Baal?

Yes, that is in the middle of the Quad building. (Yes, it is taken at night… 9.20ish). No, this doesn’t happen every night, but even so… there was some kind of musical performance going on in the Great Hall and all I could think of was that it was some strange kind of cult gathering! All very strange.

A day of about seventeen Bigs. (Or, A big day.)

Today I:

• Had a frustratingly circular discussion about the problem of [negative net social benefit resulting from existence] (‘evil’ is what I’d term it).
• Worried about what next week would look like without any common conviction about the state of any problem, but tried to resolve just to pray more about it and worry less. It’s sort of working.
• Stressed some more about actually finding time to get next week’s stuff done before Monday when I get to go through it with a good friend for practice’s sake, in light of groupwork, and an essay or two. Consequently, this post is procrastination and I will be heading to Fisher immediately after it’s published.
• Went to an education lecture involving drawing various things, including some fascinating art psychology allusions.
• Sat on a bus two meters from a talkative pre-school child and her mother, quite engrossed in their conversation. This is juxtaposed immediately against the backdrop of an education lecture which always tends to focus thoughts in that age-direction anyway. Consequently, I decided that no matter how many ways there are to potentially screw up being a parent, it seems immutably worth the risk. One day…
• Quit my job. By way of buried statement, I’m now completely free to freelance. Exciting things to come, God willing.
• Ate dinner at home at a relaxed pace for some reason (I don’t know why this is of note… I feel it is…), whilst wishing there were some other way to balance… everything.

Ambivalent

One of those weather-ambivalent days. It wasn’t an ambivalent time when I took the photo but what it depicts is… bedraggled Dandelion clock foreground with brighter flora in an uncertain background, whilst the photo itself was bright (or at least washed-out and very digital looking) and my edited version is rather more foreboding (or deep/feels like film grain). So there’s some over-explanation for a rainy day.

When are explosives not explosives?

When they’re crappy S3 graphics cards instead of TNT2′s. Here endeth the geek humour for tonight (this morning?).

Ah well. Good times breaking speakers, adding memory, and generally having stupid conversations.

Van Helsing as object of comic derision

The notion itself seems laughable. The proposition of a progression from ‘normality’ to ‘comedy’ to horror as one travels eastwards (from England in Stoker’s Dracula) seems… well, itself very foreign. Only not foreign in any substantiable kind of way, more in a “you lied about where you went when on holidays, didn’t you” scenario. His language is reflective firstly of his foreignness, but this foreignness is less modern, and more attuned to the powers of “old Europe” than England perhaps is. We see modernity through a distinctly British lense, whereby competing powers are completely marginalised and it is all reduced (seemingly) to a dichotomous struggle between heritage and contemporary being. It will be noted, also, that until the twelvth century or thereabouts (maybe later, even), England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales were considered as barbarous and undeveloped as the (Far East) and Muslim powers… modernity splits this, perhaps, into future potential versus present as-yet-undefeated currency of being (I love that phrase, Communist influences or not) in a sense of antiquity.

Also, one mustn’t make the mistake of confusing antiquity as lineage. MH’s first lecture drew attention to ‘the whirlpool of European races’ in Dracula’s third chapter (though I wasn’t at the lecture, it’s online in Powerpoint format) which, notably, refers only to continental European influences. There is preserved an irrevocable distinction between ‘Europe’ (which, it seems, is an old power without the same sense of embracing modernity — notably Germany and Russia are generally ignored in this text) and ‘England’ (even including America, by a character link).

Helsing is still ‘other’. His otherness is not that of cheap laughs, but of blended encounters with savage forces lurking further to the East. (IMO, of course :))