meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeme

5 things chosen by Rhian:

1. The Awful German Language
I’ve been learning since I was eleven, so for almost exactly half of my life. It was back in the good old days when taking a modern language through to GCSE was compulsory for all state school pupils. I can remember finding a German map of Europe and finding it so interesting that different countries were called different things and that those different names weren’t so incomprehensible. Spanien. Irland. Schweden. Italien. Anyway, ten years later I’ve used this initiative to spread out my tentacles into other languages, when really the only reason I’m interested in those other languages is because so much of the vocabulary is shared (as Rhian quite rightly points out). Hup Holland Hup! The German language isn’t so awful though. Getting to grips with the concept of case might have taken major emotional investment but it was worth it. My favourite case is the genitive btw. Although ask me next week and it’ll be the dative.

2. Politics
Politics is what I use to blog about when my life is as bare of interesting developments as the current government is of interesting ideas (see section 4). Final year of study means that any semblance of a life you may like to think you once had goes right out of the window, or in my case it has anyway. And I do think politics is important, which is why I get so attached to so many issues.

3. NEDERLAND
I’ve been having an affair with it for two and a half years now. I just think it’s a really good place. Of course it has its problems just like any other place, but I’m not there, so don’t see them, so can live in the happy if probably misguided belief that it is some kind of utopia. I want to do an MA in Amsterdam.

4. Labour
ARGH. Do I even have the time for this? Or the strength? Okay, well, my parents grew up in the era of Thatcher Milk Snatcher and I was brought up in a very anti-Conservative household. My dad still hates her and everything the party stands for. So when Labour won in 1997, I rather thought it was all a bit of a fun game, like winning at the football, or at Eurovision (which followed two days later). Labour was ‘my team’. Everyone was Labour. I lived in a safe Labour seat. Everything was fine. Fast forward, ooh, nine years: everyone’s having a dig at Blair, everyone’s fawning over Cameron. Blair gets kicked out. That’s where the party went wrong, in my opinion. It gives me a dilemma of who to vote for, because although I really doubt I could ever bring myself to vote Conservative, I sometimes feel like I want to punish Labour for being so self-absorbed and self-satisfied, arrogant, inefficient – basically, when they behave like they are behaving now, they don’t deserve to be in government. But what can I do about it? I don’t want to vote for the Conservatives because on so many things they are the direct opposite of what I believe, and I don’t want to vote Labour because I’d feel like I was rewarding present mediocrity on the basis of past achievements. And I’d rather eat my ballot paper than vote Lib Dem. But when Labour lose, that sadness is still there. It still felt like I’d lost an arm or something when Labour lost the mayoralty to that idiot fool who’s currently occupying the office.

5. London
I do love London. I’m really glad I decided to come here to study in for three years of my degree. I do see my long-term future here, but I want to spread my wings a bit first.

This is a list

Lists. Yeah, lists are good. A good way of NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS god I’m so bored of it all at the moment.

So yes, this is a list of films I have wanted to see for a while, but haven’t, some of which are no longer on at the cinema but won’t be released on DVD for ages, leading to varying degrees of angst:

- Waltz With Bashir
- Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (I do actually need to see this but the nearest cinema showing it is in Norfolk or something and I am not going there thanks)
- The Reader
- Revolutionary Road
- Valkyrie
- Milk
- Frost/Nixon
- Slumdog Millionaire (I don’t actually want to see this but feel like I should do so if I want to continue to count myself as a member of the human race)

It’s reading week this week, which is very welcome. I’ve got a crapload of essay work to do in the next five weeks, so it’s good to clear the decks of all the rag-ends of outstanding assignments and errands and all that.

The I give a shit department is out of the office today

Hahaha, best comment ever on the Guardian comment boards, on the story about Carol Thatcher calling a tennis player a golliwog:

hermionegingold
04 Feb 09, 11:29am (about 23 hours ago)

i have ‘outrage fatigue’

i’m all out, so no comment.

x

I am going to start citing that more often.

DER ZEIT IHRE KUNST, DER KUNST IHRE FREIHEIT

I am doing a course this term, Modern German Art. It’s pretty rubbish and there is an unrealistic amount of set reading every week. This week my patience snapped and I am making a stand by refusing to do the reading. There is no exam for the course anyway, only two assessed essays.

Allow me to summarise Modern German Art between the years of 1871 and, well, we’re up to 1920 at the moment, but I have no reason to think that the childish behaviour stops there:

There is an established art movement. Everyone is happy. The happiness leads to things getting a bit bourgeois and stale. A precocious artist comes along and joins. The establishment puts up with him (always him) for a while. Artist submits increasingly ridiculous pieces. Establishment refuses to hang them. Artist announces A GRAND SECESSION. Artist sets up splinter movement with a few other groupies also a bit disillusioned with life. Things proceed without incident for between two and five years. Everyone is happy. The happiness leads to things getting a bit bourgeois and stale. A precocious artist comes along and joins…

It was just one temper tantrum after another with these artists. Kandinsky managed to fit in two Secessions in his career, apparently: he actually managed, with a straight face, to secede from his own Secession after he broke his own rules about how large submitted pieces could be. So this set text says, anyway.

I really should’ve done the course on German Jews instead of this rubbish. I will have to swallow my annoyance though, because I will probably have to write an essay on the Secessions, since it was the only week I actually did the reading properly.

Snowbound

I haven’t felt this childish since 1991! Which is the last time snow fell this heavily in the south-east, back in the day when I lived in Essex. I went for a quick walk down to campus and wanted to go further, down to the British Museum and maybe Westminster, but the snow was too strong and I didn’t have appropriate footwear. There’s a lovely atmosphere in London today, relaxed and happy but not like a weekend day, more like the whole city just decided to take the day off work and play in the snow. It’s a relief, considering how miserable everyone’s been for the last few months. I hope it carries on tomorrow so that I can actually get some benefit from a snow day! No Tuesday translation or Grimmelshausen, eee. I have no uni on Mondays anyway.

There’s a kind of silly excitement about it all. I think so, anyway. Anyone who’s ever been anywhere which has real snow probably won’t be too fussed. No tubes or buses, bank branches closed, university shut down (they’ve declared a “Major Incident”, no less!)… Some people might complain about how ridiculous it is that the country can’t cope with ‘a bit of snow’, but secretly, they love the fact that it can’t. That’s what makes it fun!

I went out and took some photos. Disclaimer: I wasn’t particularly going for technical beauty, because I was too busy trying not to avoid slipping on the ice in my pathetic Converse trainers (only footwear with no holes in the soles) and falling flat on my face. Hover over the icon below and it’ll tell you where I took the photo (if I can do HTML properly).