found:

one hilarious note.  made even more amusing by the fact that i recently penned a parallel missive.  i wasn't apologising for criticising bad bread, per se, but given that i was quite intoxicated, the tone of both notes is laughably similar...

note to self: write no notes when boozy.

making order out of chaos

I woke up at 4:04 this morning, rolled over and tapped the following message out in an email to myself:

Making order out of chaos or chaos out of order. Why do humans attempt to systematise everything? We like to feel in control, but how much control do we really have?

Riiiiight...

I've a long-standing love affair with the idea of perception as reality (was sort of my unofficial motto for a while) and the fine, fuzzy line between philosophy and neuroscience. Yesterday, I skimmed an article about whether you can know something without believing in it. The study gave as a rather lacklustre example a student who believed they knew nothing about history, but when asked about dates of important events could rattle off a surprising amount: hence the student knew facts about history without 'believing' in them.

I suppose this translates into ideas of perception and control in that humans tend to feel happier and more satisfied if their self-perception leads them to believe they have a sense of control over their own lives. A well-known example of this comes from Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin's 1976 study whereby nursing home residents were given plants, but only some were given the opportunity to water and look after them.  The residents who were in control of caring for their plants lived longer than those who had no control over the care of their plants. The psychological sense of control was enough to result in an apparent effect on the physical health of the residents.

It's quite remarkable that a sense of control is enough to make us healthier and happier, even if this sense is simply a perceptory illusion. We seek order and control as intuitively and naturally as a falling cat seeks to manoeuvre itself to land on all four feet. We're more likely to seek out or to create a pattern as a means of preserving this feeling of control, even if those patterns are illusory.

From a neurological point of view, it seems better to maintain this illusion of control as it contributes to a happier, healthier individual, but philosophically I find the whole premise uncomfortable. It's sort of analogous to the idea that ignorance is bliss, I suppose. How helpful (from a philosophical standpoint, anyway) is a perception of control if it's only a conceit? I don't know. I'm still working it out. Or at least, evidenced by my 4am sleepy emails to self, my subconscious is...

bad day

today was a:

things that cheer me up when my world doesn't fit into a 3 x 5:

1. a beautiful poem by a poet i don't typically jive with, e.g. lullaby by auden.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit�s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

2. tunes by darwin deez (see above).

3. hilarious kids rocking out to tunes by darwin deez.

4. this blog.

5. my wonderful, ridiculous friends.

6. the knowledge that, come 30 September, I'll be one step closer to freedom...

Subject: maybe it would be a good idea if you

a) stop pining after completely unsuitable boys
b) remember how much fun you had with xyz today
c) try to forget about the fact that xyz is called xyz 
d) stop sending yourself so many ridiculous emails
e) figure out what you're going to do in New York
f) edit this review (attached)
g) get some work done on the education chapter
h) buy a pair of white tights before Milan

The above is an email I sent to myself (from my personal email to my work email) last night. Underneath the list I wrote a brief note about how it might be rather amusing to write a blog post about emails I send to myself. This is the sort of thing that happens when it's late and I'm feeling sleepy and silly. And I don't mean a-h above, for that sort of behaviour is perfectly normal for me, but the 'maybe this would make an interesting blog post' addendum.

I've always made lists and jotted down interesting things in my hipster Moleskin, but it's really since I've gotten a Blackberry that I've started using emails as notes to myself, the modern version of geeky academic types and dictaphones (or at least the cinematic cliche of geeky academic types and dictaphones). Not only is this method surprisingly practical, but it's also a way for my present self to amuse my future self. My present self doesn't find the emails very funny, but it knows that my future self will laugh hilariously when it finds an email with the subject line, 'i is very tiny ruler of tiny, tiny tower' or 'if it looks like a cow, it is a cow', hidden among the forest of emails when clearing out my inbox three months later. 

I send myself things that pique my interest or things that inspire me: those poems on the underground that are often surprisingly good, notes about strange things that people do when they don't think anyone is watching, ideas for stories or poems or books to read. The notes to self are usually the most interesting as I'm just quickly typing up a stream of consciousness about whatever it is that's caught my eye. Here's an amusing example of something I wrote to myself after reading a piece in the FT (completely unedited, might I add):

From Thurs 25th about Greek economic crisis and the Markit index - why isn't this illeagal? The same sort of thing as companies like WalMart taking out life insurance policies against their own employees. It's fucking corrupt and morally wrong. When have we as a society allowed corporate institutions to roll all over us. I'm sorry people, but capatilism has failed us when we allow the profit making of companies to take precedent over the economic welfare of an ENTIRE country. How fucked up is that. 

Genius, ain't it? 

Please do not worry. I promise I am in most excellent mental health.

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 sleep, perchance to dream

from the Fallen Princesses series by Dina Goldstein

This is why it's never a good idea to spend the weekend reading only books about neuroscience and Lucan's Pharsalia.

Last night's epic dream:

Things started off innocently enough. I was driving an old beat up car down a dusty, deserted freeway in Phoenix when I pulled the car over onto the side of the road. I got out of the car and walked down a hill, whereupon Phoenix turned into a huge lake in the middle of a tropical jungle. I crossed the lake on a series of primary-coloured plastic stepping-stone box things until they began to crumble into the lake and I had to dive in and swim. Obviously, I couldn't swim with my flip-flops on so I took them off and set them on one of the crumbling boxes while stopping to save a turtle who was trapped inside the box. After swimming for quite some time, it turned out that the jungle lake was actually a water feature at Claridge's (go figure). As I was swimming out of the lake, a bell hop ran up to me carrying my discarded flip-flops and told me to be careful that no one saw me in the lake - it was a protected environment and he didn't want to piss of the eco-people staying in the hotel as part of a big scientific conference. He also mentioned that if the eco-people knew I was swimming in the lake, my funding would be pulled. He gave me a white tuxedo blazer to wear and I began to go about my merry way, when I thought - fuck it, I'm here - so I turned about and went into Claridge's for lunch. Once seated, two preposterously obnoxious children proceeded to terrorise me until I pawned them off on the very charming couple sitting at the table beside me.

After lunch, I went back outside. The lake and Claridge's had disappeared only to be replaced by a landscape resembling the war-torn Afghani countryside, though it turned out to be a video game. Of course in this video game world, civil war was raging and the video game people had managed to trick a group of real world people into entering the video game 'to play' at war. All the men had gone off to fight and the video game women were explaining to the real world women that it would soon be their turn to fight. Some of the real world women began complaining that it wasn't their world so why should they have to fight. At this, the ringleader lady of the video game people turned into a giant jelly baby and knocked six shades of Hades into the women who had been complaining. The ringleader lady kept calling me Ingrid Bergman and asked me what I was going to do, whereupon I made a rousing speech about fighting for liberty and honour. I said that even if we weren't fighting for our own freedom were were still fighting for the cause of liberty and that there was nothing more honourable than the fight for freedom. I screamed 'vivre libre ou mourir' at the top of my lungs and we all ran off over the hill to fight.

Mental.

past tense

It seemed to me then, that it would always be this way. That it would always be a surprise to walk out of a party at nine thirty at night and find the sky the colour of butter, That his childish mannerisms and forlorn looks would always delight me. How reckless now, I know, was he who wrote, 'the past is a foreign country.' Perhaps for professional historians, maybe, but for those of us amateurs not protected by the armour of expertise, the past is all too real. The past is a back garden, filled with uncontrollable weeds.

christmas in, ummm, october?

image � ladybanana

Dear Shop Retailers, Evening Standard, and People Who Decide When To Put the Lights Up On Oxford Street,

Today is October 23rd. It is not even Halloween. November is a distant dream. December is a foreign country. Shop window displays should NOT be full of tinsel and ornaments. The Oxford Street Christmas lights should be gathering dust in a Croydon warehouse, not creeping us out (IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER!) with their ghostly hints of impending holiday doom.

While I realise that you would like us to spend the next two months in a Bacchanalian, Christmas-inspired retail frenzy as some sick means of propping up our tired economy, I would quite like you to fuck off and leave us in peace. Toys will not sell out by mid-December because buyers didn't order enough stock. Remember what they said about the millennium? Exactly.

Christmas is one day. ONE DAY. Please do not force us to spend 1/6th of the year thinking about a single day.

That is all.

Yours eternally,

Crystal

why I love Paris in the summertime

Things overheard/seen in Paris. Day one:

- a French girl wearing flip flops!
- An American tourist get knocked off his Velib after being mowed down by a Japanese tourist, also on a Velib.
- a French man totally kitted out in full Breton regalia: slightly, angled beret and everything.
- a riot that wasn't quite a riot at the Forum des Halles. Either this is a good measure of French racism or I completely missed something. There was a group of about 25 black men - it sort of looked like two rival groups winding each other up - but I didn't stop long enough to look. Walking past, there must have been about 20 police vans and the police easily outnumbered the men 3 to 1. I've never seen more police in one place in my life. I still don't know what was going on.
- The Pont des Arts turned into a giant picnic bench.
- the inside of the beautiful reading room at the Biblioth�que de l'Arsenal
- An American tourist standing outside the Notre Dame approached by a scammer. When the scammer asked the tourist if he spoke any Enlish, his immediate reply was, 'a little.' How true!

be careful what you search for

A lot of people come to blogs by google searches. The great thing about blog stats is that you can see exactly what people were searching for when they came to your blog. These are usually hilarious, often ridiculous. Some of the best in the last week for your amusement:

(in parentheses is what the post actually was)

- what is the meant by "appetitive system?" (porn and neuroplasticity post)
- buildings that convey sentiment of love [what does that even mean?!] (Auden's poem, September 1, 1939)
- sexy haunch video (Adrian Ghenie at Haunch of Venison)
- sexy bbc radio plays (I do actually have a post called 'welcome to sexy voices on bbc radio 4')
- post letter opening by neighbours (an open letter to our neighbours)
- big haunch photo (Haunch of Venison review)
- "Tanya Gold" "hard to swallow" esquire (dinner party diva)

Moral of the story. Be careful what you search for. Someone out there knows that you, by virtue of your googling, are a pervy, sentimental, paranoid freak of nature. Unless, that is you're the one person searching about the appetitive system, in which case you're probably addicted to pervy, sentimental, paranoid freaks of nature.

Keep it up.

Top 10 reasons why you should never sleep with The Man

1) Playing dirty hide and seek with the surveillance cameras is only fun for a little while.

2) It isn't the size that matters, but what He can do with it.

3) And He can't do anything with it. Cf. Health and Safety at Work Act 1974

4) Your sexy police helicopter impression isn't sexy: it's shit.

5) What seems cool in a foreign country isn't such a good idea back home.

6) Big Brother is never as good with a condom on.

7) Despite all His promises, He'll never make you Queen.

8) Or famous.

9) Unless the phones are tapped, He'll never call.

10) It's not Him; it's you. Cf. Immigration Act 1971 and Immigration Act 1988.

The Civil War goes Global

For D.P.

In session three of what the fish had taken to calling my 'cultural enrichment programme', he asked me to take him to one of my regular haunts. He said he hoped it would help him figure out where I went wrong.

I took him to a little place in Shoreditch. 'I've only been here once,' I said, 'but they do make an excellent Sazerac.'

'Fine,' the fish countered, 'but does our waiter know who said: "when sorrows come, they come in battalions"? How do you suppose you will ever learn anything if you persist in such ignorance.'

The poor waiter's skin-tight jeans and trendy tousled hair were no match for the fish's aggressive contempt. The waiter turned his head toward me, as if to ask for help, though he looked surprised when I finally spoke up: 'if you want to know the answer, go and buy your own fish.'

Surprisingly the fish laughed loudly and said, 'that's funny, I don't know either.' He slammed his empty lowball on the glass-topped table, making an awful sound. 'Another round, young man, and one on the house!' Many made-up faces turned to stare at his outrageous behaviour.

He fixed me with judgemental eyes and asked what I hoped to gain from my purchase. I was becoming uncomfortable with the nature of our relationship. 'I rather gathered,' I said, 'that I paid for you to answer those sorts of questions, not to ask them.'

'You know,' he said after a lengthy pause, 'you cannot write poems about fish forever.'

an open letter to our neighbours

Dear No. 6,

To those who live in the flat above us. We hate you. You'll probably never read this, but it makes us feel better to get it off our collective chests.

We can't stand the fact that you play a remixed version of 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life' over and over again. Have you no other music in your record collection? Or your demonstrable fear of being alone - must you always be on the telephone if you're in the house. Don't get me wrong, we love a party. But 3.30am on a Tuesday morning is not the time to piss off your neighbours. And no, we don't get off listening to you shag your numerous lady friends.

So from all of us at no. 4 to all of you at no. 6, this middle finger up is all for you.

Yours sincerely,

No. 4

PS Your girlfriend is faking it.

how long must i wait?

Three hours, thirty seven minutes, twenty one seconds.

With this lovely, yet completely ridiculous, device you can now find out exactly how long it took your missive d'amour to get from London to Paris and your lover's waiting arms.

Cute, but creepy.

Wonder if HM Postal Officers might deliver things more quickly if they knew we knew exactly how long it was taking.