baby don't go in no corners

I've been a PhD student for two and a half years and only gave my first departmental paper on Tuesday evening. I've given papers before and it's actually something I quite enjoy, but giving a paper to your entire faculty is something else altogether. It went very well, thankfully, and a moment of extreme smugness ensued when one of the professors asked me where I lived in France (a lot of my paper is in French). I've never lived in France, I'm just pretty good with languages.

While the experience was less painful than expected, it also reinforced what I wrote about a few days ago. I don't want to know everything about an extremely limited field, � la academia: I want to know everything about everything. I am inquisitive and curious - insatiably so. I clip interesting looking places/books/shows/etc out of newspapers or magazines and then I actually go there/read them/see them. Cf. latest wonderful discovery - the Alice-in-Wonderlandesque cocktail bar 69 Colebrooke Row - thanks to an article in the FT weekend magazine.

Apart from my game of cultural russian roulette - which for me seems to work better with books than music and has brought me GK Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself, JK Donlevy's Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B as well as Ronan Bennett's The Catastrophist and Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing - I keep my eyes peeled and my ears open.

If I hear a song in a shop or a cafe and I have no idea who it is, I'll write down a few of the lyrics and track down the song later when I get home. This doesn't seem to yield the same kind of results that I get with random book buying, but I've come to The Cribs, The Young Knives, and the Hot 8 Brass Band this way.

One of the best books I've ever read - James Salter's Light Years - was discovered by snooping through the contents of the desk of a very cute boy sitting next to me in the London Library. I wondered what he was reading and when he vacated his desk for a moment, I took the opportunity to rifle through the books on his desk (like I said, insatiably curious). The book at the top of the pile was Light Years, which I'd never heard of, so I went out and bought a copy and then spent the next day on the terrace at Somerset House savouring it. Such a marvellous book! And one which I might never have come to know had I not been up to my silly tricks.

When I was in Edinburgh over the Christmas holidays I headed to Armchair Books [Armchair served as the inspiration for Dylan Moran's Black Books bookshop - tis an Edinburgh institution] to pick up a few gifts and look for something new for me. I found what I was looking for giftwise and then asked the [totally and hilariously random] bookseller if he might recommend something good. As it happened, he was just about to put a book on the 'staff recommendation' shelf with a handwritten note blue tacked to the front which read: 'This book is astoundingly good. And I have excellent taste.' I finally got around to reading the book on Tuesday, but your man was right. I don't know if it's astoundingly good, but it is a good book [it's Russell Hoban's Amaryllis Night and Day]. But the thing that really gets me is that it's so perfect for what's been going on in my head lately - about the nature of creative people - and how they think and where they take inspiration from. A reminder that it's not a bad thing to be a girl who loves eighteenth-century French literature and Latin epic and neuroplasticity and architecture and opera (though not Stravinsky, as I learned last night) and dance punk and London and Edinburgh and dressing up and grunging out - why limit possibilities for the sake of a good old-fashioned academic career.

Nobody is going to put this baby in a corner.

to all the things i loved before

This is a lazy, mood-boardy sort of post. Been up to lots of interesting things this week but I don't want to write about them in any great detail. Instead, I'll just summarise (and lavishly illustrate).



First and perhaps most importantly: the snow!! I can't remember the last time it snowed in December, i.e. when it's supposed to. I don't know about anyone else, but I've certainly got my fingers crossed for a white Christmas. Edinburgh in the snow is beautiful.

I hunted down this Louis MacNeice poem yesterday as soon as it started snowing. Tis a lovely, evocative piece of writing:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was 
Spawning snow and pink roses against it 
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: 
World is suddener than we fancy it.  

World is crazier and more of it than we think, 
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion 
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel 
The drunkenness of things being various.  

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world 
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes - 
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's
hands - 
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Also, got sent pictures of these amazing Andreia Chaves mirror shoes. They feel really wintery, even if they aren't very practical and I'd love to be stomping about London town in a pair.



If I ever get round to it, I'll write a sort of 'best of' culture this year, but if I don't the single cultural consumable I'd recommend to anyone is James Salter's incredible book, Light Years. I'm giving it to pretty much everyone for Christmas after re-reading it this weekend. It's one of the most beautifully written novels I've ever read and I've read a lot of novels. Though he's as good, if not better, than Hemingway or Fitzgerald, he seems to have slipped through the cracks of critical acclaim - possibly because he was born 20 years after the two American literary giants - thus fading into their shadows. It's an elegant, elegiac piece of writing and a definite must read.



I've been to see the Nutcracker ballet nearly every year since I was a little girl. I still remember my mother taking me - just the two of us - when I was very young. It helped that we went to see the ballet at Frank Lloyd Wright's amazing Grady Gammage auditorium. Just walking up the illuminated ramps to the main hall was an amazing spectacle, but I'll always remember how thrilled I was when the Christmas tree magically grows through the roof in the first half.



The Scottish Ballet does a pretty wonderful new-fangled Nutcracker ballet, choreographed by its artistic director, Ashley Page. There are evil snowflakes and a naughty governess who turns into the mouse queen in act two: it's all good fun, but really, nothing beats the classic ballet version.





The ROH put on quite a show - you really see where all the ticket money goes - with buckets of gold glitter, fantastical costumes, and most importantly, superb dancing. The grand pas de deux between the sugar plum fairy and her prince was absolutely breathtaking. The music is also wonderful, personally I think it's Tchaikovsky's best ballet score, and the live choir was icing on the very Christmasy cake.



Finally for something I don't like. Just been reading on coolhunter that McDonald's is to open a bunch of 'boutique food stands' during the various fashion weeks. I don't care if you dress it up in Hermes, Tom Ford, or Jil Sander: McDonald's is revolting and is SO NOT fashion. Ugh. PR fail.