cafes or in bed, toiling on only because of what she’d already invested, unwilling to let those almost five years become obsolete. She cannot stand that loss. She cannot stand that humiliation. She trusted him, against all her better judgement. And now she realizes that this past year she’s been blinded; she believed the pain and constant dissatisfaction was testing her, would pay off in the end, but now his actions stick out in her mind much clearer than his words. He doesn’t care anymore. He was using her, as he always had done. He’d waltzed into her life for gratification, for entertainment, for a fleeting moment of intimacy, never asking her permission to bluster through, and never stopping to tell her he was leaving again. Right now she hates him, she hates what he’s become. It hurts her to be angry at him, but she is. She hates the impossible standards he sets, and how he brings out the very worst in her. He once said he never wanted to change her, and look what he’s allowed her to be reduced to! She has given everything she can, she can give no more. She will not sacrifice herself. She will not disappear into him.

September 22^nd 2011 – At home her mother can tell there’s something wrong. Finally she gives in and the surge of emotion almost defeats her. But she must cook. Her mother offers to stir the vegetables while Rosie has some wine, but “No! I have to cook! I have to do something!” So she chops the peppers up, the fucking bell peppers, the only person who ever called them that, and she’s screaming and crying the whole time but she just needs to know that the right thing to do is to say goodbye, because he isn’t going to. She needs to move on. She needs her life not to be about him anymore. The concept of his absolute absence terrifies her, and has done for a long time, but she’s been denying its necessity because her life ceased to have meaning as soon as she thought of him not in it. It’s irrational, she knows, but that’s how it is. It’s because he knows everything. And it felt right to tell him. And she was safe with him. And now she has to start all over. And she can’t be bothered. She’s too tired. She’s thinking of how love is a chemical high in the body that lasts for approximately four to five years. She’s thinking that’s how long it took the last time. She knows she has to pick herself now. She cannot keep picking him. Thank God Walking with Dinosaurs arrived in the post this morning or she might have sank to cyan. She watches the entire thing and goes to bed.

September 23^rd 2011 – Rosie has just one lecture today, and when she comes out she checks her email. She is expecting a confirmation of the printing job she’s requested, and when she opens her inbox there is one from the printing place saying her manuscript will be ready to pick up after 2pm today—not next Friday as she’d anticipated. She has three hours to kill. She jumps on a bus to Waterstone’s, buys a hot chocolate with two marshmallows, and sits upstairs at her favourite table where he once came to pick her up and remarked the staff were rude which, frankly, should have tipped her off about him. She jogs upstairs and selects the two books she was perusing when she came in. One is about zombies, their blind slavery to cannibalism, and how to survive them. The other is centred around the idea that love is a disease, for which scientists have developed a cure and the government has made mandatory. The significance of the themes doesn’t sink in until later. Rosie feels no anxiety as she types out the valedictory message and hits send. It is a belated reply to the nebulous text she received yesterday as a solution to the problem of meeting up; “Okay, I’ll text you soon :)” Rosie types back; “Hey, listen, I know you said you’d text me soon but I don’t know what soon is and I don't really feel like waiting around to find out. If you don’t want to be friends anymore that’s fine! But just tell me that okay?” Predictably, he doesn’t tell her. But as soon as she’s sent it, an enormous weight lifts from her shoulders. She doesn’t have to wait anymore.

September 23^rd 2011 – A little after two Rosie heads back to the West End to the tiny print shop that’s like a cosy nest of wood shavings. She wants to hug the woman behind the desk who presents her finished, printed, bound manuscript to her. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. And she did it herself. It’s hard not to compare the whole thing to pregnancy and giving birth and seeing her baby for the first time, being allowed to hold it! And it is the same weight as a baby; her rambling skills have ensured that. All the way home she smiles. She feels freer than she has in years, since the last time she was at the ocean at Durness, at the top of everything. She has become herself again, evidenced by the three new books in the Waterstone’s bag she will find the time to read somehow. Even the wasp on the bus doesn’t bother her. She listens to Komeda’s It’s Alright Baby, U2’s Even Better Than The Real Thing and Eddie Vedder’s Hard Sun delivers her right to her front door. So today didn’t turn out the way she’d planned, by sentencing herself to masochism. In fact, it turned out a fuck load better. And she got home by herself.   

Allllllll the post-its :).

Folder of character drawings/outtakes/procrastination,

the post-it pile,

the Leaning Tower of Pukka Pads,

and The Manuscript (L).

:)

Boathouse, Phegans Bay, Australia, October 2009.